Our Epistemological Mess: An Enthusiastic Reader’s Response to Urs App’s The Birth of Orientalism

REVIEW ESSAY OUR EPISTEMOLOGICAL MESS: AN ENTHUSIASTIC READER’S RESPONSE TO URS APP’S THE BIRTH OF ORIENTALISM TIMOTHY BROOK The University of British Columbia, Canada URS APP, The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 201o. xviii, 550 pp. US$79.95, £52.00 (hb). ISBN 978-0-8122-4261-4 When Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978, most scholars of China took no notice. The book was viewed as being about problems particular to Europe’s relationship with what we still persist in calling the Middle East, or might perhaps be extended to problems concerning the study of India. But those who worked on parts further east—China, Southeast Asia, Japan especially—were confident that they were not implicated in the charge that the knowledge Europeans had created of ‘‘their’’ part of the world was fundamentally undermined by the political interests that organized and funded its study. When I read Orientalism shortly after it was published, I had no difficulty absorbing Said’s critique into my epistemological framework: the politicized nature of European knowledge of Asia made complete sense to me. Not all sinologists were so willing to let his Foucauldian challenge dismantle our field’s claim to innocence; some even rallied around Bernard Lewis’ self-important attempt to assert the chastity of Arabic studies, fearing that not to do so might cause the contagion to spread to the study of the rest of Asia. But spread it already had. The question was simply how long it would take for the stain of the original sin of Eurocentrism to seep its way through the shroud in which the profession wrapped the body of its knowledge. The upshot of Said’s challenge was not to bring the study of Asia to an end, but to guide it to a more self-reflexive position. The challenge of voice appropriation almost derailed the dialogue in the 1990s, but in the end that too helped hone the critical instincts of those of us who feel that all cultures can, and must, be studied from without as well as within. This cheerful assertion does not relieve sinology of all charges that a Saidian analysis can lay before us. I make it to point out that the habit of othering those who do not share one’s identity is indispensible as a tool for asserting the discriminations by which we make sense of the world, for good as well as for ill. I would even go so far as to insist that without it, we have no tools for dismantling the essentialist claims of those within a culture who have a vested interest in representing it not as ‘‘that’’ but as ‘‘this’’ (for ‘‘this,’’ substitute ‘‘modern,’’ ‘‘backward,’’ ‘‘civilized,’’ ‘‘advanced,’’ ‘‘world-historical,’’ ‘‘moral,’’ or what you will). These claims have a way of dodging scrutiny unless they are Journal of Chinese Religions, 42. 1, 95–99, May 2014 # Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0737769X14Z.00000000011 examined from without. Absent the perspective of distance, it is difficult to see the scaffolding that holds up a cultural identity. By the same token, however, it can be difficult for sinologists to look down at the centuries of scaffolding beneath our feet and see just how rickety the structure of our knowledge is, and how compromised at so many points, hence the value of keeping Said in the room. Religion is a particular problem for the European study of Asia. The Mediterranean transition from henotheism (my god is bigger than your god) to monotheism (my god has a capital letter and yours isn’t a god at all), consolidated by Christianity and radicalized by Islam, meant that no other system of belief could be credited with its own assumptions. The intense xenophobia that permeates the earliest layers of Biblical narrative (Isaac and Ishmael, Abel and Cain, the Tower of Babel, the Flood, Shem and Japheth, and so forth) trained Christian observers to be hostile of the other, regardless of which other it happened to be. The result was disastrous for cross-cultural interaction and set up an enormous barrier to understanding for European scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of...