Ernest Gellner

Born	(1925-12-09)December 9, 1925 Paris, France
Died	November 5, 1995(1995-11-05) (aged 69) Prague, Czech Republic
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Critical rationalism
Main interests	political philosophy, philosophy of science, anthropology, nationalism
Influenced by Şerif Mardin, Max Weber, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Ibn Khaldun, Bronisław Malinowski, David Hume, Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Aron, Jack Goody
Influenced José Guilherme Merquior, Alan Macfarlane, Adam Kuper, Edmund Leach, Michael Lessnoff, Joseph Agassi, Ian Jarvie, Raymond Aron, Andrey Korotayev, Mikhail Kryukov, Valery Tishkov, Michael Mann, Anthony D. Smith, John A. Hall

Ernest André Gellner (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist, described by The Daily Telegraph when he died as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals and by The Independent as a "one-man crusade for critical rationalism."^[1]

His first book, Words and Things (1958) prompted a leader in The Times and a month-long correspondence on its letters page over his attack on linguistic philosophy. As the Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics for 22 years, the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge for eight, and finally as head of the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism in Prague, Gellner fought all his life—in his writing, his teaching, and through his political activism—against what he saw as closed systems of thought, particularly communism, psychoanalysis, relativism, and the dictatorship of the free market. Among other issues in social thought, the modernization of society and nationalism were two of his central themes, his multicultural perspective allowing him to work within the subject-matter of three separate civilizations—the Western, Islamic, and Russian.

Background[link]

Gellner was born in Paris^[2] to Anna, née Fantl, and Rudolf, a lawyer, an urban intellectual German-speaking Jewish couple from Bohemia (which since 1918 was part of the newly established Czechoslovakia). Julius Gellner was his uncle. He was brought up in Prague, attending a Czech primary school before entering the English-language grammar school. This was Kafka's tricultural Prague, he told John Davis of Oxford University: anti-Semitic but stunningly beautiful, a city he later spent years longing for.^[3]

In 1939, when Gellner was 13 years old, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany persuaded his family to leave Czechoslovakia and move to St Albans, just north of London, where Gellner attended St Albans Grammar School. At the age of 17, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford as a result of what he called "Portuguese colonial policy," which involved "[keeping] the natives peaceful by getting able ones from below into Balliol."^[3]

"Prague is a stunningly beautiful town, and during the first period of my exile, which was during the war, I constantly used to dream about it, in the literal sense: it was a strong longing."^[3]

At Balliol, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), specializing in philosophy. He interrupted his studies after one year to serve with the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, which took part in the siege of Dunkirk, then returned to Prague to attend university there for half a term.

During this period, Prague lost its strong hold over him: foreseeing the communist takeover, he decided to return to England. One of his recollections of the city in 1945 was a communist poster saying: "Everyone with a clean shield into the Party", ostensibly meaning that those whose records were good during the occupation were welcome. In reality, Gellner said, it meant exactly the opposite:

If your shield is absolutely filthy we'll scrub it for you; you are safe with us; we like you the better because the filthier your record the more we have a hold on you." So all the bastards, all the distinctive authoritarian personalities, rapidly went into the Party, and it rapidly acquired this kind of character. So what was coming was totally clear to me, and it cured me of the emotional hold which Prague had previously had over me. I could foresee that a Stalinoid dictatorship was due: it came in '48. The precise date I couldn't foresee, but that it was due to come was absolutely obvious for various reasons.... I wanted no part of it and got out as quickly as I could and forgot about it.^[3]

He returned to Balliol College in 1945 to finish his degree, winning the John Locke prize and taking first class honours in 1947. That same year, he began his academic career at the University of Edinburgh as an assistant to Professor John Macmurray in the Department of Moral Philosophy. He moved to the London School of Economics in 1949, joining the sociology department under Morris Ginsberg. Ginsberg admired philosophy, and believed that philosophy and sociology were very close to each other.

He employed me because I was a philosopher. Even though he was technically a professor of sociology, he wouldn't employ his own students, so I benefited from this, and he assumed that anybody in philosophy would be an evolutionary Hobhousean like himself. It took him some time to discover that I wasn't.^[4]

Leonard T. Hobhouse had preceded Ginsberg as Martin White Professor of Sociology at the LSE. Hobhouse's Mind in Evolution (1901) had proposed that society should be regarded as an organism, a product of evolution, with the individual as its basic unit, the subtext being that society would improve over time as it evolved, a teleological view Gellner firmly opposed.

Ginsberg ... was totally unoriginal and lacked any sharpness. He simply reproduced the kind of evolutionary rationalistic vision which had already been formulated by Hobhouse and which incidentally was a kind of extrapolation of his own personal life: starting in Poland and ending up as a fairly influential professor at LSE. He evolved, he had an idea of a great chain of being where the lowest form of life was the drunk, Polish, anti-Semitic peasant and the next stage was the Polish gentry, a bit better, or the Staedtl, better still. And then he came to England, first to University College under Dawes Hicks, who was quite rational (not all that rational—he still had some anti-Semitic prejudices, it seems) and finally ended up at LSE with Hobhouse, who was so rational that rationality came out of his ears. And so Ginsberg extrapolated this, and on his view the whole of humanity moved to ever greater rationality, from drunk Polish peasant to T.L. Hobhouse and a Hampstead garden.^[4]

Gellner's critique of linguistic philosophy in Words and Things (1959) focused on J.L. Austin and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, criticizing them for failing to question their own methods. The book brought Gellner critical acclaim. He obtained his Ph. D. in 1961 with a thesis on "Organization and the Role of a Berber Zawiya," and became Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method just one year later. Thought and Change was published in 1965, and in State and Society in Soviet Thought (1988), he examined whether Marxist regimes could be liberalized.

He was elected to the British Academy in 1974. He moved to Cambridge in 1984 to head the Department of Anthropology, holding the William Wyse chair and becoming a fellow of King's College, which provided him with a relaxed atmosphere where he enjoyed drinking beer and playing chess with the students. Described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "brilliant, forceful, irreverent, mischievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony," he was famously popular with his students, willing to spend many extra hours a day tutoring them, and was regarded as a superb public speaker and gifted teacher.^[2]

His Plough, Sword and Book (1988) investigated the philosophy of history, and Conditions of Liberty (1994) sought to explain the collapse of socialism. In 1993, he returned to Prague, now free of communism, and to the new Central European University, where he became head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism, a program funded by George Soros, the American billionaire philanthropist, to study the rise of nationalism in the post-communist countries of eastern and central Europe.^[5] On November 5, 1995, after returning from a conference in Budapest, he suffered a heart attack and died at his flat in Prague, one month short of his 70th birthday.

Gellner was not without his critics. His own daughter, Sarah Gellner, revealed that one of her father's favourite jokes was, "Rape, rape, rape, all summer long", and that, "If there was one thing Dad disliked more than feminists, it was homosexual men."^[6]

[edit] Words and Things

Gellner first encountered the strong hold of linguistic philosophy while at Balliol.

With the publication in 1959 of Words and Things, his first book, Gellner achieved fame and even notoriety among his fellow philosophers, as well as outside the discipline, for his fierce attack on ordinary language philosophy (or "linguistic philosophy", Gellner's preferred phrase). Ordinary language philosophy, in one form or another, was the dominant approach at Oxbridge at the time (although the philosophers themselves denied they were part of any unified school). He first encountered the strong ideological hold of linguistic philosophy while at Balliol:

[A]t that time the orthodoxy best described as linguistic philosophy, inspired by Wittgenstein, was crystallizing and seemed to me totally and utterly misguided. Wittgenstein's basic idea was that there is no general solution to issues other than the custom of the community. Communities are ultimate. He didn't put it this way, but that was what it amounted to. And this doesn't make sense in a world in which communities are not stable and are not clearly isolated from each other. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein managed to sell this idea, and it was enthusiastically adopted as an unquestionable revelation. It is very hard nowadays for people to understand what the atmosphere was like then. This was the Revelation. It wasn't doubted. But it was quite obvious to me it was wrong. It was obvious to me the moment I came across it, although initially, if your entire environment, and all the bright people in it, hold something to be true, you assume you must be wrong, not understanding it properly, and they must be right. And so I explored it further and finally came to the conclusion that I did understand it right, and it was rubbish, which indeed it is.^[4]

Words and Things is fiercely critical of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Antony Flew, Peter Strawson and many others. Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal Mind (which he edited), and Bertrand Russell (who had written an approving foreword) protested in a letter to The Times. A response from Ryle and a lengthy correspondence ensued.^[7]

The move to anthropology[link]

It was in the 50s that Gellner discovered his great love of social anthropology. Chris Hann, Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology writes that, following the hard-nosed empiricism of Bronisław Malinowski, Gellner made major contributions to the subject over the next 40 years, ranging from "conceptual critiques in the analysis of kinship to frameworks for understanding political order outside the state in tribal Morocco (Saints of the Atlas, 1969); from sympathetic exposition of the works of Soviet Marxist anthropologists to elegant syntheses of the Durkheimian and Weberian traditions in western social theory; and from grand elaboration of 'the structure of human history' to path-breaking analyses of ethnicity and nationalism (Thought and Change, 1964; Nations and Nationalism, 1983)".^[2]

Nationalism[link]

In 1983, Gellner published Nations and Nationalism. For Gellner, "nationalism is primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent".^[8] Nationalism only appeared and, Gellner argues, became a sociological necessity in the modern world. In previous times ("the agro-literate" stage of history) rulers had little incentive to impose cultural homogeneity on the ruled. But in modern society, work becomes technical. One must operate a machine, and as such one must learn. There is a need for impersonal, context-free communication and a high degree of cultural standardisation.

Furthermore, industrial society is underlined by the fact that there is perpetual growth - employment types vary and new skills must be learned. Thus, generic employment training precedes specialised job training. On a territorial level, there is competition for the overlapping catchment areas (e.g. Alsace-Lorraine). To maintain its grip on resources, and its survival and progress, the state and culture must for these reasons be congruent. Nationalism therefore is a necessity.

Criticisms of Gellner's theory:

• It is too functionalist. Critics charge that Gellner explains the phenomenon with reference to the eventual historical outcome—industrial society could not 'function' without nationalism. (Tambini 1996)
• It misreads the relationship between nationalism and industrialization. (Smith 1998)
• It accounts poorly for national movements of ancient Rome, Greece, etc. claiming an alum type argument; insisting that nationalism is tied in 'modernity' and cannot exist without a clearly defined modern industrialization. (Smith 1995)
• It fails to account for nationalism in non-industrial society and resurgences of nationalism in post-industrial societies. (Smith 1998)
• It cannot explain the passions generated by nationalism. Why should anyone fight and die for his country? (Connor 1993)
• It fails to take into account the role of war and the military in fostering both cultural homogenization and nationalism, ignoring in particular the relationship between militarism and compulsory education. (Conversi 2007)

Selected works[link]

Books[link]

• Words and Things, A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, London: Gollancz; Boston: Beacon (1959). Also see correspondence in The Times, 10 November to 23 November 1959.
• Thought and Change (1964)
• Saints of the Atlas (1969)
• Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974)
• The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974)
• Legitimation of Belief (1974)
• Spectacles and Predicaments (1979)
• Soviet and Western Anthropology (1980) (editor)
• Muslim Society (1981)
• Nations and Nationalism (1983)
• Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985)
• The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985)
• The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays (1986)
• Culture, Identity and Politics (1987)
• State and Society in Soviet Thought (1988)
• Plough, Sword and Book (1988)
• Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992)
• Conditions of Liberty (1994)
• Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (1995)
• Nationalism (1997)
• Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (1998)

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Obituary A Philosopher on Nationalism Ernest Gellner Died at 69 written by Eric Pace The New York Times 10 November 1995
• Hall, John A. 2010. Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso.
• Connor, Walker Ethnonationalism:The Quest for Understanding, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
• Conversi, Daniele 2007 'Homogenisation, nationalism and war: Should we still read Ernest Gellner?’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 13, no 3, 2007, pp. 1–24
• Davies, John. Obituary in The Guardian, November 7, 1995
• Lukes, Steven. "Gellner, Ernest André (1925-1995)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, retrieved September 23, 2005 (requires subscription)
• Malesevic, Sinisa and Mark Haugaard (eds). Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• O'Leary, Brendan. Obituary in The Independent, November 8, 1995
• Smith, Anthony D, Nations and Nationalism In a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-7456-1019-1
• Smith, Anthony D, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN 978-0-415-06341-8
• Stirling, Paul. Obituary in the Daily Telegraph, November 9, 1995
• Tambini, Damian 1996 ‘Explaining monoculturalism: Beyond Gellner’s theory of nationalism’, Critical Review, vol. 10, no 2, pp. 251–70
• "The Social and Political Relevance of Gellner's Thought Today" papers and webcast of conference organised by the Department of Political Science and Sociology in the National University of Ireland, Galway, held on 21–22 May 2005 (10th anniversary of Gellner’s death).
• Kyrchanoff, Maksym. Natsionalizm: politika, mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, regionalizatsiia (Voronezh, 2007) [1] Detailed review of Gellner's works for students. In Russian language.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ernest Gellner

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ernest Gellner

• Gellner resource page (at the London School of Economics)
• Ethics and Logic, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LV (1954–1955), 157-178.
• Catalogue of the Gellner papers at the Archives Division of the London School of Economics.
• Gellner video materials, at Dspace at Cambridge repository (MP4 files).
• Special Issue of the journal Social Evolution & History "The Intellectual Legacy of Ernest Gellner" (guest editor Peter Skalnik)

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Edward Wadie Saïd (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd] Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد‎, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. Said was a Palestinian born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) and held an American passport. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism.^[1] Robert Fisk described him as the Palestinians' "most powerful political voice."^[2]

Said was an influential^[3][4] cultural critic and author, known best for his book Orientalism (1978). The book presented his influential^[5][6] ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. Said contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction of Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism and following works proved influential in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East.^[7] Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.^[8]

Said also came to be known as a public intellectual who frequently discussed contemporary politics, music, culture, and literature, in lectures, newspaper and magazine columns, and books. Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian growing up in a Palestinian Christian family in the Middle East at the time of the creation of Israel, Said argued for the creation of a Palestinian state, equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return, and for increased pressure on Israel, especially by the United States. He also criticized several Arab and Muslim regimes.^[9] Having received a Western education in the U.S., where he lived from his high school years until his death, Said tried to use his dual heritage, the subject of his prize-winning memoir Out of Place (1999), to bridge the gap between the West and the Middle East and to improve the situation in Israel-Palestine. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council for over a decade and his pro-Palestinian activism made him a figure of considerable controversy.^[10]

With his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, the Palestinian territories, and surrounding Arab nations. It opened in 1999. Said was also an accomplished pianist.^[11] In 2002, he and Barenboim published a book of their earlier conversations on music, titled Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. Active until his last months, Said died in 2003 after a decade-long battle with leukemia.

Early life[link]

Edward Said and his sister, Rosemarie, 1940

Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935.^[12] His father, a U.S. citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins, was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I. He moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His mother, born in Nazareth, also had a Protestant background^[13][14] and was half-Lebanese.^[15] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.

Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12.^[16] He attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem.^{[nb 1]} As the Arab League declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. In a London Review of Books article, Said gave a more detailed account of his upbringing:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.^[16]

Said attended Victoria College in Alexandria at the same time as Michel Shaloub, later to be known as Omar Sharif. He recalled the future film star was both sadistic and physically abusive in his capacity as "head boy". ^[26] In 1951, Said was expelled from the college for being a "troublemaker". ^[16] Consequently his parents sent him to Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite college preparatory school in Massachusetts; he recalled it was a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place", yet Said managed to do well in the school, 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.^[16]. Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'.^[16] These themes of interweaving cultures, feeling out of place, and being far from home affected Said dissonantly and would echo through Said's work for the rest of his life.^[16]

Fluent in English, French, and Arabic,^[27] Said earned a Bachelor of Arts (1957) from Princeton University, and a Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) in English Literature from Harvard University.^[28]

Career[link]

In 1963, Saïd joined the faculty of Columbia University, in the departments of English and Comparative Literature, where he served until his death in 2003. In 1974 he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, in 1975–6 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford, and in 1977, Saïd became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1979, Saïd was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.^[29] Saïd was also a visiting professor at Yale University and lectured at more than 100 universities.^[30] In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's highest academic position.^[31] He lived near campus in The Colosseum on Riverside Drive.

Saïd also served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the executive board of PEN, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, the Council of Foreign Relations,^[29] and the American Philosophical Society.^[32]

In 1993, Said was invited to present the BBC's annual Reith Lectures. In a series of six talks, entitled Representation of the Intellectual^[33] he examined the role of public intellectuals in modern society. The BBC made these lectures available to the public in July 2011.^[34]

Saïd's writing regularly appeared in The Nation,^[35] The Guardian,^[35] the London Review of Books,^[36] Le Monde Diplomatique,^[37] Counterpunch,^[38] Al Ahram,^[39] and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.^[35] His writings have been translated into twentysix languages^[40] and the themes of his writings included literature, politics, the Middle East, music, and culture.

Literary criticism[link]

After expanding on his thesis to produce his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Said, swirling with a wealth of ideas he received from studying the works of Giambattista Vico and others, presented his award-winning second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), a work on the theoretical underpinnings of literary critical projects.^[41] Other literary critical texts by Said include The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), and the posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and On Late Style (2006).

Fascinated, like his postmodern influences, with how people perceive things in cultural contexts, and by the effects of society, politics and power on literature, Said is considered a founder of postcolonial criticism. His work on Orientalism is particularly important, but his interpretations of Conrad, Jane Austen,^[42] Rudyard Kipling,^[43] Yeats,^[44] and other writers have also proven influential among critics.

"Orientalism"[link]

Said is most famous for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as the inaccuracies that are the foundation of Western thought toward the East. In his most famous book, Orientalism (1978), Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."^[45] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and the U.S.'s colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the U.S. and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In Orientalism, the book, Said asserted that much western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study,^[47] a method of discrimination, and a tool of imperialist domination.^[45] Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,^[48] Anouar Abdel-Malek,^[49] Maxime Rodinson,^[50] and Richard William Southern,^[51] Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term that he transformed into a pejorative):^[52]

Said argued that the West has stereotyped the East in art and literature, since antiquity – such as the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus.^[54] Even more so in modern times, Europe has dominated Asia politically so that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that Western scholars could not recognize. Western scholars appropriated the task of exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves, with the implication that the East was not capable of composing its own narrative. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.^[55]

Said concluded that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up.^[56] In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia.^[57] After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

Criticism[link]

Orientalism and other works by Said sparked a wide variety of controversy and criticism.^[58] Ernest Gellner argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe.^[59] Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian Empires intervened.^[60] Others argued out that even at the height of the imperial era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims.^[61] Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.^[62]

Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism came from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis,^[63][64] and Kanan Makiya addressed what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's Orientalism on the perception and status of their scholarship.^{[nb 2]} Bernard Lewis in particular was often at odds with Said following the publication of Orientalism, in which Said singled out Lewis as a "perfect exemplification" of an "Establishment Orientalist" whose work "purports to be objective liberal scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material".^[67] Lewis answered with several essays in response, and was joined by other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.^[68]

Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic.^[69] According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations in Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans.^[70] The critic Robert Irwin writes that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.^[71]

Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic "Occidentalism" to oppose to the "Orientalism" of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment; that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.^[72] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).^[73][74]

Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern".^[75] Given Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own arguments that "any and all representations … are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer … [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation"^[76] could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism",^[77] unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.

In 1985, the Jewish Defense League called Said a "Nazi". That same year, someone set fire to his office at Columbia. Said and his family were recipients of death threats throughout his life.^[78]

Supporters[link]

Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.^[79] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship^[80] and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics, such as Lewis.^[81] Orientalism is regarded as central to the postcolonial movement, encouraging scholars "from non-western countries…to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with 'narratives of oppression,' creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western 'other.'"^[82]

Said's importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash,^[83] Nicholas Dirks,^[84] and Ronald Inden,^[85] and Cambodia, such as Simon Springer,^[86] and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha^[87] and Gayatri Spivak.^[88] His work continues to be widely discussed in academic seminars, disciplinary conferences, and scholarship.^[7]

Influence[link]

Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting,^[89] his supporters praise his influence as liberating.^[90] Postcolonial theory, of which Said is regarded as a founder and a figure of continual relevance,^[1] continues to attract interest and is a thriving field in the humanities.^[91] Orientalism continues to profoundly inform the field of Middle Eastern studies.^[7] He was a prominent public intellectual in the United States, praised widely as an "intellectual superstar," engaging in music criticism, public lectures, media punditry, contemporary politics, and musical performance.^[82] His breadth of influence is regarded as "genuinely global," resting on his unique and innovative blend of cultural criticism, politics, and literary theory.^[7]

Milica Bakić-Hayden based her concept of Nesting Orientalisms on the ideas of historian Larry Wollf and Edward Said's Orientalism.^[92] Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova introduced another concept, a concept of "nesting balkanisms", which is related to concept of "nesting orientalisms".^[93]

Music[link]

Being not only an avid music lover, but also an accomplished pianist,^[94] Said wrote extensively about music, including being the music critic for The Nation for several years,^[95] and writing three books on music: Musical Elaborations, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim), and his last book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. In music, Said often saw a reflection of his ideas on literature and history, and he would find real life possibilities in bold composition and performance. A posthumous collection of essays was published in 2007 by Columbia University Press, entitled Music at the Limits.^[96][97]

The music of Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz has been deeply influenced by the writings of Said. Fairouz's First Symphony references the essay Homage to a Belly Dancer and his Piano Sonata is titled Reflections on Exile after the collection of essays by Said.^[98]

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim

In 1999, Said jointly founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Barenboim. The award-winning youth orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries, and has performed internationally, including within both Israel and Palestine. Said and Barenboim also worked together to establish The Barenboim-Said Foundation in Seville. The government-funded foundation was eventually constituted in 2004 with its purpose being to develop several "education through music" projects. In addition to managing the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim-Said Foundation assists with other projects such as the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine project and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project in Seville.^[99]

Politics[link]

Pro-Palestinian activism[link]

Throughout his adult life, Said involved himself in the effort for Palestinians statehood. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council.^[100] He was also an early proponent of a two-state solution and, in 1988, voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the United States government in the late 1970s.^[101] In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. Said's relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad in 1995 that PA leaders banned the sale of his books,^[102] but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.^[103]

In an article entitled Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, he argued for the legitimacy and authenticity of both the Zionist claim to a land (and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland) and Palestinian rights of self-determination.^[104] Said's books on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

A photograph taken on July 3, 2000, of Said in South Lebanon throwing a stone across the Lebanon–Israel border drew criticism from some political and media commentators, some of whom decried the act as "terrorist sympathizing.".^[106] Said explained the act as a stone-throwing contest with his son, and called it a symbolic gesture of joy at the end of Israel's occupation of Lebanon. "It was a pebble. There was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away."^[107] Although he denied aiming the rock at anyone, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir asserted that Said had been less than 30 feet (9.1 m) from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower when he aimed the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed wire.^[108] While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia University faculty members, some students, and from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Columbia provost issued a five-page letter defending Said's act on the grounds of freedom of expression: "To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Said."^[109] Said said that there were repercussions, however, noting that in February 2001 the Freud Society of Vienna cancelled an invitation for him to give a lecture.^[110] The president of the Freud Society cited "the political situation in the Middle East and its consequences" as a reason, going on to explain that antisemitism "has become more dangerous" in Austrian politics and that the Society had decided on the cancellation "to avoid an internal clash."^[107]

Said made a documentary film about Palestine for BBC named In Search of Palestine.^[111] BBC was unsuccessful in getting it on U.S. television.^[112]

In Culture and Resistance (2003), Said likened his situation to that of Noam Chomsky: "It's very similar to him. He's a well known, great linguist. He's been celebrated and honored for that. But he's also vilified as an anti-Semite and a Hitler worshiper." Said went on to explain:

For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. We don't want anybody's history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. On the other hand, there's a great difference between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people.^[113]

In 2003, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to Fatah and Hamas. Three years later, in January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under FBI surveillance as early as 1971. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.^[114]

Criticism of U.S. foreign policy[link]

In a 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.”^[115] Said opposed many U.S. foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East and elsewhere. He critiqued U.S. involvement in Kosovo and Iraq under President Clinton,^[11] and U.S. support for Israel was a constant topic that he addressed in his activism. Although growing increasingly weak from his battle with leukemia, Said spent many of his last months speaking out against the then recent invasion of Iraq.^[116] In an April 2003 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said argued that the Iraq War was ill-conceived:

My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative….

I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest.

The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.^[117]

Death and tributes[link]

An al-Mubadara memorial poster of Edward Said on the Israeli West Bank wall

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a 12 year-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.^[118] He was survived by his wife of 33 years, Mariam (née Cortas); a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla, an actress, playwright, and founding member of the Arab-American theatre collective Nibras.^{[119][120][121]}

Subsequently, several prominent writers published eulogies for Said, including Alexander Cockburn,^[122] Christopher Hitchens,^[123] Tony Judt,^[124] Michael Wood,^[125] and Tariq Ali.^[126]

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Said's honor.^[127]

In 2008, Verso Books published Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, a book of essays by 15 authors, including Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi and Elias Khoury. The book was edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür.^[128][129]

A critical memoir, Edward Said: the charisma of criticism, by H. Aram Veeser was published by Routledge in March 2010.

In August 2010, the University of California Press published a large volume of essays by some 29 authors about every aspect of Said's intellectual contributions. Edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations includes interviews with Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, as well as the writings of Joseph Massad, Jacqueline Rose, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Asha Varadhjan, RR Radhakrishnan, Ardi Imseis, Ghada Karmi, Sabry Hafez and many others.

Edward Said memorial lectures[link]

Since Said's death in 2003, several institutions have instituted annual lecture series in his memory, including Columbia University, University of Warwick, Princeton University, University of Adelaide, American University of Cairo, and Palestine Center, with such notables speaking as Daniel Barenboim, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Cornel West.

Bibliography[link]

Awards[link]

Besides being honored with memberships and posts to several prestigious organizations and institutions, Said was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world.^[130] Said was the recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize. He received the Lionel Trilling Award (twice), the first occasion being the first time the award was given. He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award.^[131] In 2001, Said received the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and he was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais prize.^[132] His autobiography, Out of Place, won him the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature.^[133] Said Was named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin in 2003, shortly before his death.

Honorary Degree at The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS): Orientalism once more (2003) / Edward W. Said / The Hague: ISS, 2003. Lecture delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa on the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, 21 May 2003.

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Blaming the Victims
• List of Columbia University people
• Palestinian Christians
• Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis

Notes[link]

1. ^ One critic, Justus Weiner,^[17] asserted that Said's formative years were spent in Egypt where his family's business was located, and that Said "probably" did not attend St. George's Academy in Jerusalem, except briefly. There is no official record of his attendance in the school registry books from the period. Weiner said that cast doubt on Said's qualification to contribute to the debate over the dispossession of Arabs before Israel's founding in 1948. Weiner said he did not interview Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: "The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'" Three journalists and one historian wrote that Weiner's claims are false. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian, who reported telling Weiner that he had been Said's classmate at St. George's, a fact Weiner omitted mentioning ^[18] In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's,^[19] and quoted Said stating, that in 1992, Said had spent much of his youth in Cairo.^[20] Amos Elon, biographer of the founders of Israel, wrote in The New York Review of Books that Weiner failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–48, Said "and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains that shortly afterward the family's property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Said and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government's refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth."^[21] In reply, Weiner accused Elon of dishonesty, and Hitchens of making himself "into a poster boy for Palestine."^[22] Said observed that the publishers of Commentary, a conservative magazine, had attacked him in three long articles and that Weiner's was the third in the series.^[23][24] Said commented that the article about his early life was "undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact."^[25]
2. ^ Martin Kramer wrote that "Fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie, whose work Said had praised in Covering Islam, allowed that Orientalism was 'important and in many ways positive.'^[65] But, in an interview, Keddie said that she also thought Said's work on Orientalism had had "unfortunate consequences." She continued:

   “

   I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab–Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too "conservative". It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So "orientalism" for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.[66]

   ”

References[link]