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dward Said, a Palestinian professor of English and Comparative Litera-
ture at Columbia University, published Orientalism in 1978, a book
which radically altered how we view the knowledge of non-Western
societies that had accumulated over more than two centuries. By “Orient” he
did not mean the actual societies of Asia and the Middle East as known to the
people who were born into them; he meant instead the “knowledge” compiled
in the West about these societies. He argued that “ideas, cultures, and histories
cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more pre-
cisely their configurations of power, also being studied.... The relationship
between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of
varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said 1978:5).
Scholarship about colonized populations, histories written by scholars
embedded in colonial regimes that had already removed power from local rul-
ers, studies that attempted to airbrush out the violence of colonial acquisition,
or to romanticize the colonized “other,” are what Said had in mind. We saw,
for instance, in the last chapter that Mead and Bateson never asked questions
about the puputan—the self-destruction of Balinese rulers in the face of Dutch
aggression—in their effort to study the psychology of Balinese people only 30
years later, and never took the psychological impact of that social destruction
into consideration in their theorizing. In India, scholars overemphasized the
caste system and the dominance of the Brahmans because they had already
“decapitated” the social order by depriving local rulers of actual power.
This chapter begins with two works of art that glorify empire. The first is
the chapter opener depicting the Red Dragon departing Woolwich in 1601 as the
lead ship in the East India Company’s first trading fleet to the Spice Islands—a
romanticized moment in the history of empire.
Orientalism was also a movement in art history that was absorbed with
eroticized imaginings of harem life and the beautiful women who lived in
them, frequently nude. The second work is part of this movement, an art nou-
veau-style map of the British Empire that glorifies and eroticizes the imperial
conquests of Britain. It portrays representatives of conquered people all turned
to Britannia, the warrior-goddess in the middle, her trident denoting her as
goddess of the seas. Semi-nude African and Pacific Island women serve her; an
Indian raja on elephant back and a big game hunter pay tribute, while a
scrawny Indian laborer in loincloth is doubled over with his load. On the left
are Canadian trappers and a Native American in feathered headdress; on the
right are voluptuous women from Asian colonies in Malaya and China. At
E
Chapter opener photo: The first fleet of the East India Company with its lead ship the Red
Dragon departing Woolwich in 1601 bound for the Spice Islands.