Said Oriental Ism

8/3/2019 Said Oriental Ism

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OrientalismEDWARD W. SAID';

0", A VISlT to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a Frenchjournallst wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that 'i t had onceseemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval'[Desjardins 1976: J4). He wa s right about the place, of course, especiallyso far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a Europeaninvention, and had been since anliquicy a place of romance, exotic bejngs,haunting memories and l a n d s c a p e s ~ remarkable experiences. ~ o w it wasdisappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps itseemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stak


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EDWARD W. SAIDIt will be dear to the reaJer . . . that by Oriemalism I mean se

things) aU of them, in my opmion, interdependent. The most reaccepted designat ion for Orien tal ism is an academic one, and indeelabel stilJ serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who t e ~writes about, or researches the Orient ~ a n d this applies whether the peis an anthropologist, sociologist, hisrorian, or phiIofogisr - either specific or its general aspects, is an Orientallst l and what he or she doOrientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is truethe term Orientatisffl is less preferred by specialists today, both becauis too vague and genera] and because it connotes the h i g h ~ h i 1 n d e d e xtive attitude of nineteenth-century an d early t w e n t i e t h ~ c e n t u r y Eurocolonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held withOrient' as their main focus, with the Orientalisr in his new or old guitheir main authority. The poim is rhat even if it does not s.urvive as itdid, Orienralism lives on academically through lt S doctrines an d tabout the Orient and the OriemaL

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigratspecializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this studymore genera! meaning for Orientalism. OrienraHs.m is a style of thobased upon an ontological and epistemological distlncti on made bet'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.' Thus a very large of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political dsts, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the distinction between East an d West as the smIting point for elabtheories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accoconcernjng the Orient1 its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny, and so on,Oricnralism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, DanteKarl Marx. A little later in thlS introdudion I shall deal with the metological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a 'field' as

The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginmeanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eightecentury there ha') heen a considerable, quite disciplined - perhapsregulated - traffi.: between the two. Here I come to the third meaninOrientaiism, which is something more hiswricaHy and materially dethan either of the orher two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a roughJy del1ned starting point OriemaJism can be discussed and analyzthe corporate institution for dealing with the Orient - dealing wiby making statements a.bout it, authorizing views of it. describing ireaching it, settling it: in short, Oriemalism as a Western styledominating, r e s t r u c t u r i n g ~ and having authority over the Orient. [ found it useful here to employ ivlichel Foucault's notion of a discoursdescribed by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discil>linePlmish, to identify Oricmaii:-.m. My contention is that without examOrientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly undersmnd the enormosystematic discipline by which European culture was able to m a n a g e ~

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ORIENTALlSMeven 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 noone writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without takingaccount of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. Inbrief, because of Orientalism the Orient was no t (and is not) a free subjectof 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 ofinterests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in)any occasion when that peculiar entity 'the Orient' is in question. How thishappens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show thatEuropean culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off againstthe Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. . . .

I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert factof nature. It is no t merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just thereeither. We must take seriously Vico's great observation that men make theirow n history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extendit to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities - to say nothingof historical entities - such locales, regions, geographical sectors as 'Orient'an d 'Occident' are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, theOrient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, an dvocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. Thetwo geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.Having said rhat, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orientwas essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality....There were - and are - cultures and nations whose location is in the East,and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greaterthan anything that could be said ahout them in the West. About that factthis study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here dealsprincipally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism an d Orient,but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about theOrient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lackthereof, with a 'real' Orient....A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, an d histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely theirconfigurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the Orient wascreated - or, as I call it, 'Orientalized' - an d to believe that such thingshappen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. Therelationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, ofdomination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony....

This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume thatthe structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or ofmyths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow

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EDWARD W. SAIDaway. I myself believe rhat Orientalism 15 more particularly valuablesign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a vdiscourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or schoform., it claims to be). . ,

In a quite constant way, Odentalism depends for its strategy onfJexibJe positi(mal superiority, which puts the Westerner in a wholeof possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing himrelative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, espeduring the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from theRenaissance to the prescnt? The scientist, the scholar, the missionarytrader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because hebe there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orpart, Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and withiumbreHa of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period fromend of the eighteenth century, there emerged ':l complex Orient suitablstudy in the academy, for dispby in the museum, for reconstruction icolonial oHke, [or theoretical illustration in anthropological, biololinguistic, radal, and historical theses about mankind and the universeinstances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolucultural personality, national or religious character. Additionally, the iinative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusupon a sovereign \Vestem consciousness out of whose unchaliecentrality an Oriental world emerged. first according ro general ideas awho or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed Jogrc govenot simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressinvestments, and projections. , . .

Therefore, Orlentalism is no t a mere political subject matter orthat is reflected passively by culture) scholarship, or institutions; nor ilarge and diffuse collection oftexts abour. the Orient; no r is 1t representan d expressive of some nefarious 'Western' imperialist plot to hold dthe 'Orienral' world . It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awarenesaesthetic, scholarly. economic, s o c i o l o g i c a l ~ h i s t o r i c a l ~ and philolotexts; ir is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinctionworld is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident} bu t alsowhole series of 'interests' which, by such means as scholarly discophilological reconstrucrion, psychological analysis, landscape and slogical d e s c r i p t l o n ~ it not only creates but also maintains; it is, ratherexpresses, a cerratn toiU or intention to understand, in some cases to conmanipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alttive and novel, world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no meadirect, corresponding re1


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ORJENTALISMpolicy 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 reat argument is thatOrientalism is - and does not simply represent - a considerable dimenSIonof modern political-intellectual cuhure, and as such has less to do with theOrient than it does with ~ O U [ ' world.

Because Orientalism is a cultural an d a political fact, then, it does notexist in some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, I think it can be shownthat wh

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