ORIENTALISM
ter the Soviet takeover of Armenia. This legitimized the USSR as the protector of the Armenian nation after the genocide of 1915 (which Turkey denies) in which the large Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was either massacred or forced across the desert to Syria, where large large Armenian Armenian communities communities of Anatolian Anatolian origin origin remain. Outside Armenia itself, diaspora communities are to be found across the Middle East, especially in Iran, Syria, and Israel/Palestine. Both the Syrian and Armenian Churches have socalled Uniate branches in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Two other Uniate churches originated as non-Chalcedonian churches. These are the Maronite Church, the dominant Christian confession in Lebanon, and the Nestorian, or Assyrian, Church, with its leadership in Baghdad, Iraq, and followers in Iran, Turkey, and Syria, where many adherents fled after persecution in Iraq in the early twentieth century. Will Myer Further Reading Challiot, C. (1998) The Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch. Geneva, Switzerland: Inter-Orthodox Dialogue. Mar, Gregorios. (1982) The Orthodox Church in India. New Delhi: Sophia Publications. Nersoyan, T. (1996) Armenian Christian Historical Studies. New York: St. Vartan Press. Ramet, P. (1988) Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vogt, K., and N. van Doorn-Harner, eds. (1997) Between Desert and City: The Coptic Orthodox Church Today. Oslo, Norway: Novis-farlag.
ORIENTALISM Orientalism refers to two intellectual trends in the West: the appearance or deliberate cultivation in literature and art of stylistic and aesthetic traits reminiscent of Asian cultures, which began in eighteenth-century Europe; and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scholarly study of premodern Asia, especially philology (the study of language and linguistics) and other text-based pursuits, by Europeans and Americans. The fields of anthropology, sociology, and cultural, political, and economic history, insofar as they address Asia, have since been called Orientalist as well. The First Orientalists The earliest Orientalists, mostly trained in the Greco-Roman classics, were interested in recovering ancient texts, often seeing this as a way to open a window onto the origins of culture, which was itself a ma-
NCYCLOPEDIA EDIA OF MODERN A SIA SIA ENCYCLOP
jor preoccupation in the nineteenth century. Scholars studied the relationships between ancient languages and cultures and focused attention on religious and legal texts. John Selden (1584–1654), an English legal antiquarian and politician, became a recognized authority on Near Eastern polytheism and Jewish law. The German biblical scholar Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827) challenged pious traditions by showing the common origins of the Bible and other Semitic texts. A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), a French scholar, brought Zoroastrian manuscripts to France in the early 1760s. Eugène Burnouf (1801– 1852), the son of a French classicist, published works on the Pali language of the Theravada Buddhists, on Zoroastrian liturgy in the Avesta, and on Sanskrit mythological texts, for which he was appointed professor of the Sanskrit language at the Collège de France (1832–1852). Orientalists as Diplomats and Administrators in Asia Some of the first Orientalists got their start accompanying diplomatic missions to Asia. Antoine Galland (1646–1715), a French scholar who accompanied the French ambassador to Constantinople in 1670– 1675, studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish there. He later published Mille et une nuits, the first translation of Arabian of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments into Entertainments into a European language, as well as French translations of collections of Indian fables and the Qur’an. Likewise, Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783–1835), a German who had taken part in a Russian visit to China in 1805, published a two-volume ethnographic and linguistic study of the Caucasus. In other cases, Orientalists went to Asia as army officers or colonial administrators. Sir William Jones (1746–1794), an English scholar and translator of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian who became a British supreme-court judge in Calcutta, undertook the study of Sanskrit to compile an authoritative digest of Hindu law that might be used in the courts. He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, and in his presidential discourse of 1786 he was the first to propose that Sanskrit and Greek shared a common ancestry, to which most other languages of Europe also belonged. Another example is Sir Henry Rawlinson (1810–1895), a British army officer assigned in 1833 to reorganize the army of the shah of Iran. He deciphered and wrote a linguistic analysis of the Old Persian section of the cuneiform inscription of Darius the Great at Bisitun, Iran (1837, 1846–1851), which paved the way for the decipherment of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script.
393
ORIENTALISM
Orientalists as Public Intellectuals By the late nineteenth century, some Orientalists had become celebrities and public intellectuals. The controversial British explorer and polymath Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890) captivated the reading public with prolific accounts of his adventures in Asia and Africa; he also produced thirty volumes of translations from numerous languages, including The Arabian Nights (sixteen volumes, 1885–1888) and the Kama Sutra, a Sanskrit treatise on the erotic arts (1883). Burton also wrote one of the first ethnological treatises, Sind, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851). Equally famous, at least in learned circles, was Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), often called the founder of the field of comparative religion. Germanborn, he became a professor at Oxford University; he established his reputation with his edition of the Rig Veda, the oldest extant Sanskrit work, and with his influential essays on comparative mythology, religion, and linguistics. The fifty-one-volume series of translations that he edited, Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910), helped win acceptance for the idea that non-Western traditions could be viewed as religions comparable to Christianity or Judaism, each with a body of scriptures. Since the end of the colonial era, philological studies have continued, although they have lost much of the prestige they had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the most part, interest (and funding) has shifted to political science, social anthropology, and the history of the last few centuries. Said’s Critique In 1978, Edward Said (b. 1935), a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and a Palestinian by birth, wrote a book called Orientalism in which he criticized the conceptual foundations and principal methods of such scholarship. Said’s approach was shaped by the writings of the French poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). From Foucault he took the notion of discourse theory and the insight that the production and possession of knowledge are sources of power. But he objected to the diffuseness of Foucault’s conception of power and appealed to Gramsci’s hegemony theory (which argues that elite social groups use cultural institutions, such as schools, parties, and the media, rather than naked force, to secure and extend their dominance, so that this dominance seems natural and appropriate). Analyzing British, French, and American writing on the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East,
394
Said argued that Western scholars systematically misunderstood and misrepresented these societies, due largely to the nature of their relationship to them (one of cultural superiority and imperial dominance). His conclusions have subsequently been extended to apply to Western scholarship on Asia in general. At the same time, his study extended its purview beyond scholarly works to include journalism, travel writing, and other types of literature, so that "Orientalism" as he defined it is in fact the sum of all Western literary and artistic expressions relating to Asia. Said traced the roots of modern Orientalism back to ancient Greek depictions of the East and outlined its later development by littérateurs (Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321; Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342–1400; William Shakespeare, 1564–1616). According to him, the Orientalist vision of the East was well established as a literary trope long before the colonialist period; he claimed in fact that "colonial rule was justified in ad vance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact" (Said 1978: 39). Beginning with the Egyptian expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), "the Orientalist’s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use" (Said 1978: 80). For Said, the work of Sir William Jones exemplifies the double task of Orientalism: to describe, tabulate, analyze, and codify the Orient "scientifically," always in comparison with the Occident; and to use the knowledge thus generated to master and rule the Orientals. Thus Jones attempted to codify and apply in the courts a traditional Hindu law based on Sanskrit texts, as part of the East India Company’s policy of governing Indians by their own codes. Said argued that, although Orientalism adopts the posture of an objective scientific pursuit, it has from the first been motivated and sustained by a political purpose: the governance of colonial territories. Imperial administrators like Lord Curzon (1859–1925), viceroy of India, acknowledged that knowledge of the culture and sensibilities of the people of the East were indispensable for securing colonial dominance. With the end of the European empires and a decline in the popularity of philology, Said argued, the Orientalist enterprise increasingly took a new form: area-studies fields, which created expertise to be made available to governments and policy-making institutions. Said argued that Orientalism helped the West to construct an image of itself by projecting every trait opposite to that of the West’s onto the screen of a backward and decadent Orient. He made this argument by psychologizing the West’s relationship to the East as self to "other." The Oriental was reduced to a
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN A SIA
ORIENTALISM
stereotype, springing from the notion that it is possible to define the essential nature of Arabs or Muslims. Orientals, he claimed, are routinely characterized as sensuous, childlike, irrational, mendacious, and culturally passive and static. Such traits are supposedly exemplified in the person of the "Oriental despot," whose state is said to be the characteristic political institution of the East. Defining the Orient in this way provided a rationale for Western imperialism and colonialism: the destiny of Western power is to introduce reason and order into the Orient. Said’s critique of Orientalism became one of the most important foundations for what has been called colonial-discourse theory or, more broadly, postcolonial studies (the study of the relationships between European nations and the societies they formerly colonized). Another notable ramification of this field is subaltern studies, an approach to Indian history led by the Indian historian Ranajit Guha (b. 1923) and inspired by the work of Gramsci, which aims to write the history of subaltern peoples by recovering their own voices and agency. These approaches share a recognition that knowledge is intertwined with the exercise of power, as well as a postmodernist skepticism of all claims to objectivity. Criticisms Although widely praised in literary critical circles from the start, Said’s book has been criticized from a variety of angles. First, representatives of Asian studies in a wide range of disciplines sharply objected to the suggestion that they were willfully or unwittingly complicit in their governments’ programs for colonization and for political and economic domination, even in the postcolonial era. Philologists, for example, insisted that their painstaking analyses of ancient texts were only distantly related to any political agenda. Many objected to the suggestion that the field as a whole displays cynicism and bad faith. It has been observed that Said essentialized the Orientalist and elided all differences of approach or discipline. He made little distinction between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury views of the East and those of his scholarly contemporaries. Furthermore, it can be pointed out that the charges laid at the door of Orientalists and of Westerners in general apply also to Asians and to people everywhere. Jones, for instance, is faulted for "an irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to ‘a complete digest’" (Said 1978: 78), but the Sanskrit legal works he consulted were deliberate codifications already, designed by Brahman
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN A SIA
scholars to consolidate and extend their own authority. Said’s fallacy, by this reasoning, is to demonize Europeans in particular for behaving as the privileged and powerful do everywhere; indeed, the colonized of modern times were often the colonizers of earlier eras and produced "Orientalisms" of their own. Moreover, many critics note that scholarship on Asia is no longer in the hands of Westerners alone, and that the academic climate has changed considerably, partly in response to the arguments of Said. On the other hand, criticisms also emerged from the vanguard of literary, social, and political theorists. Notable among these are Dennis Porter (b. 193 3) and Aijaz Ahmad (b. 1945). Porter, a literary critic interested in travel writing, found Said’s literary analysis too blunt: his sources (said Porter) are inadequately historicized, and literary texts are not treated any differently than are obviously ideological texts. Porter pointed to the fact that aesthetic products follow more than simply ideological imperatives. At the heart of this problem, Porter saw an incompatibility between Foucault’s discourse theory and Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony. Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist critic, objected to Said’s acceptance of the Nietzschean tenet that all communication is distorting and all truths illusory, an article of faith in late-twentieth-century French cultural criticism. This claim, which Ahmad called irrational and antihuman, allowed Said to dispense with considerations of class, gender, and even historical process. Ahmad also noted the totalizing character of Said’s Orientalism. All other forms of oppression are subordinated to Orientalism, and all Westerners and everything they have said and done are by definition Orientalist. Ahmad alleged that this formulation of oppression was particularly well received in the United States by mostly male Third World immigrant scholars of upper-class background who were not moved by theories of class-based and gender-based oppression, and who could represent themselves as oppressed despite the fact that people of their social class often benefited from the colonial order. Timothy Lubin
Further Reading Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures . London: Routledge. Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. (1994) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader . New York: Columbia University Press.
395
