Surveillance and gaze facilitate other representational strategies that fix the Orient and the Other, particularly those that seek to classify, differentiate, and provide identity to the Other (and in turn to the Self).
Differentiation – Classification
Differentiation and classification, two crucial factors in the formation of the modern subject (Foucault 1984, 7-11), are also evident in Western representations of the Other. The ideational differentiation between the West and the Rest underpins these representations. The need to articulate one's personal and collective self in terms of identity comes from an internalization of this principle of differentiation. Classification occupies a central place in any account of non-Western people. It polices discourses, assigns positions, regulates groups, and enforces boundaries (Spurr 1993, 63). Given the taxonomizing predilection and conceit of Western imperialism, we can hardly disagree with Rampa's conjecture about the fate of the yetis: "[If] Western Man had his way, our poor old yetis would be captured, dissected, and preserved in spirit" (1956, 220).
While some classifications may be essential for understanding, often the classification of non-Western peoples was a corollary of the hierarchization and racialization of cultures. Classifying the Other as barbarian or savage validated its dehumanization and was seen as justification for the use of violence to impose European norms (Keal 2003; Salter 2002). At the top were the white Europeans and at the bottom were "primitive" Africans and aboriginal populations in the "new world." Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and others occupied different positions in the hierarchical table. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century obsession with racializing culture can be seen in the case of Tibetans too where different commentators sought to identify characteristics of the Tibetan "race." A typical example was Sandberg, who was unflattering in his comments about the "'Tibetan race' as 'a weak and cowardly people, their pusillanimity rendering them readily submissive'" (in Bonnington and Clarke 2000, 209). The fact that racism has less to do with color and more to do with power relations becomes evident in the British treatment of the Irish as "colored," as "white negroes" (McClintock 1995, 52; Lebow 1976) during the nineteenth century. Captain William Frederick O'Connor's observation at the start of the twentieth century about Tibet is illustrative: "Common people are cheerful, happy-go-lucky creatures, absurdly like the Irish in their ways, and sometimes even in their features" (in Sharma and Sharma 1996, 191; emphasis added). On the other hand, the French traveler Alexandra David-Neel finds that dobdob, the Lhasa monk "police," looks like a "real negro" (1936, 105). Differentiation, classification, and identification, when combined with racialization, evolutionism, and hierarchization, lead to the debasement of most non-Western natives and idealization of some.
Debasement – Idealization
The seemingly opposite techniques of debasement (and its corollary negation) and idealization (and its corollary affirmation) have similar rhetorical structures; these involve processes of decontextu-alization and othering. In terms of Western representations of the non-West, the binary of the noble/ignoble savage has been a product of such discursive practices. The ease with which writers and observers have switched between highly negative and eulogizing appraisals of Tibetan culture is illustrative. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Tibetans were seen as either "backward and barbaric or noble and charming" (Dodin and Rather 2001a, 397).
Natives have been debased and associated with filth and dirt numerous times. The discourse of contamination and disease was used to enforce colonial oppression and to inculcate a sense of inferiority in the colonized peoples. This has particularly been the case with the representations of Tibet and Lhasa where physical dirt was seen as symbolically standing for an inherent weakness in Tibetan character. Thomas Manning, the first Englishman to visit Lhasa, noted in 1811:
There is nothing striking, nothing pleasing in its appearance. The inhabitants are begrimed with dirt and smut. The avenues are full of dogs, some growling and gnawing bits of hide which lie about in profusion and emit a charnel-house smell; others limping and looking livid; others ulcerated; others starved and dying, and pecked at by ravens; some dead and preyed upon. In short, everything seems mean and gloomy, and excites the idea of something unreal. Even the mirth and laughter of the inhabitants I thought dreamy and ghostly. (in Chapman 1992, 146-47)
The British Foreign Office, in its report of 1920 in the section on "geography," felt under compulsion to allude to the poor sanitary conditions and the "gruesome custom" of the disposal of the dead by cutting them into pieces and leaving them to be devoured by vultures, dogs, and pigs (Foreign Office 1920, 22). George Knight, the leader of the 1922-23 British expedition to Tibet "affirms" the truth of various labels attached to Tibet: "It is a land of mountains, monasteries and monks, land of women, dogs and dirt, country of the great unwashed" (1930, 25; see also Knight 1894). However, the unequivocal condemnation of Tibetans for being "dirty" began to change as some visitors starting reevaluating the dominant Western stance. Chapman, visiting in the late 1930s, amended his preconceived conclusions about Lhasa: "It is true that the common people do not wash, that their houses are, by our standards, filthy, and that they live in a state of serfdom-but what a delightful folk, nevertheless" (1992, 146). [22]
Debasement of the natives often accompanied the strategy of negation by which Western writings conceive of the Other as absence, emptiness, nothingness, thus denying Other its agency, its history, and, often, its language. Negation serves to erase what one sees in order to clear "a space for the expansion of the colonial imagination and for the pursuit of desire" (Spurr 1993, 92-93). This, in colonial times, led to ground clearing for the expansion of colonial rule in places including the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa.
Idealization and self-affirmation often exist along with negation and debasement as evidenced in the present-day positive exoticiza-tion of Tibet in the Western popular imagination. Paradoxically, despite its difference, Tibet was often seen as the non-Western culture with which Europeans could identify (see Kaschewsky 2001). While early Christians sought traces of a forgotten community of Christians here, theosophists looked for the lost brotherhood of wise hermits. In the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph Wolff popularized the idea of a long-lost population of Jews in the Himalayas (Feigon 1996: 14-15; see also Kamenetz 1995; Katz 1991). On the other hand, the Nazi SS sent an expedition in 1938-39 to ascertain whether Tibet was an abode of true Aryans or not (Hale 2004). Thus, we can see that there are various ways in which often conflicting desires of the West got invested in Tibet. One such set of conflicting desires is expressed through the strategies of eroticization/ moralization.
Eroticization – Moralization
Eroticization and moralization are central to Western representations of the Other. Reference to the licentiousness and voracious sexual appetite of Arabs/Africans, the feminization of Asian males, the availability of docile and yet elusive Oriental women-such motifs are conspicuous in many Western fiction and nonfiction writings and in films. The Orient becomes the "fertile" ground on which the sexual fantasies of Western "men" (mainly though not exclusively; for a discussion of gender and imperialism, see Blunt and Rose 1994; Lewis 1996; McClintock 1995; Midgley 1998; Sharpe 1993) is played out. The ideas of sexual innocence and experience, sexual domination and submissiveness play out a complex dance in the discourse of "the West and the Rest" (Hall 1992, 302; also see Schick 1999).
One important reason for eroticization, of course, has been to escape from conventional censorship in metropolitan societies. Association is made between the Orient and the "freedom of licentious sex" and "escapism of sexual fantasy" (Said 1978, 190). Contemporary incarnations of such images can be seen in a range of places, from sex tourism at Thai beaches to the standardization of "Oriental" sex as a commodity in the "red light" districts of Europe. At the same time, the Orient also provides opportunities for the play of "forbidden" desires of same-sex love, especially male homosexuality, as evident in the works of W
illiam Beckford, Lord Byron, T. E. Lawrence, Edward Carpenter, and E. M. Forster (see Parsons 1997), to name a few. Investment of these "forbidden" desires in the non-West may be a resistance to the hegemonic masculinity of metropolitan culture, but it does not challenge the unequal power relations between the Western representer and the non-Western represented.
The very language of exploration was marked by strong gender distinctions and drew much of its subconscious force from sexual imagery. Discovery of America was often seen literally as dis-covering of the unknown land, un-covering of the naked, available, desirable, and primitive female body of America by the clothed, civilized European man (for instance, Jan van der Straet's 1575 depiction The Discovery of America; see Gallagher 1997).
The intent to subjugate indigenous people can be seen as the male's mastery of the female. The feminization of colonial space is an act of epistemic as well as corporeal violence. The feminized landscape titillated and provoked explorers and discoverers to take control of her, to possess her-this was a common sentiment expressed in exploration literature from the fifteenth century onward. Edward William Lane described his first sight of Egypt in 1825 thus: "As I approached the shore, I felt like an Eastern bridegroom, about to lift the veil of his bride, and to see, for the first time, the features that were to charm, or disappoint, or disgust him" (in Kabbani 1986, 67).
These erotics of imperial conquest evident in the evocation of feminized space were linked to the Enlightenment's pursuit of truth. After all, "study, understanding, knowledge, evaluation… are instruments of conquest" (Said 1978, 309). European consciousness is encoded as masculine and the object of knowledge as feminine. The combination of knowledge and eroticization is illustrated strongly in Bell's description of Lhasa as practically "untouched by white men"-"Shut off from their outer world by their immense mountain barriers, Tibet still presented a virgin field of inquiry" (1928, viii; emphasis added). Grenard regrets Tibet's closure, her foiling of attempts by Europeans to pry her open: "In truth, the Tibetans are one of the nations that have changed the least in the course of the centuries and it is greatly to be regretted that they are so difficult to access and so obstinately opposed to enquiries" (1904, 373). This resonates with Said's analysis of the Middle East in the Western imagination: "The Middle East is resistant, as any virgin would be, but the male scholar wins the prize by bursting open, penetrating through the Gordian knot despite the 'taxing task'" (1978, 309).
Not surprisingly, after the British invasion of Lhasa in 1903-4, Lord Curzon wrote, "I am almost ashamed of having destroyed the virginity of the bride to whom you aspired, viz. Lhasa," in a letter addressed to Sven Hedin (a famous Swedish explorer) as the latter described the expedition as "the rape of Lhasa" (in Schell 2000, 201). For his part, Hedin lost "the longing that had possessed [him] to penetrate the Holy City" (in Bishop 1989, 176). These writers and commentators draw upon a long tradition of what McClintock calls "European porno-tropics" treating "male travel as an erotics of ravishment" in which uncertain places were figured as "libidi-nously eroticized" (1995, 22). The most prevalent metaphor for the British invasion of Tibet was that of "unveiling." [23] Candler (1905) titled his account Unveiling of Lhasa. The attitude of European travelers to Tibet was "almost voyeuristic," the most commonly expressed aim being to "get a 'peep' at Tibet, or at Lhasa" (Bishop 1989, 177). [24] Millington, who later wrote his book as "a man in the street," described going to Lhasa as "assisting in drawing aside a purdah" and departure as the "show was over" (1905, 77, 199). Writing about Lhasa, Waddell says that the enigma has been solved (virginity lost!) for the
fairy Prince of "Civilisation" has roused her from her slumbers, her closed doors are broken down, her dark veil of mystery is lifted up, and the long-sealed shrine, with its grotesque cults and its idolised Grand Lama, shorn of his sham nimbus, have yielded up their secrets, and lie disenchanted before our Western eyes. Thus, alas! Inevitably, do our cherished romances of the old pagan world crumble at the touch of our modern hands! (1905, 2)
This triumphalism (of civilization over obstinacy) was mixed with regret and a sense of inevitability with a feeling of betrayal. For "Shangri-la" (most commonly associated with Tibet, as discussed in the next chapter) is conceptualized as "a virginal state: once defiled by foreign invasion, modernization or internal political strife, it is as if some kind of betrayal has taken place" (Hutt 1996, 52). Candler expresses these mixed emotions when he says, "To-morrow, when we enter Lhasa, we will have unveiled the last mystery of the East. There are no more forbidden. Why could we have not left at least one city out of bounds?" (in Sharma and Sharma 1996, 119).
Eroticization was not the only representational technique deployed by the West when gendering the Orient. Moralization was also an effective tool. Morality was seen as a sign of progress, and European bourgeois standard came to represent the pinnacle of civilization. This was contrasted with a "lack" of morality among natives, "Orientals," and the domestic working classes. The policing of morality primarily involved policing women's bodies. Hence, cultures (like that of Tibet) where this sort of policing was negligible were seen as inferior. A common idea among travelers and commentators was that Tibetans ranked low in terms of morality and the "freedom" accorded to women was both a cause and an effect of this low standard. A discourse of filth and contamination was attached to that on morality and the status of women. In the words of a member of the British expedition to Lhasa in 1903-4: "Tibetan morals are not of a very high order and there seems to be a good deal of promiscuousness in the relations of the lay population. I twice came across parties of men and women bathing together in a small stream behind the Potala, which struck me as most unusual as the majority of Tibetans are filthy and grimy to a degree" (IOR: MSS EUR/C270/FL2/E/1/144 n.d., 8).
Macdonald contended that in Tibet women have much influence and, compared with the West, morals are lax (1929, 133-34). Those who showed admiration for Tibetan society were not exempt from passing judgments about the Tibetans-Riencourt argued that Europeans and Americans can learn a lot from the Tibetans because among them women are "perfectly free" and equal; however, a laxity in sexual relations was a sore spot as it led to rampant sexually transmitted diseases (1950, 152-53). In contrast to European (and Japanese, in the case of a Japanese traveler to Lhasa, Ekai Kawaguchi) women, Tibetan women are unclean, disrespectful to their husbands, and lacking character and hence are "objects more to be loved and pitied not respected and adored" (Kawaguchi in Sharma and Sharma 1996, 175). Thus, we see that eroticiza-tion and moralization often went hand in hand as representational strategies.
Chronopolitics
Chronopolitics, or the politics of time, has played an important role in Western representations of the non- Western Other. The Other has been imagined as socially and culturally backward (in time)- medieval (feudal), archaic (like ancient Egyptians or Mesopota-mians), prehistoric (primitive), or simply beyond the matrix of time (timeless). The colonial journey and travel of contemporary Western commentators is often figured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time. This technique rendered nondominant groups out of the present and legitimized control in the name of modernity. That natives were backward, requiring the rule/control/guidance/assistance of more advanced "foreigners" to enter the modern era, was taken as uncontested fact.
The Other is both a prisoner of time (frozen in a certain stage of history) and an escapee (outside the time grid, timeless, outside history). The West is the present, the now, and it has the duty/right to bring progress to the Other. The entire range of timeframe available under chronopolitics can be illustrated through European representations of Tibet and Tibetans at the turn of the nineteenth century. The world is divided into chronological reserves, and when we enter Tibet, we reach a different age, as if the "tracts of past time persisted here and there which could be visited" (Spufford 1996, 212).
The most prevalent representation of Tibet was that it was medieval. Candler's impression about Tibet bein
g medieval was "confirmed" as a result of the only incident in 1904 in Lhasa, when a Tibetan monk attacked the soldiers of the occupying British Indian force. He described how a lama "ran amuck outside the camp with the coat of mail and huge paladin's sword concealed beneath his cloak, a medieval figure who thrashed the air with his brand like a flail in sheer lust of blood. He was hanged medievally the next day within sight of Lhasa" (Candler 1905, 246, 265; emphases added).
The monk was hanged in full public view to act as a deterrent to any other Tibetan contemplating resistance. It is interesting that the British justified their own barbarity by blaming it on the medieval quality of their field of operation, by putting the responsibility on the victims. We see ambiguity and nostalgia as the twentieth century unfolds. Chapman muses in his account first published in 1940, "Tibet is in the position of European countries in the Middle Ages-in many ways a position which we are bound, nowadays, to envy" (Chapman 1992, 193).
Apart from medievalism, Tibet also was imagined as parallel to the ancient archaic world. Potala palace, for Landon, was "an image of that ancient and mysterious faith which has found its last and fullest expression beneath the golden canopies of Lhasa" (1905, 262). As in the writings of theosophists, precursors to New Age movements, Tibetan Buddhism began to be imagined as forming a direct connection with ancient Egyptian religion. The Western imagination of Tibet also flirted with the prehistoric and the primitive (see Bishop 1989, 156). Grenard was reminded of "American Redskins" (1904, 72), while Chapman wrote, "I sang an Eskimo folk-song and Norbhu [a Tibetan companion] said it was exactly like Tibetan music-a doubtful compliment, but interesting, seeing that the Eskimos and Tibetans are, ethnologically speaking, fairly closely related" (1992, 52). One significant emblem of Tibet's association with the prehistoric in the Western imagination is the figure of Yeti, made popular through works such as Tintin in Tibet.
Geopolitical Exotica Page 5