|
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jere Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith-based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al-Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti-Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
July
18, 2002
Through
Racist Eyes
Is
Eurocentrism Unique?
by M. Shahid Alam
It would be hard for someone who comes to European
historiography from another perspective--Greek, Roman or Islamic--not
to notice an obsession, especially pronounced since the eighteenth
century, with European superiority.
One runs into this obsession amongst
all kinds of writers. It is already visible during the eighteenth
century in Montesquieu, Hume and Kant. During the nineteenth
century it was elaborated into historical systems by Hegel and
Marx, erected into racial hierarchies by Blumenbach and Cuvier,
and shaped into a pseudo-science of race by Agassiz and Morton.
In recent times, this obsession may be observed in full bloom
in several leading historians, including White, Brenner, Jones
and Landes. When one stumbles into an exception, such as Needham
or Hodgson, it is refreshing.
This obsession takes a variety of forms.
It is claimed that Europeans possess qualities that no one else
possesses, or they possess them in greater abundance. At various
times, these claims have been asserted with respect to rationality,
freedom, individuality, inventiveness, daring, curiosity and
tolerance; not an exhaustive list. In addition, these qualities
have always been translated into superior achievements. The Europeans
have always excelled in governance, wars, technology, management,
sciences, humanities, philosophy, historiography, romance, pornography,
shipping, banking, capitalism and industrialization. Again, the
list is not exhaustive.
The claims of superiority take two forms.
First, there is the method of assertion; we control the production
of knowledge, and we can say what we like about ourselves and
others. A recent example of this is David Landes' Wealth
and Poverty of Nations. There are others who hit upon
the strategy of starting the wagon train of Western civilization
in Babylon, and moving it generally westward, through Egypt,
Phoenicia, Israel, Greece and Rome, until it arrives at its final
destination in Western Europe. A clever way to overcome a skimpy
history, by extend it backwards some five thousand years in order
to appropriate the greatest achievements of the ancient Near
East.
These superior qualities and attainments
were of course not accidental: they were produced by additional,
deeper layers of superiority. Europeans excelled because they
were descendants of Japheth, who had been chosen for divine preferment.
Alternatively, they derived their superiority from their location,
their favored continent, whose temperate climate, diverse environment,
rivers, and abundant coastline, produced greater vigor and economic
opportunities. There were many more who put it down simply to
race: the whites were biologically superior.
What is it that drives this European
obsession? In his essay, Eurocentrism,
Samir Amin argues that Eurocentrism is historically specific
to capitalism; it constructs an ideology of racial superiority
to support capitalist Europe's project of global domination.
In the same way that orthodox economics obscures class divisions,
Eurocentrism obfuscates imperialism and global inequalities.
Amin's thesis contains important insights,
but it also raises some questions. Why has this ideology been
cast primarily in terms of racial--as opposed to cultural--differences?
Have stronger groups involved in asymmetric relationships always
mobilized ideologies of differences to perpetuate their superiority?
And have they always employed the language of race, blood, or
lineage? In order to begin to answer these questions, I turn
to history to examine how different civilizations have articulated
autocentrism.
A Variety of Autocentrisms
As I review autocentrisms across space
and time, there is no pretense that these assessments are definitive
or always rooted in exhaustive evidence.
Ascertaining the extent of autocentrism
in any group can be problematic. A group's autocentrism may change
over time, and it may vary across different classes even at any
point in time. Moreover, too often we rely on literary sources
as our primary sources for evaluating autocentrism. This has
pitfalls. The literary sources may reflect factional or elitist
viewpoints. In the event, we need to look out for discriminatory
practices, whether sanctioned by laws or custom, that may be
rooted in autocentric ideologies. I take these to be more reliable
indicators of autocentrism.
Ancient Greece.
It appears that the Greeks first acquired a consciousness of
their distinctiveness--separate from the barbarians--in the eight
century BCE. However, this was not accompanied by a sense of
superiority; this emerged much later, during the fifth and fourth
centuries BCE, in the course of their rivalry with the Persians.
Aristotle's Politics
represents Greek autocentrism at its most rigorous. He argues
that barbarians are deficient in reasoning and lack the ability
to govern--and hence, they are 'by nature' fit to be slaves,
whereas the Greeks are born to be free and to govern others.
Aristotle argued that the Greeks combine the virtues of Asiatics
and Europeans while avoiding their defects. If only "they
were united they would rule over everyone."
It appears, however, that Aristotle represented
a minority position. Further, even Aristotle's arguments should
not be equated with modern racism; the barbarians he excluded
are not a racial category. Most remarkably, when Alexander went
out and conquered the world, he disregarded the advice of Aristotle,
his teacher. He refused to treat the defeated Persians as "natural
slaves." Instead his policies suggest that he wanted to
create a joint Macedonian/Persian world empire.
Medieval Islam.
There are two organizing principles that medieval Islam employed
to classify societies: one based on faith, another on climatic
zones.
Islamic society was a community of faith,
whose membership depended only on the acceptance of Islam--not
on color, class, lineage, or ethnicity. In theory, at least during
the early period of Islam, this community of faith, Dar al-Islam
(the House of Peace), was set apart from Dar al-Harb (the
House of War). Islamic rulers were required to wage constant
war against Dar al-Harb, though periods of respite were
permitted. The wars could cease only when the Dar al-Harb
was incorporated into Dar al-Islam.
Once the non-Muslims entered into Dar
al-Islam they were granted rights as dhimmis, or protected
subjects. The dhimmis did not serve in the military, and
enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy over their civil affairs.
On the other hand, they paid the jizya, a poll tax, but
this did not apply to slaves, old or sick men, women, children
and monks. Initially, the dhimmi status was accorded only
to Christians and Jews, but it was eventually extended to nearly
all non-Muslim groups.
In their climatic ethnology, the Islamic
societies followed Greek precedents. They divided the northern
hemisphere into seven latitudinal zones. It is the central zones--the
third and fourth, neither too hot nor too cold--that possessed
the greatest potential for supporting civilized societies. These
zones contained the central Arab lands, North Africa, Iran, the
northern Mediterranean, and parts of China. The first and second
zones--because of their extreme heat--and the sixth and seventh
zones--because of their extreme cold--did not support advanced
civilizations. This climatic principle was not applied too rigidly.
Although much of India and Arabia fell within the first and second
zones, both were peninsulas, which allowed for cooling and brought
them closer to the temperate climate of the central zones.
It should be noted that the essential
thrust of this climatic ethnology--that civilizational achievements
were correlated with climatic zones--had some basis in facts
at the time. Nearly every one of the advanced civilizations and
the great empires, both ancient and contemporary, were located
in the central zones. On the other hand, the achievements of
the peoples inhabiting the cold and hot zones--the Slavs, Turks,
Bulgars, Franks, Sudanese and Ethiopians--were not comparable
to those of the central zones.
There are other reasons for thinking
that ideology may not have been the principal motivation behind
this climatic construct. First, the cold and hot zones were far
removed from the Islamic heartlands, allowing a freer play to
the imagination in the description of these remote regions. Second,
the denigration of peoples in the north and south was never complete.
Thus, while the Franks are seen as coarse, filthy, sexually lax,
and lacking in the sciences, they are also described as courageous,
enterprising, disciplined and well-governed. Third, these regions
did not constitute serious threats to the Islamic empire, at
least during the early phase of Islamic conquests, when these
constructs were developed. Finally, the central zones were not
wholly Arab or Islamic; they included, both in the past and present,
a variety of non-Islamic societies. The Muslim sources were nearly
always very generous in recognizing the achievements of ancient
and contemporary civilizations.
The West, Medieval and Early Modern. In defining their self-image, the West has not
only drawn upon differences in religion, culture and climate,
but from an early date their claims of superiority have been
framed in biological metaphors, which gained greater salience
over time. We also observe a tendency, again quite early on,
to translate the ideologies of differences into systems of legal
discrimination and worse.
Although Christianity was initially a
Mediterranean religion--spanning three continents--it would acquire
a European identity starting in the seventh century. This was
the result of two parallel processes. While they destroyed the
Roman empire, the Germanic invaders soon embraced Latin Christianity
and carried it to the northern regions of Europe. As a result,
the political unity of the defunct Roman Empire was replaced
by a deeper cultural unity based in Christianity, a common language
(Latin), and a hierarchy of priests centered in Rome. At the
same time, as the Islamic empire conquered Christian domains
outside Europe, a politically fragmented Europe increasingly
emphasized its Christian identity. This identity found early
expression in the wars against heretics, persecution of Jews,
and the demonization of Islam.
The three remaining components of Western
autocentrism--a superior geography, race and divine preferment--were
derived from ancient Greece and Israel. Although, the Greeks
had two systems of ordering the world, the division into three
continents and the division into seven latitudinal climes, it
is perhaps not too difficult to understand why medieval Europe
opted for the former. The climatic scheme placed northern Europe
in the less desirable fifth and sixth zones, whose frigid climate
did not support intellectual vigor or high civilization. On the
other hand, the continental system allowed Europeans to appropriate
one of three equal continents, and endow it with a temperate
climate.
The continental system had another advantage
in constructing a European autocentrism: it allocated one continent
to each of the sons of Noah. Denys Hay has shown in Europe:
The Emergence of An Idea that a racial and continental
construction of the Noachian legend began with Josephus, a Jewish
scholar of the first century BCE, and it was firmly established
by fifth century CE. Christian Europe was identified with Japheth,
who had been promised dominion over the children of Shem and
Ham, now identified with Asia and Africa. At the same time, the
Africans, identified with the Hamites, would serve both Europe
and Asia.
There is some disagreement about whether
ethnicity in early medieval Europe was a social or racial construct.
It is clear that the discourse about ethnicity, even in this
early period, was framed in terms of racial concepts--including
blood, stock, gens, natio--but Robert Bartlett, in The
Making of Europe, believes that "its medieval reality
was almost entirely cultural." Richard Hoffman, in Studies
in Medieval and Renaisance History, disagrees. He maintains
that the use of such terms by medieval writers show "a fundamentally
biological explanation of how the groups came into being."
In any case, even Bartlett speaks of an "intensification
of racial feeling in the later Middle Ages" that was accompanied
by a "new biological racism."
The later middle ages are also marked
by legal discrimination against native populations in Europe's
periphery--Ireland, Wales and Eastern Europe--controlled by the
Germans, Franks and Englishmen. Starting in the fourteenth century,
the towns and guilds in these areas began to restrict membership
by race, residential areas were segregated by race, languages
and cultural practices belonging to native populations were banned,
and marriages between conquering and native populations were
prohibited. Racism and discrimination intensified during the
later Middle Ages.
The class conflict, between lords and
serfs, during the Middle Ages is also framed in the language
of racism, lineage in this case. According to Paul Freedman,
Images
of the Medieval Peasant, the medieval writers commonly
describe the serfs as stupid, malformed, grotesque, dwelling
in filth and excrement, and closer to beast than humans. In addition,
this degradation of serfs is attributed to their lineage, their
connection to the accursed line of Cain, Ham or both. In short,
the serfs are savages who are fitted by nature, or their inherited
sins, to the hard and humiliating conditions to which they are
born.
The idiom of race enters into Europe's
autocentric discourse in a variety of contexts during the early
modern period. While the persecution, expulsion and forced conversion
of Jews and Muslims in Spain may have been motivated primarily
by Christian bigotry, conversion did not win the Conversos and
Moriscos--the converted Jews and Muslims--acceptance into Spanish
society. Careers in the church and state were restricted to those
who could prove a Christian lineage before the Inquisition. The
Moriscos were eventually expelled in the early seventeenth century.
In the Americas, the Spaniards quickly
constructed a system of racial discrimination to justify their
exploitation of the indigenous Indians. According to Peggy Liss
in Mexico Under Spain they lost no time in imposing a
"rudimentary apartheid policy" under which a white
Spanish elite extracted labor and goods from the dark Indians.
In 1550, Juan Sepúlveda, the royal chaplain and philosopher,
produced an elaborate defense of these policies.
Although some medieval writers identified
Africans as descendents of Ham, their systematic denigration
as an inferior, savage race began only after the mid-fifteenth
century when their blackness became a "master symbol"
of all negative racial characteristics. In Spanish Americas,
the ban on enslavement of Indians, introduced in 1542, would
not be extended to Africans. Alden Vaughan and Virginian Vaughan,
in The William And Mary Quarterly, attest to the "sheer
accumulation of derogatory references [to blacks] in narratives,
plays, poems, and other printed and visual material in the second
half of the sixteenth century," in Elizabethan England,
and these denigrative images "transcended class, gender,
age and levels of literacy."
China.
The Chinese have always cultivated a sense of superiority, but
this was based on cultural rather than biological distinctions.
The Chinese texts rarely make any references to the physical
appearance of barbarians. It is striking that a biological racism
did not enter into the Chinese discourse even during the three
centuries of "endemic ethnic conflict" that began in
the late third century CE.
The centrality of culture--rather than
race--in the Chinese world-view had an important corollary. Nearly
always, this translated into civilizing mission as state policy,
not merely a propaganda tool. In the Confucian cannon, the chief
instrument of this civilizing mission was always education. This
policy produced not only an expansion of the boundaries of the
Chinese state but the eventual absorption of the conquered peoples
into the Chinese cultural sphere.
The one aberrant exception to this occurs
towards the end of the nineteenth century when, defeated by the
West, China's reformers adapted the racist ideology of the West.
Sun Yat-Sen spoke of Chineseness "running in the blood."
And these ideas became a central part of the Guomindang ideology
in Taiwan.
Concluding Remarks
The review of autocentrisms across four
civilizations has yielded results which are more often at variance
with a priori expectations.
While theory would suggest that stronger
groups, in asymmetric relationships, will seek to perpetuate
their dominance with autocentric constructs, this was not always
the case. The ancient Greeks adopted an attitude of superiority
towards the Asiatics only briefly, during the fourth century
BCE, when the Persians threatened them. In fact, Hellenic civilization
moved east after Alexander's conquest, and it was there, in partnership
with the Asiatics, that it continued to flour-ish for several
more centuries. Similarly, the power of Islamic socie-ties was
rarely founded, in theory or practice, on a racial stratification.
The Islamic elites claimed cultural superiority not for particular
races, but for peoples living in central climatic zones, which
included peoples other than themselves. While the Chinese empires
claimed centrality, this too was based on cultural distinctions,
not race. It was always their official policy to assimilate the
barbarians, not to exclude them.
It would appear that the Europeans are
the exceptions to this. The evidence suggests that stronger groups
in Europe, as early as the twelfth century, rather quickly moved
towards autocentric constructs with a racial content. This may
be observed in their relations with subjugated populations that
were ethnically or racially different, both inside and outside
Europe. Moreover, the autocentric myths were also translated
into discriminatory policies--sometimes, genocidal policies--against
the weaker groups.
This means is that Samir Amin's construction
of Eurocentrism as a capitalist ideology, though fundamentally
correct, needs to be modified in one important respect. It appears
that the racist conceptions that underpin this ideology represent
are not unique to the capitalist epoch. The Franks, Germans,
English and Spaniards used race to justify their dominance well
before global capitalism, and global inequalities, had taken
a firm hold. The roots of European racism are older than capitalism.
M. Shahid Alam
is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston.
His second book, Poverty
from the Wealth of Nations was published by Palgrave (2000).
He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu.
Copyright: M. Shahid Alam.
Today's Features
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jere Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|