Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

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.

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 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).