Graham in Brief

Orientalism and Western Power

A missionary - or, for that matter, any visitor from North America or Europe - would come to West China with a variety of assumptions and expectations, all of them formed by earlier cultural experiences at home. Her experience of West China could not be direct and immediate, but would be filtered through images of "the Orient" learned in and carried from the West. If she wrote back to a supporting congregation, or published a scholarly work about her new cultural or natural environment, she would be adding to this catalogue of images and ideas through which people in the West understood their counterparts in the non-Western world - the exotic and different "Other&qquot; with whom they existed in the world. In other words, she would participate in what Michel Foucault and others have called a "discourse." Mary Klages defines a discourse as, "a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology, and/or a set of common terms and ideas."[1] Although the missionary may seem largely unrelated to an ethnologist writing on Chinese social traditions, she would still operate within a certain framework of ideas and a pattern of writings shared with the social scientist. Her perception of the Oriental Other would emerge from knowledge generated by her predecessors and would likely share many of the same assumptions or prejudices.

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Edward Said published a seminal analysis of this discourse in 1978 entitled Orientalism.[2] The term "Orientalism" has had a long history and refers to several distinct, interrelated cultural phenomena. Orientalism's earliest definition was narrowly academic, denoting a specific institutional pattern within Western learning. "Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient - and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist," Said explained, "is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism."[3] Orientalists were those Westerners who devoted themselves to the study of any facet of the Orient. As Benjamin Disraeli remarked in his Tancred, "The East is a career," and the scholars who made a career of Eastern languages or history were charged with the task of creating knowledge about the Occident's opposing character, the Orient.

A broader definition of Orientalism includes this academic tradition but extends the label to an epistemology based on specific assumptions about the "East" and "West," of which this very distinction is the most significant. Orientalists distinguish the "East" (or "Orient") and "West" (or "Occident") as discrete entities with innate, contrasting characteristics. Moreover, the definitions of Orient and Occident depend upon these contrasts, as thinkers in the West use the East as a frame of reference for understanding what their own civilization is. Said argued that this practice of self-definition had deep roots in Western thought; as early as the Greek playwright Aeschylus, Westerners had been transforming the foreign, unfamiliar Other of the Orient into manageable, understandable representations. Said's emphasis was on the representation itself, not on the subject (in this case, the Orient) being represented. "In any instance of at least written language," he explained, "there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation."[4] "The Orient" is not an actuality but a category formed in Western minds, encompassing all the peoples and places of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As such, Orientalism represents but does not embody these parts of the real world, and Westerners do the representing for the people. Said cited Karl Marx's statement on Orientals in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as evidence of this attitude: "They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented."

Although Orientalist representations may not be the Orient itself, this role of representing the East still carries a great power for the West. A worldview in which East and West were essentially different has naturally had many uses over time. Western domination of the Orient could be legitimated if all the various peoples of this vast region - encompassing North Africa, the Middle East and Asia - shared certain essential qualities. According to Said, "'Orientals' for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence, which any Orientalist (or ruler of Orientals) might examine, understand, and expose."[5] The Oriental then became a sort of "human material" that the Orientalist was free to study, dissect, and define.[6] "To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it," Said explained.[7] The Oriental is no longer a free subject but an object in the possession of the Orientalist. Thus, Westerners collected and analyzed people in just the same way as the purely material elements of the Orient, like geological or biological specimens. Through knowing, the West could come to "possess" the East figuratively even as it laid claim to the Orient politically during imperialist expansion.

Empowering in itself, the role of representing the Other also allowed the Orientalist to produce the most useful, advantageous representations. If the world is bifurcated into East and West, and the West creates the definitions, then the West will normally fall on the positive side of the dichotomies. If the West was strong, then the East was weak. If the West was rational, then the East was irrational. Orientalists could identify essential characteristics of personality, government, and economic production, all of which were exotic but inferior.[8] For instance, Karl A. Wittfogel's 1957 classic, Oriental Despotism, posited that Oriental culture predisposed Orientals to dictatorial rule and implied that the Occident, by contrast, had a greater capacity for democracy and freedom. The Orientals constructed by Westerners were incapable of representing or governing themselves and inferior in nearly every respect from the only frame of reference - the progressive, scientific, and enlightened observers from the West.

In this same fashion, Orientalist conceptions have split along many other lines as well, all of which place the Western definer in a position of power and superiority over the defined. As Stevan Harrell has elaborated, participants in "civilizing projects," such as Christian missions, have conceived of the less civilized Other as feminine, childlike, and ancient or primitive.[9] Each of these characteristics corresponds to an opposite quality traditionally valued more highly by Western culture. The East was constructed as feminine, passive, and receptive, allowing for the West to dominate and penetrate its inferior. If the East is childlike, then the West can be understood as more mature or advanced, justified in taking a paternalistic or didactic approach to the Orient. As Harrell has pointed out, this angle has been especially crucial to missionaries, whose emphasis is primarily cultural: "Like children, the objects of missionizing can be trained, educated out of their childlike state."[10] When Orientalists construct the Other as ancient, then the progressive, modern West can be justified in economic, political and cultural transformation of its colonies and spheres of influence.

These prejudiced constructions of the Oriental "essence" prepared the way for direct Western domination of the Orient and reinforced imperialism once European expansion was under way.[11] The inferior Orient that Western scholars constructed needed to be dominated and taken care of, as a parent has both authority over and responsibility for a child. "'They' were not like 'us,'" Said later wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "and for that reason served to be ruled."[12] The West was charged with the duty of bringing their superior practices and beliefs to the East, which led many in the West to see domination as self-sacrificing service to the inferior peoples of the world. In The Sociology of Colonies, Rene Maunier described this attitude as "paternal guardianship," a viewpoint in which Westerners saw domination as their duty.[13] Thinkers in the West could not have developed this sense of "duty" without conceiving of the Other was weak, needy, and helpless - a condition that required the assistance of a West that was strong, bold, and proactive by contrast.

Unsurprisingly, missionaries occupied an important place in this larger "mission" of Western imperialism, as individuals whose goals were focused on the transformation of the Orient's inferior culture. "Administrators and planters aimed at limited ends such as order, taxation, profits, cheap labor, and advantages against competing Europeans," T.O. Beidelman wrote in Colonial Evangelism. "Missionaries invariably aimed at overall changes in the beliefs and actions of native peoples, at colonization of heart and mind as well as body."[14] Missionaries were not just fellow travelers of imperialism, but were a crucial and unique part of its apparatus. The entire enterprise of colonialism was imbued with the notion that the West ought to care for and control the non-Western world, but this belief was particularly intense among most missionaries.[15] Moreover, Western evangelists were not unaware of their role in the power relation between East and West. Two British missionaries, Mildred Cable and Francesca French, began their memoir of work in West China with the following observation:

The central portion of the Asian continent is a land of such strategic importance, by reason of the Powers whose interests are bound up in its fate, that no nation can afford to be ignorant of its frontiers, races, customs, religions, languages, and of the trade routes through which its life pulsates.[16]

Rather than viewing their book as merely a travelogue or an account of mission work, Cable and French acknowledged that their text would prove useful to "the Powers" of the West. By generating information about the culture of Oriental peoples, missionaries could contribute to the power structure that supported the imperial "interests" mentioned above.

Beidelman has suggested that case studies of individual missionaries or mission groups will help advance our understanding of this cultural encounter better than studies that treat missionaries as a single, uniform type. "Such studies would examine the day-to-day workings of beliefs and values by which colonialists picture themselves and their activities," Beidelman wrote, "as well as the stereotypes they hold about those they seek to dominate and change."[17] This paper seeks to fill in such a place in our knowledge of imperialism. David Crockett Graham inhabited this pivotal place of the missionary in the imperialist enterprise, along with several other diverse but related positions. Like any missionary, he came to China with the intention of bringing a superior culture to the people, who had to have an inferior culture for the missionizing project to make sense at all. His life and work embody some, but not all, of the attitudes and beliefs that analysts have attributed to missionaries and other Western agents operating with and within the Orient. Indeed, in some ways his writings and behaviors diverged from what we have come to understand of the Western and, specifically, Orientalist mentality. Now that we have looked at this mentality in general, and its specific relation to missionaries, I want to examine those ways in which Graham himself directly participated in Orientalism.

One way to approach Graham's attitudes and ideology is to look at the West China Border Research Society, a scholarly institution in which Graham was highly active as a researcher, author and leader. Through the Society, Graham and his fellow missionaries directly participated in the production of knowledge about the Oriental Other, and by looking at this institution we can get a sense of both Graham's intellectual milieu and the extent to which his own work aligned with the Orientalist project.

[1] Mary Klages, "Michel Foucault: 'What Is an Author?" 15 November 20001 <http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/foucault.html>

[2] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 3

[9] Stevan Harrell, "Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them," in Stevan Harrell ed., Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 9

[12] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xi

[13] Rene Maunier, The Sociology of Colonies (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949), p. 168

[14] T.O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 6

[16] Mildred Cable and Francesca French, Through Jade Gate: An Account of Journeys in Kansu, Turkestan, and the Gobi Desert (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1927), p. vii