Pathophysiology

Pathophysiology

Order Description

3.A 64-year-old patient has a lab result showing that her blood Sodium is low. Discuss 2 common causes of hyponatremia and differentiate between the 2 in terms of pathophysiologic changes that occur.
Explanation:
1) Discusses 2 common causes of hyponatremia
2) Differentiates between the 2 in terms of the pathophysiologic changes that occur

ORIENTALI§M
–Edward W. Said —
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House
New York
First Vintage Books Edition, October 1979
Copyright ® 1 ‘)7$ by Edward W. Said
All fights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United Slates
by Random House, Inc .. New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published by Pantheon Books, A Division of
Random House, Inc., in November 1978.
Library of Congress Cola/oging in Publico/ion Da/a
Said, Edward W
Orientahsm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. As ia-Foreign opinion, Occidental. 2. Near
East-Foreign opinion, Occidental. 3. Asia-Study
and teaching. 4. Near East-Study and teaching.
5. Imperialism. 6. East and West. l. TiUe.
DS12.S24 1979 950’.07’2 79-10497
ISBN 0-394-74067-X
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover: Jean-Uon Gerome, The Snake Charmer (detail),
courtesy of the Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Since this copyright page cannot accommodate aJl tbe
permissions acknowledgments, they are to be found
on the following two pages.
Grateful acknowledgment is made 10 the following for permission to reprint
previously published mate rial:
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: Excerpts from Subjects 0/ the Day: Being a
Se”‘clion 0/ Sptechts and Writings by George Nathaniel Curron.
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: Excerpts from Revolution in Ihe Middle East
and Olher Ca.’e Studies, proceedings 0/ a seminar, edited by P. J. Vatikiotis.
American Jewish Committee: Excerpts from “The Return of Islam” by
Bernard Lewis, in Commentary, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1976). Reprinted
from Commcmary by permission. Copyright @ 1976 by the American
Jewish Committee.
Basic Books, Inc.: Excerpts from “Renan’s Philological Laboratory” by
Edward W. Said, in Art, Politics, and Will; EJ’sa),s ill HOllar of Lionel Trilling,
edited by Quentin Anderson et a!. Copyright © 1971 by Basic Books, Inc.
The Bodley Head and McIntosh & Otis, Inc.: Excerpts from Flauherr in
Egypr, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller. Reprinted by permission
of Francis Steegmuller and The Bodley Head.
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., and The Letters of T. E. Lawrence Trust: Excerpt
from The Lerrers of T. E. Lo.wrence, edited by David Garnett .
Jonathan Cape, l.td., The Seven Pillars Trust, and Doubleday & Co., inc.;
Excerpt from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; A Triumph by T. E. l.awrence.
Copyright 1926, 1935 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
Doubleday & Co., Inc., and A. P. Wntt & Sons, Ltd : Excerpt from Verse
by Rudyard Kipling.
The Georgia Review; Excerpts from “Qrientalism,” which originally appeared
in The Georgia Review (Spring 1977). Copyright © 1977 by the University
of Georgia.
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: Excerpt from II poem by Bornier (}862),
quoted in De Lesseps 0/ Sliez by Charles Beatty.
Maemillan-& Co., London and Basingstoke: Excerpts from Modern EgYpt,
vol. 2, by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer.
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from “Propaganda” by Harold Lasswell, in Tile Encydopedia of the Socia! Sciences, edited by Edwin R. A.
Seligman, vol. 12 (}934).
Macmillan Publishing Co .• Inc., and A. P. Watt & Sons, Ltd.: E.??cerpt from
‘”Byzanlium” by William Butler Yeats, in The Collecred Poems. Copyright
J933 by l’Iacmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
The New York Times Company; Excerpts from “Arabs, islam, and the
Dogmas of the West” by Edward W. Said, in The New York Times Book
Review, October 31, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The New York Times
Company. Reprinled by permission.
Northwestern University Press: Excerpt from “The Arab Portrayed” by
Edward W. Said, in The Arah-Israeli Confrontation 0/ June 1967: An Arab
Perspective, edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Copy right @ 1970 by North_
western University Press.
Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Excerpt from The Persians by Aeschylus, translated by
Anthony J. Podleck. Copyright © 1970 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
v
The Royal Asiatic Society, Great Britain and Ireland; Excerpt from “Louis
Massignoll (1882-1962).” in lournal 0/ the Royal Asiatic Society (1962).
University of California Press: Excerpts from Modern Islam: The Search Jor
Cui/ural Identity by Gustave von Grunebaum. Copyright © 1962 by the
Regents of the University of California.
University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Modern Trends in Islam by
H. A. R. Gibb.
FOR lANET AND IBRAIDM
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Scope of Orientalism
I. Knowing the Oriental 31
II. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations:
Orientalking the Oriental 49
Ul. Projects 73
IV. Crisis 92
Chapter 2 Orientalist Structures and Restructures
I. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized
Religion 113
n. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest ReDan: Rational
Anthropology and Philological Laboratory 123
Ill. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The
Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination “” 149
IV. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French 166
Chapter 3 OrientaIism Now
I. Latent and Manifest Orientalism 201
IT. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Worldliness 226
III. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower 255
IV. The Latest Phase 284
Notes 329
Index 351
Acknowledgments
I have been reading about Orientalism for a number of years,
but most of this book was written during 1975-1976, which I spent
as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford. California. In this unique and generous insti·
tution, it was my good fortune not only to have benefitted agreeably
from several colleagues, but also from the help of Joan Warmbrunn,
Chris Hath, Jane Kielsmeier, Preston Cutler, and the center’s
director, Gardner Lindzey. The Jist of friends, colleagues, and
students who read, or listened to, parts or the whole of this manuscript
is so long as to embarrass me, and now that it has finally
appeared as a book, perhaps even them. Nevertheless I should
mention with gratitude the always helpful encouragement of Janet
and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky, and Roger Owen, who
followed this project from its beginning to its conclusion. Likewise
I must gratefully acknowledge the helpful and critical interest of
the colleagues, friends, and students in various places whose
questions and discussion sharpened the text considerably. Andre
Schiffrin and Jeanne Morton of Pantheon Books were ideal publisher
and copy editor, respectively, and made the ordeal (for the
author, at least) of preparing the manuscript an instructive and
genuinely intelligent process. Mariam Said helped me a great deal
with her research on the early modem history of Orientalist institutions.
Apart from that, though, her loving support really made
much of the work on this book not only enjoyable but possible.
New York
September-October 1977
E. W.S.
xi
They cannot represent themselves; they must be repee·
sented.
-Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte
The East is a career.
-Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred
Introduction
I
On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975??1976
a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown acea
that “it had once seemed to belong to … the Orient of Chateaubriand
and Nerval.”l He was right about the place, of course,
especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was
almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place
of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable
experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had
happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that
Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that
even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived
there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing
for the European visitor was a European representation of the
Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged
communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.
Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which
for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with
the Far East (China and Ja2an. mainly). Unlike the Americans,
the French and the British-less so the Germans. Russians, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss-have had a long tradition of what
I shall be calling Orienta/ism. a way of coming to terms with the
Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European
Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it
is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies,
the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant,
and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.
In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)
1
J
2 ORIENTALISM
as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of
this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of
European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses
and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode
of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship,
imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.
In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem
considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and
Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober,
more realistic “Oriental” awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded
American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle
East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.
It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still
throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean
several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The
most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic
one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic
institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the
Orient-and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist,
sociologist, historian, or philologist–either in its specific or its general
aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.
Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true
that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both
because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the
high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-
century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are
written and congresses held with “the Orienf’ as their main focus,
with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority.
The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism
lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about
the Orient and the Oriental.
Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations,
specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of
this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism
I i a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
.t-‘ distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the
Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are
poets, novelists, philosophers. political theorists, economists, and imperial
administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between
East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics,
novels, social, descriptions, and political accounts concerning the
Introduction 3
Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. This Orientalism
can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante
and Karl Marx. A liule later in this introduction I shaH deal with
the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly CORstrued
a “field” as this.
The interchange between the academic and the more or less
imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since
the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite
disciplined??perhaps even regulated-traffic between the two. Here
I come to the third meaning of Oriental ism, which is something
more historically and materially defined than either of the other
two. 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. Oriental ism
as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority
over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ
Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in
The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to
identify Oriental ism. My contention is that without examining
Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the
enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was
able to manage-and even 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 no one writing, thinking.
or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account
of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism.
In brief, because of Oriental ism the Orient was not (and is not) a ‘
free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism v’
unilaterally detennines what can be said about the Orient, but that
it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on
(and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar
entity “the Orient” is in question. How this happens is what this
book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that Euro?jln
c????un::f?ined??trength and identity by setting itself off against 0;(/
the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.
Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a
qualitative difference between the Franco-British involvement in
the Orient and-until the period of American aScendancy after
4 ORIENTALISM
World War II-the involvement of every other European and Atlantic
power. To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly,
although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enter
??, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate rearms
as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levanl, the
Biblical texis and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial annies
and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a fonnidable scholarly
corpus, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands,” an Oriental
professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental
despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern
sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European
use-the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point
is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced
between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early
nineteenth??century had really meant only India and the Bible lands.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of
World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and
Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the
Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of
that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it ??
always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occi??
dent (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts
I call Orientalist.
It should be said at once that even with the generous number
of books and authors that I examine. there is a much larger number
that I simply have had to leave out. My argument, however. depends
neither upon an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with
the Orient nor upon a clearly delimited set of texts, authors, and
ideas that together make up the Orientalist canon. I have depended
instead upon a different methodological alternative-whose backbone
in a sense is the set of historical generalizations I have so far
been making in this Introduction-and it is these I want now to
discuss in more analytical detail.
II
I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is Dot an inert
fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself
is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great obserIntroduction
5
vation that men make their own history, that what they can know
is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical
and cultural entities-to say nothing of historical entities
-such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident”
are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the
Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought,
imagery. and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in
and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to
an extent reflect each other.
Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable
qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that
the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding
reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that
the East was a career, he meant that to be interested in the East
was something bright young Westerners would find to be an allconsuming
passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the
East was only a career for Westerners. There were-and arecultures
and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives,
histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than … anything that could be said about them in the West. About that
fact this study of Oriental ism has very little to contribute, except
to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as
,l I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between
Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism
and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite
or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real”
Orient. My point is that Disraeli’s statement about the East refers
mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of
ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its
mere being, as Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.
A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot
seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more
precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe
that the Orient was created-or, as I call it, “Orientalized”
-and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of
the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between
Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of
varying degrees of a complex hegemony. and is quite accurately
indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western
Dominance,2 The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was
discovered to be “Oriental” in _ all those ways ‘considered common6
ORIENT ALISM
place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it cou l??d be-that is, submitted to being-made Oriental. There is very lttle consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flau- bert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential
model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself,
she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke
for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy,
male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed
him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak
for her and tell his readers in what way she was “Iypically Oriental.”
My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to
Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for
the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the
discourse about the Orient thai it enabled.
This bri.ngs us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume
that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure
of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told,
would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orienlalism is more
particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over
the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which
is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Nevertheless,
what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knittedtogether
strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the
enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and ils redoubtable
durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain
unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses,
universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest
Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must
be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies.
Oriental ism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the
Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for
many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.
Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of
knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through
the Orient into Western consciousness, just as that same investment
multiplied-indeed, made truly productive-the statements proliferating
out from Orientalism into the general culture.
Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil
and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary
(or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools,
Introduction 7
families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the
police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct
domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within
civil 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 Olhers, just as certain ideas are more influential
than others; the form of t??is cultural leadership is what
Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for
any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. 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. Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay
has called the idea of Europe,3 a collective notion identifying “us”
Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can
be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely
what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe:
the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison.)
with all the non-European peoples and cultures. 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 had different views on the matter.
In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on
this flexible posilionai superiority, which puts the Westerner in a
whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever
losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been
otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European
ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist,
the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or
thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think
about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part. Under the
general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella
of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from
the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient
suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for
reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in
anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses
about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and
sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural person8
QRIENTALISM
ality. national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginative
examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively
upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged
centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general
ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a
detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a
battery of desires, repressions, investments. and projections. If we
can point to great Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like
Silvestre de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe or Edward William Lane’s
Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,
we need also to note that Renan’s and Gobineau’s racial ideas
came out of the same impulse, as did a great many Victorian
pornographic novels (see the analysis by Steven Marcus of “The
Lustful Turk”??).
And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters
in Orientali??m is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of
material-about which who could deny that they were shot through
with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism,
imperialism, and the like, dogmatic views of “the Oriental” as a
kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction?–or the much more
varied work produced by almost uncountable individual writers,
whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing
with the Orient. In a sense the two alternatives, general and
particular, are really two perspectives on the same material: in
both instances one would have to deal with pioneers in the field like
William Jones, with great artists like Nerval or Flaubert. And
why would it not be possible to employ both perspectives together,
or one after the other? Isn’t there an obvious danger of distortion
(of precisely the kind that academic Orientalism has always been
prone to) if either too general or too specific a level of description
is maintained systematically?
My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind
of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too posi??
tivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems I
have tried to deal with three main aspects of my own contemporary
reality that seem to me to point the way out of the methodological
or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing, difficulties that
might force one, in the first instance, into writing a coarse polemic
on so unacceptably general a level of description as not to be
worth the effort, or in the second instance, into writing so detailed
and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general
Introduction 9
lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How
then to recognize individuality and to reconcile it with its intelligent,
and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general
and hegemonic context?
III
I mentioned three aspects of my contemporary rea1ity: I must
explain and briefly discuss them now, so that it can be seen how
I was led to a particular course of research and writing.
1. The distinction between pure and political koowledge. It is
very easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare or Wordsworth
is not political whereas knowledge about contemporary
China or the Soviet Union is. My own formal and professional
designation is that of “humanist,” a title which indicates the
humanities as my field and therefore the unlikely eventuality that
there might be anything political about what I do in that field.
Of course, all these labels and terms are quite unnuanced as I use
them here, but the general truth of what I am pointing to is, I think.
widely held. One reason for saying that a humanist who writes
about Wordsworth, or an editor whose specialty is Keats, is not
involved in anything political is that what he does seems to have
no direct political effect upon reality in the everyday sense. A
scholar whose field is Soviet economics works in a highly charged
area where there is much government interest, and what he might
produce in the way of studies or proposals will be taken up by
policymakers, government officials, institutional economists, intelligence
experts, The distinction between “humanists” and persons
whose work has policy implications, or political significance, can
be broadened further by saying that the former’s ideological color
is a matter of incidental importance to politics (although possibly
of great moment to his colleagues in the field, who may object to
his Stalinism or fascism or too easy liberalism), whereas the
ideology of the latter i s woven directly into his material-indeed,
economics, politics, and sociology in the modern academy are
ideological sciences-and therefore taken for granted as being
“pclitical.”
Nevertheless the determining impingement on most knowledge
10 ORIENT ALISM
produced in the contemporary West (and here 1 speak mainly about
the United States) is that it be nonpolitical. that is, scholarly,
academic. impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal
belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory,
pemaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No
one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the
circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious
or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or
from the mere activity of being a member of a society. These
continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though
naturally enough his research and its fruits do attempt to reach a
level of relative freedom from the inhibitions and the restrictions
of brute, everyday reality. For there is such a thing as knowledge
that is less, rather than more, partial than the individual (with his
entangling. and distracting life circumstances) who produces it.
Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical.
Vo’hether discussions of literature or of classical philology are
fraught with—or have unmediated-political significance is a very
large question that I have tried to treat in some detail elsewhere.5
What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general
liberal consensus that “true” knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical
(and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not
“true” knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized
political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced.
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. We may
say, first, that civil society recognizes a gradation of political importance
in -the various fields of knowledge. To some extent the
political importance given a field comes from the possibility of its
direct translation into economic terms; but to a greater extent
political importance comes from the closeness of a field to ascertainable
sources of power in political society. Thus an economic study
of long-term Soviet energy potential and its effect on military
capability is likely to be commissioned by the Defense Department,
and thereafter to acquire a kind of political status impossible for a
study of Toistoi’s early fiction financed in part by a foundation.
Yet both works belong in what civil society acknowledges to be a
similar field, Russian studies, even though one work may be done
by a very conservative economist, the other by a radical literary
Introduction 11
historian. My point here is that “Russia” as a general subject matter
has political priority over nicer distinctions such as “economics”
and “literary history,” because political society in Gramsci’s sense
reaches into such realms of civil society as the academy and
saturates them with significance of direct concern to it.
I do not want to press all this any further on general theoretical
grounds: it seems to me that the value and credibility of my case
can be demonstrated by being much more specific, in the way, for
example, Noam Chomsky has studied the instrumental connection
between the Vietnam War and the notion of objective scholarship
as it was applied to cover state-sponsored military research.6 Now
because Britain, France, and recently the United States are imperial
powers, their political societies impart to their civil scx;ieties a sense
of urgency, a direct political infusion as it were, where and when·
ever matters pertaining to their imperial interests abroad are
concerned. I doubt that it is controversial. for example, to say that
?? .??ngljsbman jn India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century
took an interest in those countries that was never far from their
.stat!.is in iiii-mind-a;-Sritish colonies. To say this may .seem ql,lJte … . .. . ,,-._ … __ .—…..-.. ????”‘” …. .-_….. ._-
??.iff??r??Jl.t l.??Ql!!..??ay!E.[,??????!.??1I a??d??i”:. kno??led..g??…@put Il.ldi????
??gypt is someho??nged ???? il)).p.r:????????_??”????, ,:??o.!a.ted _??, the .# ??ro??.s politi.cJ!iJ..a£.t-and yet Ihal is what I am saying in this study
of Orientalism. For if it is true that no production of knowledge
in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s
involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it
must also be true that for a European or American studying the
Orient there can be no disclaiming the main” circumstances of his
actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or
American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or
an American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It
meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs
to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important,
that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement
in the Orient almost since the time of Homer.
Put in this way, these political actualities are still too undefined
and general to be really interesting. Anyone would agree to them
without necessarily agreeing also that they mattered very. much, for
instance, to Flaubert as he wrote SalammbO, or to H. A. R. Gibb as
he wrote Modern Trends in Islam. The trouble is that there is too
greao: a distance between the big dominating fact, as I have de12
ORIENT ALISM
scribed it, and the details of everyday life that govern the minute
discipline of a novel or a scholarly text as each is being written.
Yet if we eliminate from the start any notion that “big” facts like
imperial domination can be applied mechanically and deterministically
to such complex matters as culture and ideas, then we will
begin to approach an interesting kind of study. My idea is that
European and then American interest in the Orient was political
according to some of the obvious historical accounts of it that I
have given here, but that it was the culture that __c r??ated t!t1!.t
in£e:??!t, that acted dynamically along with brute political. economic.
and military rationales to make the Orient the varied and
complicated place that it obviously was in the field I call
Orientaiism.
Therefore. Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter
or field iliat is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions;
nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the
Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious
“Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is
rather a §J!i£Y1i2n of ??caL.awa!????ess int{L??esJhetic.
1’£ho????. .?? !!.OQlj.f.. J!. ??s:191(lgi(:????:_’l??storical, an????..h..E. i101()gLqll texts;
it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the
world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but
also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as
scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological
analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates
but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain wiJI or
intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even
to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and
novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is bY2.l???,jn
4!rect corresgonding relationship with political power in thu????,
??ut rather is produced and exists in an uneven exch”,,!l?? with
various k????aped tCl_a-.E_??ree by the 0change with
.p??litical (as with a colonial or imE!rial establishm??t),
power inte??l??l!!al (as with reigning sciences like comparatjve
linguistics or anatomy, or any of the mooem lic sciences), ower
!!Jura as wlth art ??oxles an canons of taste texts. valuesl,
power moral (as with Ideas about what “we” dQ and what “they”
‘cannot do or understand as “we” doL 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.
Introduction 13
Because Orientalism is a cultural and a political fact, then, it
does not exist in some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, I think
i t can be shown that what is thought, said, or even done about the
Orient follows (perhaps occurs within) certain distinct and intellectually
knowable lines. Here too a considerable degree of
nuance and elaboration can be seen working as between the broad
superstructural pressures and the details of composition, the {acts
of textuality. Most humanistic scholars are, I think, perfectly happy
with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such a thing
as intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors.
and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called the
“overtaxing of the productive person in the name of .. the
principle of ‘creativity,’ ” in which the poet is believed on his own,
and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work.7 Yet
there is a reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideological
constraints act in the same manner on the individual author.
A humanist will believe it to be an interesting fact to any interpreter
of Balzac that he was influenced in the ComMie humaine by
the conflict between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, but the
same sort of pressure on Balzac of deeply reactionary monarchism
is felt in some vague way to demean his literary “genius” and
therefore to be less worth serious study. Similarly-as Harry
Bracken has been tirelessly showing-philosophers will conduct
their discussions of Locke, Hume, and empiricism without ever
taking into account that there is an explicit connection in these
classic writers between their “philosophic” doctrines and racial
theory, justifications of slavery, or arguments for colonial exploitalion.
8 l;’hese. areo c()mJP.-on e!1s”.ugh wa?? by which !;Ontemp9J’!…CY
SC??9!’!ll!!jQ keeps !!????!LP.w:e. Perhaps it is true that most attempts to rub culture’s nose
in the mud of politics have been crudely iconoclastic; perhaps also
the social interpretation of literature in my own field has simply
not kept up with the enormous technical advances in detailed
textual analysis. But there is no getting away from the fact that
literary studies in general, and American Marxist theorists in
particular, have avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap
between the superstructural and the base levels in textual, historical
SCholarship; on another occasion I have gone so far as to say that
the literary-cultural establishment as a whole has declared the
seriOl!S study of imperialism and culture off Iimits,g For Orientalism
brings one up directly against that question-that is, to realizing
J
14 ORIENT ALISM
that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination,
and scholarly institutions??in such a way as to make its
avoidance an inte1!ectual and historical impossibility. Yet there
will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that
a literary scholar and a philosopher. for example, are trained in
literature and phitosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological
analysis. In other words, the specialist argument can work quite
effectively to block the larger and, in my opinion, the more intellectually
serious perspective.
Here it seems to me there is a simple two-part answer to be
given, at least so far as the study of imperialism and culture (or
Orientalism) is concerned. [n the first place, nearly every
nineteenth-century writer (and the same is true enough of writers
in earlier periods) was extraordinarily welt aware of the fact of
empire:.this is a subject not very well studied, but it will not take
a modern Victorian specialist long to admit that liberal cultural
heroes like John Stuart Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay,
Ruskin, George Eliot, and even Dickens had definite views on race
and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at work in
their writing. So even a specialist must deal with the knowledge
that Mill, for example, J!!ade it ??lear if!”??e::IY and Represenlnlive
Governmel1l that his, __?? .i????,:=could not be applied to J2!!ll!? w?ai??Offi?!J?????tion”a2′-!o??_??? ??eal oTllls
life, after all) because the Indians were civilizationally, if not
‘raciallr, inferior. The same kind of paradox is to be found in Marx,
as I try to show in this book. In the second place, to believe that
politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the production of
literature, scholarship, social theory, and hiMory writing is by no
means equivalent to saying that culture is therefore a demeaned
Or denigrated thing. Quite the contrary: my whole point is to say
that we can better understand the persistence and the durability of
saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their
internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not
unilaterally inhibiting. It is this idea that Gramsci, certainly, and
Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very different ways have
been trying to il!ustrate. Even One or two pages by Williams on “the
uses of the Empire” in The Long Rellolurion tell us more about
nineteenth-century cultural richness than many volumes of hermetic
textual analy??es.!(l
Therefore I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between
–
Introduction 15
individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the
three great empires-British, French, American-in whose intellectual
and imaginative territory the writing was produced. What
interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but
the detail, as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or
Flaubert or Renan is not the (to him) indisputable truth that Occidentals
are superior to Orientals, but the profoundly worked over
and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very wide
space opened up by that truth. One need only remember that
Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic
of historical and anthropological observation because of its style, ils
enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not because of its
simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am
saying here.
The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are
as follows: What other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly,
and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition
like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography,
history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and
lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist
view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even
revolutions take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of
originality, of continuity, of individuality, in this context? How
does Oriental ism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to
another? In fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon
of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work-not of mere
unconditioned ratiocination-in all its historical complexity, detail,
and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alJiance between
cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific
realities of domination? Governed by such concerns a humanistic
study can responsibly address itself to politics and culture. But this
is not to say that such a study establishes a hard-and-fast rule about
the relationship between knowledge and politics. My argument is
that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of
that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject
matter, and its historical circumstances,
2. The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a
good deal of thought and analysis to the methodological importance
for work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first
step, a point of departure, a beginning principleY A major lesson
16 ORIENT ALISM
I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a
merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have
to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows
from them. Nowhere in my experience has the difficulty of this
lesson been more consciously lived (with what success–or failure
-I cannot really say) than in this study of Orientalism. The
idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves
an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great
mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for,
as well as be, a starting point, a beginning; for the student of texts
one such notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis Althusser’s idea
of the problematic, a specific determinate unity of a text, or group
of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis.a Yet in the
case of Orientalism (as opposed to the case of Marx’s texts, which
is what Allhusser studies) there is not simply the problem of finding
a point of departure, or problematic, but also the question of
designating which texts, authors, and periods are the ones best
suited for study.
It has seemed to me foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative
history of Oriental ism, first of all because if my guiding principle
was to be “the European idea of the Orient” there would be
virtually no limit to the material I would have had to deal with;
second, because the narrative model itself did not suit my descriptive
and political interests; third, because in such books as Raymond
Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale, lohann Flick’s Die Arabischen
Studien in Europa his in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderls, and
more recently, Dorothee Metlitzki’s The Maller of Araby in
Medieval Englandl’ there already exist encyclopedic works on certain
aspects of the European-Oriental encounter such as make the
critic’s job, in the general political and intellectual context I sketched
above, a different one.
There still remained the problem of cutting down a very fat
archive to manageable dimensions, and more important, outlining
something in the nature of an intellectual order within that group
of texts without at the same time following a mindlessly chronological
order. My starting point therefore has been the British,
French, and American experience of the Orient taken as a unit,
what made that experience possible by way of historical and intel??
lectual background, what the quality and character of the ex??
perience has been. For reasons I shall discuss presently I limited
that already limited (but still inordinately large) set of questions to
Introduction 17
the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam,
which for almost a thousand years together stood for the Orient.
Immediately upon doing thai, a large part of the Orient seemed
to have been eliminated-India, Japan, China, and other sections
of the Far East??not because these regions were not important
(they obviously have been) hut because one could discuss Europe’s
experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experiellCe
of the Far Orient. Yet at certain moments of that general
European history of interest in the East, particular parts of the
Orient like Egypt. Syria, and Arabia cannot be discussed without
also studying Europe’s involvement in the more distant parts, of
which Persia and India are the most important; a notable case in
point is the connection between Egypt and India so far as
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was concerned. Similarly
the French role in deciphering the Zend-A vesta, the pre-eminence
of Paris as a center of Sanskrit studies during the first decade of
the nineteenth century, the fact that Napoleon’s interest in the
Orient was contingent upon his sense of the British role in India:
all these Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest
in the Near East, Islam, and the Arabs.
Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from
about the end of the seventeenth century on. Yet my discussion of
that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to (a)
the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy,
Russia, Spain, and Portugal and ( b ) the fact that one of the important
impulses toward the study of the Orient in the eighteenth
century was the revolution in Biblical studies stimulated by such
variously interesting pioneers as Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn, Herder,
and Michaelis. In the first place, I had to focus rigorously upon the
British-French and later the American material because it seemed
inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the
pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these
vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial
networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American Oriental
position since World War II has fit-I think, quite self-consciously
-in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers.
Then too, I believe that the sheer quality, consistency, and mass
of British, French, and American writing on the Orient lifts it
above the doubtless crucial work done in Germany, Italy, Russia,
and elsewhere. But I think it is also true that the major steps in
Oriental scholarship were first taken in either Britain and France,
18 ORIENT ALlSM
then elaborated upon by Germans. Silvestre de Sacy. for example.
was not only the first modem and institutional European Orientaiist,
who worked on Islam. Arabic literature, the Druze religion, and
Sassanid Persia; he was also the teacher of Champollion and of
Franz Bopp, the founder of German comparative linguistics. A
similar claim of priority and subsequent pre-eminence can be made
for William Jones and Edward William Lane.
In the second place-and here the failings of my study of
Orientalism are amply made up for-there has been some important
recent work on the background in Biblical scholarship to the rise of
what I have called modern Orientalism. The best and the most
illuminatingly relevant is E. S. Shaffer’s impressive “KuMa Khan”
and The Fall oj Jerusalem,l4 an indispensable study of the origins
of Romanticism, and of the intellectual activity underpinning a
great deal of what goes on in Coleridge, Browning, and George
Eliot. To some degree Shaffer’s work refines upon the outlines provided
in Schwab, by articulating the material of relevance to be
found in the German Biblical scholars and using that material to
read, in an intelJigent and always interesting way, the work of three
major British writers. Yet what is missing in the book is some sense
of the political as well as ideological edge given the Oriental
material by the British and French writers I am principally concerned
with; in addition, unlike Shaffer I attempt to elucidate
subsequent developments in academic as well as literary Orientalism
that bear on the connection between British and French Orientalism
on the one hand and the rise of an explicitly colonial-minded imperialism
on the other. Then too, I wish to show how all these
earlier matters are reproduced more or less in American Orientalism
after the Second World War.
Nevertheless there is a possibly misleading aspect to my study,
where, aside from an occasional reference, I do not exhaustively
discuss the German developments after the inaugural period dominated
by Sacy. Any work that seeks to provide an understanding
of academic Orientalism and pays little attention to scholars like
Steinlhal, Muller, Becker, Goldziher, Brockeimann, Noldeke-to
mention only a handful-needs to be reproached, and I freely reproach
myself. I particularly regret not laking more account of the
great scientific prestige that accrued to German scholarship by the
middle of the nineteenth century, whose neglect was made into a
denunciation of insular British scholars by George Eliot. I have in
mind Eliot’s unforgettable portrait of Mr. Casaubon in Middle-
Introduction 19
march. One reason Casaubon cannot finish his Key to All Mythologies
is, according to his young cousin Will Ladislaw, that be is
unacquainted with German scholarship. For not only has Casaubon
chosen a subject “as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are
constantly making new points of view”: he is undertaking a job
similar to a refutation of Paracelsus because “he is not an
Orientalist, you know.”15
Eliot was not wrong in implying that by about 1830. which is
when Middlemarch is sel, German scholarship had fully attained
its European pre-eminence. Yet at DO time in German scholarship
during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century CQuid a close
partnership have developed between Orientalists and a protracted,
sustained national interest in the Orient. There was nothing in
Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the
Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost
exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made
the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never
actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand,
Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval. There is some significance
in the fact that the two most renowned German works on
the Orient, Goethe’s WestOstlicher DilVan and Friedrich Schlegel’S
Vber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier, were based respectively
on a Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. What
German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques
whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages
almost literally gathered from the Orient by. imperial Britain and
France.
Yet what German Orientatism had in common with AngloFrench
and later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual
authority over the Orient within Western culture. This authority
must in large part be the subject of any description of Orienlalisrn,
and it is so in this study. Even the name Orientalism suggests a
serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when I apply it to
modern American social scientists (since they do not call themselves
Orientalists, my use of the word is anomalous), it is to draw
attention to the way Middle East experts can still draw on the
vestiges of Orientalism’s intellectual position in nineteenth-century
Europe. ?? is nothing mysterious or natural about autholitJ . .It is
iLforh mase ds,t aItrurasd, iIat tesedta, d lIsSs emesm caatneodn; si to ifs tInStrumaste andenti value; it if,itis ise rvslurtausaiv Iey; if
20 QRIENTALISM
indistin uis hie from certain ideas it di nifi as tru and from
raditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, repro*
duces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. All
these attributes of authority apply to Orientalism. and much of what
I do in this study is to describe both the historical authority in and
th-e2 rsonal authorities of Orientalism.
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 with regard to the Oriental
material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way
of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which
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 every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold
of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed
by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who
writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-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,
themes, 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 affiliateJ
itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the
Orient itself. The ensemble of reJationships between works,
audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore
constitutes an analyzable fonnation-for example, that of philological
studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature,
of travel books, of Oriental fantasies-whose presence in time, in
discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives
it strength and authority.
It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not
entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientillist text, but
analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes.
I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized.
Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that
the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes
pi
Introduction 21
the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is
never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he
says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said
or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the
Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal
product of this exteriority is of course representation : as early as
Aeschylus’s play The Persians the Orient is transfonned from a very
far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are
relatively familiar (in Aeschylus’s case, grieving Asiatic women) .
The dramatic immediacy of representation in The Persians obscures
the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment
of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole
Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis
on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations
as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient.
This evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful
text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the
avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look
at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical
and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation
nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation
is always governed by some version of the truism that if
the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the
representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for
the poor Orient. “Sie konnen sich nicht vertreten, sie mUssen
vertreten werden,” as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte.
Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it
needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange
within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not
“truth” but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated
again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system,
which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange
messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance
of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered
presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy,
strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient
therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on
the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a
presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced,
made supererogatory any such rear thing as “the Orient.” Thus all
22 ORIENT ALISM
of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: 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 discourse about it. And these representations rely upon
institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding
for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient.
The difference between representations or the Orient before the
last third of the eighteenth century and those after it (that is, those
belonging to what I call modern Orientalism) is that the range of
representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true
that after William Jones and Anquetil-Duperron, and after
Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, Europe came 10 know the Orient
more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline
than ever before, But what mattered to Europe was the expanded
srope and the much greater refinement given its techniques for
receiving the Orient, When around the turn of the eighteenth
century the Orient definitively revealed the age of its languages-Ihus
aUldating Hebrew’s divine pedigree-it was a group of Europeans
who made the discovery, passed it on to other scholars,
and preserved the discovery in the new science of Indo-European
philology. A new powerful science for viewing the linguistic Orient
was born, and with it, as Foucault has shown in The Order of
Things. a whole web of related scientific interests. Similarly William
Beckford, Byron, Goethe, and Hugo restructured the Orient by
their art and made its colors, lights, and people visible through their
images, rhythms, and motifs. At most, the “real” Orient provoked
a writer to his vision; it very rarely guided it,
Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than
to its putative object, which was also produced by the West. Thus
the history of Orienlalism has both an internal consistency and a
highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding
it. My analyses consequently try to show the field’s shape
and internal organization. its pioneers, patriarchal authorities,
canonical texts, doxological ideas, exemplary figures. its followers,
elaborators, and new authorities; I try also to explain how Oriental??
ism borrowed and was frequently informed by “strong” ideas,
doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was (and is) a
Jinguistic Orient, a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a
Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient-and so on. Yet never has there
Introduction 23
been such a thing as a pure, or unconditional, Orient; similarly.
never has there been a nonmaterial form of Orientalism, much less
something so innocent as an “idea” of the Orient. In this underlying
conviction and in its ensuing methodological consequences do I
differ from scholars who study the history of ideas. For the emphases
and the executive form, above all the material effectiveness, of
statements made by Orientalist discourse are possible in ways that
any hermetic history of ideas tends completely to scant. Without
those emphases and that material effectiveness Orientalism would
be just another idea, whereas it is and was much more than that.
Therefore J set out to examine not only scholarly works but also
works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books,
religious and philological studies. In other words, my hybrid perspective
is broadly historical and “anthropological,” given that I
believe all texts to be worldly and circumstantial in (of course)
ways that vary from genre to genre, and from historical period to
historical period.
Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted,
I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers
upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting
a discursive formation like Orientalism. The unity of the large
ensemble of texts I analyze is due in part to the fact that they
frequently refer to each other: Orientalism is after all a system for .l
citing works and authors. Edward William Lane’s Manners and
Customs of the Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such
diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard Burlon. He was an
authority whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or thinking
about the Orient, not just about Egypt: when Nerval borrows
passages verbatim from Modern Egyptians it is to use Lane’s
authority to assist him in describing village scenes in Syria, not
Egypt. Lane’s authority and the opportunities provided for citing
him discriminately as well as indiscriminately were there because
Orientalism could give his text the kind of distributive currency
that he acquired. There is no way, however, of understanding Lane’s
currency without also understanding the peculiar features of his
text; this is equally true of Renan, Saey, Lamartine, Schlegel. and
a group of other influential writers. Foucault believes that in general
the individual text or author eQunts for very little; empirically, in
the case of Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere else) I find this not
to be so. Accordingly my analyses employ dose textual readings
24 ORIENTALISM
whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or
writer and the complex collective fannation to which his work is a
contribution.
Yet even though it includes an ample selection of writers, this
book is still far from a complete history or general account of
OrientaJism. Of this failing I am very conscious. The fabric of as
thick a discourse as Orientalism has survived and functioned in
Western society because of its richness: all I have done is to describe
parts of that fabric at certain moments, and merely to suggest the
existence of a larger whole, detailed, interesting. dotted with
fascinating figures, texts, and events. I have consoled myself with
believing that this book is one installment of several, and hope
there are scholars and critics who might want to write others. There .;.// is still a general essay to be written on imperialism and culture;
other skldies would go more deeply into the connection between
Orientalism and pedagogy, or into Italian, Dutch, German, and
Swiss Orientalism, or into the dynamic between scholarship and
imaginative writing, or into the relationship between administrative
ideas and intellectual discipline. Perhaps the most important task
of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary :alternatives to
OrientaHsm, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples
from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, per??
spective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex
problem of knowledge and power. These are all lasks lefl embarrassingly
incomplete in this study.
The last, perhaps self-flattering, observation on method that I
want to make here is that I have written this study with several
audiences in mind. For students of literature and criticism, Orientalism
offers a marvelous instance of the interrelations between society,
history, and textuality; moreover, the cultural role played by the
Orient in the West connects Orientalism with ideology, politics, and
the logic of power, matters of relevance, I think, to the literary community.
For contemporary students of the Orient, from university
scholars to policymakers, 1 have written with two ends in mind:
one, to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that
has not been done; two, to criticize-with the hope of stirring discussion
??the often unquestioned assumptions on which their work
for the most part depends. For the general reader, this study deals
with matters that always compel attention, all of them connected
not only with Western conceptions and treatments of the Other but
also with the singularly important role played by Western culture
p
Introduction 25
in what Vico called the world of nations. Lastly, for readers in the
so-called Third World, this study proposes itself as a step towards
an understanding not so much of Western politics and of the non·
Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western
cultural discourse, a strength too often mistaken as merely decora??
live or “superstructural.” My hope is to illustrate the formidable
structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly ?? colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this
structure upon themselves or llpon others.
The three long chapters and twelve shorter units into which this
book is divided are intended to facilitate exposition as much as
possible. Chapter One, “The Scope of Orientalism,” draws a large
circle around alJ the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of
historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and
political themes. Chapter Two, “Orientalist Structures and Restructures,”
attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism
by a broadly chronological description, and also by the
description of a set of devices common to the work of important
poets, artists, and scholars. Chapter Three, “Orientalism Now,”
begins where its predecessor left off, at around 1870. This is the
period of great colonial expansion into tbe Orient, and it culminates
in World War II. The very last section of Chapter Three
characterizes the shift from British and French to American
hegemony; I attempt there finally to sketch the present intellectual
and social realities of Orienlalism in the United States.
3. The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci
says: “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness
of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the
historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity
of traces, without leaving an inventory.” The only available English
translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas
in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, “therefore it is
imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”16
Much of the personal investment in this study derives from
my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two
British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies ( Palestine
and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet
that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of
Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me,
the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so
powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the
26 ORIENT ALISM
hlamic Orient has had to be the center of attention. Whether what
I have achieved is the inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not (or
me to judge, although I have felt it important to be conscious of
trying to produce one. Along the way, as severely and as rationally
as I have been able. I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness,
as wen as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic,
and cultural research of which my education has made me the
fortunate beneficiary. In none of that, however, have I ever lost
hold of the cultural reality of, the personal involvement in having
been constituted as, “an Oriental.”
The historical circumstances making such a study possible are
fairly complex, and I can only list them schematically here. Anyone
resident in the West since the 1950s, particularly in the United
States, will have lived through an era of extraordinary turbulence
in the reqttions of East and West. No one will have failed to note
how “East” has always signified danger and threat during this
period, even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as
Russia. In the universities a growing establishment of area-studies
programs and institutes has made the scholarly study of the Orient
a branch of national policy. Public affairs in this country include a
healthy interest in the Orient, as much for its strategic and economic
importance as for its traditional exoticism. If the world has become
immediately accessible to a Western citizen living in the electronic
age, the Orient too has drawn nearer to him, and is now less a myth
perhaps than a place crisscrossed by Western, especially American,
interests.
One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that t??e
has been a rejnforcement of the stereotypes by which the Ori??nt is ??. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have
forced infonnation into more and more standardized molds. So far
as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping
have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and
imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient.” This is nowhere
more true than in the ways by which the Near East is grasped.
Three thin?s have contributed to makiAg e”ell tiN sjmplest perception
of the Arabs and Islam int??h ighly· politicized. almost ntUCOus
matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic ( prejudice in the West, which ii immediately reflected in the history
‘?,f Orjentalism; two, the struggle between the Arabs and Isra”li
Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as “PQA b?h
the liberal culture and the popu lation at la[?e; three the almO?t. –
lntroduction 27
total absence of an cultural osition makin it ossible either to
identif WIth or dis assionatel to discuss the Arabs or s am.
Furthermore, it hardly n s saying that because the Middle East
is now so identified with Great Power politics, oil economics. and
the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel
and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs. the chances of anything
like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the
Near East are depressingly small.
My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me
write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West,
particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an
almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and
when it is allowed that he does. it is either as a nuisance or as an
Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes. political imperialism,
dehumanizjng ideology holding in the Arab or the
Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every
Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. It
has made matters worse for him to remark that no person academically
involved with the Near East-no Orientalist, that is-has ever .’
in the United States culturally and politically identified himself / wholeheartedly with the Arabs; certainly there have been identifications
on some level, but they have never taken an “acceptable”
fonn as has liberal American identification with Zionism, and all too
frequently they have been radically flawed by their association
either with discredited political and economic interests (oilcompany
and State Department Arabists, for example) or with
religion.
The nexus of knowledge and1’9lV??atin??the _Qri????al” and / in a sense obliterating him as a ????man_????i??_is therefore not for ‘
me an exclusively academic ma!??????”,!..!?? it is an intellectual matter
Of some very obvious importance. I have b.??en able t?J??!Y? use !!!y
??,!J.!!.’!??.!l!.d politi:??! concerns for the analysis and descriQQgn
of a very worldly matter tbe rise, development. and consolidat??
Qf OrientaJism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be
politically. even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed
otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced
me (and 1 hope will convince my literary colleagues) that
SOciety and literary culture can only be understood and studied
together. In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have
found myself writing the history of a strange. secret sharer of
Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed
28 QRIENTALISM
it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very
closely is a historical. cultural, and political truth that needs only
to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly
understood. But what I should like also to have contributed here is
a better understanding of the way cultural domination has operated.
If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed
if it eliminates the “Orient” and “Occident” altogether, then we shall
have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams
has called the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative mode.”1’T
,
br
Notes
Introduction
1. Thierry Desjardins, Le Manyre du Liban (Paris: Pion, 1976), p. 14.
2. K. M. Panikkar, Asia-and Western Dominance (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1959).
3. Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence 0/ an Idea, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1968).
4. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study 0/ Sexuality and Pornog·
raphy in Mid-Nineteenth Century England ( 1966; reprint ed., New York:
Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 200–19.
S. See my Criticism Between Culture and System (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
6. Principally in his American Power and the New Mandarins: HistorjcQ/
and Political Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969) and For Reasons
0/ Slate (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).
7. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 71.
8. Harry Bracken, “Essence. Accident and Race,” Hermathena 1 1 6
(Winter 1973): 81-96.
9. In an interview published in Diacritics 6, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 38.
10. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus,
1961), pp. 66–7.
U. In my Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books,
1975).
12. wuis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1969), pp. 65-7.
13, Raymond Schwab, Lo Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, }950);
Johann W. Flick, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. lahrhunderts (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955); Dorotbee Metlitzki,
The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.; Yale
Un iversity Press, 1977).
14, E. S. Shaffer, “KuMa Khan” and The Feill of lerusalem: The Mylh()o
logical School in Biblical Criticism and Secu.lar Literature, 1770-1880 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975).
15.. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life ( 1 872; reprint
ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 164.
16. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Pub-
329
330 Notes
lisbers. 1971), p. 324. The full passage, unavailable in the Hoare and Smith
translation, is to be found in Gcamsci, Quaderni del Careere, ed. Valentino
Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1975), 2: 1363.
17. Raymond Williams, Culture l11Id Society. 1780-1950 (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1958), p. 376.
Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism
1. This and the preceding quotations from Arthur James Balfour’s speech
to the House of Commons are from Great Britain, Parliamentary Debatn
(Commons), 5th ser., 17 (1910) : 1 140–46. See also A. P. Thornton, The
Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power (London: MacMillan
& Co., 1959). pp. 357-60. Balfour’s speech was a defense of Eldon
Gorst’s policy in Egypt; for a discussion of that see Peter John Dreyfus
Mellini, “Sir Eldon Gorst and British Imperial Policy in Egypt,” unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1971.
2. Denis Judd, Balfour and the British Empire: A Study in Imperial Evolution,
1874-1932 (London: MacMillan & Co., 1968), p. 286. See also p. 292:
as late aS??1926 Balfour spoke-without irony-of Egypt as an “independent
nation.”
3. Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Political and Literary Essays, 1908-1913
(1913; reprint ed., Freeport, N. Y.: Books for libraries Press, 1969), pp. 40,
53, 12-14.
4. Ibid., p. 171.
5. Roger Owen, “The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience on
British Policy in Egypt 1883-1907,” in Middle Eastern ADairs, Number
Four: St. Antony’s Papers Number 17, ed. Albert Hourani (London: Oxford
University Press, 1965), pp. 109-39.
Ii. Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1908), 2: 146–67. For a British view of British policy in Egypt that
runs totally counter to Cromer’s, see Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Secret History
of the English Occupation of Egypt: Being a Personal Narrative of Events
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). There is a valuable discussion of
Egyptian opposition to British rule in Mounah A. Khouri, Poetry and the
Making of Modern Egypt. 1882-1922 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971).
7. Cromer, Modem Egypt, 2: 164.
8. Cited in John Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt (London: Elek Books, 1970),
p. 271.
9. Harry Magdoff, “Colonialism ( l763-c. 1970),” Encyclopaedia Britannica,
15th ed. (1974), pp. 893-4. See also D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial
Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (New York:
Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 178.
10. Quoted in Afaf LuUi al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer: A Swdy in AngloEgyptian
Relatians (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), p. 3.
11. The phrase is to be found in Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability:
A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability. Induction
and Statistical Inference (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 17.
11. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man,
and White Man in an Age of Empire (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969),
p.55.
,
I
,
About the Author
Edward W. Said, one of the country’s most distinguished
literary critics, is Parr Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
He was Visiting Professor in Comparative
Literature at Harvard and a Fellow of the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford,
and delivered the Gauss lectures in criticism
at Princeton in 1977. In 1976 his book Beginnings:
Intention and Method won the first annual Lionel
Trilling Award given at Columbia University.