Orientalism and Enframing

Over the past couple weeks, the major discussion in class has been about Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt.  A large amount of Mitchell’s book discusses the use of enframing within the context of colonial Egypt.  Enframing is the creation of a hierarchy that makes knowledge about people/things more accessible.  Those doing enframing want to “know” the inhabitants, and the implication is that enframing is used primarily for exploitive purposes.  Exploitive purposes are usually based off exerting the highest productivity for a populace.  Often in order to create the hierarchies, the organization doing the enframing, the organization needs to tear down old ideas, structures, and even spaces.  Enframing is evident throughout Mitchell’s work but especially as he describes the new model villages favored by 19^th century Egyptian planners as well as the city improvements seen in places such as Cairo.  The important thing to recognize about enframing is that it is not a specifically modern development.  It would be a mistake to attribute such a discourse as only a product of modernity.  Certainly, modern facets of technology have eased the ability of the state or other organization to implement enframing structures (see my last blog post).  However, the desire for humans to control others is perhaps older than all other political instincts.  

            In order to better understand how enframing is not a product of colonialization but rather is a basic­­­ nature born out of fundamental human desires, it is important to look at the history of enframing as a discourse.  Particularly, one can focus on perhaps the most significant discourses that can be defined as an enframing process within a post-colonial context: Orientalism.  Edward Said makes the argument that Orientalism, the study of non-Western cultures and histories, is fundamentally a hegemonic discourse designed to create a non-Western Other.  Through art, literature, and historical works, Said analyzes how the Middle East in particular was defined by the West as the Other.  Orientialism as a field of studies is a relatively modern term with its beginnings as a field usually attributed to the 18^th or 19^th centuries (perhaps the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt would be a good date to start with).  However, the larger process of Orientialism is much older.  Europe defining the East as the Other stretches back through at least a couple millennia.  The Ancient Greeks were especially adept at defining their Persian rivals in terms that would not be out of place in 19^th century Britain or France.  Greece itself was soon defined as the East by the new Roman Empire; ironically, the Eastern Roman Empire itself (although many would argue that by this point the Roman Empire post-Justinian was heavily divorced from its Latin origins) would be defined as the East by Western European states in the Middle Ages.  Orientalism and the enframing discourse that is an aspect of it was not a product of colonialism at this time.  In fact, Alexander the Great can be defined as the only “Western” up till the 19^th century that was able to control the “East”.  A history of Orientalism (itself an enframing discourse) shows that these ideas are much older than colonialism itself.  For a scholar studying enframing, it is important to recognize that these tendencies are not products of their time but rather products of humanity.  

BDF