ORIENTALISM

ter the Soviet takeover of Armenia. This legitimized the

USSR as the protector of the Armenian nation after the
genocide of 1915 (which Turkey denies) in which the
large Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was either massacred or forced across the desert to Syria,
where large Armenian communities of Anatolian origin
remain. Outside Armenia itself, diaspora communities
are to be found across the Middle East, especially in
Iran, Syria, and Israel/Palestine.
Both the Syrian and Armenian Churches have socalled Uniate branches in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Two other Uniate churches
originated as non-Chalcedonian churches. These are
the Maronite Church, the dominant Christian confession in Lebanon, and the Nestorian, or Assyrian,
Church, with its leadership in Baghdad, Iraq, and followers in Iran, Turkey, and Syria, where many adherents fled after persecution in Iraq in the early
twentieth century.
Will Myer
Further Reading
Challiot, C. (1998) The Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch.
Geneva, Switzerland: Inter-Orthodox Dialogue.
Mar, Gregorios. (1982) The Orthodox Church in India. New
Delhi: Sophia Publications.
Nersoyan, T. (1996) Armenian Christian Historical Studies.
New York: St. Vartan Press.
Ramet, P. (1988) Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Vogt, K., and N. van Doorn-Harner, eds. (1997) Between
Desert and City: The Coptic Orthodox Church Today. Oslo,
Norway: Novis-farlag.

ORIENTALISM Orientalism refers to two intellectual trends in the West: the appearance or deliberate cultivation in literature and art of stylistic and
aesthetic traits reminiscent of Asian cultures, which
began in eighteenth-century Europe; and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scholarly study of
premodern Asia, especially philology (the study of language and linguistics) and other text-based pursuits,
by Europeans and Americans. The fields of anthropology, sociology, and cultural, political, and economic history, insofar as they address Asia, have since
been called Orientalist as well.
The First Orientalists
The earliest Orientalists, mostly trained in the
Greco-Roman classics, were interested in recovering
ancient texts, often seeing this as a way to open a window onto the origins of culture, which was itself a ma-

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jor preoccupation in the nineteenth century. Scholars

studied the relationships between ancient languages
and cultures and focused attention on religious and legal texts. John Selden (15841654), an English legal
antiquarian and politician, became a recognized authority on Near Eastern polytheism and Jewish law.
The German biblical scholar Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (17521827) challenged pious traditions by
showing the common origins of the Bible and other
Semitic texts. A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (17311805),
a French scholar, brought Zoroastrian manuscripts to
France in the early 1760s. Eugne Burnouf (1801
1852), the son of a French classicist, published works
on the Pali language of the Theravada Buddhists, on
Zoroastrian liturgy in the Avesta, and on Sanskrit
mythological texts, for which he was appointed professor of the Sanskrit language at the Collge de
France (18321852).
Orientalists as Diplomats and Administrators
in Asia
Some of the first Orientalists got their start accompanying diplomatic missions to Asia. Antoine Galland (16461715), a French scholar who accompanied
the French ambassador to Constantinople in 1670
1675, studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish there. He
later published Mille et une nuits, the first translation
of Arabian Nights Entertainments into a European language, as well as French translations of collections of
Indian fables and the Quran. Likewise, Heinrich
Julius Klaproth (17831835), a German who had taken
part in a Russian visit to China in 1805, published a
two-volume ethnographic and linguistic study of the
Caucasus.
In other cases, Orientalists went to Asia as army officers or colonial administrators. Sir William Jones
(17461794), an English scholar and translator of
Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian who became a
British supreme-court judge in Calcutta, undertook
the study of Sanskrit to compile an authoritative digest of Hindu law that might be used in the courts.
He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, and
in his presidential discourse of 1786 he was the first
to propose that Sanskrit and Greek shared a common
ancestry, to which most other languages of Europe
also belonged. Another example is Sir Henry Rawlinson (18101895), a British army officer assigned in
1833 to reorganize the army of the shah of Iran. He
deciphered and wrote a linguistic analysis of the Old
Persian section of the cuneiform inscription of Darius
the Great at Bisitun, Iran (1837, 18461851), which
paved the way for the decipherment of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script.

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Orientalists as Public Intellectuals

By the late nineteenth century, some Orientalists
had become celebrities and public intellectuals. The
controversial British explorer and polymath Sir
Richard Burton (18211890) captivated the reading
public with prolific accounts of his adventures in Asia
and Africa; he also produced thirty volumes of translations from numerous languages, including The Arabian Nights (sixteen volumes, 18851888) and the
Kama Sutra, a Sanskrit treatise on the erotic arts
(1883). Burton also wrote one of the first ethnological treatises, Sind, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley
of the Indus (1851).
Equally famous, at least in learned circles, was
Friedrich Max Mller (18231900), often called the
founder of the field of comparative religion. Germanborn, he became a professor at Oxford University; he
established his reputation with his edition of the Rig
Veda, the oldest extant Sanskrit work, and with his influential essays on comparative mythology, religion, and
linguistics. The fifty-one-volume series of translations
that he edited, Sacred Books of the East (18791910),
helped win acceptance for the idea that non-Western
traditions could be viewed as religions comparable to
Christianity or Judaism, each with a body of scriptures.
Since the end of the colonial era, philological studies have continued, although they have lost much of the
prestige they had in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. For the most part, interest (and funding) has
shifted to political science, social anthropology, and the
history of the last few centuries.
Saids Critique
In 1978, Edward Said (b. 1935), a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University
and a Palestinian by birth, wrote a book called Orientalism in which he criticized the conceptual foundations
and principal methods of such scholarship. Saids approach was shaped by the writings of the French poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault (19261984)
and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (18911937).
From Foucault he took the notion of discourse theory
and the insight that the production and possession of
knowledge are sources of power. But he objected to the
diffuseness of Foucaults conception of power and appealed to Gramscis hegemony theory (which argues
that elite social groups use cultural institutions, such as
schools, parties, and the media, rather than naked force,
to secure and extend their dominance, so that this dominance seems natural and appropriate).
Analyzing British, French, and American writing on
the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East,

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Said argued that Western scholars systematically misunderstood and misrepresented these societies, due
largely to the nature of their relationship to them (one
of cultural superiority and imperial dominance). His
conclusions have subsequently been extended to apply
to Western scholarship on Asia in general. At the same
time, his study extended its purview beyond scholarly
works to include journalism, travel writing, and other
types of literature, so that "Orientalism" as he defined
it is in fact the sum of all Western literary and artistic expressions relating to Asia.
Said traced the roots of modern Orientalism back
to ancient Greek depictions of the East and outlined
its later development by littrateurs (Dante Alighieri,
12651321; Geoffrey Chaucer, 13421400; William
Shakespeare, 15641616). According to him, the Orientalist vision of the East was well established as a literary trope long before the colonialist period; he
claimed in fact that "colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact" (Said
1978: 39).
Beginning with the Egyptian expedition of
Napoleon Bonaparte (17691821), "the Orientalists
special expertise was put directly to functional colonial
use" (Said 1978: 80). For Said, the work of Sir William
Jones exemplifies the double task of Orientalism: to describe, tabulate, analyze, and codify the Orient "scientifically," always in comparison with the Occident; and
to use the knowledge thus generated to master and rule
the Orientals. Thus Jones attempted to codify and apply in the courts a traditional Hindu law based on Sanskrit texts, as part of the East India Companys policy
of governing Indians by their own codes.
Said argued that, although Orientalism adopts the
posture of an objective scientific pursuit, it has from
the first been motivated and sustained by a political
purpose: the governance of colonial territories. Imperial administrators like Lord Curzon (18591925),
viceroy of India, acknowledged that knowledge of the
culture and sensibilities of the people of the East were
indispensable for securing colonial dominance. With
the end of the European empires and a decline in the
popularity of philology, Said argued, the Orientalist
enterprise increasingly took a new form: area-studies
fields, which created expertise to be made available to
governments and policy-making institutions.
Said argued that Orientalism helped the West to
construct an image of itself by projecting every trait
opposite to that of the Wests onto the screen of a
backward and decadent Orient. He made this argument by psychologizing the Wests relationship to the
East as self to "other." The Oriental was reduced to a

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ORIENTALISM

stereotype, springing from the notion that it is possible to define the essential nature of Arabs or Muslims.
Orientals, he claimed, are routinely characterized as
sensuous, childlike, irrational, mendacious, and culturally passive and static. Such traits are supposedly
exemplified in the person of the "Oriental despot,"
whose state is said to be the characteristic political institution of the East. Defining the Orient in this way
provided a rationale for Western imperialism and
colonialism: the destiny of Western power is to introduce reason and order into the Orient.
Saids critique of Orientalism became one of the
most important foundations for what has been called
colonial-discourse theory or, more broadly, postcolonial studies (the study of the relationships between European nations and the societies they formerly
colonized). Another notable ramification of this field
is subaltern studies, an approach to Indian history led
by the Indian historian Ranajit Guha (b. 1923) and inspired by the work of Gramsci, which aims to write
the history of subaltern peoples by recovering their
own voices and agency. These approaches share a
recognition that knowledge is intertwined with the exercise of power, as well as a postmodernist skepticism
of all claims to objectivity.
Criticisms
Although widely praised in literary critical circles
from the start, Saids book has been criticized from a
variety of angles. First, representatives of Asian studies in a wide range of disciplines sharply objected to
the suggestion that they were willfully or unwittingly
complicit in their governments programs for colonization and for political and economic domination,
even in the postcolonial era. Philologists, for example,
insisted that their painstaking analyses of ancient texts
were only distantly related to any political agenda.
Many objected to the suggestion that the field as a
whole displays cynicism and bad faith. It has been observed that Said essentialized the Orientalist and elided
all differences of approach or discipline. He made little distinction between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury views of the East and those of his scholarly
contemporaries.
Furthermore, it can be pointed out that the charges
laid at the door of Orientalists and of Westerners in
general apply also to Asians and to people everywhere.
Jones, for instance, is faulted for "an irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety
of the Orient to a complete digest" (Said 1978: 78),
but the Sanskrit legal works he consulted were deliberate codifications already, designed by Brahman

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scholars to consolidate and extend their own authority. Saids fallacy, by this reasoning, is to demonize Europeans in particular for behaving as the privileged and
powerful do everywhere; indeed, the colonized of
modern times were often the colonizers of earlier eras
and produced "Orientalisms" of their own. Moreover,
many critics note that scholarship on Asia is no longer
in the hands of Westerners alone, and that the academic climate has changed considerably, partly in response to the arguments of Said.
On the other hand, criticisms also emerged from
the vanguard of literary, social, and political theorists.
Notable among these are Dennis Porter (b. 1933) and
Aijaz Ahmad (b. 1945). Porter, a literary critic interested in travel writing, found Saids literary analysis
too blunt: his sources (said Porter) are inadequately
historicized, and literary texts are not treated any differently than are obviously ideological texts. Porter
pointed to the fact that aesthetic products follow more
than simply ideological imperatives. At the heart of
this problem, Porter saw an incompatibility between
Foucaults discourse theory and Gramscis understanding of hegemony.
Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist critic, objected to
Saids acceptance of the Nietzschean tenet that all
communication is distorting and all truths illusory, an
article of faith in late-twentieth-century French cultural criticism. This claim, which Ahmad called irrational and antihuman, allowed Said to dispense with
considerations of class, gender, and even historical
process. Ahmad also noted the totalizing character of
Saids Orientalism. All other forms of oppression are
subordinated to Orientalism, and all Westerners and
everything they have said and done are by definition
Orientalist. Ahmad alleged that this formulation of oppression was particularly well received in the United
States by mostly male Third World immigrant scholars of upper-class background who were not moved by
theories of class-based and gender-based oppression,
and who could represent themselves as oppressed despite the fact that people of their social class often benefited from the colonial order.
Timothy Lubin
Further Reading
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (1989) The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures. London: Routledge.
Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. (1994) Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York:
Columbia University Press.

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