ANTHROPOLOGY FINAL PAPER!!

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The Clash of Definitions

Edward W. Said

Samuel P. Huntington’s essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, announcing in its first sentence that “world politics is entering a new phase.”1 By this he meant that whereas in the recent past world conflicts were between ideological camps grouping the first, second, and third worlds into warring camps, the new style of politics would entail conflicts between different and presumably clashing civilizations. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural…. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.” Later he explains how it is that the principal clash will be between Western and non-Western civilizations, and indeed Huntington spends most of his time in the article discussing the fundamental disagreements, potential or actual, between what he calls the West on the one hand and, on the other, the Islamic and Confucian civilizations. In terms of detail, a great deal more attention is paid to Islam than to any other civilization, including the West.

Much of the subsequent interest taken in Huntington’s essay, I think, derives from its timing, rather than exclusively from what it literally says. As he himself notes, there have been several intellectual and political attempts since the end of the cold war to map the emerging world situation; this included Francis Fukuyama’s the end of history and the thesis put about during the latter days of the Bush administration, the theory of the so-called New World Order. More recently Paul Kennedy, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Eric Hobsbawm—all of whom have looked at the approaching millennium—have done so with considerable attention to the causes of future conflict, which has given them all cause for alarm. The core of Huntington’s vision (not really original with him) is the idea of an unceasing clash, a concept of conflict that slides somewhat effortlessly into the political space vacated by the unremitting bipolar war of ideas and values embodied in the unregretted cold war. I do not therefore think it is inaccurate to suggest that what Huntington is providing in this essay of his—especially since it is primarily addressed to the influential opinion and policy makers who subscribe to Foreign Affairs, the United States’s leading journal of foreign policy discussion—is a recycled version of the cold war thesis, that conflicts in today’s and tomorrow’s world will remain not economic or social in

The New Crusades : Constructing the Muslim Enemy, edited by Emran Qureshi, and Michael A. Sells, Columbia University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wou/detail.action?docID=909211. Created from wou on 2018-01-31 13:14:08.

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essence but ideological, and if that is so then one ideology, the West’s, is the still point or locus around which for Huntington all others turn. In effect, then, the cold war continues, but this time on many fronts, with many more serious and basic systems of values and ideas (like Islam and Confucianism) struggling for ascendancy and even dominance over the West. Not surprisingly, therefore, Huntington concludes his essay with a brief survey of what it is that the West might do to remain strong and keep its putative opponents weak and divided (it must “exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions”).2

So strong and insistent is Huntington’s notion that other civilizations necessarily clash with the West, and so relentlessly aggressive and chauvinistic is his prescription for what the West must do to continue winning, we are forced to conclude that he is really most interested in continuing and expanding the cold war by other means rather than advancing ideas about understanding the current world scene or trying to reconcile between cultures. Little in what he says expresses the slightest doubt or skepticism. Not only will conflict continue, but, as he says on the first page, “conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world.” It is as a very brief and rather crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status in the minds of Americans and others that Huntington’s essay has to be understood. I would go so far as to say that it argues from the standpoint of Pentagon planners and defense industry executives who may have temporarily lost their occupations after the end of the cold war but have now discovered a new vocation for themselves. Huntington at least has the merit of underlining the cultural component in relationships between different countries, traditions, and peoples.

The sad part is that “the clash of civilizations” is useful as a way of exaggerating and making intractable various political or economic problems. It is quite easy to see how, for instance, the practice of Japan bashing in the West can be fueled by appeals to the menacing and sinister aspects of Japanese culture as employed by government spokespersons, or how the age-old appeal to the “yellow peril” might be mobilized for use in discussions of ongoing problems with Korea or China. The opposite is true in the practice throughout Asia and Africa of Occidentalism, turning “the West” into a monolithic category that is supposed to express hostility to nonwhite, non-European. and non-Christian civilizations.

Perhaps because he is more interested in policy prescription than he is either in The New Crusades : Constructing the Muslim Enemy, edited by Emran Qureshi, and Michael A. Sells, Columbia University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wou/detail.action?docID=909211. Created from wou on 2018-01-31 13:14:08.

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history or the careful analysis of cultural formations, Huntington in my opinion is quite misleading in what he says and how he puts things. A great deal of his argument depends on second- and third-hand opinion that scants the enormous advances in our concrete and theoretical understanding of how cultures work, how they change, and how they can best be grasped or apprehended. A brief look at the people and opinions he quotes suggests that journalism and popular demagoguery are his main sources rather than scholarship or theory. For when you draw on tendentious publicists, scholars, and journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Sergei Stankevich, and Bernard Lewis you already prejudice the argument in favor of conflict and polemic rather than in favor of true understanding and the kind of cooperation between peoples that our planet needs. Huntington’s authorities are not the cultures themselves but a small handful of authorities picked by him because in fact they emphasize the latent bellicosity in one or another statement by one or another so-called spokesman for or about that culture. The giveaway for me is the title of his essay—the clash of civilizations—which is not his phrase but Bernard Lewis’s. On the last page of Lewis’s essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” which appeared in the September 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, a journal that has on occasion run articles purporting to describe the dangerous sickness, madness, and derangement of Arabs and Muslims, Lewis speaks about the current problem with the Islamic world: “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reactions of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.”3

I do not want to spend much time discussing the lamentable features of Lewis’s screed; elsewhere I have described his methods—the lazy generalizations, the reckless distortions of history, the wholesale demotion of civilizations into categories like irrational and enraged, and so on. Few people today with any sense would want to volunteer such sweeping characterizations as the ones advanced by Lewis about over a billion Muslims, scattered through at least five continents, dozens of differing languages and traditions and histories. Of them he says that they are all enraged at Western modernity, as if a billion people were but one and Western civilization were no more complicated a matter than a simple declarative sentence. But what I do want to stress is, first, how Huntington has picked up from Lewis the notion that civilizations are monolithic and homogenous and, second, how—again from Lewis—

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he assumes the unchanging character of the duality between “us” and “them.” In other words I think it is absolutely imperative to stress that, like Bernard Lewis,

Samuel Huntington does not write a neutral, descriptive, and objective prose but is himself a polemicist whose rhetoric not only depends heavily on prior arguments about a war of all against all but in effect perpetuates them. Far from being an arbiter between civilizations, therefore, Huntington is a partisan, an advocate of one so-called civilization over all the others. Like Lewis, Huntington defines Islamic civilization reductively, as if what most matters about it is its supposed anti- Westernism. For his part Lewis tries to give a set of reasons for his definition—that Islam has never modernized, that it never separated between church and state, that it has been incapable of understanding other civilizations—but Huntington does not bother with them. For him Islam, Confucianism, and the other five or six civilizations (Hindu, Japanese, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African) that still exist are separate from each other and, consequently, potentially in a conflict that he wants to manage, not resolve. He writes as a crisis manager, not as a student of civilization or as a reconciler between them.

At the core of his essay, and this is what has made it strike so responsive a chord among post–cold war policy makers, is this sense of cutting through a lot of unnecessary detail, of masses of scholarship and huge amounts of experience, boiling them down to a couple of catchy, easy-to-quote-and-remember ideas, which are then passed off as pragmatic, practical, sensible, and clear. But is this the best way to understand the world we live in? Is it wise as an intellectual and a scholarly expert to produce a simplified map of the world and then hand it to generals and civilian lawmakers as a prescription for first comprehending and then acting in the world? Doesn’t this method in effect prolong, exacerbate, and deepen conflict? What does it do to minimize civilizational conflict? Do we want the clash of civilizations? Doesn’t it mobilize nationalist passions and therefore nationalist murderousness? Shouldn’t we ask the question Why is one doing this sort of thing? To understand or to act? To mitigate or to aggravate the likelihood of conflict?

I would want to begin to survey the world situation by commenting on how prevalent it has become for people to speak now in the name of large and, in my opinion, undesirably vague and manipulable, abstractions like the West or Japanese or Slavic culture, Islam or Confucianism, labels that collapse religions, races, and ethnicities into ideologies that are considerably more unpleasant and provocative than those of Gobineau and Renan 150 years ago. Strange as it may seem, these examples of group psychology run rampant are not new, and they are certainly not edifying at all. They occur in times of deep insecurity: that is, when peoples seem

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particularly close to and thrust upon each other, the result either of expansion, war, imperialism, and migration or as the effect of sudden, unprecedented change. Let me give a couple of examples to illustrate. The language of group identity makes a particularly strident appearance from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, as the culmination of decades of international competition between the great European and American powers for territories in Africa and Asia. In the battle for the empty spaces of Africa—the dark continent—France and Britain as well as Germany and Belgium resort not only to force but to a whole slew of theories and rhetorics for justifying their plunder. Perhaps the most famous of such devices is the French concept of civilizing mission, la mission civilisatrice, a notion whose basic premise is that some races and cultures have a higher aim in life than others. This conclusion grants the more powerful, more developed, and more civilized the right therefore to colonize others, not in the name of brute force or raw plunder, both of which are standard components of the exercise, but in the name of a noble ideal. Joseph Conrad’s most famous story, Heart of Darkness, is an ironic, even terrifying enactment of this thesis, that—as his narrator Marlow puts it—“the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”4

In response to this sort of logic, two things occur. One is that competing powers invent their own theory of cultural or civilizational destiny in order to justify their actions abroad. Britain had such a theory, Germany had one, Belgium had one, and, of course, in the concept of manifest destiny, the United States had one too. These redeeming ideas dignify the practice of competition and clash, whose real purpose, as Conrad quite accurately saw, was self-aggrandizement, power, conquest, treasure, and unrestrained self-pride. I would go so far as to say that what we today call the rhetoric of identity by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group puts that group at the center of the world derives from that period of imperial competition at the end of the nineteenth century. And this in turn provokes the concept of “worlds at war” that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington’s article. It received its most frightening futuristic application in H. G. Wells’s fable The War of the Worlds, which, one recalls, expands the concept to include a battle between this world and a distant interplanetary one. In the related fields of political economy, geography, anthropology, and historiography, the theory that each “world” is self-enclosed, has its own boundaries and special territory, is

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applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, psychology, ethos, etc.5 All of these ideas, almost without exception, are based not on the harmony but on the conflict, or clash, between worlds. You see it in the works of Gustave LeBon (cf. his The World in Revolt) and in such relatively forgotten works as F. S. Marvin’s Western Races and the World (1922) and in George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers’s The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races (1927).

The second thing that happens is that, as Huntington himself concedes, the lesser peoples, the objects of the imperial gaze, so to speak, respond by resisting their forcible manipulation and settlement. We now know that active primary resistance to the white man began the moment he set foot in places like Algeria, East Africa, India, and elsewhere. Later, primary resistance was succeeded by secondary resistance, the organization of political and cultural movements determined to achieve independence and liberation from imperial control. At precisely the moment in the nineteenth century that among the European and American powers a rhetoric of civilizational self-justification begins to be widespread, a responding rhetoric among the colonized peoples develops, one that speaks in terms of African or Asian or Arab unity, independence, self-determination. In India, for example, the Congress Party was organized in 1880 and by the turn of the century had convinced the Indian elite that only by supporting Indian languages, industry, and commerce could political freedom come; these are ours and ours alone, runs the argument, and only by supporting our world against theirs—note the us-versus-them construction—can we finally stand on our own. One finds a similar logic at work during the Meiji period in modern Japan. Something like this rhetoric of belonging is also lodged at the heart of each independence movement’s nationalism, and it achieved the result shortly after World War II not only of dismantling the classical empires but also of winning independence for dozens and dozens of countries thereafter. India, Indonesia, most of the Arab countries, Indochina, Algeria, Kenya, etc.: all these states emerged on the world scene sometimes peacefully, sometimes as the effect of internal developments (as in the Japanese instance) of ugly colonial wars or of wars of national liberation.

In both the colonial and postcolonial context, therefore, rhetorics of general cultural or civilizational specificity went in two potential directions: the first, a utopian line that insisted on an overall pattern of integration and harmony between all peoples, and the second, a line that suggested all civilizations were so specific and jealous, monotheistic in effect, as to reject and war against the others. Among instances of the first are the language and institutions of the United Nations,

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founded in the aftermath of World War II, and the subsequent development out of that of various attempts at world government predicated on coexistence, voluntary limitations of sovereignty, integration of peoples and cultures harmoniously. Among the second are the theory and practice of the cold war and, more recently, the idea that the clash of civilizations is if not a necessity for a world of so many different parts then a certainty. According to this theory, cultures and civilizations are basically separated from each other. I do not want to be invidious here. In the Islamic world there has been a resurgence of rhetorics and movements stressing the inimicability of Islam with the West, just as in Africa, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, movements have appeared that stress the need for excluding designated others as undesirable. White apartheid in South Africa was such a movement, as is the current interest in Afrocentrism and a totally independent Western civilization to be found in the Africa and the United States respectively.

The point of this short cultural history of the idea of the clash of civilizations is that people like Huntington are products of that history, are its product, and are shaped in their writing by it. Moreover, the language describing the clash is laced with considerations of power: the powerful use it to protect what they have and what they do, the powerless or less powerful use it to achieve parity, independence, or a comparative advantage with regard to the dominant power. Thus, to build a conceptual framework around the notion of us-versus-them is in effect to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural—our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange—whereas in fact the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational. Within each civilizational camp, we will notice, there are official representatives of that culture or civilization who make themselves into its mouthpiece, who assign themselves the role of articulating “our” (or for that matter “their”) essence. This always necessitates a fair amount of compression, reduction, and exaggeration. So on the first and most immediate level, then, statements about what “our” culture or civilization is, or ought to be, necessarily involve a contest over the definition. This is certainly true of Huntington, who writes his essay at a time in the United States when a great deal of turmoil has been occurring around the very definition of Western civilization. Recall that in the United States many college campuses have been shaken during the past couple of decades over what the canon of Western civilization is, what books should be taught, which ones read or not read, included, or otherwise given attention. Places like Stanford and Columbia debated the issue not simply as a matter of habitual academic concern but because the definition of the West and consequently of America were at stake.

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Anyone who has the slightest understanding of how cultures work knows that defining that culture, saying what it is for members of the culture, is always a major and, even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. There are canonical authorities to be selected, and regularly revised, debated, reselected, or dismissed. There are ideas of good and evil, belonging or not belonging (the same and the different), hierarchies of value to be specified, discussed, rediscussed, and settled or not, as the case may be. Moreover, each culture defines its enemies, what stands beyond it and threatens it. For the Greeks beginning with Herodotus anyone who did not speak Greek was automatically a barbarian, an Other to be despised and fought against. An excellent recent book by the French classicist François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, painstakingly shows how deliberately and painstakingly Herodotus sets about constructing an image of a barbarian Other in the case of the Scythians, more even than in the case of the Persians.6

The official culture is that of priests, academies, and the state. It provides definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and what I have called belonging. It is this official culture that speaks in the name of the whole, that tries to express the general will, the general ethos and idea, that inclusively holds in the official past, the founding fathers and texts, the pantheon of heroes and villains, etc., and excludes what is foreign or different or undesirable in the past. From it come the definitions of what may or may not be said, those prohibitions and proscriptions that are necessary to any culture if it is to have authority.

It is also true that in addition to the mainstream, or official, or canonical, culture there are dissenting or alternative, unorthodox, heterodox cultures that contain many antiauthoritarian strains in them in competition with the official culture. These can be called the counterculture, an ensemble of practices associated with various kinds of outsiders—the poor, the immigrants, artistic bohemians, workers, rebels, artists. From the counterculture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. The great contemporary Arab poet Adonis has written a massive account of the relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Arabic culture and has shown the constant dialectic and tension between them. No culture is understandable without some sense of this ever present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund.

In the United States the debate about what is American has gone through a large number of transformations and sometimes dramatic shifts. As I was growing up, Western films depicted the native Americans as evil devils, to be destroyed or

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tamed. They were called Red Indians, and insofar as they had any function in the culture at large—this was as true of films as it was of the writing of academic history —it was to be a foil to the advancing course of white civilization. Today that has changed completely. Native Americans are seen as victims, not villains, of the country’s Western progress. There has even been a change in the status of Columbus. There are even more dramatic reversals in the depictions of African Americans and women. Toni Morrison has noted how it is that in classic American literature there is an obsession with whiteness, as Melville’s Moby Dick and Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym so eloquently testify. Yet she says the major male and white writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, men who shaped the canon of what we have known as American literature, created their works by using whiteness as a way of avoiding, curtaining off, and rendering invisible the African presence in the midst of our society. The very fact that Toni Morrison writes her novels and criticism with such success and brilliance now underscores the extent of the change from the world of Melville and Hemingway to that of Dubois, Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Which vision is the real America, and who can lay claim to represent and define it? The question is a complex and deeply interesting one, but it cannot be settled by reducing the whole matter to a few clichés.

A recent view of the difficulties involved in cultural contests whose object is the definition of a civilization can be found in Arthur Schlesinger’s little book, The Disuniting of America.7 As a mainstream historian, Schlesinger is understandably troubled by the fact that emergent and immigrant groups in the United States have disputed the official, unitary fable of America as it used to be represented by the great classical historians of this country, men like Bancroft, Henry Adams, and, more recently, Richard Hofstader. The former want the writing of history to reflect not only an America that was conceived of and ruled by patricians and landowners but an America in which slaves, servants, laborers, and poor immigrants played an important but as yet unacknowledged role. The narratives of such people, silenced by the great discourses whose source was Washington, the investment banks of New York, the universities of New England, and the great industrial fortunes of the Middle West, have come to disrupt the slow progress and unruffled serenity of the official story. They ask questions, interject the experiences of social unfortunates, and make the claims of frankly lesser peoples—of women, Asian and African Americans, and various other minorities, sexual as well as ethnic. Whether or not one agrees with Schlesinger’s cri de coeur, there is no disagreeing with his underlying thesis that the writing of history is the royal road to the definition of a country, that the identity of a society is in large part a function of historical

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interpretation, which is fraught with contested claims and counterclaims. The United States is in such a fraught situation today.

There is a similar debate inside the Islamic world today, which in the often hysterical outcry about the threat of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorism that one encounters so often in the Western media is often lost sight of completely. Like any other major world culture, Islam contains within itself an astonishing variety of currents and countercurrents, most of them undiscerned by tendentious orientalist scholars for whom Islam is an object of fear and hostility or journalists who do not know any of the languages or relevant histories and are content to rely on persistent stereotypes that have lingered in the West since the tenth century. Iran today—which has become the target of a politically opportunistic attack by the United States—is in the throes of a stunningly energetic debate about law, freedom, personal responsibility, and tradition that is simply not covered by Western reporters. Charismatic lecturers and intellectuals, clerical and nonclerical alike, carry on the tradition of Shariati, challenging centers of power and orthodoxy with impunity and, it would seem, with great popular success. In Egypt two major civil cases involving intrusive religious interventions in the lives of an intellectual and a celebrated filmmaker respectively have resulted in the victory of both over orthodoxy (I refer here to the cases of Nasir Abu Zeid and Yousef Chahine). And I myself have argued in a recent book (The Politics of Dispossession, 1994) that far from there being a surge of Islamic fundamentalism as it is reductively described in the Western media, there is a great deal of secular opposition to it, in the form of various contests over the interpretation of sunnah in matters of law, personal conduct, political decision making and so on. Moreover, what is often forgotten is that movements like Hamas and Islamic Jihad are essentially protest movements that go against the capitulationist politics of the PLO and mobilize the will to resist Israeli occupation practices, expropriation of land, and the like.

I find it surprising and indeed disquieting that Huntington gives no indication anywhere in his essay that he is aware of these complex disputes or realized that the nature and identity of a civilization are never taken as unquestioned axioms by every single member of that civilization. Far from the cold war being the defining horizon of the past few decades, I would say that it is this extremely widespread attitude of questioning and skepticism toward age-old authority that characterizes the postwar world in both East and West. Nationalism and decolonization forced the issue by bringing whole populations to consider the question of nationality in the era after the white colonist had left. In Algeria, for example, today the site of a bloody contest between Islamists and an aging and discredited government, the debate has

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taken violent forms. But it is a real debate and a fierce contest nonetheless. Having won independence from the French in 1962, the National Front for the Liberation of Algeria declared itself to be the bearer of a newly liberated Algerian, Arab, and Muslim identity. For the first time in the modern history of the place Arabic became the language of instruction, state socialism its political creed, nonalignment its foreign affairs posture. In the process of conducting itself as a one-party embodiment of all these things the FLN grew into a massive, atrophied bureaucracy, its economy depleted, its leaders stagnating in the position of an unyielding oligarchy. Opposition arose not only from Muslim clerics and leaders but from the Berber minority, submerged in the all-purpose discourse of a supposedly single Algerian identity. The political crisis of the past several years then represents a several-sided contest for power and for the right to decide the nature of Algerian identity: what is Islamic about it, and what kind of Islam, what is national, what Arab and Berber.

To Huntington, what he calls “civilization identity” is a stable and undisturbed thing, like a roomful of furniture in the back of your house. This postulate is extremely far from the truth, not just in the Islamic world but throughout the entire surface of the globe. To emphasize the differences between cultures and civilizations (incidentally, I find his use of the words culture and civilization extremely sloppy, precisely because for him the two words represent fixed and reified objects rather than the dynamic, ceaselessly turbulent things that they in fact are) is completely to ignore the literally unending debate or contest (to use the more active and energetic of the two words) about defining the culture or civilization within those civilizations, including various “Western” ones. These debates completely undermine any idea of a fixed identity, and hence of relationships between identities, what Huntington considers to be a sort of ontological fact of political existence, to wit the clash of civilizations. You don’t have to be an expert on China, Japan, Korea, and India to know that. There is first of all the American instance I mentioned earlier. Or there is the German case, in which a major debate has been taking place ever since the end of World War II about the nature of German culture, as to whether Nazism derived logically from its core or whether it was an aberration.

But there is more to the question of identity even than that. In the field of cultural and rhetorical studies a series of recent discoveries/advances have given us a much clearer insight not only into the contested, dynamic nature of cultural identity but also into the extent to which the very idea of identity itself involves fantasy, manipulation, invention, construction. During the 1970s Hayden White published an extremely influential work called Metahistory.8 It is a study of several nineteenth-

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century historians—Marx, Michelet, and Nietzsche among them—and how it is that their reliance upon one or a series of tropes (figures of speech) determines the nature of their vision of history. Thus Marx, for instance, is committed to a particular poetics in his writing that allows him to understand the nature of progress and alienation in history according to a particular narrative model, stressing the difference in society between form and substance. The point of White’s extremely rigorous and quite brilliant analysis of Marx and the other historians is that he shows us how their histories are best understood not according to criteria of “realness” but rather as to how their internal rhetorical and discursive strategies work: it is these, rather than facts, that make the visions of Toqueville or Croce or Marx actually work as a system, not any external source in the so-called real world.

The effect of White’s book, as much as the effect of Michel Foucault’s studies, is to draw attention away from the existence of veridic confirmations for ideas that might be provided by the natural world and focus it instead on the kind of language used, which is seen as shaping the components of a writer’s vision. Rather than the idea of clash, for instance, deriving from a real clash in the world, we would then come to see it as deriving instead from the strategies of Huntington’s prose, which in turn relies on what I would call a managerial poetics, a strategy for assuming the existence of stable and metaphorically defined entities called civilizations that the writer proceeds quite emotively to manipulate, as in the phrase, “the crescent- shaped Islamic bloc, from the bulge of Africa to central Asia, has bloody borders.” I am not saying that Huntington’s language is emotive and shouldn’t be, but rather that quite revealingly it is, the way all language functions in the poetic way analyzed by Hayden White. What is evident from Huntington’s language is the way he uses figurative language to accentuate the distance between “our” world—normal, acceptable, familiar, logical—and, as an especially striking example, the world of Islam, with its bloody borders, bulging contours, etc. This suggests not so much analysis on Huntington’s part but a series of determinations that, as I said earlier, create the very clash he seems in his essay to be discovering and pointing to.

Too much attention paid to managing and clarifying the clash of cultures obliterates the fact of a great, often silent exchange and dialogue between them. What culture today—whether Japanese, Arab, European, Korean, Chinese, or Indian—has not had long, intimate, and extraordinarily rich contacts with other cultures? There is no exception to this exchange. One would wish that conflict managers would have paid attention to, understood the meaning of the mingling of different musics, for example, in the work of Olivier Messiaen or Toru Takemtisu? For all the power and influence of the various national schools, what is most

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arresting in contemporary music is that no one can draw a boundary around any of it; cultures are often most naturally themselves when they enter into partnerships with each other, as in music with its extraordinary receptivity to developments in the musics of other societies and continents. Much the same is true of literature, where readers of, for example, García Marquez, Mahfuz, and Oe exist far beyond the boundaries imposed by language and nation. In my own field of comparative literature there is an epistemological commitment to the relationships between literatures, to their reconciliation and harmony, despite the existence of powerful ideological and national barriers between them. And this sort of cooperative, collective enterprise is what one misses in the proclaimers of an undying clash between cultures: the lifelong dedication that has existed in all modern societies among scholars, artists, musicians, visionaries, and prophets to try to come to terms with the Other, with that other society or culture that seems so foreign and so distant. One thinks of Joseph Needham and his lifelong study of China or, in France, of Louis Massignon, his pilgrimage within Islam. It seems to me that unless we emphasize and maximize the spirit of cooperation and humanistic exchange—and here I do not speak simply of uninformed delight or of amateurish enthusiasm for the exotic but rather of profound existential commitment and labor on behalf of the other—we are going to end up superficially and stridently banging the drum for “our” culture in opposition to all the others.

Two other recent seminal works of cultural analysis are relevant here. In the compilation of essays entitled The Invention of Tradition edited by Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm,9 two of the most distinguished historians alive today, the authors argue that tradition, far from being the unshakable order of inherited wisdom and practice, is frequently a set of invented practices and beliefs used in mass societies to create a sense of identity at a time when organic solidarities— such as those of family, village, clan—have broken down. Thus the emphasis on tradition in nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a way that rulers can claim to have legitimacy, even though that legitimacy is more or less manufactured. In India, as a case in point, an impressive array of rituals was invented to celebrate Queen Victoria’s ascension to the title of Empress of India in 1872. By doing so, and by claiming that the durbars, or grand processions, commemorating the event had a long history in India, the British were able to give her rule a pedigree that it did not have in fact but came to have in the form of invented traditions. In another context sports rituals like the football game, a relatively recent practice, are regarded as the culmination of an age-old celebration of sporting activity, whereas in fact they are a recent way of diverting large numbers of people. The point of all this is that a great

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deal of what used to be thought of as settled fact, or tradition, is revealed to be a fabrication for mass consumption in the here and now.

To people who speak solely of the clash of civilizations, there exists no inkling of this possibility. For them cultures and civilizations may change, develop, regress, and disappear, but they remain mysteriously fixed in their identity, their essence graven in stone, so to speak, as if there existed a universal consensus somewhere agreeing to the six civilizations Huntington posits at the beginning of his essay. My contention is that no such consensus exists or, if it does, it can hardly bear the analytic scrutiny brought to bear by analyses of the kind provided by Hobsbawm and Ranger. So in reading about the clash of civilizations we are less likely to assent to analysis of the clash than we are to ask the following question: Why do you pinion civilizations into so unyielding an embrace, and why then do you go on to describe their relationship as one of basic conflict, as if the borrowing and overlappings between them were not a much more interesting and significant feature?

Finally, my third example of cultural analysis tells us a great deal about the possibilities of actually creating a civilization retrospectively and making that creation into a frozen definition, in spite of the evidence of great hybridity and mixture. The book is Black Athena; the author, the Cornell political scientist Martin Bernal.10 The conception most of us have today about classical Greece, Bernal says, does not at all correspond to what Greek authors of that period say about it. Ever since the early nineteenth century Europeans and Americans have grown up with an idealized picture of Attic harmony and grace, Athens as a place where enlightened Western philosophers like Plato and Aristotle taught their wisdom, where democracy was born, and where, in every possible significant way, a Western mode of life completely different from that of Asia or Africa held sway. Yet to read a large number of ancient authors accurately is to note how many of them comment on the existence of Semitic and African elements in Attic life. Bernal takes the further step of demonstrating by the skillful use of a great many sources that Greece was originally a colony of Africa, more particularly of Egypt, and that Phoenician and Jewish traders, sailors, and teachers contributed most of what we know today as classical Greek culture, which he sees as an amalgam therefore of African, Semitic, and later northern influences.

In the most compelling part of Black Athena, Bernal goes on to show how with the growth of European, and in particular German, nationalism, the original mixed portrait of Attic Greece that obtained into the eighteenth century was gradually expunged of all its non-Aryan elements, just as many years later the Nazis decided to burn all books and ban all authors who were considered non-German, non-Aryan.

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So from being the product of an invasion from the South (i.e., Africa), as in reality it really was, classical Greece was progressively transformed into the product of an invasion from the Aryan North. Purged of its troublesome non-European elements, Greece thereafter has stood in the Western self-definition—an expedient one, to be sure—as its fons et origo, its source of sweetness and light. The principle underlined by Bernal is the extent to which pedigrees, dynasties, lineages, predecessors are changed to suit the political needs of a later time. Of the unfortunate results this produced in the case of a self-created white Aryan European civilization none of us here need to be convinced.

What is even more troubling to me about proclaimers of the clash of civilization is how oblivious they seem of all we now know as historians and as cultural analysts about the way definitions of these cultures themselves are so contentious. Rather than accepting the incredibly naive and deliberately reductive notion that civilizations are identical with themselves, and that is all, we must always ask what civilizations are intended, created, and defined by whom, and for what reason. Recent history is too full of instances where the defense of Judeo-Christian values has been urged as a way of quelling dissent or unpopular opinions for us passively to assume that “everyone” knows what those values are, how they are meant to be interpreted, and how they may or not be implemented in society.

Many Arabs would say that their civilization is really Islam, just as some Westerners—Australians and Canadians and some Americans—might not want to be included in so large and vaguely defined a category as Western. And when a man like Huntington speaks of the “common objective elements” that supposedly exist in every culture he leaves the analytic and historical world altogether, preferring instead to find refuge inside large and ultimately meaningless categories.

As I have argued in several of my own books, in today’s Europe and the United States what is described as “Islam” belongs to the discourse of Orientalism, a construction fabricated to whip up feelings of hostility and antipathy against a part of the world that happens to be of strategic importance for its oil, its threatening adjacence to the Christian world, its formidable history of competitiveness with the West. Yet this is a very different thing than what, to Muslims who live within its domain, Islam really is. There is a world of difference between Islam in Indonesia and Islam in Egypt. By the same token, the volatility of today’s struggle over the meaning of Islam is evident in Egypt, where the secular powers of society are in conflict with various Islamic protest movements and reformers. In such circumstances the easiest, and the least accurate, thing is to say that is the world of Islam, and see how it is all terrorists and fundamentalists, and see also how

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different they are from us. But the truly weakest part of the clash of civilizations thesis is the rigid separation

assumed between them, despite the overwhelming evidence that today’s world is in fact a world of mixtures, of migrations, of crossings over. One of the major crises affecting countries like France, Britain, and the United States has been brought about by the realization now dawning everywhere that no culture or society is purely one thing. Sizable minorities—North Africans in France, the African and Caribbean and Indian populations in Britain, Asian and African elements in the United States— dispute the idea that civilizations that prided themselves on being homogenous can continue to do so. There are no insulated cultures or civilizations. Any attempt made to separate them into the watertight compartments alleged by Huntington does damage to their variety, their diversity, their sheer complexity of elements, their radical hybridity. The more insistent we are on the separation of cultures and civilizations, the more inaccurate we are about ourselves and about others. The notion of an exclusionary civilization is, to my way of thinking, an impossible one. The real question then is whether in the end we want to work for civilizations that are separate or whether we should be taking the more integrative but perhaps more difficult path, which is to try to see them as making one vast whole whose exact contours are impossible for one person to grasp but whose certain existence we can intuit and feel. In any case, a number of political scientists, economists, and cultural analysts have for some years been speaking of an integrative world system, largely economic, it is true, but nonetheless knitted together, overriding many of the clashes spoken of so hastily and imprudently by Huntington.

What Huntington quite astonishingly overlooks is the phenomenon referred to frequently in the literature as the globalization of capital. In 1980 Willy Brandt and some associates published North-South: A Program for Survival.11 In it the authors noted that the world was now divided into two vastly uneven regions: a small industrial North, comprising the major European, American, and Asian economic powers, and an enormous South, comprising the former third world plus a large number of new, extremely impoverished nations. The political problem of the future was going to be how to imagine their relationships as the North would get richer, the South poorer, and the world more interdependent. Let me quote now from an essay by the Duke political scientist Arif Dirlik that goes over much of the ground covered by Huntington in a way that is more accurate and persuasive:

The situation created by global capitalism helps explain certain phenomena that have become apparent over the last two or three decades, but especially since the

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eighties: global motions of peoples (and, therefore, cultures), the weakening of boundaries (among societies, as well as among social categories), the replications in societies internally of inequalities and discrepancies once associated with colonial differences, simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation within and across societies, the interpenetration of the global and the local, and the disorganization of a world conceived in terms of three worlds or nation-states. Some of these phenomena have also contributed to an appearance of equalization of differences within and across societies, as well as of democratization within and among societies. What is ironic is that the managers of this world situation themselves concede that they (or their organizations) now have the power to appropriate the local for the global, to admit different cultures into the realm of capital (only to break them down and remake them in accordance with the requirements of production and consumption), and even to reconstitute subjectivities across national boundaries to create producers and consumers more responsive to the operations of capital. Those who do not respond, or the “basket cases” that are not essential to those operations—four-fifths of the global population by the managers’ count—need not be colonized; they are simply marginalized. What the new flexible production has made possible is that it is no longer necessary to utilize explicit coercion against labor at home or in colonies abroad. Those peoples or places that are not responsive to the needs (or demands) of capital, or are too far gone to respond “efficiently,” simply find themselves out of its pathways. And it is easier even than in the heyday of colonialism or modernization theory to say convincingly: It is their fault.12

In view of these depressing and even alarming actualities it does seem to me ostrichlike to suggest that we in Europe and the U.S. should maintain our civilization by holding all the others at bay, increasing the rifts between peoples in order to prolong our dominance. That is, in effect, what Huntington is arguing, and one can quite easily understand why it is that his essay was published in Foreign Affairs, and why so many policy makers have drifted toward it as allowing the United States to extend the mindset of the cold war into a different time and for a new audience. Much more productive and useful is a new global mentality that sees the dangers we face from the standpoint of the whole human race. These dangers include the pauperization of most of the globe’s population; the emergence of virulent local national, ethnic and religious sentiment, as in Bosnia, Rwanda, Lebanon, Chechnya, and elsewhere; the decline of literacy; and onset of a new illiteracy based on electronic modes of communication, television, and the new global information

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superhighway; the fragmentation and threatened disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment. Our most precious asset in the face of such a dire transformation of tradition and of history is the emergence of a sense of community, understanding, sympathy, and hope, which is the direct opposite of what in his essay Huntington has provoked. If I may quote some lines by the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire that I used in my recent book Culture and Imperialism:

but the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to man to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of his passion

And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory.13

In what they imply, these sentiments prepare the way for a dissolution of cultural barriers as well as of the civilizational pride that prevents the kind of benign globalism already to be found, for instance, in the environmental movement, in scientific cooperation, in the universal concern for human rights, in concepts of global thought that stress community and sharing over racial, gender, or class dominance. It would seem to me therefore that efforts to return the community of civilizations to a primitive stage of narcissistic struggle need to be understood not as descriptions about how in fact they behave but rather as incitements to wasteful conflict and unedifying chauvinism. And that seems to be exactly what we do not need.

Notes

1. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (Summer, 1993): 22–50. 2. Ibid., 49. 3. Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1990). 4. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1969). 5. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London: Heinemann, 1951). 6. François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans.

Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 7. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.:

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Whittle Direct, 1991). 8. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1973). 9. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1983). 10. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers

University Press, 1987). 11. North-South: A Program for Survival: Report of the Independent Commission on International Development

Issues (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980). 12. Arif Dirlik, Critical Inquiry (Winter 1994), 351. 13. Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans., with an introduction and notes, Clayton Eshleman and Annette

Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 76–77. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 231.

“The Clash of Definitions” by Edward Said. From Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 569–592. Printed by permission of Edward Said.

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