We [Westerners] readily imagine that we are a very tolerant civilization, that we have welcomed all the forms of the past, all the cultural forms foreign to us, that we welcome also behavior, language, sexual deviations, et cetera. I wonder if this is an illusion. In other words, in order to know madness it first had to be excluded. Maybe could we also say that in order to know other cultures—non-Western cultures, so-called primitive cultures, or American, African, and Chinese cultures et cetera—in order to know these cultures, we must no doubt have had not only to marginalize them, not only to look down upon them, but also to exploit them, to conquer them and in some ways through violence to keep them silent? We suppressed madness and as a result came to know it. We suppressed foreign cultures, and as a result came to know them.
Michel Foucault
