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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2009
As a field of study, the Middle East, like its predecessor the “Orient”, continues to exist more concretely within a vast realm of Western texts, both artistic and ethnographic, than it does on the ground. This ingrained disparity between representation and social reality has motivated some scholars to examine this literature as the manifestation of physical or ideological domination. In Edward Said's Orientalism the interpretation of this literature becomes a search for determining social and political forces, the evidence of which, like the nineteenth-century anthropological notion of “survivals”, resides in each text as an implicit network of unconscious images and metaphors. Similarly, Abdelkebir Khatibi, investigating the historical and ethnographic texts of Jacques Berque, views this literature as determined by the requirements of an exigent and compelling, but inherently flawed, Western metaphysic; an “onto-tháologie” which, in confronting questions of essence and existence, must formulate an “other” to realize its “self”.
Author's note: This paper was originally written for Dale F. Eickelman's seminar “The Arabian Peninsula” at New York University and I wish to thank him for his encouragement and guidance during and since that course. Michel Beaujour's advice on both theoretical and stylistic concerns is also gratefully acknowledged. Thomas O. Beidelman gave me some valuable, if critical, commentary and Abdellah Hammoudi's interest and patience also furthered this paper. I regret that it does not accommodate all the suggestions, stylistic, methodological, and theoretical, which they made.
1 A pointed example can be found in Raban, Jonathan, Arabia: A Journey through the Labyrinth (New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1979).Google Scholar
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7 Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973);Google ScholarBourdieu, Pierre, “Genese et structure du champ religieux” Revue française de sociologie, 12 (1971), 295–334;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDale, F. Eickelman, “The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20 (1978), 485–516.Google Scholar
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