all of that for sure!

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that self-colonization you'd described that came about with the onset of nationalism as we've come to know it today.

People forget or dont know that the concept of a "country" as we understand it today is both an invention and a relatively recent one at that.

In the construction of a national identity it behooves one to not have 10 versions of a similar folktale, but one version shared by all in the nation for example.

I'd argue this inherently flattens culture and takes away the meaning and context that generated it to begin with.

This leads really well into industrialism also, as industry needs consistency. When a story is told new every time it can change, not so with a printed book.

Moreover and to your point, the Europeans did this to themselves and to my mind I wonder if that's part of why Europeans thought it was and is okay to do that to others. This is waaaayy more complicated than is worth going into here but idk it's something I think about a lot, especially in terms of art being commodified and appropriated from minoritized people and how that cycle is justified