anthropology and orientalism

Anthropology and OrientalismAuthor(s): Nicholas ThomasSource: Anthropology Today, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 4-7Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3033165 .

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governable by) volition. Actively inquiring, Rick states: I'm really just at the point of touching on something that's important and trying to physically stomp it down somehow by getting sick and putting my attention onto my physical body instead of going to the root of all these physical symptoms. It might be mental. I think it is mental or emotional.

Shortly after, I ask Rick: Do you have any idea about what that is? I always try to say exactly what comes to my mind, and what [comes] to my mind ... is [my] relationship with my Dad. I'd like to remember when I started feeling bad because he just had a birthday May 14 - three or four weeks ago - and I missed it. I missed calling him. ... I really don't usually call [my Dad] for his birthday but I have been over the last years to heal my relationship with him, to do what I feel is expected of me. ...

When you just said that, I think it is some old crap that I am still carrying around with him. I talked to my [younger] sister about it [on the phone] the other night. ... We both realized that [he] didn't expect anything out of us. ... We were underrated as people with ability. ... I think I stopped looking for affirmation there of self-worth.

Here, the metaphor of illness as volition assumes a

full complex form. No longer is Rick deliberating between the action of another and his own action as an

explanation for his illness. Now Rick embraces a more specific and at the same time more encompassing metaphor, equating his illness with the relationship between his father and himself.

When you asked me it struck this thing like - all the time it's the same thing with my Dad, the relationship we have. And he wasn't a terrible person. He was just ... I don't know. Maybe I just didn't get what I expected. I couldn't win or do good enough. So I always have to prove myself now. And when you have to prove yourself now - and you

never can - it's almost like running yourself into the ground. And that's what I think AIDS is too. You're just so used up because all you've been doing is trying ...

Once Rick formulates this interpretation, he con- tinues to embrace it in the interviews that follow. It is, perhaps, a 'lurid metaphor' - to use one of Sontag's expressions - but Rick is not simply a 'victim' of his beliefs. Although the general proposition 'emotional conflict creates illness' has been learned, what gives Rick's specific interpretation salience is 1) its corre- spondence to past experience and 2) the adaptive func- tions it performs. Rick's relationship with his father is effectively signified by his illness because so many ele- ments of his current experience - his feelings of help- lessness, his humiliation, his sense of being neglected - can be organized around his memories of this relationship. Representing his illness as derived from this conflict also increases Rick's sense of control because it posits a manipulable situation. The metaphor further- more focuses Rick's attention on his subjective need to resolve the actual relationship with his father - something Rick was in fact able to do, to an extent, before his death three months following this interview.

Would Rick's death have been more virtuous if he had embraced it with a sense of meaninglessness, 'purified,' as Sontag advocates, of metaphoric thinking? The stance against metaphor implies an ideal of censor- ship, I believe. In spite of their vulnerability, the ill do not need to be protected from ideas. Metaphors are fragments. The more fragments, the more there is to build from. And who is to say what sense can or should be made out of illness? O

American epidemiology', in R. Bolton, ed., The AIDS Pandemic - A Global Emergency, pp.23-36. New York: Gordon and Breach; Sontag, S. 1989. Aids and its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

2. Sontag, S. 1990[1978]. 'Illness as metaphor.' In S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and .AIDS and its Metaphors, pp. 1-87. New York: Doubleday.

3. Ibid., p. 43. 4. Ibid., p. 58. 5. Louise Hay is an

ordained minister of the Church of Religious Science. In its emphasis on prayer and mental healing, the Church of Religious Science resembles and has been influenced by the Christian Science Church. Louise Hay was raised in a Christian Science environment as a child by her mother, a Christian Science practitioner.

6. Hay, L. L. 1984. You Can Heal Your Life. Santa Monica: Hay House, p. 151.

Anthropology and Orientalism NICHOLAS THOMAS

Nicholas Thomas is a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow affiliated with the Australian National University. His books include Out of time: history and evolution in anthropological discourse (Cambridge U.P. 1989) and Marquesan societies (Oxford U.P. 1990). In October 1987 he contributed an article to A.T. entitled 'Narrative as practice?: accessible adventure in Swallows and Amazons'.

If we suspect that in all scholarly disciplines, the custo- mary way of doing things both narcotizes and insulates the guild member, we are saying something true about all forms of disciplinary worldliness. Anthropology is not an exception.I

No-one who reads literary, historical, anthropological or philosophical journals could have remained unaware of the intense debate sparked off by Edward Said's Orien- talism. What is conspicuous is not just the amount of comment the book has prompted, but also the polariza- tion of views, and the level of vituperation. For some it is 'three hundred pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed, and badly-written diatribe'2; for others it seems to open a new field of problems and critiques.

Hence there seems only a choice of hypercritical and uncritical positions: the first is clearly the defensive reaction of an 'Asian studies' discipline that has all too much in common with the Orientalism it succeeded; the second, perhaps reacting in turn to the first, presumably overlooks Orientalism's faults and omissions. My interest in this essay is in the reception of Said's work in anthropology, and the separate question of what its real challenge or relevance might amount to. Because books are perceived entities as well as stable texts, this is however a more complex issue than might be initially apparent. Orientalism contained scarcely any direct references to anthropology - one of which was laudatory,

suggesting that particular anthropologists had evaded the enduring stereotypes to which most European writers on the Middle East had resorted - but anthropologists have often responded to the book as though it was, by implication, a critique of anthropology, just as scholars in regions other than the Middle East have taken an interest in 'Orientalist' images of Pacific Is- landers, Africans, and Indians. One of the most common objections to the book is that the critique is over- generalized, yet ironically much of the generalization has been performed by readers of Orientalism rather than by Said himself. This is so in both positive and negative senses: on one side, the style of analysis developed with respect to the Middle East and Islam has been transposed to many other parts of the world, and extended and modified in various ways. On the other hand, references to the book - in seminar discussions and conversation as well as in print - often con- vey a perception of a more unambiguously threatening and negative polemic than the text really seems to sus- tain. The Orientalism often argued about may thus be rather different from the book that Said wrote.

Much of the comment on Said from within anthropology has been tentative and qualified, even from those whose work is regarded as critical and experi- mental in other respects:3 Michael Richardson's com-

4 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991



Edward Said ment ('Enough Said', A.T., August 1990) appears to be essentially a defensive reaction that misconstrues and deflects Said's observations more than it addresses or challenges them. Though his concern is particularly with Said's 'methodological assumptions', he makes two quite elementary mistakes right at the start in asserting, first, that Said is an idealist and, second, that it is insisted that Orientalism's perceptions of the Orient were false. The claim that the approach is 'manifestly idealist' is based not on a quotation from Orientalism, but from Christopher Miller's Blank darkness, which serves equally well because he is a 'disciple' of Said's. Never mind that Miller clearly also has substantial theoretical debts to various more committed deconstructionist critics, such as Paul de Man (whose work is discussed at greater length than Said's in Blank darkness), but it is somewhat more unfortunate that whereas Miller writes that 'perception is determined by Oriental- ism rather than Orientalism's being determined by perception'4, Said's own propositions are quite different. Because institutionalized Orientalism acquired such authority, 'no-one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations of thought and action imposed by Orientalism.'

Said explicitly disowned the idea that 'Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient' and affirmed an interest in 'the determining im- print of individual writers upon the otherwise anony- mous collective body of texts'5. Given the debates that have raged over authorship since Barthes and others, it hardly needs to be pointed out that this interest in the perspectives of particular writers places Said at some remove from the main strands of structuralist and post- structuralist literary theory. Hence what is merely a general and highly qualified premise which differs sig- nificantly from a more rigorous deconstructionist posi- tion, and which in fact seems to provide parameters for a more open inquiry into relationships between knowledge and politics and the various manifestations of Orientalism, is rendered as the book's dogmatic thesis.

This misreading aside, the more consequential error seems to arise from a complete misunderstanding of Said's theoretical framework. Richardson omits to men-

tion that Said is drawing - admittedly loosely - on Fou- cault, and that Orientalism is understood as a discourse, not simply as an ideology or an array of ideas. In other words, Orientalism was an institutionalized discipline, that possessed authority, that involved descriptive and analytical practices that projected constructions of the Orient in imaginative, sociological, military, and political terms. For Foucault - and especially the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, which Said appears particularly indebted to - knowledge and power are mutually con- stitutive. The imposition of philosophical straitjackets which make any inquiry either materialist or idealist is here entirely inappropriate; and when one reads Said's assertions that 'never has there been a nonmaterial form of Orientalism', and encounters again and again his concern with the 'material effectiveness' of institutionalized Orientalism in administration and policy, one wonders how Richardson can have arrived at his view.6

It is consistent with this non-recognition of the theoretical ground that Richardson takes Said to be in- sisting that Orientalist perception 'was false.' To the contrary, the interest is in establishing how it creates truth. Hence, with respect to Lane's Modern Egyptians, Said is concemed with the text's systematization and organization, its use of detail, the role of the characterization of a typical life cycle, and so on: the question is how the status of an unadorned, neutral and dis- passionate account is evoked. And although many generalized notions concerning the character of particular colonized populations (such as postulates of 'the lazy native') are clearly nothing other than pernicious mystifications, the question of truth or falsity is not always the central issue. With respect to the great archive of archaeological, philological and ethnological facts conceming India that was inaugurated by Sir William Jones and others in the Asiatick Journal, critiques of Orientalism are not chiefly concemed to find fault with translations from Persian or Sanskrit, or revise drawings of stone monuments. The point is rather that this information became part of a prodigious archive, that enabled the British to think that they knew India better than Indians ever did themselves; this was never merely an adjunct to rule, or a legitimization of it, but rather an expression of dominance with its own distinctive aes- thetics and peculiar intricacy.

More generally, Said's concem is with specifying how the 'Orient' or the 'East' as an entity, could be a reference point for extremely serious and confident statements conceming, for instance, 'the Oriental mind.' At this level, it must be clear that the Orient, like 'America'7 in sixteenth and seventeenth century ethnology, is not usefully understood as a real entity that has been distorted by European writers, but as a discursive construct. When, for instance, Lord Cromer made pronouncements about the differences between the capacities for logical thought in Egyptians and Europeans - which were not merely idiosyncratic views, but are reflected in a great variety of sources - it is ludicrous to regard this negatively as error or bias. The point is rather that such a characterization was positive and productive, in the sense that it enabled a larger understanding of social and racial difference which made European government in colonized territo- ries appropriate and natural.

On this point, as James Clifford has pointed out, Said's arguments are certainly not consistent, in that he sometimes departs from writers such as Foucault in suggesting that there is a real Orient that is distorted or dominated.8 Though Said does not address the issue

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991 5



clearly and explicitly, it would seem important to rec- ognize that there are political as well as analytical imperatives, and distinguish levels of specificity in texts and propositions. That is, while it is crucial that analysis deal with the economy of truth which certain ways of characterizing topography, natives, and colonization entail, it is equally crucial to point out what the truths obscure, displace, or occlude. For example, colonial discourses in certain parts of the world frequently emphasized both the natural richness and the vacancy of lands in which white settlement was proceeding or projected, and which were in fact occupied by peoples such as Australian Aborigines. In this case, and with regard to the denials of the existence of the Palestinian people that were long central to Zionist writing and propaganda, it is not that something - the savage or terrorist - is perceived falsely, but that one construct permits the life and rights to land of a real people to be suppressed. Rather than explore the ambiguities of Said's approach to these questions in any thorough fashion, Richardson makes much of the inconsistency between Said's extremely cursory references to Geertz in quite different contexts, as if Geertz's work was not sufficiently heterogeneous to prompt a variety of responses, and as if there was something terribly wrong with changing one's mind. While these references are accorded disproportionate significance, neither Richard- son nor other critics who assert Said's ignorance9 seem to make any systematic attempt to deal with or fault the extensive discussions of Lane, Renan, Flaubert and many others which in fact constitute the bulk of the book.

Other problems arise because Richardson, like a number of other writers, is mainly concerned with taking Said's work as though it were a criticism of anthropology. It is quite understandable that anthropologists should be concerned with such issues, but Said cannot be faulted for misrepresenting a field of work that he never sought to represent, or not providing appropriate terms to discuss it. Hence, while the question of reciprocity, that, it is suggested, is overlooked by Said, is no doubt important in interpreting the constitution of ethnographic knowledge, it is of less significance when we consider much Orientalist repre- sentation, such as Balfour's and Cromer's statements. These referred to Egyptians and Orientals but were never addressed to them; even texts that are far more complex and ambivalent, such Kipling's Kim - though it was and is no doubt read by Indians - was con- structed with a British and Anglo-Indian readership in mind. The Hegelian master-slave dialectic, which Ri- chardson suggests needs to be considered, is simply not of direct relevance in this context, because Orientalism has generally created representations of the Orient for the West, that have served various cultural and political purposes, but have frequently not even been circulated in the countries that were purportedly represented, let alone imposed upon the populations there. The cultures of the colonized have their own dynamics, which sometimes engaged directly with colonizers' discourses, through collaboration and resistance, but which never simply stood in relation to them as a subordinate term. Though Said has elsewhere written on Palestinian life - and Arab literature, cultural life in Cairo, and many other topics10 - the impact of Orientalism on the Orient is only indirectly treated in Orientalism itself.

It is certainly the case, however, that another kind of discussion could emphasize the interplay between out- siders' and insiders' perspectives, and the ramifications

of the former for constructions of identity and ethnicity in particular populations. Whether these would be well- served by the Hegelian model, rather than historical attention to the transformation of relationships and the forms of encounters, is, however, a moot point; any condensation of the self/other and subject/object op- positions would seem to embody many of the difficul- ties that efforts to rethink fieldwork and ethnographic writing have sought to transcend.

It is a pity, given that his interest seems mainly to be in the ramifications of this literature for anthropology, that Richardson had not read the essay of Said's that specifically dealt with the discipline, and which did something quite different to merely extending the arguments of Orientalism to anthropology. While Ri- chardson warns us about the dangers of turning 'the "Other" into an ill-defined universal' there appears to be an equal risk of generalizing some quite specific projects in literary criticism, anthropological theory, discourse analysis, and contemporary political commen- tary into a 'post-modernist' criticism that is characterized mainly by its objectionable subjectivism. The subsumption of Johannes Fabian's Time and the other to this 'deconstructive' impulse is particularly mislead- ing, given that the book manifestly owes more to an earlier wave of interest in the communicative character of ethnography that seemed influenced by hermeneutic philosophy and Habermas rather than Nietzsche. But perhaps any anti-positivism must 'fall into the trap of all subjectivism and conflate general and specific critiques in a way that de-legitimizes both'? The critiques of Said indeed indicate that this is a difficult trap to avoid.

This is not to say that Orientalism does not have faults or limitations. Because of the novelty of its pro- ject, some homogenization of the object of study was almost inevitable; though critical discussion of European perceptions of non-Europeans was not, of course, a new endeavour, Said redirected such inquiries by dealing not with a history of ideas or images, but with a discourse, that was understood as a systemic, enduring entity. While the earlier genre had emphasized stereotypes and particular visions of others, Said's book suggested the very significant epistemic level at which discourses such as Orientalism could work: they pro- duced representations with considerable political weight and authority. Once the field had been opened up, however, it obviously becomes more productive to examine Orientalisms or colonial discourses in their plurality. As Said as well as many of his critics anticipated, much more attention might be paid to the differences between traditions of orientalist scholarship in various European countries, traditions relating to other regions such as southeast Asia and the Pacific, more precise, periodiza- tion of particular constructs, and the differing interests of particular colonists, writers, artists, and scholars. The aim is not to dissolve the field of questions into a mass of particularities, but to gain a better sense of localized projects and their common ground.

More might also be done by way of examining coun- terparts to Orientalism in the cultures of indigenous and colonized groups - that is, in exploring their characterizations of whites, among others, in ethnic typologies and narratives of colonial encounters.l While diverse modes of 'othering' and stereotyping might be iden- tified, it would be unfortunate if the result was a pre- sumption that Orientalizing was a universal kind of cultural process - that people everywhere have always done to each other. While that might be a valid state-

1. Edward Said, 'Anthropology's interlocutors: representing the colonized', Critical Inquiry 15 (1989), p.213.

2. Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys), 'Orientalism and Sinology', Asian Studies Association of Australia Review 7 (3), p. 20; these comments are typical of a number of statements which appeared in a review symposium over several issues of that periodical. Among more negative reviews, that of Robert Irwin is more considered than most: 'Writing about Islam and the Arabs', Ideology and Consciousness 9 (1981/82), 103-112.

3. e.g. George E. Marcus and Michael J. J. Fisher, Anthropology as cultural critique, Chicago: U. of Chicago P., pp. 1-2.

4. Christopher Miller, Blank darkness: Africanist discourse in French (Chicago: U. Chicago P., 1985), p. 15.

5. Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp.3, 23.

6. Said clearly also owes something to Raymond

6 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991



ment in a categorical sense, it is clearly the case that the capacities of populations to impose and act upon their constructions of others has been highly variable throughout history; the distinctiveness of European and American characterizations of various colonized or pro- spectively colonized populations over the last several centuries can hardly be overlooked.

Whatever its faults, Orientalism thus opens up a whole range of questions for further exploration, but many critics seem inclined to avoid the challenge by denouncing the book. The dismissive claim that Orien- talism merely expresses its Palestinian author's grudge against the West has been often reiterated, and this is why more is at issue here than the adequacy or otherwise of Richardson's reading of Said. He follows others such as Leys in noting Said's 'personal stake' in the topics at issue, as if other writers were merely dis- passionate scholars who had no commitments, grudges, or personal investments in academic disciplines, institu- tions, theoretical stances, or particular arguments. While these commitments are in fact diverse, and linked up with individual biographies in a highly particular fashion, it must be acknowledged that most scholars have a general stake in the credibility of their chosen discipline: this is, after all, the context and condition of salar- ies, grants, personal prestige, and so on. Of course, the extent to which this constrains scholarship is diverse: many academics obviously have a critical attitude to assumptions that establish particular disciplines as clearly separate and scientific endeavours, but there are evi- dently also many who respond to any questioning of a discipline's distinctiveness or rigour in an extraordi- narily defensive fashion. In the wake of Writing culture and similar explorations of the constitution of ethnographic texts, there have been many pleas to forget about sterile meta-theory - that is stereotyped as it is accused of stereotyping conventional work - and get on with the job.

The challenge posed by Said's work is rather different. In fact, much of the reflective literature on the making of ethnographies seems to have a celebratory character, and affirms rather than deconstructs ethnographic authority; this tendency no doubt arises from the orientation towards individual fieldworkers and individual ethnography that has characterized the literature, and in particular, the emphasis on autocriticism.13 Said, on the other hand, is oriented more towards genres and the enduring metaphors and structure of writing on the Middle East. He points out that writers such as Lawrence and Doughty saw their own concep- tions of the Orient as highly individual, 'self-created out of some highly personal encounter' yet tended nevertheless to confirm traditional attitudes and ulti- mately disparage the Orient in a conventional fashion.14 In a similar way, anthropologists tend to see their por- traits of peoples studied as the outcomes of a singular and personal experience, while neglecting the impor- tance of genre constraints and enduring rhetorical forms. Ethnographic accounts still seem to be regarded as a novel genre associated with professional anthropology, even though the most cursory reading of eight- eenth and nineteenth century travel writing and ethnology makes significant continuities apparent.

If anthropologists are to draw anything from work such as Said's, it is perhaps less important to take the critique of Orientalism as though it might be directly transposed to anthropology, and instead apply similar interpretative methods to both general styles and re- gional traditions of research and writing. At a very

general level, it is, for instance, notable that many prominent works of anthropological comparison con- tinue to emphasize us-them juxtapositions, using the 'other' as a counter-example to what is notionally a 'western' institution or belief.15 While these studies - such as Clifford Geertz's Negara - frequently manifest a humanistic will to understand the people described, they also subordinate their lives, cultures, and societies, to the purposes of metropolitan rhetoric: the interests of healthy scepticism or relativistic cultural criticism at home thus make the other admissible primarily as a corrective to some aspect of 'our' thought. In the case of Negara, this leads to a highly picturesque account, similar in rhetorical form if not in content, to the us/them juxtaposition of Enlightenment travel writing.16

* 17 Contrary, then, to what Said implied in Orientalism constructions of other cultures are not necessarily to be applauded simply because they avoid hostile or aggres- sive attitudes, which have hardly been conspicuous in recent anthropology; his later article more appropriately raises the question of what the problematic and interests of the observer actually are.18

Many anthropologists' misgivings concerning 'reflective' anthropology relate to its perceived introspection and narcissism. Whether these complaints can really be sustained by the literature in question is a moot point, but Said suggests directions for a different kind of critical anthropology, that is concerned with the formation of anthropological knowledge in the context of colonial histories and contemporary imperialism. While ethnography and oral history have already contributed a great deal to better understandings of indigenous responses to colonialism, the perceptions and strategies of white in- truders, and those who planned or wrote about intru- sion, have been relatively neglected.19 Anthropology might now examine the cultures of colonizers, not only through ethnographic or ethnohistorical studies of particular groups such as missionaries, but in a more wide ranging way in relation to the development of representations of others in metropolitan cultures. Given that such studies are now attempting to deal with the localized manifestations of such discourses, as well as their general contours, it might seem that anthropology's par- ticularist vision might make a distinctive contribution. The challenge of such research, though, lies not in the scope there might be for reinterpreting the Cook voy- ages, Mungo Park, or more recent travellers and ethnol- ogists, but in the continuity between such endeavours and contemporary scholarship. Just as Orientalism es- tablished the continuities between various scholarly traditions and anti-Arab political propaganda - which has regrettably been given a new lease of life in the western media by the Gulf war - what are the connections between colonial constructions and modern popu- lar and anthropological views of particula'r societies? And what political projects or imperatives do these discourses express? If some kind of collective self-understanding is a legitimate aim for an academic discipline, the interest in the making of contemporary texts might be complemented by an awareness of precedents and continuities, that is, a sense of anthropology's place in larger discourses such as Orientalism. While some patches of blindness are perhaps inevitable correlates of the kinds of insight that particular disciplines enable, we should not complacently succumb to the guild members' narcotic; the dose of politics and history that a critical investigation of anthropological and colonial discourses might bring is no magic solution, but a par- tial antidote is better than none.a

Williams, hardly an idealist critic. See 'Narrative, geography and interpretation', New Left Review 180 (1990), 81-97.

7. Cf. Peter Mason, Deconstructing America, London, Routledge, 1990.

8. 'On Orientalism' in The predicament of culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. P, 1988), p.260. This is probably the most careful and extended reading of Said's work published within anthropology thus far.

9. e.g. Simon Leys, cited by Richardson.

10. See for instance the book with Jean Mohr's photographs, After the last sky: Palestinian lives, New York, Pantheon, 1986, and 'Homage to a belly-dancer', London Review of Books, 13 September 1990, pp. 6-7.

11. 'Anthropology's interlocutors.'

12. See for instance Jonathan Hill (ed.) Rethinking history and myth: indigenous south American perceptions of the past (Urbana, U. of Illinois P., 1988).

13. e.g. R. Borofsky, Making history, Cambridge U. P. 1987, pp. 152-56.

14. Orientalism, p. 237. 15. For discussion with

respect to the Maussian literature on the gift, see N. Thomas, Entangled objects: exchange, material culture and colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard U. P., in press.

16. Some of the more particular connections between colonial ethnology and modem anthropology are discussed in my paper, 'The force of ethnology: origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division', Current Anthropology 30 (1989), 27-41; 21 1-213.

17. Orientalism, p. 325. 18. 'Representing the

colonized', p. 212. 19. For recent work in

this direction, see the special issue (November 1989) of American Ethnologist on 'Tensions of empire'.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 7 No 2, April 1991 7



anthropology and orientalism

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