MCLC: Birth of Orientalism review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Birth of Orientalism review
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Thanks to Victor Mair for bringing this book/review to my attention. It
should be of interest to list members.

Kirk 

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Source: Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (fall 2012)

The Birth of Orientalism by Urs App
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010
512pp. US$79.95. ISBN
978-0-8122-4261-4.

Review by Kenneth Haynes, Brown University
 

 Urs App’s study of orientalism, centred on the eighteenth century,
extends from Xavier’s mission to Japan in 1549 to the posthumous third
edition of Volney’s Ruines  in 1826. App has written a great work. It
Establishes the ground on which all future studies of European orientalism
will have to build, it rewrites the stories that scholars of religious
history have been telling about the Western discovery (invention?) of
Hinduism and Buddhism, it offers indispensable analyses of influential
writers both famous (Bayle, Diderot, Voltaire) and now obscure, and it is
a model of a truly global study of intellectual history.

In addition to being alert and erudite, the book is free of pedantry and
moral one-upmanship. “Historians of the European discovery of Buddhism,”
App notes, “tend to be rather unforgiving schoolmasters,” prompt to
denounce the errors of the past and inclined to “the ‘monkey show’
approach where historical views are held up for ridicule like chimpanzees
dressed in human clothes.” But App knows that “parading ‘false’ ideas ...
is far easier than understanding why those ideas arose and realizing the
fragility of present-day certitudes” (134–36). Among other consequences,
it follows that frauds (or “frauds”) get their due in his study, and App
offers painstaking reconstructions of the genesis of the Ezour-vedam  and
John Zephaniah Holwell’s Shastah (summarized in charts on 395 and 340).
App does not dismiss them as self-contained European inventions, or
confine himself, for example, to Voltaire’s notorious use of them;
instead, App explores their genesis and dissemination in a global
(multilingual, multireligious, multicentred) context. A distinct pleasure
found in reading App’s work is his “biography” of these works, his account
of their “mind-boggling” fates. For example, the Ezour-vedam  “presents us
with ... The mystical marriage of a wrongly translated, pieced-together,
fifth-century Chinese Buddhist text, tuned up and put into the Buddha’s
mouth by an eighthcentury Chinese Zen master, with the fake—yet oh so
true! Yajur Veda (Ezour-vedam ) authored by a French Jesuit calling
himself Sumantu who criticizes the Veda and whom Sainte-Croix portrayed as
a Gnanig.l heir of the Buddha’s deathbed teaching of God’s emptiness”
(435). Holwell’s “translation” has a similarly twisting fate, spurred into
being by a variety of sources—missionary accounts, Voltaire and the
Chevalier Ramsay, an angelology deriving via Milton and Jacob Ilive from
the Book of Enoch, perhaps Ossian, and, possibly, at whatever remove, the
Shaivite Agamas—and then, according to App, going on to become almost
single-handedly responsible for the European invention of “Gentooism,”
giving it at once a scripture, god, founder, transmission, dogma, and
practice.
 

The level of textual detail is matched by an equal attention to the
theoretical frames and ideological orientations in which the texts were
created and disseminated, especially as they formed part of contested
discourses over origins. App documents and motivates searches for the
world’s oldest text (besides the Ezour-vedam  and the Shastah, candidates
included the Book of Enoch, the Yijing, the Forty-two Sections Sutra, the
Upanishads) and oldest religious homeland (Egypt, China, or India? less
often, Siberia or Tibet?). The hermeneutical practice of accommodation,
what App calls the “friendly-takeover” approach to non-Christian religions
(though of course their practitioners did not experience it as friendly),
is a central theme of the book, brilliantly discussed not only in the
famous case of the Jesuit missions but also in Eusebius and among the
deists.
 

Errors of the past tend to be occluded or denounced in order to serve
present-day purposes. App seeks to understand them in context, however,
and this means expanding the scope of research to include the labour of
native informants, on whom missionaries were uneasily dependent and whose
existence they sometimes concealed; the accounts, often archival, of
missionaries; and the work of librarians, rarely remembered at all (on the
first, see 158, 173, 191, 371; on the second, passim  practically; on the
third, see 83ff, 373, and 474). It also means telling stories that do not
yield obvious morality tales. This makes the relationship between
orientalism and European colonialism extraordinarily resistant to brief
summary. When there was a consensus among historians of religion that the
“scientific” study of Asian religions emerged at a particular moment in
the nineteenth century, it was easy to see religious history as a story of
progress or intellectual emancipation, or, conversely, as a story of how
the putative breakthrough into science served as a mask for colonial
exploitation. After App (77ff , 185ff ), such a chronology is no longer
credible; even more challengingly, he removes the confidence we might have
had in identifying a historical movement towards the “secular” at all,
regardless of whether it should be applauded or denounced.

 
For twenty years after its publication in 1978, the study of European
orientalism was dominated by Edward Said’s Orientalism. During the first
decade of the new century, that work was subject to increasing, sometimes
polemical, criticism (as by Robert Irwin, Ibn Warraq, and Daniel Martin
Varisco). Around 2010, two books—this one by App and Suzanne Marchand’s
German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship
(Cambridge University Press, 2009)—established the essential, long-delayed
groundwork for research into the history of oriental scholarship; in both
texts, Said makes few appearances. His work, it now appears, was more a
symptom of orientalism than a diagnosis, and it is not sufficiently
corrigible to serve as a basis for future knowledge. The main problems
were its truncation of orientalism into Arabic and Islamic studies where a
global perspective is needed; and a programmatic, rather crude, equation
of knowledge and power, which insisted on a chronology and geography of
orientalism that no one can now accept (that is, a sudden breakthrough
into secular scholarship around the time of Napoleon, and the exclusion of
Germany, as having too few colonies, from the ranks of nations that
produced oriental scholarship). Though much time was lost, it is exciting
to welcome at last the appearance of a book as good as App’s.
 

Kenneth Haynes is professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at
Brown University. His research is focused on the modern reception of
classics.