The Said, the Unsaid, and 'Orientalism' All Make Geertz’ Webs Most Significant

Michel Foucault, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and James C. Scott are connected in theory by the issues of power, silence, and that which is hidden in discourse between “unequal” participants. Put them all together, and Edward Said’s Orientalism is the postmodernist result—and Clifford Geertz may be the solution to many of the challenges historians face in the twenty-first century when it comes to dissecting the past in an “objective” fashion.

source: Wikipedia

Foucault informed us all about power and its influence, while Trouillot observed the silences created by the struggles over power. Scott took those silences and examined what was hidden within them, while Said argued the perception of the “other”—based on assumed power and unrecognized ethnocentrism—actually was deeply inherent racism in Western intellectualism. Enter Geertz: By immersing in a culture (past or present) to the point of assimilation, then and only then can historians approach their goal of telling stories of the past in the most honest way.

In his 1990 book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Scott put forth the proposition that taking power relations as is without scrutiny is problematic and a mistake. As he queried, “How do we study power relations when the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic pose in the presence of the powerful and when the powerful may have an interest in overdramatizing their reputation and mastery?”^[1] This idea takes Trouillot’s “silences” and give them new meaning, while forcing us to look deeper into the power relationship(s) to find hidden meaning.

source: theory-talks.org

When Scott wrote, “The public transcript is, to put it crudely, the self-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen. Given the usual power of dominant elites to compel performances from others, the discourse of the public transcript is a decidedly lopsided discussion. While it is unlikely to be merely a skein of lies and misrepresentations, it is, on the other hand, a highly partisan and partial narrative. It is designed to be impressive, to affirm and naturalize the power of dominant elites, and to conceal or euphemize the dirty linen of their rule”^[2], he was funneling his readers right into Said’s lap. 

It’s impossible to synthesize Said’s theory into a short paragraph, but his idea(s) drill down to this basic premise: The discourse of power is held by the writer who then describes the “other” in terms of comparison to the ethnocentric power of the writer’s diction. As he argued, “A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual ... is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.”^[3]

For Said, this problem was clear in the Western intellectual portrayal of “the Orient”, although in any post-imperial writings, the same constructs might be evident. Tracing theory from Foucault to Trouillot to Scott to Said, the reality is we cannot pretend to be authoritatively accurate because of the inherent power in language and ingrained ethnocentricity.

source: commondreams.org

This is where we arrive back at Geertz, through a convenient Said use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. If Conrad’s narrative about the “blank spaces on the earth” exemplifies the concept of Orientalism (as applied to the African continent), then a film version of the story, Apocalypse Now—set during the Vietnam War era in the 1970s, in the actual “Orient”—committed the same “error” despite being produced eight decades after the novel was published. Most audience members will associate the acting legend Marlon Brando with the film, in the role of Kurtz. Brando was a method actor, noted for immersing himself in the role of a character in order to achieve authenticity.

Ironically, the character of Kurtz—whether by choice or not—immersed himself in the culture he found himself in, as Geertz would have us do as historians in order to gain true understanding of the webs of significance within a culture that is not our own. Then, and perhaps only then, can historians avoid what Said argued above about the misappropriation of expertise and knowledge when encountering a culture different from our own supposedly superior one. Even if the culture exists only in the past now, historians can still “Geertz” it up like a method actor, like Kurtz, in pursuit of understanding what happened, how it happened and why it happened to the best of our professional abilities.

source: irishtimes.com

In sports, especially the Olympics Games, there is a power relationship between nations of immense size (like the United States) and nations of smaller stature (Angola, for example). There is the inclination for American journalists (in the present) and American historians (in the future) to write about a sporting event between these two nations as an unfair contest. Even the Angolan media might do the same, playing into that power relationship as Scott noted above, because they must.

But to truly tell the story of the Angolan athlete in the Olympic Games against the mighty United States, the writer would have to imbed her/himself for a significant amount of time in the culture and life of the Angolan athlete to truly come as close as possible to understanding that existence, before the Olympic Games even occurred. Like the method actor sinking into a role, the writer would have to immerse in the Angolan culture in order to write about the athlete and her/his culture respectfully. Immersion can include archives, interviews, daily life, patterns of behavior, symbols, etc.—all those researchable webs of significance that come together to form what Geertz defined as “culture”—as the writer truly becomes as much a part of the culture as an outsider can become in order to write it well.

Historians, therefore, must become the Brandos of their craft, following the theoretical frameworks offered by Foucault, Trouillot, Scott, Said, and Geertz, if we want to be as conscientious of the past as we should be in the present—and the future.

About the author: Sam Fleischer is a third-year doctoral student researching the modern Olympic Games in the twentieth century, under the guidance and supervision of Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton, Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor at Washington State University. Fleischer also completed his doctoral studies in education at Michigan State University and has taught film courses at multiple campuses in the United States. He recently published a chapter in the WSU Press publication, Leading the Crimson and Gray.

[1] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance : Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), xii.

[2] Ibid., 18.

[3] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 94.