Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Chapter 17

Orientalism and the study of religions

Richard King

Introduction

How often have you watched a news report on television, read a newspaper article or been exposed to an advertisement conveying some image of ‘Eastern’ culture? Whether it is a scene of crowds of angry Muslims burning an American flag, a shaven-headed Buddhist monk clothed in a saffron robe and quietly meditating, militant Hindus attacking a mosque or a billboard promoting a perfume that evokes the ‘mystic sensuality’ of India, what all of these images have in common is their involvement in a long history of Western representations and stereotypes of Asia as an ‘other’ – that is as essentially different from the West. One consequence of such images, whether positive or negative in their connotations, is that ‘we’ (the West) become clearly separated from ‘them’ (the East). The acceptance of a basic opposition between Eastern and Western cultures characterizes what has been called ‘Orientalism.’

Indeed images of the East have often functioned as a means of defining the cultural identity of the West, however differently that has been conceived throughout history. The Christian identity of medieval Europe was bolstered by concerns about the incursion of Turkish Muslims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Asia represented both a mysterious and timeless realm of wisdom and spirituality, but also the site of unspeakable social depravities and primitive religious practices. In this regard the West was able to comfort itself that it was progressive, civilized and thoroughly modern in contrast to an ahistorical and unchanging Orient. Widespread beliefs about the indolent and despotic nature of Oriental societies also justified a Western sense of superiority and the belief that it was the duty of the West to civilize the savage and aid the Oriental in their progression away from tradition and dogmatism and towards modernity and civilization. In the modern era, whether it is the threat of the ‘yellow peril’ (Chinese communism) in the 1970s, or the militant Islamic fundamentalist of the 1980s and 1990s, the West has always maintained its own sense of cultural identity by contrasting itself with a radically different ‘Orient’.

The latter part of the twentieth century has seen the demise of Western political rule of Asia and the emergence of countries such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as independent nation-states. The British Empire, for instance, has become the British Commonwealth. However, many still question whether the world has really entered a ‘post-colonial’ era, arguing that Western political, economic and cultural dominance represents continuity rather than a fundamental break with the colonial past. Are we living today in a post- colonial or a neo-colonial age? Although the influence of Britain and the rest of Europe has

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receded to a significant degree since the end of the Second World War, it is clear that with the demise of Eastern European communism, the United States of America is the new global power in the West. Capitalism, consumerism and multi-national corporations continue to influence an increasingly global marketplace. Western dominance is apparent not only on an economic and political level, but on a cultural one also, having an inevitable impact upon traditional beliefs and practices in non-Western societies. What are we to make of the cultural impact of the ‘new technologies’? When American television soap operas are beamed into middle-class Asian homes via satellite, punctuated by advertisements for Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, where does one draw the line between the modernization of Asia and its Westernization? Is the ‘global network’ of cyberspace a realm in which Asian and Western cultures can meet as equal participants in a worldwide celebration of human diversity or does the rhetoric of ‘globalization’ mask the continued dominance of ‘the rest’ by the West?

What is Orientalism?

Orientalism refers to the long-standing Western fascination with the East and the tendency to divide the world up into East and West, with the East acting as a kind of mirror or foil by which Western culture defines itself. The question of the complicity between Western scholarly study of Asia – the discipline of Orientalism, and the imperialistic aspirations of Western nations – became a subject of considerable attention in Western academic circles after the publication of Edward Said’s work, Orientalism (1978). In this book, Said offered a stinging indictment of Western conceptions of and attitudes towards the Orient. According to Said ‘Orientalism’ refers to three inter-related phenomena (1978: 2–3):

1the academic study of the Orient;

2a mind-set or ‘style of thought’ founded upon a rigid dichotomy of ‘East’ and ‘West’;

3the corporate institution authorized to dominate, control and subjugate the peoples and cultures of the East.

For Said the mutual intersection of these three dimensions of Orientalism demonstrates the complicity between Western discourses about the Orient and Western colonialism. Orientalism then is primarily a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 1978: 3). Although credit has usually been given to Said for highlighting this dimension of the Orientalist enterprise, his work was certainly not the first to suggest complicity between scholarly analysis of the East and Western imperialist aspirations. Said’s work is also clearly indebted to earlier studies (Schwab 1950; Pannikar 1959; Abdel-Malek 1963; Steadman 1970).

The study of religion, both in the concern to explore comparative and cross-cultural issues and themes, and in the more specific attempt to understand and examine the religions and cultures of Asia, has had a seminal role to play in the development of Western conceptions of and attitudes towards the Orient, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards. Western intellectual interest in the religions of the East developed in a context of Western political dominance and colonial expansionism. It is perhaps surprising then to discover that it is only in recent years that the discipline of religious studies has begun to take seriously the political implications and issues involved when Western scholars and institutions claim the authority to represent and speak about the religions and cultures of others. Recent

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collections of scholarly articles such as Orientalism and the Post-colonial Predicament (1993) and Curators of the Buddha (1995), explore the impact of Western colonialism upon South Asia and the study of Buddhism respectively. Such developments have occurred in response to the growing post-colonial agenda to be found in other academic disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology and history. Specific studies such as Philip Almond’s The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988), Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Richard King’s

Orientalism and Religion (1999) have taken up the mantle left by Edward Said and applied it to the disciplines of Buddhist Studies (Almond), anthropology (Asad) and religious studies/ Indology (King). It is likely that the trend toward post-colonial approaches to the study of religion will continue, if only because the issues highlighted by such an orientation remain central to international politics and debates about globalization, modernity and the future of cross-cultural analysis in a post-colonial world.

Knowledge and power

Edward Said (1935–2003) was a diaspora Palestinian educated according to Western conventions and standards. He was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 1963 until his death in 2003. This background in Western literary studies is reflected in Said’s work, which displays the influence of a number of Western theorists and writers, most notably the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault (1926–84). The importance of Foucault in this context resides in his comprehensive analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge. In a number of critical studies on the history of madness, the birth of the clinic and the history of sexuality in the West, Foucault argued that all claims to knowledge involve an attempt to establish a particular set of power relations. Foucault described his method as a ‘genealogy of knowledge’ (supplementing what he describes in his earlier works as an ‘archaeology of knowledge’). This involves an examination of the socio-historical roots of an ideology or institution in order to highlight the ways in which certain groups within society have constructed discourses which have promoted their own authority (Carrette 1999).

The impact of Foucault’s work has grown as postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches have gained support in contemporary academic circles. Critics of Foucault’s approach have questioned his apparently relativistic stance towards all knowledge and truth claims. Foucault seems to be arguing not just that knowledge is always associated with power, but that knowledge is power, i.e. that what we call knowledge is merely a manifestation or reflection of the will-to-power within any given society. It is this aspect of his approach, clearly influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), which has drawn the fiercest criticism of his work, with the suggestion that Foucault’s approach makes it impossible to establish any definitive truth about the nature of reality. From Foucault’s perspective the concern is to overturn the modern ideal of an objective and value-free knowledge of universally applicable truths. But as other critics have argued there are many notions of truth at work in Foucault’s writings (Prado 1995: 119). Nevertheless, in place of the notion of absolute and universal ‘truths’, Foucault advocates an approach that focuses upon a diversity of localized ‘truths’ and a concern to explore their complicity with power structures within that specific locality. Thus, for Foucault:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own régime of truth, its

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‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.

(Foucault 1977, translation in Gordon 1980: 131)

Said found Foucault’s analysis and his equation of power and knowledge useful conceptual tools for articulating his own conception of Orientalism as the West’s exercising of its will- to-power over the East. He remained unwilling, however, to adopt Foucault’s general stance since it seemed to allow no room for ethical judgements based upon universal truths and humanistic principles. Moreover, if there is no truth ‘out there’ one can offer no basis for a critique of Western representations of the Orient on the basis of their unrepresentative nature. Thus, Said argued that:

It would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality … But the phenomenon of Orientalism as 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.

(Said 1978: 5)

The truth is out there or is it?

The ambiguities of Said’s analysis and methodology have been a central theme of many of the responses to his work. Some critics have argued that Orientalism reflects theoretical inconsistencies in Said’s account (al-’Azm 1981; Lewis 1982; Clifford 1988; Ahmed 1992), with the author arguing on the one hand that ‘the Orient’ is constructed in Western imaginations and yet attacking Western characterizations of the East as misrepresentations of a real Orient ‘out there’. Other reviewers have celebrated such ambiguities as deliberately disruptive and anti-theoretical (Behdad 1994; Prakash 1995), a position that Said himself came to endorse when reflecting, some years later, upon his own work (Said 1995: 340). Indeed, Said’s reluctance to offer an alternative representation of ‘the Orient’ is grounded in his firmly held belief that the division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is an act of the imagination, and a pernicious one at that. This, however, does not mean that the social and human realities that these images of ‘the Orient’ are meant to refer to are also imaginary. Far from it, it is precisely because representations of the Orient are essentially imaginary that they can be said to be unrepresentative of the diversity of Asian peoples and cultures (King 1999: 209). Said’s challenge to his successors, therefore, is to find alternative and ever more nuanced ways of representing cultural diversity to replace those founded upon a simplistic and oppositional logic of ‘Occident vs. Orient’ – of ‘us’ and ‘them’:

Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly? By surviving the consequences humanly, I means to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say of men into ‘us’ (Westerners) and ‘they’ (Orientals).

(Said 1978: 45)

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Other scholars, however, have been more willing to embrace a postmodernist or poststructuralist view of knowledge, with its rejection of any unproblematic appeal to a reality ‘out there’ beyond the play of representations. Anthropologist Ronald Inden, for instance, agrees with Foucault in rejecting a representational view of knowledge . There is no privileged or unmediated access to reality.

[K]nowledge of the knower is not a disinterested mental representation of an external, natural reality. It is a construct that is always situated in a world apprehended through specific knowledges and motivated by practices in it. What is more, the process of knowing actively participates in producing and transforming the world that it constructs intellectually.

(Inden 1990: 33)

Inden maintains that the study of South Asia has been based upon a misleading search for essences such as ‘the Hindu mind,’ ‘the Indian village,’ ‘caste’ and ‘divine kingship’ – as if entire cultures could be represented by such basic categories. These approaches also imply that the Western scholar has some special ability to discern the central features of Asian cultures in a way that is unavailable to Asians themselves. Inden advocates the abandonment of approaches that search for cultural essences and ‘fundamental natures’ because they ignore historical change and cultural diversity and therefore provide stereotypes of Asian culture. In their place Inden proposes an emphasis upon the historical agency of indigenous Asians. This approach, he suggests, would avoid the tendency to conceive of the Orient as an unchanging and timeless realm – as if Asian cultures and peoples were subject to rather than agents of historical change. The critical response to Inden’s work has been varied. Some scholars have questioned his universal indictment of Western scholarship on the East as an example of the very essentialism that he attacks: ‘If, as Inden says, India and the Indians were “essentialized” by the Indologists, it is certainly no less true and obvious that Indology and Indologists are being essentialized by his own sweeping statements’ (Halbfass 1997: 19).

Other critics such as the Marxist literary theorist Aijaz Ahmad (1991) worry that Inden’s appeal to indigenous agency lends itself too easily to appropriation by right wing Hindu groups in contemporary India. Indeed, the work of scholars such as Robert Sharf (1994; 1995) and King (1999) demonstrate that indigenous spokesmen for Asian religious traditions, such as D. T. Suzuki (Zen Buddhism) and Swami Vivekananda (Hinduism) were implicated in their own forms of ‘internal colonialism’ in the manner in which they represented their respective religious traditions at home and abroad. Moreover, many scholars have highlighted Western colonial influences upon contemporary forms of Hindu nationalism and communalism (Pandey 1990; Thapar 1992; Chatterjee 1986; van der Veer 1994).

Questions have also been raised about the poststructuralist theory of knowledge expounded by Inden. Is it possible, following Inden, to make any sort of appeal to a ‘real India’ underlying the various representations of it? In a similar fashion David Ludden criticizes Edward Said for believing that ‘there is to be found in the East a real truth’ (1993: 271). What we are dealing with are more or less powerful images of the Orient and not a ‘real Orient’ out there. Indologists such as Wilhelm Halbfass (1997: 16–17) have been quick to reject this approach on the grounds that it is self-refuting. Such a claim, he argues, prevents any critique of Orientalism based upon the misleading and unrepresentative nature of Orientalist accounts. How can one offer a critique of representations if there is no way of appealing to a real Orient or India ‘out there’?