1. ID501
Nationalism and Orientalism
The Social Science of Enyclopedia
Selma Kadiroğlu
1561729

2. NATIONALISM

3. • Nationalism is the political doctrine which holds that
humanity can be divided into separate units, and each
unit has a right and the duty to constitute itself as a
state.
• It is not specified exactly what a nation is. It would be
shared culture, shared language or shared religion and
sometimes history .
• It emerges with French Englihtenment and American
Revolution in 18th century.
• Opera and novel were favourite vehicles of nationalist
feelings.

4. • Italy remains imperfectly national.
• German unity owed more to Bismarck than to popular
passion for nationhood.
• In Africa and Asia, there were few plausible states
and successor states claimed freedom in order to
begin the process of cultural homogenization which
may lead to nationhood.
• Pakistan tried to hold together two separated areas
inherited from British Raj but could not be sustained
in that form and separated.

5. • Political scientists argue that nationalism provides an
explanation to hidden causes of conflict between
different ethnic groups. Nationalism becomes a force
to move people to both action and belief.
• “Nationalism is better treated as a complex of ideas
and sentiments which respond flexibily,decade by
decade, to new situations,in which peoples may find
themselves.”(Kenneth Minogue)

6. • The ideas of Herder and Fichte were important in the
development of the anthropological concept of
culture.
• Boas failed to question the assumption that people
belonged to one culture only as naturally while
fighting against the idea „race‟.
• Weber and Marx treated nationalism and vision of
human cultural differences which is based on classes.
• Anthropologists rarely questioned the idea of
nationhood desptite its pervasive effects, they prefer
ethnicity.

7. • Mauss, Dumont, Warner and Geertz treated
nationalism and rituals of nations.
• In 1980, it was seen as an antropological
problem, because of civil war and violent movements
towards separatism. Ethnographers in European
colonies had to deal with the political and human
cost of postcolonial nationalisms.

8. • There were publications of important theoretical
books on nationalism in the 1980s.
• Ernest Gellner offers a general sociological model of
links between nationalism and modernity (Nations
and Nationalism ,1983)
• He argues that industrial society is based on a
necessary cultural homogeneity which allows for
continious cognitive and economic growth.

9. • Benedict Anderson focused on nationalism as a mode
of political imagination (Imagined Communities
, 1983)
• Chatterjee examined the paradoxes and contradictions
of anti colonial and post colonial nationalisms
(Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 1986)

10. • Anderson opened new research areas on cultural
production;in the mass media, consumption, art and
folklore (Foster 1991).
• Anthropologist have been slower to respond to
nationalism as a specifically political phenomenon,
slower to deal with its power to mobilize people
politically.

11. • Several ethnographic research has instead
concentrated on the rituals and symbols of
nationalism, tracing a line of enquiry opened by
Hobsbawm and Ranger (Invention of Tradition).
• In this research, intellectuals and cultural producers
become unexpected object for anthropology .
Handler‟s research on Québécois nationalism as a
cultural system became an important examination of
the intellectual genealogy of ideas.

12. Jonathan Spencer( Routledge World Reference);
Nationalism occupies a sensitive place in
anthropological collective consciousness.
It can be held accountable for many gravest crimes in
the 20th century.
Anthropologist should not employ assertions of
relativisim as a smokescreen for hiding their own
political engagement .

13. ORIENTALISM

14. What is Orientalism?
Orientalism conventionally describes academic
disciplines which specialize in the study of „the
Orient‟, taken to mean Asia and the Middle East .

15. • Edward Said ;
“the Orient is an integral part of European material
civilization and culture.
Orientalism expresses and represents that part
culturally and even ideologically as a a mode of discourse
with supporting
institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, e
ven colonial bureaucracies and colonial
styles”(Orientalism,1978)
• Orientalism refers to distortions in the perception and
analysis of alien societies that resemble the distortions
that Said discern in Oriental Studies.

16. Distortions
1. exaggerating the difference between the familiar and the
strange
It is found in theories or models that compare the west
and the alien and that portray the alien as little more than
a mirror image of the western.
Examples includes comparison of
• hierarchic(India) and egalitarian(western) societies
(e.g. Dumont 1970,1977),
• commodity(western) and gift(Melanesian)
(e.g. Gregory 1982)

17. Distortions
2. treating society as though it is unchanging expression
of some basic essence or genius, a distortion
sometimes called „essentialism‟.
According to Said, social and cultural practices and
institutions are portrayed or understood as being “what
they are because they are what they are for all time, for
ontological reasons that no empirical matter can either
dislodge or alter.

18. Distortions
3. portraying and analysing a society as though it is
radically separated from the west.
Ethnography ignores ;
• points of contact between society and the west
• the colonial relations that may have existed between
two societies
• western intrusions in that society .
Reason of ignorance: They do not reflect what is taken to
be the true essence of the society involved.

19. • Johannes Fabian suggested that the antropological other
is placed in a different temporal frame in anthropological
writings, rendered different though the denial of a shared
history. It was extended beyond the East and, applied to
the examination of Occidentalist stereotypes about the
West.
• James Clifford( On Orientalism,1988) were
inconsistent between a fairly traditional liberal
humanism and a more unsettling stance borrowed from
Michael Foucault. Some of Said‟s weaker arguments
were providedn to legitimation by Foucault.

20. • Said‟s use of discourse in Foucault‟s sense allows him
to build up a portrait of a totalizing and
undifferentiated Orientalism.
His Orientals become mute and passive in the face of
Western knowledge-power axis: there is little sense
that the inhabitants of the East have themselves
contributed to Orientalist discourse.
• In 1990s, Orientalist stereotypes were encountered in
communal politics within India as in Western foreign
policy.

21. Although many disapprove orientalism, it may be
inescapable in anthropology.
James G. Carrier says that;
“Comparison is at the heart of anthropology and it is
necessary to stress their differences and slight their
similarities and to construe them in terms of
fundamental attributes or essences.”(The Social
Science of Encyclopedia)