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Orientalism It will be clear to the reader . .
. that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion,
interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an
academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic
institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient . .
. is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. . . . Related to this academic
tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and
transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general
meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an
ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the
Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." . . . . . . [T]he third meaning of
Orientalism . . . is something more historically and materially defined than
either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly
defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the
corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it,
settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found
it useful here to employ Michel Foucault's notion of a discourse . . . to
identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as
a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage--and even
produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.
Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no
one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking
account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In
brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject
of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally
determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole
network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always
involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity "the Orient" is
in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also
tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even
underground self. ... We would be wrong, I think, to
underestimate the reservoir of accredited knowledge, the codes of Orientalist
orthodoxy, to which Cromer and Balfour refer everywhere in their writing and
in their public policy. To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization
of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified
in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact. Men have always
divided the world up into regions having either real or imagined distinction
from each other. The absolute demarcation between East and West, which
Balfour and Cromer accept with such complacency, had been years, even
centuries, in the making. There were of course innumerable voyages of
discovery; there were contacts through trade and war. But more than this,
since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been two principal
elements in the relation between East and West. One was a growing systematic
knowledge in Europe about the Orient, knowledge reinforced by the colonial
encounter as well as by the widespread interest in the alien and unusual,
exploited by the developing sciences of ethnology, comparative anatomy,
philology, and history; furthermore, to this systematic knowledge was added a
sizable body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators, and
gifted travelers. The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that
Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. There is
no way of putting this euphemistically. True, the relationship of strong to
weak could be disguised or mitigated, as when Balfour acknowledged the
"greatness" of Oriental civilizations. But the essential
relationship, on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was
seen--in the West, which is what concerns us here--to be one between a strong
and a weak partner. Many terms were used to express
the relation: Balfour and Cromer, typically, used several. The Oriental is
irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, "different"; thus the
European is rational, virtuous, mature, "normal." But the way of
enlivening the relationship was everywhere to stress the fact that the
Oriental lived in a different but thoroughly organized world of his own, a
world with its own national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries and
principles of internal coherence. Yet what gave the Oriental's world its
intelligibility and identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather
the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient
was identified by the West. Thus the two features of cultural relationship I
have been discussing come together. Knowledge of the Orient, because
generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the
Oriental, and his world. In Cromer's and Balfour's language the Oriental is
depicted as something one judges (as in a court of
law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one
disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a
zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained
and represented by dominating frameworks. Where do these come from? Cultural strength is not something
we can discuss very easily--and one of the purposes of the present work is to
illustrate, analyze, and reflect upon Orientalism as an exercise of cultural
strength. In other words, it is better not to risk generalizations about so
vague and yet so important a notion as cultural strength until a good deal of
material has been analyzed first. But at the outset one can say that so far
as the West was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient
and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of
corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by the
classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual.
Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in
class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or
governing. ... . . . What [Orientalists]
shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was the kind of
intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism. In a sense Orientalism
was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its aspects,
unanimously held. What bound the archive together was
a family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be
effective. These ideas explained the behavior of Orientals; they supplied
Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important, they
allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon
possessing regular characteristics. But like any set of durable ideas,
Orientalist notions influenced the people who were called Orientals as well
as those called Occidental, European, or Western; in short, Orientalism is
better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than
it is simply as a positive doctrine. If the essence of Orientalism is the
ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority,
then we must be prepared to note how in its development and subsequent
history Orientalism deepened and even hardened the distinction. When it
became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire
its administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of
fifty-five, then a further refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no
Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just
as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes of the
subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj. ... . . . Orientalism was ultimately a
political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between
the familiar (Europe, the West, "us") and the strange (the Orient,
the East, "them"). This vision in a sense created and then served
the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world,
“we” lived in ours. The vision and material reality propped each other up,
kept each other going. . . . My argument takes it that the Orientalist
reality is both antihuman and persistent. Its scope, as much as its
institutions and all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present.
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