Sunday 28 September 2014

Palestine - Accidental Orientalism

Edward Said was one of Palestine's most famous sons.  Born in Jerusalem in 1935, he was brought up in Mandate Palestine and in Egypt and he was educated in the US (Princeton and Harvard).  I'd heard about him before I started researching Palestine, of course, but I'd never read his key text Orientalism (1978), so I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to do so.

Said's theory on orientalism

Moorish bath (1870) by Jean-Leon Gerome
To be honest, I already had enough material to write a blog post by the time I'd finished his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism and I immediately connected to the theme and understood the main arguments behind Said's theory, i.e. that Orientalism is a fake area of cultural study, which says more about the Europeans who invented these ideas about their eastern neighbours, than those who actually live in the Middle East/Far East, outside Europe and 'the West'. 

According to Said, orientalism isn't merely a West/East division, it's an our culture/Other division that has served to justify wars, colonisation and inhumane behaviour.  Interestingly, he puts forward the case that every Empire claims that it is working in the best interests of the people who are being colonised and that each Empire claims that its circumstances are different than the circumstances of previous Empires.  How true that is!

The link with occidentalism and cannibalism

I've blogged about orientalism before, when I was researching Xinjiang/Uyghuristan in 2011 - strictly speaking, that blog post was more about occidentalism (i.e. the Middle Kingdom's view of exotic lands like Turkestan, which lies to the west of China), but the principle behind orientalism and occidentalism is pretty much the same, i.e. projecting your own culture's fears, desires, expectations onto another culture you don't really understand.  I also came across this 'cultural projection' when I was blogging about cannibalism in the South Pacific.  

The West and the non-West

Harem bath by Jean-Leon Gerome
I agree with Said's point of view, as I think our image of the Middle East/Far East/non-Western countries says more about who we are than the people who live in those places.  Our concept of the Middle East probably wouldn't mean much to someone living in Palestine and the problem with generalisations, of course, is that they assume that other people's cultures are monolithic, that everyone there is the same and there is no diversity in terms of how people see the world or interact with it.  This is the basis of prejudice which can quickly become racist and patronising.  

However, as Said argues, our tendency to propagate an East/West dichotomy is so strong that we do it without even thinking.  I've talked about 'the West' many times in previous blog posts which, whilst this recognises diversity in non-European cultures, still imposes a West/non-West understanding on the world.  It's only after reading Said's book that I'm starting to question what 'the West' really means and whether or not it's useful to continue using this kind of false dichotomy?  

A new world of humanism

Said promotes an approach which he calls humanist - which means that when we try to understand people from other parts of the world, we shouldn't immediately fall into the West/non-West distinctions, but look at each culture/situation/tradition with the understanding that we are all human. Israel/Palestine is a good example of how orientalism colours the debate - we think Palestine/East and Israel/West, which usually also means Palestine/Muslim and Israel/Jewish, rather than thinking purely about human beings who lose their homes, their loved ones or their lives.  

In the unravelling of his opening chapter, Said shows that European fear of the East is deep-rooted and steeped in centuries of misinformation and prejudice. He goes right back to the time of Euripedes' Bacchae and Aeschylus' The Persians.  Invasion from the east was a very real fear for most of Europe's history and still manifests itself in modern Europe in the guise of Islamophobia and racism.

Relentless invasion  

It's interesting to note that, even in modern times, we've retained this fear of the East. Whether it's Youtube videos of the (real) North Korean army marching, or a depiction of the (fictional) march of the Unsullied in The Game of Thrones, the armies of the East are seen as relentless, numerous, faceless, voiceless.  

I think the 2007 action film 300 about the Persian invasion of Europe and the Battle of Thermopylae captures the essence of European fears, echoing down the centuries to a modern-age that still struggles to come to terms with cultures that are 'Other'.  You just need to watch the trailer to get a sense of how we perceive the Other to be frightening, freaky and threatening.




Accidental orientalism

The words accidental and occidental are from the same root, meaning 'to fall' - accidental when you fall over and occidental meaning that the sun falls from the sky (in the West).  By contrast, the word oriental comes from the verb 'to rise' - you can also see it in the word aurora which means 'dawn'.  I thought I would play with the words in my title for this blog post, as I feel that I've been an accidental orientalist.  

Thinking in terms of West/non-West is second-nature to many of us and I want to get away from that and understand cultures from their own point of view. Of course, language is a real barrier, as I'm trying to understand most of the world through English, which has already inherited an ingrained cultural orientalism.  

I guess my main experience outside all of this is in relation to Russian culture. I speak Russian and can read source materials without any need for translation.  I've always thought that Russians are misunderstood by most of the world, because the way things sound in Russian and how they translate into English is quite different, but perhaps it's the case that misunderstandings happen between all cultures, as we depend on languages and concepts steeped in centuries of orientalism to make sense of the modern world?

Palestine and Egypt

Reading Said's book has made me more aware of the strong cultural connections between Palestine and Egypt.  I've also got a heightened awareness of orientalism and I've been looking out for it in my everyday life. As I just happen to be listening to Kate Bush's third album Never for Ever (1980) at the moment, I couldn't help but notice the blatant orientalism in her song Egypt (and the accompanying video).  I'm going to leave you with this, as evidence of how orientalism works in our culture, but also because I love Kate Bush!





Image credits:

Both paintings are by the French artist (and orientalist) Jean-Leon Gerome and are in the public domain.  With increased European colonisation in the East and new opportunities to travel, the 19th century saw an explosion of interest in the 'exotic' East and Gerome's paintings made the promises about the sensuality of the East that would attract European men to travel there and administer the colonial governments.

It's interesting that we now criticise the East for being too conservative - whereas, in the 19th century, Eastern women were seen as shamelessly sensual, now they are depicted as religiously repressed.  I think that says a lot about how we project our understanding of the world onto other people.  

Saturday 20 September 2014

Palestine - The Cause of a Country

I've known for some time that I would be blogging about Palestine and it's interesting in recent months to see how the Palestinian Territories, particularly Gaza, have come and gone in the news. Palestine has become a real cause célèbre in the past hundred years, particularly on the left of the political spectrum and it's fair to say that most of us will know more about Palestine than we do about other places I've blogged about, eg. Eritrea or Kiribati!

Or do we? 

As I've started researching about Palestine and started trying to see the world through Palestinian eyes, my first conclusion is that Palestine is a place we think we know, through news headlines and politics, but what do most of us really know about Palestinian culture, beyond the political sphere? I don't want to criticise the well-meaning solidarity that exists for Palestine around the world, but I'm coming to the conclusion that Palestine is a cause for most people when, what the Palestinians really need, is a country.

The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict - A Very Short Introduction

The Dome of the Rock by F.R.L.
I've always wanted to read a book that would explain the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in a concise and clear way and Martin Bunton's The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict - A Very Short Introduction (2013 - part of the Oxford University Press series that I love so much!) does just that.

Like most people out there, I had a rough idea of the history of Palestine/Israel and a sense of the reasons for conflict, but Bunton's book helped me order the events and understand the important milestones, particularly in the 20th century, when Palestinians saw their mandated territory shrink from 75% to 22% of the land currently recognised as Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The issues are complicated, needless to say, and I don't have time to go through all of them, but I will share one interesting thing that I learned regarding Jewish settlement in the eastern Mediterranean towards the end of Ottoman rule and during the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948).  At first the need for a Jewish homeland was so strong that most Jewish settlers bought land in the plains between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea, rather than the ancestral Jewish homelands in the mountains of Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. the West Bank).

View from the Garden of Gethsemane by F.R.L.
The plains contain some good farming land, particularly for citrus fruits, with easy access to the port of Jaffa and European markets, however, this part of Palestine was also vulnerable to Bedouin raids, so the majority of the Palestinian population stayed in the mountains.

Thus, the Jewish homeland, which is now Israel, ended up in lands that weren't ancestral Jewish lands and the Palestinian population ended up in the West Bank, which is the ancestral homeland, not just of Judaism, but also of Christianity and with sacred Islamic sites as well.

Unfortunately, nationalism has dominated the Palestinian-Israeli discourse, with each side claiming the other has no real identity and a reluctance on the part of the Israeli government to fully hand over control of the West Bank to the Palestinian authorities, usually under pressure from right-wing Jewish groups to hold on to the Jewish ancestral homelands.

Which Palestine?

Christian nuns on the Temple Mount by F.R.L.
I'll probably need to explain what I mean when I say Palestine, as well, as Palestine means different things to different people.  There is Palestine as seen by the majority of Palestinians, an historic land incorporating the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

There are the Palestinian territories, the de facto political entities of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, currently under varying degrees of Israeli occupation.

There is the State of Palestine, the nation declared by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1988.  It's the most internationally accepted form of Palestine, being an observer state at the U.N. and recognised de jure by more than two-thirds of the world's countries (United States, Australia and European countries being notable exceptions).

The Palestine I want to blog about is not so much a geographical one, as a cultural one.  More than any other place I've blogged about, it's going to be hard to get away from the politics of Palestine (even food can be political!) but I'll try to learn more about the culture of Palestine through movies, books, music and cooking.

It's hard to learn about Palestine and not learn about Israel, but my blog posts will focus on Palestinian culture, rather than Israeli culture, regardless of the geographical realities or political understanding.

I hope you'll join me on this learning journey over the next month or so, I'm sure it will be an interesting experience!

Image credits:

To illustrate this blog post, I wanted to share some photographs from Flickr member F.R.L. who is originally from Munich in Germany.  Rather than create just another slide show for friends and relatives, F.R.L. took the brave move to put his photos on Flickr!  Thanks for sharing these images with us F.R.L. and yes, they are interesting!

You can see more of F.R.L.'s photos on his photo stream.  

Monday 15 September 2014

Happy Blogiversary! Learning about the World for five years now!

It's five years to the day since I published my first blog post on Learning about the World.  As a tribute to the 5th anniversary of this blog, I've coined a new word - blogiversary!

I've learned a lot over the past five years and documenting my learning experience has been incredibly rewarding, not to mention necessary, as otherwise I don't think I would be able to remember everything that I've learned.

To date, I've blogged about 35 countries/places around the world, including four new places since my last blogiversary: Liberia, Maharashtra, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Oaxaca.    Highlights of the past year have included discovering the works of Graham Greene, watching almost 30 hours of Bollywood musicals, falling in love with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and learning to cook a Mexican mole.

Some stats


Worldwide visits to Learning about the World
My blog has had 46,204 page views until just now and more than 10,000 of these have been in the last year.  Actually, August 2014 saw the most page views ever in a single month at 1,784 so Learning about the World is more popular than ever!

Having said that, unique visitor numbers since last September (3,670) are down slightly compared to the previous year, but the number of returning visitors has increased from 18% to 22%.  The average 'session duration' has also increased by 28.72%, which means that visitors are spending more time reading the blog than they used to - always a positive sign!

The top twenty countries in terms of visitors since last year are:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. India
4. Australia
5. Canada
6. Italy
7. Germany
8. Ireland
9. Brazil
10. France
11. Saudi Arabia
12. Cambodia
13. Belgium
14. Barbados
15. Netherlands
16. New Zealand
17. United Arab Emirates
18. Spain
19. Malaysia
20. Indonesia

Whilst the United States still tops the list, the number of US readers has dropped by about 30% since last year, which is interesting and I wonder if it's related to the fact that I haven't blogged about the US during that period? The fact that there are 30% less readers from the US, yet overall visits are only marginally lower this year suggests that the blog has had more international readers than ever before.

India has pushed Australia out of the third place and I've seen a 20% increase in the number of Indian readers, which might, likewise, be due to the fact that I blogged about Maharashtra.

I've lost some countries from the top 20, such as Russia, Sweden and Fiji, but I've gained others, notably Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia!  The biggest increase for one country/place has been Jersey, where my number of readers has quadrupled!

The blog has had visitors from 157 countries in total (11 new countries since last year) and the newest country to appear on my readership list was Andorra in August 2014.

Popular posts

You can see a list of the ten most popular posts of all time below:


And it's interesting to compare this with the ten most popular posts when I blogged about this last year:


Sum total of my learning

Since last September, in my pursuit of learning I have:

Read 22 books
Watched 21 movies
Learned how to cook 4 new dishes
Listened to countless hours of classical music, Bollywood music, Mariachi and Son

I'm looking forward to another year of learning, reading, cooking, movie-watching and blogging - don't forget to join me!

Next up . . . P . . .

Sunday 7 September 2014

Oaxaca - The Final Word

The time has come to say Kande tne tíu to Oaxaca.  I started blogging about Oaxaca back in June and all of the reading and research that I've done on Oaxaca and Mexico has kept me entertained during a busy summer period.

I've learned about the history of Mexico and its complicated relationship with its northern neighbour, the United States of America.  I've blogged about eye contact and the culture significance of too much or too little eye contact.  I've learned about the impact of contact with Europe and the Columbian Exchange.  I've read a novel set in the Mexican jungle and learned to cook Mole, a dish that Oaxaca is particularly famous for.  I've listened to Mexican music and learned about muxe and mezcal.

Of course, there were many topics I didn't have time to cover and I would like to have done more research into the following areas:

Juan O'Donojú - last European ruler of Mexico
- The languages of Mexico
- Apparitions of the Virgin Mary
- The influence of Gold and Silver on the global economy
- Cabrera and the Virgin of Guadeloupe
- The Irish in Mexico
- Murals
- Chocolate
- Chillies
- The Aztec Gods
- Juarez and the denial of race
- The Oaxaca uprising in 2006
- The Danza de los Viejitos
- Reasons for societal collapse
- The Zapotec and Mixtec writing systems
- Itzcuintli - the Mexican hairless dogs
- Volcanoes
- La Malinche

Books

I'm trying to keep the number of books I read for this blog to a minimum, as I have other more general reading that I need to do.  So I managed to restrict myself to just four books this time around:

Mexican reading list by me
Mexico: Insight Guides (2010), ed. Alyse Dar. I found the Insight guide invaluable, as usual.  I generally buy these guidebooks second-hand, as they're for research only, so the edition  I read is already a few years old.  I definitely want to travel to Mexico at some point in the future and researching Oaxaca has given me some ideas of where I'd like to go and what I would like to see.  I'd also prefer to back-pack around Mexico, than spend my time on a beach in Cancun.

Conquistadors (2000) by Michael Wood, a book which accompanies the BBC series of the same name.  I loved Wood's clarity and this book gave me a very useful overview of the conquest period, not just in Mexico, but also in Peru, the Amazon region and the southern United States.  In fact, I loved Wood's writing so much, I've ordered another book by him about Alexander the Great!

The Bridge in the Jungle (1940) by B. Traven - a novel set in the jungles of southern Mexico

Sliced Iguana (2001) by Isabella Tree - a really fantastic travel book, with chapters set in Mexico City, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Movies

Mexican cinema has really caught on in recent years and I've already seen quite a few well-known Mexican movies such as Amores Perros and Como agua para chocolate.

I couldn't get my hands on any movies set in Oaxaca, so I had to content myself with re-watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006).  Apocalypto is a controversial movie in many ways.  Not only does it confuse Mayan and Aztec cultures, but it also seems to be defending the Spanish conquest of Mexico, by depicting barbaric practices like human sacrifice in pre-Hispanic Mexico and suggesting that they would have all killed each other anyway, even if the Spanish hadn't brought war and disease to the Americas.

Despite its suspiciously right-wing propaganda, I found myself enjoying Apocalypto, as it's a beautifully-shot movie and the suspense in the storyline is gripping.  Also, the protagonists turn their back on Spain and Mexico, in the end, returning to a simpler existence in the forest, which appealed to me.  I'm pasting in a trailer from YouTube, so you can get a sense of the movie for yourself, if you haven't already seen it.



The final word on Afro-Mexicans

Whilst researching about Oaxaca, I came across a place called the Costa Chica (Little Coast), which has a significant population of African descent.  Whilst many people in the Caribbean have African ancestry and countries like Brazil and the USA have sizable African-American populations, Mexico is not a country that springs to mind, when you talk about African-American culture.

So it was surprising to find that Mexico does have a very small African-American or Afro-Mexican population. European society in Mexico wasn't dependent on slave labour, as it was in places like Jamaica or Barbados, which would explain why there are so few people in 21st-century Mexico with African heritage.

In the cultural battle between European-descended Mexicans, indigenous Mexicans and the Mestizo majority population, Afro-Mexican culture has been largely ignored, neglected and even denied. Because the Afro-Mexican population is so small, they don't have a powerful voice in Mexico's ethnic arena and they have also tended to intermarry with other races and disappear into the majority mestizo population.

I guess the geographical concentration of Afro-Mexican communities in Oaxaca and Veracruz has helped preserve these two state's vestiges of Afro-Mexican culture, such as the Danza de los Diablos. It's believed that the hit song La Bamba has African origins!

Compared with countries like Jamaica (91%), USA (13%) and Brazil (7%), Mexico's African-descended population stands at less than 1% of Mexico's total population.

I'm going to leave you with a wonderful video by Toña la Negra, a famous Afro-Mexican singer:





Image credits:

The image of the reading list was taken by me.  The image of Juan O'Donojú, last European ruler of Mexico, is in the public domain.