ORIENTALISM - Ed Said

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident)but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or understand as "we" do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is - and does not simply represent- a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with "our" world. (12)

Bernard S.Cohn- 'The Command of Language and the Language of Command' (SS-4)

In this essay I will argue that the tribute represented in print and manuscript is that of complicated and complex forms of knowledge created by the Indians, but codified and transmitted by Europeans. The conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge. In these 'official' sources we can trace the changes in forms of knowledge which the conquerors defined as useful for their own ends. (276)

Persian was a language which required highly specialized forms of knowledge, particularly to draft the many forms of documents which were the basis of official communication throughout much of India. Persian as a language was part of a much larger system of meanings which was in turn based on cultural premises which led to Indians constructing action in ways far different from those on which the British based thier own. (278-79)

... Relations between persons, groups, 'nations' (quam) and ruler and ruled were constituted differently in Europe and India. The British in seventeenth century India operated on the idea that everything and everyone had a 'price'. Hence, the cloth which was the staple of their trade was seen as a utilitarian object whose value was set in a market. They never seemed to realize that certain kinds of cloth and clothes, jewels, arms and animals had values that were not established in terms of a market-determined price, but were objects in a culturally constructed system by which authority and social relations were literally constituted and transmitted. ... (279)

Meaning for the English was something attributed to a word, a phrase or an object, which could be determined and translated, hopefully with a synonym which had a direct referent to something in what teh English thought of as a 'natural' world. Everything had a more or less specific referent for the English. With the Indians, meaning was not necessarily constructed in the same fashion. The effect and affect of hearing a Brahmin chanting in Sanskrit at a sacrifice did not entail meaning in the European sense; it was to have one's substance literally affected by the sound. When a Mughal ruler issued a farman or a parwana, it was more than an order or an entitlement. These were more than messages or, as the British construed them, a contract or right. Rather, they were a sharing, through the act of creating the document, in the authority and substance of the sender. Hence, in the drawing up of a document, a letter, a treaty, everything about it was charged with a significance which transcended what might be thought of as its practical purpose. the paper, the forms of address, the preliminary invocative phrases, the type of script, the elaboration of the terminology, the grammar, the seals used, the particular status of the composer and writer of the document, its mode of transmission, and the form of delivery, were all meaningful.(279-80)

... Political strategies and tactics had to be created and codified into diplomacy through which the country powers could be converted into allied dependancies. The vast social world that was India had to be classified, categorized and bounded before it could be hierarchized. (283-84)
As with many discursive formations and their discourses, many of its major effects were unintended, as those who were to be the objects produced by the formation often turned it to their own ends. None the less the languages which the Indians were to speak and read were to be transformed. The discursive formation was to participate in the creation and reification of social groups with their varied interests. It was to establish and regularize a discourse of differentiations which came to mark the social and political map of nineteenth-century India. (284)

M.Miles

Studying Responses to Disability in South Asian Histories
The initial motivation for studying responses to disabilities was to learn more about South Asian concepts of disability and the cultural baggage attached. There are, however, problems in trying to 'discover' the disability concepts of people long ago, especially those who spoke and thought in a variety of different languages. Fundamental concepts of fitness and unfitness, health and chronic infirmity, ability and lack of ability, are seldom subjected to analysis by ordinary people going about their daily business, or even by writers- such notions lie too deep for frequent review. One finds little direct discussion in Asian antiquity of the 'meaning of disability'. Further, some disabilities appear to be more universallycomprehensible than others- blindness, for example, presents problems of mobility and self-protection in practically any culture, whereas mental retardation is more obviously socially constructed and dependant uppn the sorts of local demands made upon intellectual and communicational abilities (Miles, 1992). The difficulties of investigation are compounded by cross-application of vocabulary. The inability to see physically is commonly used as a metaphor for spiritual blindness or foolishness, which may also be attributed to the inability or unwillingness to hear. This is so in modern Britain, and in the Indo-Aryan vocabulary back to antiquity. One cannot freeze and inspect language at a given period- so trying to 'understand South Asian historical concepts of disability' would mean comparing a muddle of current ideas in English with guesses at fragments of an ancient muddle. My ambitions in this direction had to be modified. (Disability and Society, Vol 16:1, 2001, 143-160)

'Emancipating Disability Studies' - Vic Finkelstein

We now have three boundaries demarcating discrete fields for the separation of libraries of information abou the separation of libraries of information abou tthe nature of disability. In my view these are:

a) A primary knowledge boundary dividing comprehension of the 'normal' (i.e. able-bodied lifestyles) from the special disability services (their needs, goals, ways of being cared for, etc.- i.e. the disabled career).

On the 'disabled' side of this fence two additional boundaries have further dismantled our integrity so that the development of knowledge can always be located in an either/or dilemma between two fields:

b) The search for a 'cure'- the health field
c) The provision of 'care'- the welfare field

It seems to me that, until the emergence of 'disability studies' in the late 1970s, knowledge about disabled life was incarcerated in an isolated field. Disability studies (the study of disabled people's lifestyles and aspirations) clearly could not emerge within the bounds of any discipline that had percolated out of 'normal' academic studies, simply because we had been removed from this arena and all analysis allocated to the disability experts in 'cure or care' (health and welfare) disciplines. (1998, 32-33)

EMILY MARTIN- Flexible Bodies

Even though the task of finding culprits seems both fruitless and misguided, the implications of the ideas that I discuss in this book do include an emerging sense of an organization of the world that will benefit only certain people. So, even though no one individual, and no one group, is at fault, it is no less important to identify what the emerging "common sense" is and how we come to think of it as natural and desirable. (1994,16-17)

the social model of disability: an outdated ideology? SHAKESPEARE/ WATSON

Many disabled people do not want to see themselves as disabled, either in terms of the medical model or the social model. They downplay the significance of their impairments, and seek access to a mainstream identity. They do not have a political identity, because they do not see themselves as part of the disability movement either. This refusal to define oneself by impairment or disability has sometimes been seen as internalised oppression or false consciousness by radicals in the disability movement. Yet this attitude can itself be patronising and
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oppressive. People do have a choice as to how they identify, within obvious limitations. What is wrong with seeing yourself as a person with a disability, rather than a disabled person, or even identifying simply as a human being, or a citizen, rather than as a member of a minority community? After all, identity politics can be a prison, as well as a haven. The unwillingness to identify as disabled - either in a political sense, or in a medical sense - is very evident in our recent research with children with impairments (the ‘Life as a disabled child’ project, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council). We started with the intention of imposing our social model perspective on their lives. Yet, because we were also following the precepts of the new sociology of childhood, and treating children as agents, and their testimony as reliable, we were forced to rethink our adult-oriented social model assumptions. The children easily identified the social barriers which they experienced, and were often vociferous in complaining about the treatment which they received. But most of them wanted to be seen as normal, though different, and actively resisted definition as disabled (Priestley et al, 1999). It has been argued that many people with learning difficulties resist being defined as disabled or different (Finlay & Lyons, 1998). We hypothesise that the same might apply to older people with impairments or chronic illnesses, who make up the majority of 'disabled people' in Britain and America. There is also the issue of multiple identities. While some people with impairment resist identification as disabled, because they want to see themselves as normal, others are more likely to identify in terms of alternative parts of their experience. For
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example, gender may be more salient, or perhaps ethnicity, or sexuality, or class, or marital status. Research on disabled sexuality has found gay people, for example, who prioritise their sexual identity, and ignore their experience of impairment (Shakespeare et al, 1996). Social model perspectives have not proved very effective in reconciling the dimensions of gender, race and sexuality within or alongside disability (Morris, 1991, Vernon, 1996). Most people are simultaneously situated in a range of subject positions. To assume that disability will always be the key to their identity is to recapitulate the error made by those from the medical model perspective who define people by their impairment. Any individual disabled person may strategically identify, at different times, as a person with a particular impairment, as a disabled person, or by their particular gender, ethnicity, sexuality, occupation, religion, or football team. Identity cannot be straightforwardly read off any more, it is, within limit, a matter of choice. Here we are with Foucault: “Do not ask me who I am, and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” (quoted in Kritzman, 1990, ix)
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Shakespeare/social%20model%20of%20disability.pdf

HABITATIONS OF MODERNITY- Dipesh Chakrabarty

...subaltern named a political position that, by itself, was incapable of thinking the state; this was a thought to be brought to that position by the revolutionary intellectual. once the subaltern could imagine/ think the state, he transcended, theoretically speaking, the condition of subalternity. (pg. 34)

Patrick Loobuyck: Intrinsic and equal human worth in a secular worldview.

The idea of equal human worth is central in almost all major ethical traditions in history. The bible, Rabbi Hillel, Confusious and the Indian epic the Mahabharata, all accept, in some form or other, a version of the golden rule that encourages equal consideration of interests.[7] Furthermore, the experience of all human beings as sacred and intrinsically valuable is widely shared among religions and is the basis of many systems of religious ethics.[8]
In line with Kant, as well as other modern moral philosophers – and especially for humanists – the idea of equal and intrinsic human worth is a necessary condition for morality. This condition is a central presupposition of the egalitarian liberal stance of Dworkin, Rawls, and Nagel, as well as in Nozick's libertarianism. The Benthamite version of utilitarianism (e.g. of Peter Singer) also uses the equality principle that each is to count as one and none is to count as more than one, in spite of the fact that, in that utilitarianism, people do not have intrinsic value.[9]
Of course, the idea of intrinsic and equal human worth is also the basis of human rights discourse. Every declaration of human rights alludes in one way or another to the concept of ‘the inherent dignity of
JSRI • No.9 Winter 2004 p.59
all human beings'. Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. By now most secular and many religious moral systems, theories, and practices accept that declaration as a legitimate and necessary basis. Human rights discourse is accepted as the lingua franca of international moral and political thought. Human rights are the universal minimum minimorum (a decidedly ‘thin' theory of what is right) for every political and moral practice.[10]
Many secular moralists built upon and refer to the discourse of human rights, because for secularists the idea of human rights has replaced the earlier authority and certainty of religion as the basis for morality. In our time the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has become the sacred text of what Elie Wiesel has called a ‘world-wide secular religion'.[11] Human rights have become the major secular article of faith (Ignatieff even warns of ‘idolatry') of a culture that fears it believes in nothing else.[12]
As such, the idea of intrinsic and equal human worth is one of the most important basic theses in secular morality. However, as we will see, the idea of intrinsic and equal human value has in fact a natural home in theological metaphysics, and does not easily fit into secular moral philosophy.[13] For human rights are based on two ideas: first, that every human being is ‘sacred'[14] – or in secular terms: each and every human being is ‘inviolable', has ‘inherent dignity and worth', is ‘an end in himself'. Second, because every human being is sacred, certain things ought not to be done to any human being, and certain other things ought to be done for every human being.[15] This is called the moral principle of human rights: human rights are claim-rights and entail correlative moral duties of other persons.[16] In the words of Mackie we could say that human rights entail an ‘objective requirement'.[17] The fact that people have human rights implies a categorical imperative: it express a reason for acting that is unconditional in the sense of not being contingent upon any present desire, preference, or interest of the agent.
It is very hard to place all this in a secular worldview, because an indifferent universe cannot make room for intrinsic values, the sacredness of human beings, and objectively prescriptive properties. The putative queerness of moral rights lies with the notion of moral bindingness. It seems that many secular moralists presuppose theses that they cannot really justify. The ideas of human dignity, worth, and sacredness appear to confuse what is with what ought to be. They are controversial because each version of them must make metaphysical claims about human nature and objective requirements beyond what we can know empirically.[18]
3. The project of naturalistic accommodation