CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the
Other
Richard McCutcheon; October 3, 2011
Think Piece #3: Safe with the Other?
A simple view of Said’s
critique of Orientalism and its synthesising power can be shown within his metaphor
of a fierce tiger.[1]
The metaphor shows how expectations can create reality about the object in our
gaze, actually causing the object to become what we ‘know’ about it. It is what
it is because it is, and it always will be. Not only does the metaphor dig out
the years of Orientalist evidence, but it also leads itself towards one of the
significant debates about how to deal with, or at least prepare for, the Other.
The
debate around military might is often given in a framework where there is a
major assumption about the Other. The assumption is a worldview that sees
danger out in the world, born out of illegitimate reasons, that seeks to
destroy the good. Military budgets then can be justified on the kneejerk
reactions of safety and protection of the innocent. While there is no doubt
that there is danger in the world, does the action of preparing and readying
oneself for war make safety more or less likely? In Said’s example, he did not
state that tigers were not fierce, but he did imply that they can be other than
fierce. A tiger can kill a human being quite easily, but it has little reason
to do so unless it is provoked or handled in a way that will actually “increase its fierceness.”[2]
One could imagine an explorer who traps every spottable tiger to protect
himself and the innocents, only having his suspicions confirmed when one breaks
loose and attacks him. Would that explorer not be justified in killing baby
tigers to prevent them from growing up to become blood thirsty terrors? Could it
occur to the explorer that he could leave the tigers alone?
Is
that what is happening in our world? I hear about these people, these Others,
who want to destroy us and our way of life. While I am sure that these people
have the natural ability to be dangerous – they have actually proved that they
can be – is our ways of dealing with them making the world a more dangerous
place? If yes, then do we need to give up our fascination with the darkness and
embrace a ‘naive’ assumption that all human beings are good and peaceful? If we
are wrong, will we die because of it?
Either way, we are not the ones
dying right now. The ones who have died and are dying – to confirm our
suspicions about them – are the ones who are still human enough to consider
that imperialism was a created inevitability of capitalism; that it was “a
necessity like those today of the national liberation of people, the
destruction of capital and the advent of socialism.”[3]
This formulaic statement, welcome to the conscience of the West, pushes the
fact that it was historically inevitable that two significant but diverse
cultures were going to collide. While the statement does not place value on
imperialism, it does bring up interesting questions about capitalism: Was it necessary?
How did that system contributed to the caging up of the other? More
importantly, does the formula of injury and repair apply to the damage that has
been done by Orientalism? As inevitable as national liberation is to
imperialism, is there an equally inevitable push for the natives to
recontextualize the Other who has Othered them? Unlike the geographically lines
of a country, what are the bounds that signify the shift from intellectual
liberation to retaliatory attack?
The
fundamental question as both Said and Clifford have highlighted is “how does
one represent other cultures?”[4]
In the effort to avoid “quick recourses to alternative totalities,”[5]
they give us no distinct answer but their unique relationship is more informative
than their contemplation. One man is part of a historically dispossessed and
marginalized group while the other one enjoys the full range of social and
economic support, yet they are able to engage and challenge each other without
self-pity or rage.
[3] Amilcar Cabral, “The
Weapon of Theory.” Revoluation in Buinea:
Selected Texts By Amilcar Cabral (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 99.
[4] James Clifford, “On
Orientalism.” The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1988), 274.
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