Foucault's episteme is the model for this study's historical approach. This book is organized in large historical periods—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the colonial period that intersects with Orientalism, the Enlightenment and the Gothic, the age of exploration, the American colonial period, and the present. The episteme is a code that determines how people understand and act within their world, much like the doxa that underlies habitus. Monsters must be examined within this milieu that generates them. To this end, in each chapter I identify the dominant forces in play to suggest why monsters emerge in the ways they do.

XREF: Parallels Foucault's episteme and Bourdieu's habitus/doxa, both explicitly invoked in the passage.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 70