Orientalism

Orientalism by Edward W. Said
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been looking for this book for 20 years, and at last found a copy in a 2nd-hand bookshop. Since hundreds of people must have reviewed it in that period, I won't even attempt to write a review, which would simply be repeating what hundreds of other people have said. Rather I will comment on a few of the things that stuck me about it, and that I've learnt from it. 

In his book Edward Said examines the Western academic discipline of Orientalism, or, as it is sometimes called, Oriental Studies. He notes that it is entirely a Western discipline. It is a study of the way the people of "the West" study the people of "the Orient", which is that part of the world that lies to the East of "the West". In other words, it is all subjective. 

Said also looks at some of the terms the West uses to describe "the Orient" -- Near East, Middle East and Far East. Because they are subjective, these terms are rather vague, and can have different meanings at different times. Like so many subjective terms they tell you more about the people who use and devise them than it does about the people they purport to describe. If someone speaks of a place as "the Near East", that tells you little about the Near East, but tells you a bit more about the person wo whom the Near East is nearer than the Far East. To a person living in India, the "Near East" is actually the "Middle West".

Because of this particular viewpoint, therefore, the people of "the Orient" never get to talk about themselves. In "Oriental Studies" they are described and discussed as seen by outsiders. Actually, as Said points out, Orientalism was originally not much concerned with people at all; it was mainly concerned with literature and manuscripts. 

Much of what Said says in this book rang a lot of bells for me, though they are not directly related to the content of the book, which is why I'm writing about them in a blog post instead of in a review on GoodReads.

My own academic field is Missiology, the study of Christian mission, and one of my particular interests in that field is African Independent Churches (AICs). African Independent Churches were studied and defined by academics who belonged to Christian denominations that had been founded by Western Christian missionaries, and therefore, like Said's Orientals, had been studied from the outside and defined from the outside -- see African Independent Churches: Judgement through Terminology.

I wrote that article before I had even heard of Edward Said's book, but what I said in it, it seems to me, is reinforced in many ways by what Said  says in his book, even though he is writing about Muslims and I was writing about African Christians.

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Lost Horizon and Shangri-La

Lost Horizon by James Hilton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book, first published in 1933, is a kind of throwback to the kind of late-Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels exemplified by those of H. Rider Haggard, but also includes, for example, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It follows the convention of a story within a story, where several gentlemen gather for cigars or port after dinner in a club or restaurant and one of them tells a story of his own adventures, or those of a mutual acquaintance. The story often involves a far-away place with a society cut off, either partly or completely, from the outside world -- in this case a monastery called Shangri-La in a hidden valley in Tibet.

By the time James Hilton wrote this story, most such stories had already moved into the realm of science fiction, and had moved to other planets, other solar systems, other galaxies, or even other dimensions as most of the surface of our planet had been mapped.

This story is one of the better examples of the genre, and probably one of the last of those set on earth, so much so that the name of its hidden place, Shangri-la, has become part of popular culture, and has found its way in to pop songs and the names of holiday resorts and the like.

I've been reading this book in parallel with a couple of others on related topics, notably Orientalism by Edward Said, and Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel. I'll write more about those in their own place, perhaps with some reference to this one, but Lost Horizon is in some ways a very Orientalist book.

In Lost Horizon the protagonist, Conway, finds himself de facto leader of four refugees from a revolution, who are subsequently victims of a hijacking. Conway, we are told, unlike at least one of his companions, "...had no race or colour prejudice, and it was an affectation for him to pretend, as he sometimes did in clubs and first-class railway carriages, that he set any particular store on the 'whiteness' of a lobster-red face under a topee." 

But the youngest member of the party, Mallinson, was very much steeped in Orientalism, colonialism and "whiteness", and almost as soon as they had arrived at Shangri-La was demanding "porters" so they could get back to "civilization". And even the unprejudiced Conway seemed to think that "porters" would be a necessity to enable them to leave. It seems a curious demand, since they had been refugees and subsequently hijackees, and thus had no luggage to carry. 

So while Said's book gives a history of the growth and development of what he calls "Orientalism", Hilton's fictional account probably gives a better idea of how it worked in practice in its heyday. Sangri-La may be a fictional place, but it serves to project the image of the Western world and its attitudes in the 1930s, just before the rise of Hitler.



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Greek mythology

Postcolonialism perhaps needs to come to the rescue of Greece now.

Hat-tip to Notes from a Common-place Book: Rethinking Greece: "Greece has been in the news a lot recently, and not in a good way. This article, by George Zakardakis, puts the crisis in historical perspective--always a refreshing touch."

Modern Greece built on myth | The Japan Times Online:

When the Greek crisis began two years ago, the cover of a popular German magazine showed an image of Aphrodite of Milo gesturing crudely with the headline: "The fraudster in the euro family." In the article, modern Greeks were described as indolent sloths, cheats and liars, masters of corruption, unworthy descendents of their glorious Hellenic past.

The irony was that modern Greece has little in common with Pericles or Plato. If anything, it is a failed German project.

In 1832, Greece had just won its independence from the Ottoman Empire. The "Big Powers" of the time, Britain, France and Russia, appointed a Bavarian prince, Otto, as Greece's first king. Otto arrived with German architects, engineers, doctors and soldiers and set out to reconfigure the country to the romantic ideal of the times.

It seems that no sooner was Greece decolonised by the Turks than it was recolonised by the Western European countries who imposed their own ideas on it, rather along the lines of Edward Said's Orientalism.



For romantically-minded Westerners of the 19th century monasteries like those at Meteora (above) were not the "real" Greece.

Modern Greece built on myth | The Japan Times Online:

the intellectuals dream of a truly Westernized Greece through some miracle of economic and social science. When the loan referendum was announced, most of them opposed it. Greece had to show that it belonged to the European family of nations, whatever that may mean. Rebellion was not to be tolerated, lest the country was kicked out of the euro, the symbol of Greek westernization.

Ultimately the intellectuals and politicians, with persuasion from angry European leaders and technocrats, had the referendum quashed. Besides, the invention of fantastical modern Greece demanded that its people, the third division of society, also remained imaginary.

Naturally, they are real as anything. They despise the loss of their sovereignty as well as the bitter medicine prescribed by their European brethren for their "rescue." Austerity enforced by unelected officials from the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank is perceived as not remedy but punishment, a distasteful concept to the orthodox Greeks whose core value is mercy.

And that is one of the primary differences between the Orthodox Christianity of the Greek people and the pagan Greece of the Western romantic imagination. Mercy is indeed a core value of Orthodoxy.

You only have to attend a few Orthodox servicesw to become aware of this "Lord have mercy" Kyrie eleison repeated three, 12 and sometimes 40 times.

Orthodox Christians know a God who says "I desire mercy and not sacrifice", but the Westerners demand more and more sacrifices, human sacrifices, of the ordinary people of Greece, and "mercy" is an utterly foreign concept to them.