Orientalism, creating the other, Edward W. Said
Said E. W. (1994 [1979]), Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York, p.394
P. 12
« Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about Orient; nor is it representative and expressive some nefarious [malfaisant] “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves [moitiés], Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kind of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with the political power (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is- and does not simply represent- a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. »
p.20
« My principal methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describing the author’s position in a text regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed [bouleversé] by its sublimity, its scope, its awful [abominable] dimensions. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, theme, motifs that circulate in his text- all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. None of this takes place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation- for example, that philological studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies – whose present in time, in discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives strength and authority.”
p.40
“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 an 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 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 on 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?”
p.44
“But how did and does Orientalism work? How can one describe it all together as a historical phenomenon, a way of thought, a contemporary problem, and a material reality? Consider Cromer again, an accomplished technician of empire but also a beneficiary of Orientalism. He can furnish us with rudimentary answer. In “The government of Subject Races” he wrestles with the problem of how Britain, an nation of individuals, is to administer a wide-flung empire according to a number of central principles. He contrasts the “local agent”, who has both specialist’s knowledge of the native and an Anglo-Saxon individuality, with the central authority at home in London. The former may “treat subject of local interest in a manner calculated to damage, or even to jeopardize, Imperial interest. The central authority is in a position to obviate any danger arising from this cause”. Why? Because this authority can “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine” and “should endeavour, so far as is possible, to realise the circumstances attendant on the government of the dependency”. The language is vague and unattractive, but the point is not hard to grasp. Cromer envisions a seat of power in the West, and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine’s branches feed into it to the East – human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you - is processed by the machine, then converted into more power. The specialist dies the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance : the Oriental becomes, for example, a subject race, an example of an “Oriental” mentality, all for the enhancement if the “authority” at home. “Local interests” are Orientalist specialist interests, the “central authority” is the general interest of the imperial society as a whole. What Cromer quite accurately sees is the management of knowledge by society, the fact that knowledge- no matter how special – is regulated first by the local concerns of a specialist, later by the general concerns of a social system of authority. The interplay between local and central interests on intricate, but by no means indiscriminate.”
p. 54
“It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group if people living on a few acres if land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surrounding and the territory beyond, which they call “the land of the barbarians”. In other words, this universal practice of designation in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a away of making geographical distinction that can be entirely arbitrary I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land – barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough fir “us” to set up these boundaries in our own mind; “they” become accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours”. To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively. A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian. The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there”, beyond one’s own territory. All Kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own.”
p.55
“For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and different between what is close to it and what is far away.”
P. 12
« Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about Orient; nor is it representative and expressive some nefarious [malfaisant] “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves [moitiés], Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kind of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with the political power (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is- and does not simply represent- a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. »
p.20
« My principal methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describing the author’s position in a text regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed [bouleversé] by its sublimity, its scope, its awful [abominable] dimensions. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, theme, motifs that circulate in his text- all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. None of this takes place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation- for example, that philological studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies – whose present in time, in discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives strength and authority.”
p.40
“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 an 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 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 on 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?”
p.44
“But how did and does Orientalism work? How can one describe it all together as a historical phenomenon, a way of thought, a contemporary problem, and a material reality? Consider Cromer again, an accomplished technician of empire but also a beneficiary of Orientalism. He can furnish us with rudimentary answer. In “The government of Subject Races” he wrestles with the problem of how Britain, an nation of individuals, is to administer a wide-flung empire according to a number of central principles. He contrasts the “local agent”, who has both specialist’s knowledge of the native and an Anglo-Saxon individuality, with the central authority at home in London. The former may “treat subject of local interest in a manner calculated to damage, or even to jeopardize, Imperial interest. The central authority is in a position to obviate any danger arising from this cause”. Why? Because this authority can “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine” and “should endeavour, so far as is possible, to realise the circumstances attendant on the government of the dependency”. The language is vague and unattractive, but the point is not hard to grasp. Cromer envisions a seat of power in the West, and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine’s branches feed into it to the East – human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you - is processed by the machine, then converted into more power. The specialist dies the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance : the Oriental becomes, for example, a subject race, an example of an “Oriental” mentality, all for the enhancement if the “authority” at home. “Local interests” are Orientalist specialist interests, the “central authority” is the general interest of the imperial society as a whole. What Cromer quite accurately sees is the management of knowledge by society, the fact that knowledge- no matter how special – is regulated first by the local concerns of a specialist, later by the general concerns of a social system of authority. The interplay between local and central interests on intricate, but by no means indiscriminate.”
p. 54
“It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group if people living on a few acres if land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surrounding and the territory beyond, which they call “the land of the barbarians”. In other words, this universal practice of designation in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a away of making geographical distinction that can be entirely arbitrary I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land – barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough fir “us” to set up these boundaries in our own mind; “they” become accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours”. To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively. A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian. The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there”, beyond one’s own territory. All Kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own.”
p.55
“For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and different between what is close to it and what is far away.”
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