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  • Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert
  • Kamakshi P. Murti
Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert. Von Andrea Polaschegg. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. xi + 613 Seiten + 33 s/w Abbildungen. €118,00.

The title of Andrea Polaschegg's book, Der andere Orientalismus, is thought-provoking indeed. At first glance, it seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to nineteenth-century orientalists and their attempts to give a scientific rationale to the agenda of territorial aggrandizement—this reader had in her mind's eye the slightly altered title "The 'othered' Orientalism," and looked for what was seemingly the sub-text of the book, namely the writer's wish to demystify, with post-colonial theoretical underpinnings, the eternal return of the Orientalist who had armed himself this time around with the protest of being 'othered.' The title of the book, its table of contents, bibliography—all promised not only a thorough and critical re-reading of the literature, but also a constructive and insightful critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, which was the first text in a post-colonial world to question the nineteenth-century discipline of Orientalism and its avowal of a purely scientific, non-political agenda.

Polaschegg begins by analyzing Said's Orientalism, using as the basis of her critique Sadik Jalal Al-Azm's assessment of Said. However, she leaves us with Al-Azm's rather predictable conclusion that no culture can penetrate another culture without distorting the latter by categorizing, classifying, schematizing, and finally reducing it to a comprehensible entity, leaving out her own response. She merely says: "Nun hat aber bereits Sadik Jalal Al-Azm [. . .] gezeigt, daß weder das Moment der 'Vereinnahmung' (d.i. die Wahrnehmung der fremden Kultur nach Maßgabe der vertrauten) noch der Abgrenzung der eigenen Kultur gegen die andere als spezifisch westlich oder 'kolonisierend' betrachtet werden können, sondern Verfahrensweisen sind, die allen Kulturen eignen" (48). Polaschegg does not talk about Al-Azm's assumption as ignoring the fact that a culture does not always 'reduce' another culture out of 'pure' intellectual curiosity. In discussing nineteenth-century "deutsch-morgenländische" imagination, [End Page 558] she ignores the historical-political specificities of that century, namely the imperialist-colonialist discursive framework within which most Orientalists functioned. She quotes both Said and Al-Azm, accusing the former of an ahistorical approach, and presenting Al-Azm's as a counter-argument, which itself obliterates any critical analysis of intercultural relations and the kinds of hierarchies they construct at certain moments in history.

One would assume that in her extensive discussion of the "linguistic turn" (143ff.) Polaschegg would mention the political ramifications behind such an interest in comparative linguistics, the predecessor of which was, significantly enough, the field of comparative anatomy. However, the sheer weight of descriptive material presented obfuscates rather than clarifies the conditions under which Orientalism took a "linguistic" or other "turn." It was not coincidental that the discipline of comparative linguistics was established in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The age of discovery and colonization was accompanied by an obsessive search for one's national history. The British, Portuguese, and French colonial administrators discovered early on that Sanskrit provided them with the requisite knowledge to administer law in British India. They thus used the services of Europeans with a knowledge of Sanskrit (cf. Hammer-Purgstall, Rückert, Max Müller—to name some of the Germans) to provide translations of these texts as expediently as possible. In doing so, they also appealed to the search for origins, using the emotionally highly-charged issues of nation and nationalism that characterized the nineteenth century in Germany and elsewhere. German Sanskritists, who saw that Sanskrit as an originary language was even older than Greek and Latin, wanted to carve out for themselves a uniquely superior place in history. "Sanskrit knowledge presents itself to us as a major vehicle of the ideological form of social power in traditional India," says Sheldon Pollock ("Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj," Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania...

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