1500- 2000 words paper

Edward Said, Lecture 1 Sociology of Religion Lecture, April 20

Edward Said

§ 1935-2003

§ Born in Jerusalem in Palestine (when it was a British Mandate), he was a lifelong advocate for Palestinian autonomy and the Palestinian people.

§ He was a professor of literature at Columbia and is considered one of the founders of postcolonial theory.

§ His most famous book, published in 1978, was Orientalism.

Orientalism

§ Written in 1978

§ One of the most important books of the twentieth century.

§ Orientalism was historically considered alongside anthropology and sociology/political science: anthropology studied “the peoples without history”; sociology and political science studies the West and its settler colonies (the US/Canada/Mexico, etc.); and Orientalism studied peoples with a literary history, basically the “civilizations” of Asia

Orientalism

§ Yet one of the challenges of Orientalism was the way that it froze history: European scholars would emphasize their capacity with various Asian languages (usually specializing in a region like South Asia, East Asia, or the Middle East) and then believe that learning the classical texts was all they needed.

§ This is a process called “essentializing”

§ Think about what it would mean if someone felt they could talk about the current French elections by having carefully studied many of the texts in 9th

century France. Yet this still happens about Islam!

The phrase “Orientalist”

§ People use this phrase a lot less often now, and are more likely to talk about “Near Eastern Language and Civilizations” (though note that near east still refers to Europe. Near to whom? That’s why you more often now say East Asia instead of the Far East)

§ And in many ways, Said’s book helped to totally reorient the field.

What does Said mean by Orientalism

§ “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” [East] and (most of the time) “the Occident” [West] (2).

§ Ontological: Question of being. What kind of thing is something?

§ Epistemological: Question of knowing. How do we know something?

§ Said is interested in how we know the Orient and how that kind of knowing changes what the Orient is.

Meaning of Orientalism

§ “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” (3).

Antonio Gramsci

§ Italian politician, Marxist theorist

§ Most famous for his Prison Notebooks, which he wrote while being imprisoned by Mussolini

§ Famous for being one of the major influences on later Marxism, bringing culture more into focus.

§ Developed the concept of cultural hegemony

Cultural Hegemony for Said

§ “Culture…is to be found operating within civil society [not political society], where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this

cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West (7).

(Continued)

§ “It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far…a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non- Europeans… There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European

superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have different views on the matter” (7)

Said is also indebted to Foucault and how discourses are always related to power

§ Is there a different between political and non-political knowledge?

§ “No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective ’political’ is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity” (10).

What is Said’s method?

§ He analyzes texts about the Orient (especially French, English, and American) to show they work together to develop what Foucault calls a “discourse.”

§ What’s important here is that the represented “Orient” isn’t necessarily related to any sort of “real” area or people. It’s the West speaking to the West about a group that isn’t representing themselves or having any real stake in their representation.

§ That’s as true for literature and language study as it is for social science.

How does Orientalism work?

§ “…that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, ’there’ in discourses about it. And these representations reply upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient” (22).

Orientalism is about

categories

§ How are particular categories made universal across time and space? So Muslims, women, African Americans, queer people are always and everywhere “like this.” This process is called essentialization.

§ How can we analyze the production of those categories in seemingly non-political contexts (like the academy or, for Foucault, medicine)?

§ These questions have made the book hugely influential, and important for us in how we think about religion.

So is it all fake? And can we only study ourselves?

§ That’s not what Said is saying. He does say we have to be careful though, and to be aware of power.

§ How might we be reproducing inequalities in our research?

§ How might we be maintaining stereotypes and essentializations?

§ We can study people who are different from us, but how can we do so in a mindful way?

Edward Said on Orientalism

§ (his last interview, in 2003, during the buildup to the second war in Iraq)

§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NNuczNFyZM

§ Start at 1:05:14, end at 1:31:45

Review

§ Edward Said wrote Orientalism

§ The Orient is created by the West as a timeless and universal category, an essentialization

§ He’s influenced by Foucault and Gramsci

§ All knowledge is political.

§ But that doesn’t mean you can’t still try to know things. Just be mindful.

For Tuesday

§ Think about the idea that “The East is a career” and how Said uses other different thinkers to make his point.

§ What does all of this have to do with socialization?