The essentializing about jazz and blues and so forth goes back to the early 20th century (and no doubt has its roots in earlier commentaries, which I don’t know so well); and this essentializing is still very much with us. Try telling a dedicated fan of The Authentic Black Blues that Muddy Waters had more Gene Autry than blues in his repertoire when he arrived in Chicago or that (Saint) Robert Johnson had a large repertoire of Broadway show tunes — as Charlie Keil recently told me. A number of episodes of Scorsese’s often superb blues series were thick with this essentialism, from Scorsese himself and from Wim Wenders. See my reviews of this series, here and here.

While this is true in a clear and very important way (tons of books respond to Said), in another important but less obvious way it’s not: the rest of the world (including representatives within the West) began looking and writing back a good while before Said, and it’s valuable to keep re-placing the conversation around Said back into this larger trajectory. For one thing, it helps prevent the discourse from turning into a replay of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One of the reasons James Clifford’s 1980 History and Theory review of Orientalism is so valuable is that he placed it in a trajectory moving from the poet Aimé Césaire’s 1939 announcement of Négritude through the anthropologist Michael Leiris’ 1950 “L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme,” the first explicit self-critique of western knowledge production as colonial project. Said’s Orientalism, Clifford wrote, was part of a global phenomenon in which the rest of the world begins to return the western gaze. Part of Clifford’s criticism of Said was precisely that his critique was too narrow, misrecognizing a global predicament as a specifically Middle Eastern one.

All of this by way of re-emphasizing that the discourse both preceding and following Said’s book can be far more interesting than the clashing of two polarized camps.

Said, of course, comes in for special varieties of unfair nastiness that have nothing to do with his scholarship and everything to do with his politics; the same can’t be said for Geertz. But the sort of exaggerated denunciation of either as master-puppeteers of Contemporary Pointy-Headedness and Why Me No Like Eet is soft-headed on multiple levels.

Above is a link to an inteview with Irwin. Both the interview and some of the comments are interesting.

The debate about anthropology enjoining or eschewing the biological sciences is a big one, and affects the scientific and political standing of anthropology. It seems to be an endless debate, because anthropology is ambivalent towards (or critical of) almost anything. Just as there may be much knowledge to be gained by synthesising biological knowledge with anthropological knowledge, if it assimiliates too much then there is much to be lost. While discourse may be able to colonize and permeate others, they may also dilute or be washed over. Perhaps there is a limit to how much a discourse can say, and knowledge must strategically choose a path. Maintaining a critical distance from biology preserves anthropology from becoming subordinated.

The point about Geertz’s emphasis on literary qualities in ‘thick description’ plays along these same lines. I feel like some detractors of Geertz may have been jealous of his ability to write. But it does build an ivory tower. Less able readers and writers will be put off by a ‘high culture’ literary style. Maybe we need to see some airport non-fiction anthropology. Perhaps another point on the use of literary style is that it exerts a certain type of power over readers and writers. For literary devices to work readers have to be perhaps only semi-conscious of their existence, and are thus wooed by the ‘magic’ of the text. This could also give the effect of ‘fuzziness.’

On the flip-side, my English lecturer in post-colonial narratives pined for an ‘innocent’ pursuit of knowledge through literature. In this sense, if the writer is writing about ‘culture’ to provide and to get their own enjoyment, (hopefully without causing cultural offense), they are not targeting the knowledge for some less innocent purpose. the same could not be said of ruthlessly efficient empirical data designed to be churned through computers and utilized by myriad other scientists and knowledge workers, for policy, for development, etc. So the ivory tower has a rosy hedge around it.

Leading on from this, there seems to be an incessant right-wing attack on left-wing intellectuals and politicians for being ‘politically correct.’ This seems bizarre when the prevailing orthodoxy of politics is not congruent with these views. It seems the right-wing is trying to proclaim itself as ‘radical’ (it has been described as such, at times), and confronting the hegemony of the left. If left-wing ‘politically correct’ thought was so powerful, shouldn’t we all be at least socialist? The only sense I can make of ‘politically correct’ is being polite, non-offensive to all parties. Neutral, objective perhaps. Which is perhaps more a scientific position than a literary one. Confusing?

I have no doubt that Geertz used cronyism as a policy for appointing colleagues at the institute. Anthropology, like any other institution, is rife with nepotism and cronyism, despite a universal appeal in Western liberal democracy for a meritocracy and neutral, objective assessment of the best candidate for the job. Obviously, if someone is going to support your political position, you will apoint them. And, i have seen a concerted ‘politically correct’ and conservative push at a conference to say no to engaging with the natural sciences. But weeding the politics form the merit of arguments is very difficult.

http://henwood.blogspace.com/?p=4167

One problem I’ve had with Said’s Orientalism and similar works is that it posits some West as the aggressor and takes this West at face value as a cultural entity.

Well, I think the flip side of his argument that Orientalism as a discourse produces the Orient in Western eyes, is that it also requires an Occident and an equivalent discourse about what comprises the West. Orientalist discourse was a commentary on the West as much as it was about the Orient.

For more of which, see James Carrier’s edited volume “Occidentalism: images of the West”

1. Is Western Culture an Illusion?:

Sometime between ten and twenty years ago I was casually chatting with David Hays, friend, colleague, and mentor, and asked, “in what sense is American culture a kind of Western culture? What are the general features that mark a culture as Western and what special features distinguish American culture from other varieties of Western culture, say Canadian, or Italian, or Finnish?” He thought the questions rather peculiar, as did I. That’s why I asked them.

2. Fables of Identity, European and American:

Judging by a remark in the final paragraph, I wrote “Beyond Oppositional Trickeration” sometime during the O. J. Simpson trial and published it in Gravity within a month or two before “Fore Play: A Lesson in Jivometric Drummology.” The tone is conversational, a bit hip, but without the Lord Buckley embroidery of “Fore Play.” As I recall “whiteness” was being discovered at the time and, though I never read any of the books resultant upon that discovery, I certainly read articles and interviews. Could hardly miss them, they were thicker than snow at the North Pole. The influence of those ideas is obvious.

Were I to develop these ideas more formally, I would devote considerable effort to delivering on this informal observation, which I make early on: we must orient ourselves to that whole range of experience we have access to beyond our immediate family and neighborhood. What I had and have in mind is that, to the extent that we are aware of human history, we must situate ourselves within it in some role that gives us some place in history. By identifying with some ethnic, religious, or national group, we make contact with history through the role that group has played in history.

3. American Wildlife & Culture:

I have previously argued that the notion of “Western culture” is unintelligible when considered as a term of cultural description and analysis. The term is ideological and finds its meaning in geopolitical struggles, not the study of culture. I feel much the same way about the phrase “American culture.” Such phrases, when employed to talk a general way about politics, society, and history, tend to designate some undifferentiated metaphysic substance. In one case that substance is associated with the West, but not Africa or the Orient. In the other case the substance is associated with the United States of America, but no other nation.

I want to do a bit of thinking aloud and explore this matter by contrast that usage with a phrase such as “American wildlife.” That phrase simply designates the wildlife living in America. Given that America includes Alaska and Hawaii and some miscellaneous territories, the term’s geographical range is ambiguous, but that is easily enough clarified in any given context. 

I think, in general, that, we’re still got a ways to go to figure out just what we’re talking about when we talk about “culture.”

Can you even imagine someone writing an entire book on Why Geertz Sucked? It’s interesting to compare the two.

I can imagine someone writing a book on Geertz. The problem would be that Geertz was never a man with one big idea. The closest thing in the Geertz corpus is, to me at least, thick description. But thick description is, at the end of the day, a scholarly idea and not a dramatically political one in the way that Orientalism is. It concerns the scholarly question of what the aims of research should be; but that is not a question that most people care about. Orientalism is another way of expressing the rage in “Who you calling nigger?” Thick description is a way of neutralizing anger by examining a question from so many angles that dispassionate understanding dissipates the feelings that moved those involved in the events being described. That’s a hard sell.

S is the most popular initial letter for blog names, it appears! Can you even wade through all of these and remember those I missed?……

I think this statement is important because it exposes something about all cultures/groups of people – there has always been a tendency throughout history for people to say ‘the people on the other side of the fence are lovable, but not as good as us. perhaps they are not quite as human as us.’ If this is a slightly fair generalisation, what is so special about Orientalism, other than the fact the Europe had hegemonic power at the time? What aboutother hegemons, like China, and their treatment of barbarians? Can we ever get over this mindset? If it is applied at a local level doesn’t it preserve local traditions, rather than keeping up with the Jones’?

I read some Said in a course this year on post-colonial literature. One of the really interesting things to come out of that was the problematic nature of post-colonial literary responses to Orientalist literature. Many people in the class were shocked by the anger and violence in the books, and the extreme contempt directed by some authors towards the West. And because it was it was literature course, we were supposed to choose aesthetics over politics, so an angry book detracted from its own aesthetic value (in Western eyes). The lesson we were supposed to learn is that engagement with the Other is better than turning away, which some extreme authors promoting decolonisation and independence implied.

So I think perhaps the determinism which come out of Said, with reference to what Todd O. said, is something like the incommensurability thesis: How dare we have a take on someone else’s culture, someone else’s story?

Orientalism, although insightful in theoretical argument, is a bit bullying in tone. Reading Orientalism, I thought, “Yeah, ok, this is pretty much all true, and I feel bad about it, but . . . is it really fair to blame and generalize to this extent?” Since I haven’t read Irwin’s book, I can only assume from Kamiya’s article that the answer is “No.” There, I said it, I was afraid to say it before, but now I said it, Said is a meanie!

http://www.spongobongo.com/no9963.htm

I’ve had a few run-ins with the JOR guy at Wikipedia and while I can’t vouch for some of his…eccentricities… he’s nothing if not thorough.

But that said John raises an interesting point by introducing Geertz into the equation — my impression is that Geertz left us un-discipled, while Said’s death lead to a resurgence of interest in his work, including memorializations, anthologies, and so forth. Can you even imagine someone writing an entire book on Why Geertz Sucked? It’s interesting to compare the two.