The Transformation of the World (176 page)

Orientalism and Ethnology

The study of other civilizations developed on the margins of the human sciences, never coming to play a central role in European universities.
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More important to this day has been the reaffirmation of Europe's own roots, partly in Greco-Roman antiquity, partly in the early medieval social formations that are seen as the origins of nationhood. It is true, though, that contacts with foreign civilizations have always aroused curiosity about the Other. Accompanying the ideological glosses on European expansion and aggression, a huge literature developed in the early modern period in which Europeans—often travelers not directly associated with imperial operations—reported on their overseas experiences and adventures and tried to understand the customs, religions, and social institutions of the peoples they encountered. The study of language was a special concern. The interest in Arabic language and literature, particularly the Koran, had been constant since the twelfth century, while the Chinese language became known after 1600 via Jesuit missionaries. In places that had regular contact with the Ottoman Empire—Venice or Vienna, for example—experts in the field developed early on. As to the New World, missionaries began systemic study of indigenous languages soon after the Conquest. In close collaboration with Indian savants, European scholars based in Calcutta and Paris discovered, or rather
rediscovered, the old language of high culture, Sanskrit, in the 1780s.
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Thanks to the decoding of hieroglyphs by the French linguist and traveler Jean-François Champollion in 1822, Pharaonic Egypt became legible at last. And in 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a young teacher at a secondary school in Göttingen, discovered the key to unlock the ancient Persian cuneiform script.

Over several centuries, a varied literature of travelogues, country studies, botanical encyclopedias, dictionaries, grammars, and translations accumulated as a result of countless individual efforts, often outside the major centers of learning. Only the study of Arabic and Middle Eastern languages (important for biblical theology) had roots in early modern university chairs in places such as Leiden and Oxford. Nevertheless, the overall perception of the non-European world since the Middle Ages was saturated with scholarly seriousness. Even travel reports were not usually naive accounts of exciting adventures and strange fables, but were penned by observers who carried the most advanced knowledge in their baggage. This intellectual curiosity about the outside world was specific to Europeans in the early modern period. Other civilizations did not establish colonies overseas and, apart from rare diplomatic emissaries, sent no travelers to distant lands. Although a few Ottomans reported on their journeys, Muslims generally had little interest in “infidel” lands. The Japanese state forbade its subjects to leave the archipelago, on pain of severe punishment. Chinese scholars, to be sure, studied any “barbarians” who showed up at the imperial court, but only in the nineteenth century did they compose firsthand works on the non-Chinese periphery of the Qing empire. Before 1800, and even as late as 1900, the huge European literature on foreign civilizations was matched by very few texts giving an external view of Europe.
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Whereas “Oriental studies” got off the ground in Europe, it would be the late twentieth century before one could speak of the beginnings of “Occidental studies” in Asia and Africa.

The character of European Orientalism changed in the early nineteenth century. As it divided more sharply than before by region (Chinese, Arabic, Persian, etc.), it also defined itself more narrowly as the study of ancient texts and sought the same kind of scientific detachment that its model, Greek and Latin philology, had already achieved. This entailed a lack of interest in the contemporary Orient; everything that seemed of value in Asia lay deep in the past, accessible only in a dubious inheritance of written texts and material relics over which Asian or Egyptian archaeology claimed an interpretive monopoly. Ancient Egypt was rediscovered by the scientists who accompanied Bonaparte on his Nile expedition of 1798. This initiated a continuous history of Egyptology, in which French, British, Germans, and Italians long played a greater role than Egyptians themselves. In Mesopotamia, archaeological excavations began during the second decade of the century, encouraged (as later in Anatolia and Iran) by British consular officials.
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These men were well educated and, often having little else to do, could turn their hand to Middle Eastern research, much as army officers played a major role in uncovering the Indian past.
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In 1801 Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin and then British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, obtained permission from the Ottoman government to take large parts of the Parthenon friezes (already badly damaged by Venetians and Turks) back to London; the famous Elgin Marbles. A hundred years later, with archaeology turned increasingly professional since midcentury, public museums and private collectors in major European countries had accumulated huge quantities of Oriental “antiquities” alongside treasures from ancient Greece and Rome. Manuscripts from all cultures found their way into special sections of the great Western libraries. In regions such as East Asia, where colonial control was more elusive, the market stepped in to assist the acquisition of art objects (stone testimony being less common than in Europe, because of local traditions of timber construction). But there was also theft on a massive scale, as in China during the Second Opium War (1858–60), which reached a climax with the plunder and burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops, and again during the foreign occupation of the imperial capital after the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion in summer 1900. Shortly after the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands of documents from the fourth to the eleventh century were “acquired” for a token price and carted off from caves near Dunhuang (in today's northwestern province of Gansu) to European libraries and museums. Archaeology was not simply a colonial pursuit, however; it could and does also serve to build a sense of nationhood, by uncovering cultural roots long before the historical invasions recorded in written documents.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the material appropriation of Asia, North Africa, and Central America by Europeans (and North Americans) snatched numerous relics of the past from sandy or tropical oblivion, probably saved others from destruction, and laid the foundations for scientific knowledge about Egyptian tombs and Chinese ceramics, Mayan sculpture and Cambodian temples, Persian inscriptions and Babylonian reliefs. Doubts about the propriety of Western actions were seldom voiced at the time, and indigenous governments sometimes gave their approval for excavations and the shipping abroad of cultural treasures. Only since the end of the colonial era has the public become aware of the legal and ethical problems with such pillage.

In 1780 only a few specialists in Europe had linguistic access to religions, philosophies, literature, or historical documents from other parts of the world, and Oriental objects were lost amid the colorful diversity of princely “wonder chambers.” By 1910, however, a highly sophisticated academic study of the Orient in France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and the United States was in charge of, and kept adding to, a colossal store of knowledge about foreign civilizations. Archaeology, Oriental studies, and comparative religion (a newly emerging discipline pioneered in Oxford in the 1870s by the Saxon scholar Friedrich Max Müller) contributed some of the titanic feats of the nineteenth-century human sciences. Yet, contemporary non-European societies that had no system of writing and little or no urban life could not be studied with the methods of Oriental
philology. The science of ethnology that came into being from the 1860s onward developed a professional interest in these “primitive” peoples or (in German)
Naturvölker
, as they were called at the time. Strongly aligned in its first few decades with evolutionist theories of a general progression of humanity, this new science looked for social conditions in other parts of the world that, for Westerners, represented an earlier stage of development they had left behind long ago. Many of the early ethnologists did not travel themselves. Some classified and interpreted the tools, weapons, clothing, and cult objects that had been collected by scientific expeditions and colonial armies; others tried to identify basic patterns hidden in popular myths. The Enlightenment ambition to develop a general “science of man,” a comprehensive “anthropology,” gave way over time to detailed research into particular ethnic groups.

Bronisław Malinowski (a Pole) and Franz Boas (an American immigrant from Westphalia), working independently of each other, transformed ethnology (or anthropology, as Boas called it) from a series of speculations based on discrete anecdotal material into a science with empirical procedures centrally involving long-term participant observation. By 1920 the paradigm shift was complete, so that it was now possible and normal to describe the distinctive logic underlying a given non-Western society. This had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, despite its many links to colonialism, the discourse of ethnology was relatively nonracist. Franz Boas's theory of “cultural relativism,” in particular, was a weighty counter to the racist zeitgeist. On the other hand, the transition from full-scale evolutionism to the new emphasis on specialized modes of inquiry detached nonliterate societies from a comprehensive history of the human species, placing them in a space of their own outside the parameters of history and sociology. This also bred a certain isolation of ethnology/anthropology among the sciences, least marked in relation to the kind of sociology practiced by Émile Durkheim in France. Only in the 1970s—when its heroic period of description and classification of ethnic groups around the world was essentially over—did anthropology begin to have a major influence on other human and social sciences.

There has been much argument as to whether Oriental studies, archaeology, and ethnology should be regarded as handmaidens of colonialism.
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It is clear enough that the simple existence of an empire offered fertile opportunities for many sciences such as botany, zoology, or tropical medicine.
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But otherwise the balance sheet has to be mixed.
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On the one hand, from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the arrogant conviction of European scientists about the all-around superiority of their own civilization is truly astounding. The assumption seemed, however, to be borne out by major successes in the study of other cultures—successes that were not without an eminently practical side, since anyone with good maps, linguistic competence, and knowledge of the morals and customs of others finds it easier to conquer, govern, and exploit them. To this extent it may be said that Oriental studies and ethnology (sometimes against
the intentions of their representatives) produced knowledge for the sake of colonial domination. On the other hand, it is doubtful how useful this knowledge actually was, and how much it served practical purposes. Attempts to place colonial rule on a scientific foundation became a policy objective only after the First World War, and then the key experts were economists, not ethnologists. Before 1914 ethnologists—and, more important, colonial administrators for many of whom ethnology was a hobby—played a role above all where attempts were made to classify imperial subjects according to their degree of ability and cultural achievement.

But there were very few ethnologists around in those days, and when their numbers increased after the First World War they often proved troublesome critics of colonial practices.
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Philological studies of ancient India or Vietnam, for their part, offered little knowledge that was directly serviceable to colonial rulers. Some have argued that precisely because of this apolitical conception of itself, Oriental studies “objectively” played into the hands of Western world domination—a charge that would be serious indeed if the supremacy of Western knowledge had demonstrably incapacitated Asians and Africans or reduced them to silence. However, it is not easy to find evidence that colonialism suppressed the knowledge of indigenous peoples about their own civilization. The academic revival of Indian traditions was in principle a joint European-Indian project, and it continued without interruption after independence came in 1947. In noncolonial countries such as Japan, China, and Turkey—to take the example of historiography—the encounter with Rankean critical methods led to a pluralist approach to the past and a more discriminating attitude toward the cultural heritage. In the nineteenth century, therefore, Western academic study of other cultures, in spite of all the annoying arrogance that came within it, was not just a destructive intrusion into vibrant non-European cultures of scholarship but also a founding impetus for the globalized human sciences of the contemporary world.

Geography as an Imperial Science

If any discipline was complicit in European expansion, it was geography.
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In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, it developed from the descriptive collection of data about countries into a complex discourse about natural and social contexts on the earth's surface, within clearly definable spaces and landscapes. Its chief founders were far removed from European colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt, who had studied conditions in late colonial Spanish America in greater detail than anyone else, was one of its sharpest contemporary critics. Carl Ritter, the great encyclopedist at Berlin University, espoused—long before Franz Boas explicitly formulated the approach—a cultural relativism that recognized the equal value of social and cultural forms around the world. This detachment from politics was not a matter of course. House geographers already accompanied Napoleon, a zealous promoter of the subject, in his building of the
empire, and geographical elements were present in many other imperial ventures throughout the century. Official cartographers mapped newly occupied territories. Geo-experts helped to draw boundaries, gave advice on the location of naval bases, and always had things to say about mineral wealth, transportation, or agriculture. These functions were sustained by a broad public interest in geography. School courses included classes about other continents, and imperial expansion found lively approval among lay members of geographical societies. From 1880 on, a special colonial geography emerged in the European metropolises, the conditions for truly global visions of exploration and “valorization” being particularly favorable in the British Empire. With a characteristically British interpenetration of private and public initiative, the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 created a kind of headquarters for the organization of research trips and the collection of geographical knowledge from all around the world. Imperial uses, though not always foregrounded, were never overlooked. Of all the branches of learning, geography had the greatest affinity with the imperial expansion of the West.
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