Said's response to Huntington
Eric Emerson (eae0696@jeeves.la.utexas.edu)
Mon, 2 Oct 1995 15:03:46 -0500
In A Clash of Civilizations, Samual Huntington's thesis of an inevitable
clash of civilization is reliant on the representation of the world as
essential and inherently conflictual. Huntington's world view is immersed
in the paranoia of an unstable world without ever examining the entirety of
complex networks of culture, language, politics, economics, and that
constitute a culture or civilizations. In response to this theory, Edward
Said attacks such way of thinking because of its reliance on essentialism,
its ability to exclude marginalized voices, and finally, how such thinking
is often, and almost inevitably, self-fulfilliing.
In response to the essential characteristic of cultures, Edward Said
argues that cultures are heterogenous and diverse. Cultures are so inter-
related that any description of a unitary and singular individual cultural
identity, Huntington's example of the world's top seven cultures being an
excellent example, is incoherent. Cultures are part of an indissoluable net-
work of power and knowledge, where our ability to define a culture is co-
constituted of our own cultural identity. There can be no 'objective'
assessment of culture without first examining our own cultural practices of
knowing. To speak of a 'Western civilization' that's in opposition to
Confucianism or Islam is to ignore how that 'Western' identity is largely
devoid of meaning outside of the historical context of the intermingling of
peoples of different race and cultures, the conquests and imperialism of
hegemonic powers, and major cultural and political achievements of the
peoples who make up the West. Huntington's approach at knowing the West,
the Buddhist, the Islamist... fails to see how our understanding of
civilizations is complicit in our ability to produce such things as the
'West' or the 'Orient(as Said refers to it).'
The second problem with Huntington's premise is his ability to exclude
marginalized voices. When Huntington defines the seven major cultures and
civilizations, he denies the infinite diversity of voices that are incor-
porated into the larger structures of Islam and West, and also the diversity
of voices that can be found outside of those structures, the Native American
voice or the Chiapas in Mexico. An example of how this thinking plays itself
out can be seen in the Arab-Israeli crisis. The US's push to check radical
Islam has led to the US endorsement of Israeli marginalization of the
Palestinian voice by denying it statehood, subsistence or even an ability
to think outside of dominant Israeli-US thinking. Even within the US's
Arab policy, we lump the Jordanians with the Syrians, the Palestinians with
the rest of the 'towel heads' while ignoring how for all of the parties there
are equally as many infinite different viewpoints. This exclusion of voices
is implicit in our treatment of them, and there subsequent reaction to
'Western' imperialism through radicalism and extremism.
The final major fallacy that Huntington pursues is his inability to
recognize how thinking in terms of threats of 'clash of civilizations' is
often self-fulfilling. By ascribing the placement of the clash in such deep
historicly insurmountable opposition as the root of cultures, Huntington
denies the ability of individuals from seeing and acting outside of
oppositional discourse. Conflicts are so deep rooted that no negotiations
or middle ground is possible. If either or both parties see the
problem as an inevitable clash, they lock themselves into conflict of epic
proportions, one that may only resolve itself in equally dramatic ways.
The obvious example of this approach is the Gulf war. This played itself
out in how the US armed Iraq in an attempt to check the 'radical Islam' of
Iran and how that militarization gave Iraq the capabilities ot invade Kuwait.
The US's racist and anti-Islamic sentitment further played itself out in the
subsequent devastation of Iraqi society by the US in pursuit of a demonized
Saddam Hussein.
outside of those constructs
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