Orientalism conventionally describes those acad-emic disciplines, like history and comparative philology, which specialize in the study of ‘the Orient’, usually taken to mean Asia and the *Middle East. Specialists in the anthropology of *Islam, *Buddhism and *Hinduism have all had to work out a modus vivendi with Orientalist scholars, textual experts and historians of religion, in this sense (for example, through distinctions such as that between *great and little traditions). But as a consequence of †Edward Said’s powerful polemic of the same name (Said 1978), Orientalism has come to refer to a distinctive body of academic work, built up in the shadow of nineteenth-century colonial domination and continuing long after the demise of the formal structures of European empire, in which the ‘Orient’ and ‘Orientals’ are stereotyped, denied history and †agency, and represented in ways that reflect the continuing interests of the West in the East. Since the publication of Said’s Orientalism, virtually all anthropologists have had to come to terms with an argument that links stereotyped academic representations of non-European peoples to structures of *colonial and neo-colonial political and economic domination.
In fact, anthropology came off relatively well in Said’s original argument (although he has subsequently taken a more critical tack [Said 1989]). His argument concentrated on scholarly work on Islam and the *Middle East, explicitly targeting the pro-Israel, anti-Arab bias of ‘area studies’ work from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In the conclusion of the book, †Clifford Geertz is somewhat surprisingly—one of a number of scholars whose work is singled out for post-Orientalist approval. Yet that same conclusion contains the argument which, more than any other, would disturb anthropological complacency:
How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in selfcongratulation (when one discusses one’s own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the ‘other’)?
(Said 1978:325)
On the one hand, this links with the *postmodern concern with the issue of representation in ethnographic writing, but it also seriously undermines the assumption that liberal talk of cultural difference is inherently benign and tolerant: the idea of *‘culture’, as critics of *essentialism have pointed out again and again, can also be employed as a source of stereotyping and denigration, as well as providing a liberal counter to arguments based on *race.
Said’s argument chimed with other critiques of academic representation of non-Western people, such as Fabian’s suggestion that the anthropological other is placed in a different temporal frame in anthropological writing, rendered different through the denial of a shared history (Fabian 1983). It was also extended beyond the Middle East to writing about *South Asia (Inden 1985), for example, as part of a valuable re-examination of the ways in which colonial knowledge and colonial assumptions have structured both anthropological research and the self-knowledge of people living in †postcolonial societies. It was even extended beyond the East, and applied to the examination of *Occidentalist stereotypes about ‘the West’ (Carrier 1995).
Nevertheless, Said’s critique of Orientalism was not without its own problems. As a polemic, it contains its fair measure of simplification and overstatement, and outraged Middle East specialists subjected him to often vicious attacks. But even sympathetic readers had their problems. His argument, as James Clifford pointed out in an incisive critique (Clifford 1988), moves inconsistently between a fairly traditional liberal humanism and a more unsettling stance borrowed from the work of †Michel Foucault. Clifford clearly feels Said has been too timid in his commitment to Foucault’s approach, yet it could as well be argued that it is Foucault who provides the legitimation for some of Said’s weaker arguments. Certainly Said’s use of *discourse in Foucault’s sense allows him to build up a portrait of a totalizing and undifferentiated Orientalism, with (despite his protestations to the contrary) little or no room for the idiosyncracies of different Orientalists working in different historical moments and in different political contexts. Moreover, his Orientals become oddly mute and passive in the face of the Western knowledge-power axis: there is little sense that the inhabitants of ‘the East’ have themselves contributed to Orientalist discourse, still less that Orientalist stereotypes are as likely to be encountered in, say, communal politics within India as in Western foreign policy in the 1990s.
Carrier, J. (ed.) (1995) Occidentalism: Images of the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Clifford, J. ([1980] 1988) ‘On Orientalism’, in J.Clifford The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press
Inden, R. (1985) ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies 20:401–46
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
——(1989) ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Enquiry 15: 205–25
P
This is the complete article, containing 799 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
