SHIFTS IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THINKING: POSTCOLONIALISM AND ORIENTALISM    2000w

Examining Edward Said’s Orientalism as a seminal text in postcolonial thought, this essay seeks to investigate the shift towards a more critical and reflexive anthropology brought about by decolonisation. While Said makes no explicit mention of anthropology, Orientalism can nonetheless be taken as a postcolonial critique of the discipline in response to the “crisis of representation”. The text poses questions central to the work of anthropology, forcing the discipline to reckon with its colonial roots. This essay therefore argues that Orientalism’s emphasis on power reflects a shift in anthropological thinking from a focus on culture, representing a turn away from Levi-Strauss’ structuralism insofar as it questions anthropology’s claim to be an ahistorical, objective and scientific endeavour.

Orientalism focuses on the structures of power underlying knowledge production, turning a critical gaze towards cultural representations. Said emphasises that we cannot ‘assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away’ (1978:14). That is, Orientalism is not simply an aesthetic fantasy based on epistemological assumptions, but a deliberate endeavour to maintain dominance and authority over the Orient that has enjoyed considerable durability and influence. Orientalist knowledge is therefore the result of a political and power-laden process of knowledge production. Said combines Foucault’s insights regarding the knowledge-power nexus with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to suggest that Western dominance enabled the production of knowledge about other cultures that, in turn, became an instrument of continued Western domination (Kandiyoti 2002:281). Consequently, ‘that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient’ (Said 1978:30) necessitating a historical anthropology that takes the cultural hegemony of the West as its object of inquiry (Kandiyoti 2002:284). Orientalism, taken as anthropological critique, thus encourages an