
‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now - lermontov
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now/
======
deogeo
> The expeditionary force that Napoleon Bonaparte sent to Egypt in 1798
> included 122 scientists and intellectuals, among them a handful of
> professional Orientalists. The history of Orientalism is rich in tales of
> Westerners assuming Oriental masquerade, as if they wanted to become, and
> not simply to master, the Other.

It would be 30 years _after_ this attempt to 'master' the Other, that the
Greek war for independence from the Ottoman empire was won.

It boggles the mind how one can write such a long article on history, without
even the briefest mention of Arab invasions and colonialism in Europe (or
slavery - "between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured between
the 16th and 19th centuries by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the
Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves." [1]).

As much as this article tries to paint the Orient as being viewed by Europe as
some sort of curiosity, it was in fact an existential threat for the better
part of a millennium.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade)

~~~
Ericson2314
That's not an "existential threat". No European state bothered to care about
that piracy until Sweden and the US in
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars)
. The bigger states were evidently happy to pay the tribute—this is cost
cutting not defense.

~~~
Swizec
Don't know about the Barbary corsairs and piracy, but in Slovenia we very much
saw Ottoman invasions as an existential threat. Our history is littered with
reference to "The big bad Turk who steals your kids, razes your fields, and
rapes your wives".

That shit happened. Regularly. To the point that a whole cultural heritage
around fortified churches developed. The peasants would retreat into their
church behind battlements, and hunker down until the Ottomans left. The
village would get burned down and the crops were gone, but at least almost
everyone survived.

It didn't help that the Habsburg monarchy saw this as a successful strategy.
Oh okay they're just burning the peasants, at least they're not getting as far
as Vienna. This is working.

Of course once or twice they did get as far as Vienna and it was bad ...

This period of history left a deep seated distrust of islamic nations so
strong that the whole "islam vs. catholic/orthodox" thing still featured as a
driving force in the mid 90's Balkan wars. As an interesting curiosity, if you
go to Bosnia around the Mostar region you can see a very interesting divide.
Left side of the river littered with church spires, right side full of
minarets. Barely any mixing.

~~~
Ericson2314
Barbary pirates != Ottoman empire. What you talk about was the effect of a
strong empire. A weakened one that couldn't effectively control North Africa
also could dominate south-eastern Europe as much.

Everything you say is true and unrelated.

------
weeksie
I enjoyed Orientalism. My problem with so many of these works, however, is
that they seem to take such an intentional stance. Like the assertion that the
language of Orientalism serves to create an other in order to. . .

Like, wait right there.

One of the most valuable insights from scholarship like this is that we are
all trapped in power structures. The "othering" that happens isn't the result
of some demonic intention, it's just what people do. While Said takes great
pains to make this point, most readers of the book that I've interacted with
do not seem to grasp it. When I finished Orientalism I kind of chuckled
because in many ways he engaged in the process that he was describing,
"Occidentalizing" western area studies, as it were. I know it's not, but at
some level I kind of hoped the book was a big meta-joke to illustrate the
inescapability of the dynamic.

~~~
iguy
> Like the assertion that the language of Orientalism serves to create an
> other in order to. . . > Like, wait right there.

Then you got further than I did! Someone should have dragged that guy to math
class -- before you can prove two things are the same, you have to first
define both of them, then make your case.

~~~
claudiawerner
That's not what critical theorists think; for them, often the process of
describing a phenomenon involves looking at how "it" behaves. The idea that
everything must be defined analytically before it is used or analyzed shuts
one off from a lot of possible insight. For example, the debate as to whether
porn is art continues to this day, but we have analyzed both porn, art and
porn as art before we were ever clear on the matter rigourously speaking.
Furthermore, to impose a definition is to trap a concept (usually a
historically contingent one) in a moment, which isn't always useful. There are
some works on the matter of definitionalism that make this point better but I
can't find them right now. I'm short, critical theory and philosophy are
different sciences (another thorny word to define, but we use it regardless of
the intellectual poverty of some of its widely accepted definitions) to
mathematics.

~~~
iguy
Sure, I completely agree that a book discussing porn vs art can't literally
start with definitions they way a math book can, that's too narrow.

But if it wishes to use an existing word like "art" in a new sense, for
instance to claim that all portrayal of humans is inherently pornographic,
then IMHO it needs to be very careful to distinguish this from pre-existing
meanings. The fact that some building on campus has "art" chiseled into the
marble cannot be assumed to already imply agreement with some new meaning you
invented 5 pages ago, a meaning which would have been very surprising to the
guys who sponsored the building.

Even if you ultimately make a convincing case that the sense you describe is
somehow more correct/useful/interesting than other ones, or encompasses them,
you've got to act as if you haven't yet shown that. That's what I meant he
should have learned in math class. And really the more honest course is to
introduce new words for new concepts, not to try to muddle older ones, as Said
successfully did.

But, to be fair, I didn't finish the book.

------
woodandsteel
From the article: " With Orientalism, Said wanted to open a discussion about
the way the Arab-Islamic world had been imagined by the West—not to prevent a
clear-eyed reckoning with the region’s problems, of which he was all too
painfully aware."

Well that's the basic problem right there. Did Said assume there was no need
to do a serious study of the Middle East's problems and what causes them,
because he assumed that if the West would just leave the Middle East alone, it
would all on its own solve its problems? Certainly that is what a lot of his
followers seem to think, that the world was an egalitarian paradise until evil
White people can along and started oppressing everybody.

------
hurryskurry
Imo the problem with the article, and perhaps if it is a faithful
representation of the original idea of orientalism, is that it is incoherent.

>As Said argued, Orientalism’s failure was “a human as much as an intellectual
one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region
of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify
with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience.”

Alright, but considering the rest of continental philosophy and post-modern
thought it is a literal impossibility to do this ever, even with one's own
culture and even with one's previous and future selves.

How can it be an indictment on anyone to not have done something that one is
actually unable to do?

If, in the 19th century, before Amazon and YouTube, and Instagram, and
Facebook, you lived in England, in a village where most people barely even
ever travelled farther than the next village over, and you came into contact
with radical alterity how else could you be expected to respond. And as, again
according to post-modern philosophy (say Baudrillard in this case) you get
closer to this difference you actually start changing it so it becomes more
and more like you. So you are either in this state of being orientalist, or in
a state of intense globalization, and someone making a critique from this
moral high road of globalization about this bucolic, parochial state of the
orientalist is probably someone similar to a policy wonk referring to a basket
of deplorables, which is just another kind of power-knowledge relation, which
is what the critique is meant to make clear in the first place.

To think about Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, the problem is we can never
really escape from this stuff. And the problem with ever even making a
statement such as this is that it is incoherent in the sense that one never
comes away clean, basically because always and already the claim of tu quoque
can be leveled. I mean sure it doesn't strictly speaking invalidate the claim
there is this power relation, but when we're so stuck in the middle of them
all the time in every way, as Foucault said, the strategic adversary becomes
fascism itself, not the historical fascism, but our love of power and how it
causes us to act everyday, and how it makes us love it even as it dominates
us. And that is very difficult to uncover if you're leveling a claim of
inappropriate relation to any one group, because the problem is our humanity,
not the content of our relations or historically contingent facts. Putting
names to faces makes it opaque, because the reality is any human occupying a
similar role would act inappropriately, so what you do is you attack the role
not the name.

It may be that Said does that. I have never gotten around to reading the book,
but just going off of the confused article posted, I just felt there was a
sort of mishmash without a really clear and distinct thesis, and that what the
facade was hiding in a metaphorical sense was paving stones to be thrown in
the next revolution, rather than an attempt to end violence or power relations
altogether.

~~~
fwip
Not everyone subscribes to your philosophical belief that empathy is
impossible.

~~~
coldtea
You mean people don't have empathy for his position?

------
gataca
Said's original work was just as myopic as this more recent revisit. There are
so many issues with this article that it's difficult to list them all.

The author completely ignores the long history of conflict and colonialism in
the opposite direction, namely from the Islamic world and into Europe. The
idea of "the Other" is actually codified in Islamic law with religious
minorities forced to wear distinctive clothing (the yellow mark for Jews
predates its use in Germany by centuries) and pay special taxes, as well as
numerous other restrictions.

Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and
least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon)
instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture
like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

My last point is that this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to
malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. His examples of
'experts' who misunderstand the Arab world for a nefarious purpose can just as
easily apply to political 'experts' in the US who couldn't have fathomed that
someone like Donald Trump could ever win the presidency.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is
adequately explained by stupidity.

Perhaps he is just not a fan of aphorisms pulled from Murphy's law themed joke
books.

Though the trouble with Hanlon's law is not in its origins, rather it is that
malice and stupidity are not in any regard mutually exclusive and also that
people are quite adept at disguising malice as stupidity.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
I do not think the benefit of Hanlon's law is intended to be predictive. It
seems rather more like a commentary on how our beliefs about people tend to be
self-fulfilling prophecies.

~~~
inflatableDodo
I just think it is a clumsy version of giving someone the benefit of the
doubt. Is a social grace you can grant people to not look too closely at what
they are doing and assume the best about them. And in moderation it is a good
thing to be doing. It is definitely not a good approach to analysis of
academia or government however, which is where I often see it used, usually to
defend ones outlook or respective 'team'.

edit - it also makes me very suspicious about Hanlon. Maybe not the first
person I would trust if they tried to play dumb.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
I think it is mostly useful as a self-check for the types of people prone to
paranoia. I easily develop that sort of mindset and it's been a huge help to
my personal worldview.

~~~
inflatableDodo
That is a good use for it. Perhaps the Murphy's Law series is actually a
collection of koans from an occult western zen tradition.

