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structuralism is a reemergence of essentialism in French philosophy, a radical departure from the dominant theme of voluntarism. Although Shalvey’s study may be lost in the plethora of secondary and tertiary literature on Uvi- Strauss and structuralism, it does merit serious consideration by anthropologists, philosophers, and historians with interests in the foundations and contemporary development of ethnological thought. It is an outstanding critical exegesis.

Orientaliam. Edward W. Said. New York: Pan- theon Books, 1978. xi + 368 pp. $15.00 (cloth).

Roger Joseph California State University, Fullerton

In the positivistic tradition in which I and most of my peen were trained, a systematic in- quiry into a subject was thought to produce “true” knowledge. Probably such an assump- tion was never correct, but at least it was com- forting. Increasingly the nature and role of knowledge have become problematic, and this book insists that knowledge systems are meta- phoric and generate their own rationality, often to suppress or redirect interpretation for socio- political goals.

For the past 20 years the French philosopher Michael Foucault has argued that historical and social interpretations are not autonomous from ideology but rather they are means of elaborat- ing justifications for the exercise of power. Ed- ward Said, following this strategy, has examined the tradition of a group of scholars who have “created” a discipline of Muslim studies- the Orientalists. This is not a book about the Mid- dle East but rather about the men who p ro duced an intellectual order, a semiotic sign system, to serve their own hegemonic interests.

Onentaltjm is not a mirror on the East but one on the West; underlying its thesis is the no- tion that knowledge is always dialectically related to a political and cultural world. Representations are “embedded first in language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer” (p.

The image of the Muslim orient that emerged in the West, according to Said, was a stereotypic

272).

one, “denuding the humanity of another cul- ture’’ (p. 108). The Arab, unable to think ra- tionally, was perceived as being controlled by untamed sexuality and unregenerate instincts. It is hardly a surprise to discover that the pioneers of the human sciences in the 19th cen- tury had rather old ideas about the Third World and its “savages” and “barbarians.” But, whereas modem anthropology purposely set about to demolish these notions, Orientalism, Said argues, was built upon them. The 19th- century inaugurators created the mental struc- tures upon which the modem Orientalists reconstructed and represented the Muslim world to their own, Western. society.

Said traces the early generation of men who involved themselves either intellectually or ar- tistically with Arabs, as he examines the texts of Sacy, Renan, Lane, Chateaubriand. Flaubert, Nerval, and Burton. He purposefully excludes the Germans, whom he sees as a reflection of French and British scholars-an assumption I am not quite sure is justified. The final chapter offen a critique of Orientalism from the late 19th century to today. We see the blatant racism of William Robertson Smith and the more subtle racism of T. E. Lawrence. Both Gibb and Massignon represent more sympathet- ic voices, yet they too have been nurtured by colonialist. dehumanized Orientalism. The latest phase has been one in which the generous spirit of a Gibb or Massignon is replaced by a hostility toward the Islamic world, as witnessed in the contrived and often cruel stereotypes of Morroe Berger, Gustave von Grunebaum, Man- fred Halpern, Raphael Patai, Sania Hamady, and Bernard Lewis. Said’s point is not that these scholars purposely misrepresented the Mid- dle East but that the Western political-intellec- tual culture that surrounded Orientalism made such representations a logical correlation to im- perialism.

Said has presented a thesis that on a number of counts is quite compelling. He seems to me, however, to have begged one major question. If discourse, by its very metanature, is destined to misrepresent and to be mediated by all sorts of private agendas, how can we represent cultural systems in ways that will allow us to escape the very dock in which Said has placed the Orien- talists? The aim of the book was not to answer that question, but surely the book itself compels us to ask the question of its author.