This paper is an evaluation and critique Edward Said’s work, Orientalism[1] and will answer its principal concern of how Western Scholars should approach other cultures. Orientalism was first used to denote a section of scholarship that dealt with the examination of the geographic regions including the Middle East and India. Since its inception it was refined to the Middle East, or Arab studies, as more and more subfields were developed and broke off of from the field, dividing what was called the Orient[2] into smaller and smaller geo-cultural regions of study[3]. In 1973, the twenty-ninth International Congress of Orientalists decided to drop the name altogether[4]. Edward Said used the term to describe a relationship between the scholarship of the Orientalists and the colonial domination by the imperial powers. Said also rejects the validity of the terms Orient and Occident, but employs them because this is how the argument has been framed by the Orientalists[5].

I will examine the following claims of Orientalism. First, while Orientalism presents itself as an objective field of study, the knowledge it generated was used to justify the power behind the political domination of the East by the West[6]. Secondly, the Orientalists employed a essentialist way of viewing the Near East, this essentialist thinking was a false way of viewing people groups and their culture. Lastly, since the Orientalist scholars were the product of the system they came from they could not cannot help but to misrepresent the “Other.” Therefore, what was needed was for the subaltern to speak for itself. I will argue that while a significant portion of this theory is valuable and an useful way of viewing part of the Imperialist/Orientalist framework, it too was essentialist in nature and was more indicative of the nature of the Imperialists than the nature of the Orientalist scholars.

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This post is an attempt to flesh out Edward Said’s postcolonial theory of Orientalism:”(When set off in italics, the term “Orientalism” will refer to the book by Said, when merely capitalized; it will refer to Said’s theory.)”:. It has drawn from Said’s best-known work, Orientalism and incorporated several articles written in response to or are reviews of the work. These articles included “Orientalism Reconsidered” by Edward Said, and “Review of Books: Orientalism” by C. Earnest Dawn. These articles were utilized to help add clarity to a complex theory.

The four central claims of Orientalism are as follows. First, while Orientalism presents itself as an objective field of study, it was used to justify the political domination of the East by the West. Secondly, Orientalism was actually more about defining itself through the mirror of the East than it was about objectively studying it :”(The very terms “East” and “West” are rejected by Said as valid descriptions; however, they will be used as terms of convenience for the purposes of this paper.)”:. Third, points one and two are produced and reinforced by viewing the Orient as a homogenous group. This essentialist thinking was a false way of viewing people groups and their culture. Said also rejects the validity of the terms Orient and Occident, but employs them because this is how the argument has been framed by the Orientalists:”(Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique, No. 1, 1985, p. 90. )”:. Lastly, the Orientalist scholars are the product of the system they come from. Due to this, they cannot help but to misrepresent the “Other.” Therefore, what is needed is for the subaltern to speak for itself. Continued…

The chapter in the latter half of Conjuring Culture I found the most interesting was the chapter on Wisdom. The beginning question of the chapter, “What is the relationship between African, American and European elements in this [Black folk tradition] experience?” intrigued me. The idea of wisdom literature as not being very concerned with historical narration is relatively new to me. It is a very different way of looking at the world. I have always employed the narrow scope of viewing things either through the historical narrative or the abstract philosophical lens. Thus the ethos and cosmos would always remain separate. I found the following quote to sum up the idea of wisdom:

“Wisdom fulfills one of religions fundamental functions which is to bind together ethos and cosmos, the sphere of action and the sphere of the world. It does not do this by demonstrating that this conjunction is given in things, nor by demanding that it be produced by our action. Rather it joins ethos and cosmos at the very point of their discordance: in suffering and more precisely, in unjust suffering. Wisdom does not teach us how to avoid suffering, or how magically to deny it… [but] how to endure, how to suffer suffering.”

I found a similar truism in Dixon’s problem with the either/or distinctions that are used so commonly in the West. In binary opposition there is always a preferred element. When the least preferred element is attached to actual groups of humans, it leads to a dehumanization of the loosing group, which in turn usually leads to atrocities. It was very reminiscent of Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities by Albert Bandura. What I liked the most was that the categories themselves are not the problem, but the either/or distinction was the problem. Adopting a both/and approach will allow one to maintain distinctions which really appear to be there that does not result in atrocities and injustice.

I also found the idea in the latter part of the chapter, the idea of High John the Conqueror, to be a fascinatingly creative construct.

“He was a wisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and a song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low, but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing drum. The black folds had an irresistible impulse to laugh.”

I found a curious resemblance to the “whisper of a hope putting on flesh” with the way The Gospel of John describes the Word becoming flesh. High John served to sow the seeds of hope in the midst of their suffering and to conjure their freedom. Once again this concept was expressed most clearly in the following quotation:

“My mama told me, and I know that she would not mislead me, how High John Conqueror helped us out. He had done teached the black folks so they knowed a hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming. Long before the white folks knowed anything about it at all… A heap sees, but a few knows. ‘Course the war was a lot of help, but how comes the war took place? They think they knows, but they don’t. John the Conqueror had done put it in the white folks to give us our freedom, that’s what. Old Massa fought against it, but us could have told him that is wasn‘t no use. Freedom just had to come. The time set aside for it was there. That war was just a sign and a symbol of the thing.”

That passage embodies all that Smith has set up in chapter five. It displays the Monkey-Lion dueling with the Monkey employing “wit over force” to accomplish his aims. The Monkey/John is not deceitful, but in his struggle over Old Massa/Lion he has to use his wit to turn the tables and bring about justice.

The first half of the book, Conjuring Culture is an odd read. I do not mean this in a negative way, but just to say the ideas and concepts are quite foreign to the world I have known. The religious culture of Black Americans is extremely creative. The way in which the base religions fused and reacted with the Christianity that they were exposed to, presumably after their enslavement is very intriguing. I believe it parallels with the experience of the Mexican Indians and Catholicism. However, I gather from the author that the use of “conjure theology” is unique to the African, and consequently the black American religious experience. The way that native-African religious ideas were reinterpreted as biblical types is intriguing.

The idea of typology to reinterpret biblical events as a prophecy of the black American events is very creative. It not only was used to give hope and strength to the religious members, but also to invoke the action of the deity to make the prophecy come to pass in their lives. The best examples of this are Exodus, Ethiopian, Moses, and Egyptian themes. These strategies of inducement served not only to give the people a sense of purpose, but to also speak to speak these things into existence. Another function was to tie together the people of the group and to craft an identity for them. It is noted in the reading that the very action of creating an idea of god is to create oneself in relation to it. Likewise, when a group creates an idea of god, they create an identity of the group in relation to that god. This is one of the ideas behind the usage of Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God” (KJV).

The use of Psalm 68:31 was incredible powerful and diverse. There was a linking together of biblical themes to match their situation. The God of the Ethiopians would lead his people out of Slavery (Egypt) just like the God of the Hebrews did. Egypt was not only used as a symbol of slavery, but also of the destiny that there would be black princes. This pointed to the royal nature of the people and back, along with the Ethiopian kingdom, to the days of the two great black kingdoms.
It is very interesting to see how the religious culture of black Americans synthesized the religions and cultures of Europe and Africa into a synthesis that used to not only give them strength and comfort in their circumstances, but to also conjure up a betterment of their situations. It seems bizarre at first to imagine Moses as a conjure man that leaned secret words from God to recreate reality. But when viewed in the larger framework that Smith presents it begins to fit in naturally. The themes were constantly being reinvented to adapt to the current situation. It is hard to grasp at some of the concepts found in the reading, but with the repetitive frame work in which Smith reveals his theory aids in grasping the concepts presented.

A polemicist is someone “who argues in opposition to others.” Try to think of the opposing talking heads one sees so much on quasi-news programs. These people are in such direct opposition to each other that they become entrenched. They do not fight for truth for its own sake, but for their view.

“The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.”

Besides his very practical advice on the polemicist, Foucault’s most intriguing concept is the Panopticon. Upon first reading, Foucault and Bentham’s Panopticon is a terrifying construct. Anytime power is wielded with such cool efficiency and detachment, one is reminded of the dehumanizing effect on the subjugated and as a consequent on those that administrate this power. The idea of the Panopticon as a laboratory is an especially heinous notion as the idea of human lab-rats it the highest expression of dehumanization.

However, the Panopticon differs from the more overt uses of force and control that one is used to. It is easy to rally against a tyrant-king or a slave master, but the Panopticon is quite different from these concepts. Instead of constant brute force enthralling a subject, the Panopticon trains the subject to be one’s own master; it grafts the tyrant-king onto the vassal, creating a compound subject. This is done, by my understanding, by the constant threat of supervision, via the transparency of the subject’s surroundings. The unverifiability of the Panopticon serves to make the system feasible, since it would be impossible to actually monitor for deviance and administrate force to correct deviations.

Before investigation, this process smacks of oppression. In Bentham’s version of the Panopticon, this is surely the case. However, one does need to ask if the subjects in Bentham’s Panopticon are deserving of this oppression. If they are prone to violent acts and have injured members of society, then perhaps is it perfectly justifiable to mold their behavior and graft onto these individuals the tyrant-king. Panopticon is really terrifying when Foucault projects the idea of the Panopticon onto all of society. It strips one of their humanity and reduces one to a potential lab-rat. It also strips one’s spouse, one’s mother, one’s brother, all of one’s friends into lab-rats; a very sour notion indeed!

Once this machine of molding has been discovered, the first question one is lead to ask is, “Who is doing or benefiting from this power over me?” In Bentham’s Panopticon, it is the owner or operator of the prison/lab that wields the power and can have an array of uses, from the beneficent to the treacherous. When applied to society at large, as Foucault does, there is no one that one can point to as wielder of the power. It is diffused throughout society; it is present everywhere with no centralized nexus of power and administration. Therefore, no one can point to the oppressor. If there is no oppressor that can be pointed to, how can one be oppressed? Likewise if there are no actors or agents to morally evaluate, how can the system be judged from a moral standpoint of just or unjust?

Foucault describes this network of discipline as a physics of power. This physics of power can be likened to the force of gravity that binds us all to the earth. Just like gravity serves as a bind on all of humanity, stripping them of certain freedoms. It is inescapable and there is no way to rebel against it. Even in jumping and flight, one is still bound to its ruses and is using the rules of the game to play in another way. Similarly, Foucault’s Panopticon is a description of the new physics of power that has developed. No one is free from the system nor can they be set free. There is nothing to be set free from, as any change, political, personal or relational is merely a change in speed or location, not a change in the way power is administered. Therefore, this method of power administration is not to be evaluated morally, as it is merely a statement of condition.

For my final research paper on Post-Colonial Comparative Religions, I want to study the make up of what can be loosely called the “Jihad Movements” through the lens of Post-Colonialism and give a view of their alternate structure.

This draws off of a number of curiosities I have.

1. When talking about Islam, Islamic Terror, the Moderate Muslim, the various sects in Islam, ect, it is very important to get one’s terms right. In this paper, I want to survey the religion and try to sort out all of the terms that get jumbled together.
2. I want to explore how the situations the common people throughout the world interplay with the varying theologies and political aspirations of Islam present to them.
3. In the Post-Colonial critique of the current Western Heavy power structure of the world, much is said about the evils, past and present of the West towards the Rest. What I have trouble finding are alternate views of how the world should be set up. The few western voices I have read give a West-lite view while denouncing any attempt of imposing values on other cultures. I find that to be a bit hypocritical and weak-sounding.
4. I get a sense of the a alternate view of the world power structure in some of the claims of various Islamic groups, claims of the Caliphate. I want to look at this as a viable alternative to the “satellite-west” that the West is trying to impose on the rest of the world.
5. Often one slips into dichotomies when trying to talk about the West, Islam, the Third World, ect… I want to try to navigate some of these dichotomies and see how far they are true and how far they can be fragmented.

This paper will seek to explore the relationship between those in power that abuse it, otherwise known as the oppressors, and those that were the recipients of that abuse of power, affectionately known as the oppressed. More specifically, this paper will look first at a particular case of this relationship, the case of the bombing of Hiroshima by the American military with an atomic bomb. Then it will look at a wide-scale nuclear war in general. Three main sources were used in this limited inquiry; John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, and lastly the academic paper Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities by Albert Bandura. The grid of oppression will be looked at as it applies to the case, incorporating elements from Hiroshima and The Fate of the Earth. The grid of oppression is a collection of five ways that oppression can work according to Marion Young in Justice and the Politics of Difference. They include exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, violence, and environmental injustice. Finally, the cases will be examined in light of the social cognitive theory put forth by Bandura. While the bombing and aftermath of Hiroshima was not a clear-cut example of postcolonial strife, there are elements that pervade the reading. The Fate of the Earth details the consequences would be if the powers left over from the postcolonial world ever took the step and started a nuclear holocaust. |inline

Savage Systems details a horrible loss at the hands of past comparative religionists. In the work, Chidester goes to great lengths to detail how the European comparative religionists’ results paralleled the cultural conflict that was going on in the region. The comparative religion studies denied religion to the South African natives when they were in conflict with the colonizers. After the people were subjugated they were suddenly found to actually have religion. At some point, the subjugated people would start to resist the colonizers again. Once that happened and the natives were once again seen as the enemy, they were found to have no religion. This cycle kept happening over and over again.

During the times that the comparative religionists declared to be without religion, this lack of religion was purported to show that there was a fundamental lack of humanity in the natives. This fundamental lacking was used to justify the idea that the natives had no claim to the land. Often they were compared to animals in the European system of rights. Even when the comparative religionists did think that the natives had religion, they kept dismissing it as a religion from ignorance or a degradation of a previous, more sophisticated religion, such as Judaism, or Islam. The degradation theories also served to justify the taking of the natives’ land. The idea was that since they had also come to the land from another place, they had equal claim to it as did the Europeans. The apparent fact that natives had failed to upkeep their religion and had allowed it to digress instead of progress was taken as evidence that they fundamentally lacked something that would have given them full human rights. Since they did not have full human rights, this meant that the European claim to the land was superior to the natives. Chidester also shows how the natives were active in comparative religions. They suddenly were invaded by these people that wielded a great power. They reinterpreted their myths to account for the existence of the whites. This is also evidenced by their reactions of laughter to the missionaries’ messages. Chidester uses this to show that the frontier border is really a place of cultural exchange where each culture goes through a sort of synthesis as a result of contact with another culture.

What is not clear from Savage Systems is if the European comparative religionists were conscious of what they were doing. This is a sort of chicken-and-the-egg question. Did the comparative religionists try to form the colonial mindset towards the natives, or did the colonial mindset influence the comparative religionists. This question is important because it is the key in the moral evaluation of the comparative religionists’ actions. Chidester seems to indicate that this was a natural by-product of the colonizing mindset and was not intentional, but a subconscious correlation. This is further evidenced by the Christian bias that seeped into everything. The only thing that could count as a true religion was Protestant Christianity. In this sense there could not ever be a real comparative religion study, for real comparative religion study does not presuppose a master religion that all others must be a degradation of, a perversion of, or an obstacle to conversion.

The real tragedy is that with all the back and forth of the comparative religionists on the natives’ religions the real religious nature of the natives before the coming of the colonialists is lost forever to history. One can argue for the war of ideas and along with that, the idea that it is morally permissible for one idea to supplant another. However, under that line of thinking the conflict of the ideas must be waged without compulsion if the war is to remain morally permissible. Also, it is hoped that the losing ideas be preserved in history in some form. The case of comparative religions in South Africa does not follow such a template. Subjugation happened on physically and ideally. Chidester says that one can salvage is the border contact between cultures and their interplay can be studied and learned from.

The following are my notes from a paper entitled: Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities (Link to PDF) by Albert Bandura.

Thesis:

“Moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy one by:”

• (false) moral justification
• sanitizing language
• advantageous comparision
• disavowal of a sense of personal agency by ¹diffusion of responcibility or ²displacement of responcibility
• disreguarding or minimizing the injurous effects of one’s actions
• attribution of blame to, and dehumanization of those who were victimized.

The structure of inhumanites is a “supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people.”

Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to human personal standards, safeguards build into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renouce cruelty.