Week 16: Orientalism & Religion
To what extent do you think the term ʻHinduismʼ is an anachronism? Given its role in the cultivation of nationalist sentiment in India and its continuing use as a marker of identity within India, should we continue to use it or should it be discarded? Given reasons for your answer.
Hinduism certainly occupies the unhappy role of a word invented by overzealous anthropologists hoping to give an easy to remember name to the vastly differing religious communities they were encountering in India. Yet, while its etymology is certainly questionable, it has come to represent a greater meaning, and one, that while giving a false concept of the ideas behind it, still remains a new positive identity of Indian religions. Where Hinduism, it is claimed, should be discarded because the concepts it represents are wholly multitudinous, why should we continue to use other terms of similar scope? Christianity, is seldom thought of as a term that should perhaps be done away with, even though it covers a ridiculously large number of world faiths, that often have very little in common with regards to practises, beliefs and even scriptures. And there isn't even any terribly nationalistic zeal behind Christianity any more that would cause it to be saved by affiliation with a country.
Hinduism as a category remains useful, it is a fairly basic catch-all term for Indian Religions, and can be used to categorised various western splinter groups, such as the Hare Krishnas that link themselves to Indian traditions, but exist on a global scale. And foremost, everyone already pretty much knows what the word means, even with the underlying distrust of the terms origins. By saying that we are guilty about the past we are maintaining a self righteous attitude wherein we assume that we must be better than all those terrible people in the past who made such a horrid mistake in their classification. So where we are hoping to resolve thelingering problems of Orientalism, perhaps we only continue to generate new even more subversive problems where we unfairly assume that we have made such total progress in the last few generations. It also seems hypocritical to create a term, allow it to become dissimilated throughout the world and then from the same ivory tower that thrust it onto the world, suddenly deem it unworthy of modernity and demand that the world gives it back.
What is Orientalism? What larger purposes, whether political or intellectual, does it serve? What does Said mean when he says that the Orient was ʻmade Orientalʼ? How do you think we (as students/scholars at SOAS) should respond to Saidʼs analysis?
Said's Orientalism is the western's creation of a fictional Orient, manifesting a multitude of fears and the unsavoury aspects of humanity. Beginning with a localised distrust of the Ottoman Empire by Europe, it spread and eventually almost every medium claiming to present anywhere to the east, now was corrupted by an overwhelming fiction. The east was constructed to be an opposition to the west, every aspect of western cultural identity would have a dark reflection in the east, one that was inherently weaker, and yet continually frightening. The larger purposes of Orientalism eventually allow logical reasoning to justify a total subjugation of the Orient, since if all the medium visibly demonstrated the east to be inferior, then it follows that it ought to be improved by western rule.
After invasion, the various western civil servants would begin to disseminate the lies that they had been told amongst the very people that had been lied about. This would eventually wear down any culture after a sustained period of time, and so the various Orientalist myths could eventually become realised in the Orient. The essentialising cycle wherein these Orientalist stereotypes are enforced generates a new more Oriental Orient, where at first there may have been only slim differences.
Especially at SOAS, the way in which we deal with the consequences of Orientalism must define ourselves as academics. We have, of course, all come here, to this place, that at its foundation was one of the perfect examples of Orientalism in practise. And no matter how hard we try we can never actually escape this past, not when at any time we may go into the library and find,preserved, all these texts written by allegedly studious clerics, missionaries and military officers about the quaint cultures of the mohammedans and the great benefits they have received from Imperial rule. So how can we respond? The best way is first to acknowledge the past. Yet this should not dominate, we must be aware in order to not make the same mistakes, but not overly apologetic for the actions of those who didn't know any better. And from there we can go forward looking for the truth and remember that what we may have heard in our childhood, or read in some old book, or seen in the exhibitions of some great Imperialistic museum, may not always be true. End the essentialising cycle and perhaps then we can hold differences in cultures to simply be that, and not some terrible stereotype that happens to resemble our greatest fears.
In what ways do you think Butlerʼs work and the ways in which disability theorists use it might challenge our conceptions of normative and abnormal? How might these theories apply beyond the domains of queer and disability theory? How might you use this work to examine religious phenomena?
I am struggling at this stage to recognise the minute differences between all these theories of self. Especially as I tend to read the later developments as being logical progressions from the earliest theories. Fortunately this is the last for now, and I can look forward to that old stalwart of SOAS, Orientalism. The linking of the disabled body to abnormality working in the same binary oppositions dealt with in Cixous, and by the link to abnormality an association with the female body is compelling. A revelation that scans as true and yet is deeply unsettling, like many of the other revolutionary concepts put forward by this course.
The culturally generated distinction between normal and abnormal bodies, even when the bodies are maintained as ideological over physical, falls down if you start formulating the ways in which every body is different and therefore remove the hopeful normality that otherwise acts as a buffer. So perhaps if we properly criticise the normative outlook on normality we can generate a new normality typified by abnormality and destroy the prejudicial status quo.