1. ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM AND AREA STUDIES Theories of Area Studies Prof. Kyu Young Lee October 8 2007 Yuri ___________, Milena Dobranova, Jung Ah Kim

2. OCCIDENTALISM: THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN Edward Said’s Orientalism Orient and Occident Orientalisms and Occidentalisms The Gift by Mauss Gifts and Commodities Antiessentialism Jung Ah Kim

3. Edward Said’s Orientalism Stereotyped Western views of the East. Said’s Criticism: Two Points about the image of the Orient that Western academics have produced and presented. The image stresses Orient’s radical separation from the West and opposition to the West. Orient = absolutely different from the West. West = us, familiar East = them, strange Anthropology: discipline that seeks out the alien, the exotic, the distant, more than any other The image invests the Orient with a timeless essentialism. Orient = unchanging, closed system in which objects are what they are because they are what they are.

4. Anthropologists(fieldworkers): seeks to represent the essence of a way of life. Essentialism is a view that, for any specific kind of entity, there are a set of characteristics all of which any entity of that kind must have.

5. Orient and Occident The critics have described anthropological description of alien societies as “Orientalism” however, the critics mostly focused on the product of Orientalism, not the process. The process deserves attention, so we can see the problem that concerns Said and the other critics. Seeing Orientalism as a dialectical process Westerners define the Other in terms of the West. Others define themselves in terms of the West, just as each defines the West in terms of the Other. Due to the political imbalance, Westerners will be relatively free to construct their images of alien societies as they see fit. However, Aliens are less likely to be able to construct images of the West free of correction by those being imagined.

6. Orientalisms and Occidentalisms Orientalism Attracts the most attention Ethno-orientalism Essentialist renderings of an alien societies by the member s of those societies themselves Ethno-occidentalism Essentialist renderings of the West by members of alien societies Occidentalism The essentialistic rendering of the West by Westerners.

7. Mauss’s The Gift The Gift is Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure. A brilliant French sociologist and anthropologist, Mauss (1872-1950) used case studies of Melanesia, Polynesia, and northwestern North America to demonstrate that gift exchange is a total system at the center of society. The book examines the practice of exchanging gifts in many non-industrial societies, and looks to see why gifts are given, how they are exchanged, who are involved in these exchanges, what is exchanged, when and where the gifts are exchanged, and how these exchanges factor into the greater fabric of society

8. What the author discovers and shows to the reader is that gift giving is actually a very complicated and highly political process, that the way it is done affects relationships within villages, between villages, and can end/being hostilities, family fueds, marriages, and alliances. In essence, the roles of many of the business and political institutions present in industrialized societies are all wrapped up in gift-giving and gift-receiving in pre-industrial societies, or archaic societies as the author denotes them. As such, gift exchange is an ever-present ritual at major ceremonies in many tribes, such as births, deaths, marriages, the building of a new house, the clearing of new land, etc, etc... And to not participate in the gift-exchange can lead to social exclusion, isolation, and possibly even banishment.

9. Gifts and Commodities Gifts Archaic societies Dominated by kinship relations that define individuals and their connections with and obligations to one another. Money is only a part, ‘people’ is the important element. Household relation resembles gift relation Commodities Modern Western societies Members are alienated from the people and the objects around them. Transactions in which alienated individuals give and take alienated objects in monetary transactions in the market.

10. Gift and commodity relations means that each is shaped by the other Occidentalism makes sense only when it is juxtaposed with its matching Orientalism, the essentialized society of the gift, the West is the society of the commodity – these two essentializations defining and justifying each other dialectically.

11. Antiessentialism Seeking to reduce or eliminate Orientalist tendencies, the critics have urged anthropologists to look at societies in less stereotyped ways or to adopt new textual or representational devices for portraying them Advocate comprehensive approach: attending to the relationship between different areas of social life. Importance of the relationships helps understand the patterns that exist in the social units. helps limit the tendency to essentialize conceptual entities. helps limit the tendency to essentialize ethnographic entities.

12. BEYOND OCCIDENTALISM: TOWARD NONIMPERIAL GEOHISTORICAL CATEGORIES Imperial Maps The Politics of Epistemology: From Orientalism to Occidentalism Three Occidentalist Representational Modalities Labyrinths of the Imagination: The Truth of Power History and the Fetishization of Geography Modernity and Occidentalism Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories Jung Ah Kim

13. Imperial Maps: How to represent the contemporary world? Maps A medium for representing the world as well as for problematizing its representation. Included in the representation of the empire, leading to an infinite series of maps within maps. History makes maps no longer accurate and turns it into a hyper-real representation that prefigures the empire’s dissolution.

14. The West and the East The West: the occident, the center, the first world : often identified with Europe, the States, us, we, the modern Self The East: the orient, the periphery, the third world : underdeveloped, the other These terms are more flexible and gained such widespread acceptance. In this sense, the west and the east belong to cultural categories. According to Chomsky, Europe is a metaphor. e.g. Japan = Western or Western-typed society. L.A = capital of the third world

15. The Politics of Epistemology: From Orientalism to Occidentalism By relating Western representations of “Otherness” to the implicit constructions of “Selfhood” that underwrites them, we can reorient our attention from “Orientalism” to ”Occidentalism” Occidentalism Inseparable from the constitution of international asymmetries underwritten by global capitalism. Inseparable from Western hegemony because as a form of knowledge it expresses Western power and because it establishes a specific bond between knowledge and the power in the West. Expression of a constitutive relationship between Western representations of cultural difference and worldwide Western dominance

16. Three Occidentalist Representational Modalities. The Dissolution of the Other by the Self In this modality, Western and non-Western cultures are opposed to each other as radically different entities and their opposition is resolved by absorbing non-Western people into an expanding and victorious West Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind : - the “World Spirit” is realized through the dialectic between Self and Other. Consciousness of Self, achieved through recognition by the other, makes possible the movement of the World Spirit by means of dialectical transformation. - Cast his Eurocentric conception of the evolution of universal history in terms of a struggle between Master (Self) and Slave (Other).

17. Todorov’s The Conquest of America: - The relationship between Self and Other, there’s no dialectic like Hegel’s, only an interaction between discrete actors. - European Selves learn to deal with Otherness through the experience of the conquest, destruction, and domination of Mesoamericans (Central Americans). This confrontation must lead to the destruction or Westernization of the native Americans. - the question of the other presented as a problem for the Self, not of the Self or for the Other. the term America: - Since Self identified with history’s victors, the increasingly powerful United States became a metaphor for Europe. - In contrast, in Latin America, this term refers first to the entire continent and “Americans” to its inhabitants.

18. The Incorporation of the Other into the Self In this second modality of Occidentalism, a critical focus on Western development unwittingly obscures the role of non-Western people in the making of the modern world, subtly reiterating the distinction between Other and Self that underwrites Europe’s imperial expansion. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the people without History - Brings non-Western people into the Self’s history - Presents Western capitalism as a transformative process that originates in the center and engulfs non-Western people - Proposes a historical perspective that seeks to represent the unitary Character of world history. - If the world is global pool hall, the European billiard ball is composed of solid steel while those of non- European are of the flimsiest papier-mache (mixture of pieces of paper and glue); in the aftermath of collision,

19. Europe continues on course unscathed, while other party is utterly brutalized. - Focuses his discussion on the global impact of commodity production. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: the place of sugar in modern history. - analyzes sugar’s place in the modern world in terms of the interplay between commodity production in the colonies and consumption in the imperial center. - examines capitalism as a system of production of commodities for the market. Mintz focuses on one product, sugar and two processes, production and consumption. - By examining changing patterns of colonial sugar production and imperial sugar consumption, he provides a image of how the increasing availability of sugar in Europe as a result of the development of

20. plantation economies in the colonies affected changing patterns of metropolitan consumption, including the cultural understandings attached to sugar as it ceased to be an elite product and became a staple for the laboring classes. - Focusing on the dynamic exchange between metropolitan and colonial societies would lead to a less dichotomous view of their identities and to a unifying conception of capitalism. The Destabilization of Self by Other In this form, non-Western people are presented as a privileged source of knowledge of the West. the depiction of radical Otherness is used to unsettle Western culture. Micheal Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishiem in South America - Examining fantastic devil beliefs in South America as critical responses to encroaching capitalism by people unaccostomed to its objectifying logic.

21. - Argues that capitalism’s naturalized assumptions are also fantastic constructs that only our long familiarity has made appear commonsensical. Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt - analysis of colonialism based on a sharp distinction between Self (occident)and Other(orient) - focuses on the Self’s expansion into the Other as a process of that illuminates the Self - Entails the examination of the ontological and epistemological assumptions underwriting Western metaphysics. - Constructs Egypt as a self-contained, precapitalist totality in order to make visible the assumptions underpinning capitalist culture.

22. - It’s about…How the Western colonising project unfolds, and it utilizes Egypt as its main centerpiece. He observes how divergent mindsets prevent the West and East from understanding one another and he uses Foucaldian and Derridian paradigms for describing the experience of modern power in Egypt and process of mutual discovery.

23. Labyrinths of the Imagination: The Truth about Power Labyrinths without real exits to the world : dissolves the distinction between the inside and the outside. Maps without real difference from the world: erases the distinction between reality and representation. The world were a labyrinth whose exits were entrances into an expanding labyrinth and our maps not only modeled these labyrinths but also created them. Imperial power: the power to constitute the empire through the exercise of power and the ability to determine the terms in which reality should be defined - about the truth of representation of truth and truth of representation /about the representation of power and power to represent, about the truth of power/ about the imperial knowledge and imperial power.

24. History and the Fetishzation of Geography States established a peculiar relationship between history and territory between the spatial and temporal matrix. (Nicos Poulantzas) History: fluid, intangible, dynamic Geography: fixed, tangible, static History and geography are fetishized. Tangible form of geographical entities become a privileged medium to represent the less tangible historical relations among people. Through geographical fetishism, space is naturalized and history is territorialized.

25. Modernity and Occidentalism The examination of Western representations of Otherness can be encompassed within an interrogation of why Otherness has become such a peculiarly modern concern from the perspective of a critique of Occidentalism. The map of modernity is being redrawn by global changes in culture, aesthetics, and exchange that are commonly associated with the emergence of post-modernity. The new emergence of a relationship between history and geography may permit us to develop a critical cartography and to abandon worn imperial maps.

26. Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories. The interaction between geography and history involves an exchange between past and present and present and future.