CRISIS IN ORIENTALISM--Edward Said

CRISIS IN ORIENTALISM

Edward Said

[  Lecture notes by S. Sreekumar for PG students]

Edward Said—A Biographical Note

Edward Said was a Palestinian born professor and scholar. A literary theorist and academician, he wrote many books on literary criticism, musical criticism, and issues of post-colonialism. He served as a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (former American President Barak Obama was his student at Columbia University) in a teaching career that spanned four decades. He served as Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard College in 1974.He had a deep interest in politics and represented the Palestinian National Council (PNC) as an independent member from 1977 to 1991.

Said is best known for his book ‘Orientalism’, published in 1978. In the book he discussed how certain assumptions of the Western world lead to the misinterpretations of the cultural symbols of the Orient, particularly the Middle East. The book, considered to be a very significant writing on the post-colonial theory has been translated into many languages, and is a part of the prescribed reading for many political science courses.

He published ‘Covering Islam’ in 1981 in which he analyzed how the countries like France, Britain, and the U.S. view the Islamic nations and Arabs. Over the next few years he wrote ‘The World, the text and the Critic’ (1983), ‘After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ (1986), and ‘Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature’ (1990).

He died of leukemia on 25 September 2003 after battling the disease for 12 years.

Orientalism

David Lodge comments about the book: ‘Orientalism is the discourse of the West about the East, a huge body of texts—literary, topographical, anthropological, historical, sociological——that has been accumulating since the Renaissance. Said, concentrating his attention on writing about the Near East, is concerned to show how this discourse is at once self-validating, constructing certain stereotypes which become accepted as self-evident facts, and also in conscious or unconscious collusion with political and economic imperialism’.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said says that Orientalism, especially the academic study of, and discourse, political and literary, about the Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East (that primarily originated in England, France, and then in the United States) actually creates a divide between the East and the West.

‘My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge’ (Orientalism  204).

The book is divided into three chapters:

The Scope of Orientalism

Orientalist Structures and Restructures

Orientalism Now

Orientalism is considered to be Edward Said's most influential work and has been translated into at least 36 languages. It has been the focus of any number of controversies and polemics, notably with Bernard Lewis, whose work is critiqued in the book's final section, entitled "Orientalism Now: The Latest Phase." In October 2003, one month after Said died, a commentator wrote in a Lebanese newspaper that through Orientalism ‘Said's critics agree with his admirers that he has single-handedly effected a revolution in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S.’

The present extract constitutes the concluding part of the First Chapter of Orientalism  entitled, ‘The Scope of Orientalism’

Said begins this extract by pointing out that it is a fallacy to assume that the world can be understood through texts. It is foolish to apply what one learns from books to real life. Voltaire and Cervantes had shown the foolishness of this in Candide and Don Quixote [see notes—1] respectively. But people have tried and still try to use texts to understand ‘the unpredictable, problematic mess in which human beings live’ or else books like Candide and Don Quixote will not appeal to us even today. “It seems a common failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientation of direct encounters with the human”.

There are some situations that favor textual attitude to reality.

1. When a human being confronts ‘something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant’, he has to depend on what he has read about it. For example, when a person travels in strange lands he may fall back on travel books for support.  Many travelers say that their experience in a particular country is not what they expected. This simply means that the experience is not what a book said it would be. Many writers of travel books ‘compose them in order to say that a country is like this or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and  so forth’. The idea here is that experience can be described by books “so much so that the book acquires a greater authority and use even than the actuality it describes”.

   

2. A second situation favoring textual attitude is the appearance of success. Said gives an example.  If one reads a book claiming that lions are fierce and then encounters a fierce lion, the chances are that one will be encouraged to read more books by that author and believe them.  But in addition, if the book advises how to deal with fierce lions and if the instructions work perfectly, then the author will be greatly believed and will be prompted to write more books of the same kind. Thus a series of books on various aspects of the fierce lion will be written.

Expertise will be attributed to such books. Academics, institutions, and governments will surround the book with greater prestige. Such books can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In course of time such books will create a tradition or what Foucault calls a discourse. The ‘material presence or the weight’, not the originality of the writer, is responsible for the texts produced out of it.

Everything Napoleon or de Lesseps [see notes—2] knew about the Orient came from books or from pre-existing information like the one deposited by Flaubert in the catalogue of received ideas. For Napoleon and de Lesseps the Orient was silent, available for the realization of projects. These projects never directly involved the native inhabitants who were unable to resist them. The discourse of Orientalism gave meaning to the activities of people like Napoleon and de Lesseps. 

When we think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto the Orient and the will to govern over it, we will have few surprises. During the 19^th and 20^th centuries the Oriental European relationship was determined by an unstoppable European expansion in search of markets, resources, and colonies. Thus Orientalism accomplished a self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution.  Evidence of this metamorphosis exists in Napoleon and de Lesseps. Their projects for the Orient are understandable at the rudimentary level as the projects of men of vision and genius, heroes in Carlyle’s sense.

Thus there was a transition from a merely textual apprehension, formulation, or definition of the Orient to actual practice of the textual ideas in the Orient. Said says that Orientalism “had much to do with that preposterous [outrageous, unbelievable] transition”.

As a strictly scholarly theory, Orientalism did many things:-

·        During the 19^th century, it produced scholars,

·        Increased the number of languages taught in the West and the quantity of manuscripts edited, translated, and commented on, and

·        Provided the Orient with sympathetic European students genuinely interested in such matters as Sanskrit grammar and Arabic poetry.

Yet “Orientalism overrode the Orient”. As a system of thought about the Orient it rose from “the specifically human detail to the generally trans-human one”. For example:

Observation about a 10^th century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq or Arabia.

A verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality.

“Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different from the West. Orientalism could never revise itself”.    

Closeness between Politics and Orientalism

Ideas about the Orient drawn from Orientalism are put to political use. These ideas raise questions about cultural, racial, or historical generalizations, their uses, value, degree of objectivity, and fundamental intent. Western Orientalism drew attention to the debased position of the Orient or Oriental as an object of study.

Characteristics of the Orientalized Orient

Anwar Abdel Malek gives the qualities of the Orientalized Orient:-

a. The Orient/Oriental is considered as an ‘object’ of study, stamped with an ‘otherness’; as all that is different. This object of study is passive, non-participating, non-autonomous, and non-sovereign.

b. On the level of the thematic, Orientalism adopt an essentialist (a belief that things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are) conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study. The essence is both ‘historical, since it goes back to the dawn of history and fundamentally a-historical, since it transfixes the being, the ‘object’ of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings.

c. Thus one ends with a typology detached from history and therefore conceived as intangible, essential. We will have a homo Sinicus,(the Chinese) a homo Arabicus, a homo Aegypticus, a homo Africanus. The normal man is the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek antiquity.

“One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples”.

Said outlines a brief history of Orientalism.

From the last decades of the 18^th century and for at least a century and a half, Britain and France dominated Orientalism as a discipline. The great philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones, Bopp, Grimm and others were originally based on manuscripts from the East. The revolution in philology was based on the premise that languages belong to families, of which the Indo-European and the Semitic are two great instances.

Fredrich Schlegel, held the view that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than the Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages. He believed that the Indo-European family was artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic was not. But nowhere has he spoken about the living, contemporary Orient. “When he said in 1800 that “it is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism, he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala the Zend Avesta, and the Upanishads”. [Zend Avesta is the holy book of the Parsis].

Schlegel considered the Semites (whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic and mechanical) different, inferior, and backward. Schlegel’s lectures on language and on life, history, and literature are full of these discriminations, which he made without the slightest qualification. Hebrew, he said, was made for prophetic utterance and divination, the Muslims, however, espoused a ‘dead empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith.

                      

Much of the racism in Schlegel upon the Semites and other ‘low’ Orientals was widely diffused in European culture. By the later 19^th century it made the basis of a scientific subject matter. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and the ‘good’ Orient was inevitably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the ‘bad’ Orient lingered in present day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere. ‘Aryans’ were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient and the Aryan myth dominated historical and cultural anthropology at the expense of the ‘lesser’ peoples.

The Official Intellectual Genealogy of Orientalism

Include Gobineau, Steinthal, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir etc.

It also includes some learned societies

—The Society Asiatique (1822)

-The Royal Asiatic Society (1823)

-American Oriental Society (1842)

The great contribution of imaginative and travel literature which made significant input to the development of building an Orientalist discourse. This includes work by Goethe, Hugo, Flaubert, Burton, Scott, Byron, Disraeli, George Eliot. Later in the 19^th century we could add T. E. Lawrence, Forster etc.

In this enterprise of building an Oriental discourse, there was considerable support not only from the unearthing of dead Oriental civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey but also from major geographical surveys done all through the Orient.

By the end of the 19^th century the above achievements were materially abetted by the European occupation of the entire Near Orient. The principal colonial powers were once again Britain and France. To colonize meant at fist the identification / creation of interests; which could be commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural. With regard to Islam and Islamic territories Britain, as a Christian power, had legitimate interests to safeguard. A complex apparatus for tending these interests developed.

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,

Baptist Missionary Society

Church Missionary Society

British and Foreign Bible Society

Propagation of Christian religion was the main aim of these societies. The trading societies, geographical exploration funds, translation funds, the establishment of Oriental Schools, missions, consular offices, factories, and sometimes large European communities, were established consequently.  

What are the typical experiences and emotions that accompany both the scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political conquests aided by Orientalism?

1. There is disappointment that the modern Orient is not at all like the texts. Experience of the mundane Orient sends one back to the imagination as a place preferable to the real Orient. It so happened in the case of Goethe, Hugo and Nervel. Nervel once told Gautier, “For a person who has never seen the Orient a lotus is still a lotus, for me it is only a kind of onion”.

2. To write about the modern Orient is either to reveal an upsetting demystification or to confine oneself to the Orient as ‘image’.

3. There are other familiar habits of thought, feeling and perception. The mind learns to separate a general apprehension of Orient from a specific experience of it. Said gives an example from Scott’s The Talisman and comments that for writers like Scott, the Orient is like a bin ‘into which all the authoritative, anonymous, and traditional Western attitudes to the East are dumped unthinkingly” and concludes that “how much a single Oriental can escape the fences placed around him, he is first an Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental’.

4. With disenchantment and a generalized (or schizophrenic), there is yet another peculiarity.  The Orient is made to serve as an illustration of a particular form of eccentricity. The Orient is watched. The European whose sensibility tours the Orient is a watcher, never involved, always detached. “The orient becomes a living tableau of queerness”.

5. This tableau becomes a special topic for texts. Thus the circle is completed. From being exposed as what texts do not prepare one for, the Orient can return as something one writes about in a disciplines way. Its foreignness can be translated, its meaning decoded.

CRISIS IN ORIENTALISM

As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, stand apart from it objectively (though he may claim so). ‘His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized.’

By the end of World War I both Africa and the Orient formed not so much an intellectual spectacle for the West but a privileged terrain for it. The scope of Orientalism exactly matched the scope of empire, and it was this absolute unanimity between the two that provoked the only crisis in the history of Western thought about and dealings with the Orient. This crisis continues now.

Beginning in the twenties, the response of the Third World to empire and imperialism has been dialectical. By the time of the Bandung Conference of 1955, the entire Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires and confronted a new set of imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. Two alternatives opened for Orientalism.

1. Carry on as if nothing had happened.

2. Adapt the old ways to the new. This was a difficult task because the Orientalist always believed that the Orient never changes. The new for him is simply the old betrayed by new, misunderstanding dis-orientals.

The third alternative, to dispense with Orientalism altogether, was considered by only a tiny minority.

Abdel Malek says that national liberation movements in the ex-colonial Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic ‘subject races’. Moreover specialists and the public became aware of the time-lag between Orientalist science and the material under study, and also between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of Orientalism.

H.A.R Gibb

Through the career of Gibb, Said illustrates two alternative approaches by which Orientalism has respond to the modern Orient.

In 1945, delivering a lecture in the University of Chicago, Gibb displayed his biases against Oriental Islam. The Orientalist has a fixed view of Islam, and he would not tolerate any attempts to reform Islam, as such an attempt would be seen as a betrayal of the religion.

Eighteen years later, speaking at Harvard, Gibb said that ‘the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists’. He suggested that interdisciplinary approaches must be introduced in the study of Orientalism. His lecture was titled ‘Area Studies Reconsidered’ and it was meant to prepare students for careers in ‘public life and business’. At the same time Gibb warned the Orientalists that ‘to apply the psychology and mechanics of Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations is pure Walt Disney’.

Castigating this notion Said points out that ‘in practice this notion meant:

History, politics and economics do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and right wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland.

Modern Orientalists have benefitted from Gibb’s advice. Most of them today are indistinguishable from other ‘experts’ and ‘advisers’ in policy matters. They have been instrumental to the creation of military alliances such as SEATO, institutions for character analysis etc.

“As anticolonialism sweeps and unifies the entire Oriental world, the Orientalist damns the whole business not only as a nuisance but an insult to the Western democracies”. Popular caricatures of the Orient are exploited by politicians. Similar attitudes flood the media as well.

Arabs are thought of as camel riding, terroristic, hook nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.

Anwar Abdel Malek calls this ‘the hegemonism of possessing minorities’. Anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism make the white middle-class Westerner believe it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition the non-white is not as human as ‘we’ are.

The limitations of Orientalism

1. The limitation that follows upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region

2. The view that Orient is something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West.

3. Entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political, and social history are considered mere response to the West. The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.

4. If historic changes have taken place in the Orient, the Orientalist is stunned: he cannot realize that to some extent.

5. The Orientalist assumes that what his texts have not prepared him for is the result of either outside agitation in the Orient or of the Orient’s misguided inanity.

Conclusion

The present crisis in Orientalism dramatizes the disparity between texts and reality. The contemporary intellectual feels that to ignore a part of the world is to avoid reality. He can learn from Orientalism how to limit or enlarge the scope of his discipline’s claims. “To investigate Orientalism is also to propose intellectual ways for handling the methodological problems that history has brought forward in its subject matter, the Orient. But before that we must virtually see the humanistic values that Orientalism, by its scope, experiences, and structures, has all but eliminated”.

Dr. S. Sreekumar

         

NOTES

1. Candide : a novel by Voltaire—tells the story of Pangloss and his student Candide. They maintain that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” The optimists, Pangloss and Candide, suffer and witness a wide variety of horrors—floggings, rapes, robberies, unjust executions, disease, an earthquake, betrayals, and crushing ennui. These horrors do not serve any apparent greater good, but point only to the cruelty and folly of humanity and the indifference of the natural world. One of the most glaring flaws of Pangloss’s optimism is that it is based on abstract philosophical argument rather than real-world evidence. In the chaotic world of the novel, philosophical speculation repeatedly proves to be useless and even destructive.

Don Quixote is the famous adventure story by Cervantes, the Spanish writer.

2. Ferdinand de Lesseps was a French diplomat and entrepreneur who developed the Suez Canal.

Napoleon was Napoleon Bonaparte.