Fashioning an Anthropology of Imperial Hegemony
By Fadi A. Bardawil
Emergent Conversation 18
This essay is part of the series Remnants of Empire, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 18
I
Empire in Asad’s conceptualization is not the name of a well-defined actor with a conscious strategy, whose actions can be resisted by different actors (Asad 2003, 216). Asad steers our understanding of empire away from geopolitical notions about big players seeking to dominate weaker ones, who as a result resist encroachment in the name of their national sovereignty. Rather, he understands empire as a subterranean, agent-less “totality of forces that converge to create (largely contingently) a new moral landscape” (216). This tectonic conceptualization of empire is in line with his partiality to interrogating what structures and conditions practice rather than homing in on the subject’s own experiences, actions, and desires. Asad’s structuralist bent of mind is perfectly illustrated in his memorable comment on a text from the 1930s by the Indonesian nationalist Soetan Sjahrir in which the latter declares that despite its violence, he admires the West for its “higher form of living and striving” (Asad 1992, 345). “This typical celebratory text,” Asad says in response, “presents as a heroic choice something that had long become an imposed fate. Contrary to appearances, what we have here is not the West being chosen but a Western choice” (345).
An additional upshot of Asad’s tectonic, agent-less, conceptualization of empire is a quiet exit from the analytical oppositional frame of power and resistance, repression and liberation. He is less interested in the political redemption of the colonized by highlighting their acts of resistance than by the conceptual apprehension of the worldmaking powers of empire. “An anthropology of Western imperial power,” Asad writes, “must try to understand the radically altered form and terrain of conflict inaugurated by it—new political languages, new powers, new social groups, new desires and fears, new subjectivities” (Asad 1991, 322-3). This call to shift the analytical gaze from the conflict between colonizer and colonized to the reorganization of the terrain on which the conflict takes place entails giving prominence to the strong powers that intervened to bring this new world into being. As a result, Asad’s anthropology of empire underscores the importance of examining the powers of such instances as the modern state, law, bureaucratic measures, administrative decrees, statistics, and pedagogical manuals.
Asad’s interests stood in sharp contrast to the multi-disciplinary focus on interrogating essentialized representations of non-Western peoples in Western scholarship, media, and fiction that developed in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979). Asad’s divergence from these hegemonic modalities of critical inquiry can be understood in the context of his attention to the kinds of powers that have the capacity to restructure the conditions of experience and alter the terrains of practice. Modes of representation, and discourses more generally, are not equal when it comes to the strengths of their powers of intervention, to what they release into the world or disable in it (See Asad 2003). The transformations legal reforms enact in terms of reconstructing the conditions that people must navigate, and the new subjectivities they may give rise to, are much more impactful in practice than say an essentialized ethnographic or novelistic representation of them.
II
Having said that, Asad’s anthropology does not only accentuate the newness that imperial powers bring into being. It underscores that “in spite of what people tell us about global ‘differences,’ there is a very strong thrust towards basic homogeneities throughout the world as a consequence of the way imperialism works” (Scott 2006, 292-3). This thrust works on different scales and is carried out by different instances of power. Let’s take the example of statistics, which Asad is strongly interested in. He dubs statistics, “A strong language which aims to reconstruct the moral and material conditions of a target population” (Asad 1994, 78). Through ranking of countries, say with regards to human rights abuses, statistics establish a world which “converts the question of incommensurable cultures into one of commensurable social arrangements without rendering them homogeneous” (78). Statistics in Asad’s interpretation do not resolve the question of incommensurability, but can simply afford to ignore it because “They are part of the great process of conversion we know as ’modernization’” (79). At a much smaller scale, Asad is also interested in how similar sensibilities are fashioned out of mundane everyday life practices such as the ways in which people dress, furnish their houses, and listen to music (Scott 2006, 293).
Asad’s understanding of this thrust is inflected differently. It can mean rendering the world commensurable, as his work on statistics conveys, or it can correspond to a more literal understanding of homogenization as is the case with the examples revolving around aesthetic sensibilities—fashion, design, music—that he gives to David Scott during their conversation (Scott 2006). That said, I think the crux of his understanding of empire is not that people across the globe are all replicating Western forms or that difference is eradicated, even though I think this is one direction in which his work lends itself to be read in (see Scott 2006). Rather, I think it is located in his more subterranean understanding of empire which one can detect clearly in “Conscripts of Western Civilization” (1992). There, Asad does not accentuate homogenization, but rather how European conquest brought into being a single and shared world; one where “social and cultural variety everywhere increasingly responds to, and is managed by, categories brought into play by modern forces” (333). Whether those who are working to bring these modern changes are colonial powers, modernizing anti-colonial nationalists, or anti-imperialist revolutionaries is epiphenomenal.
Asad’s talk of the West may predispose some readers to a civilizational interpretation of his work, one which opposes a Western civilization to an Islamic one. Asad to my mind is not a civilizational thinker. The West for him is not primarily the name of a civilization with its own set of norms and values that are countered by those of an another. Rather, the West qua empire is the name of a “vast moral project” (Asad 1992, 345) which restructures the world at the level of its undergirding grammars. Maybe an example will make this point clearer. In thinking about the introduction of European secular codes to Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, Asad makes clear to his readers that his point is not about codification or the geographic origin of the law, i.e. its foreignness. Rather, he writes, “I argue that it is the power to make a strategic separation between law and morality that defines the colonial situation, because it is this separation that enables the legal work of educating subjects into a new public morality” (Asad 2003, 240). The work of empire does not lie in the Western origin of its concepts, rather it lies in its power to carve out differentiated domains—law and morality in this case—which come to reorganize forms of life, regardless of the “content” they come to be filled with, such as Islamic or secular law. What is at stake for Asad is the structural reorganization of societies and forms of life regardless of the different kinds of ideological programs—Islamist, Liberal, Marxist—carrying these transformations and regardless of the identities of actors undertaking it—foreigners, citizens, or indigenous people.
III
Asad’s re-thinking of the powers of different modes of representation/intervention in fashioning an anthropology of empire qua modern power, forged a singular path of inquiry. It was in conversation with, but divergent from, hegemonic positions in a number of disciplines and critical theories. His call to center the seemingly drab and dry languages of law, bureaucracy, and statistics was at odds with the focus on literature and its imputed emancipatory role by much of postcolonial scholarship. In anthropology, Asad was part of the Writing Culture (1986) volume but his work was less of its moment. In the wake of his critique of colonial anthropology, Asad who was in the early phases of founding his project of anthropologizing modernity, was less preoccupied with the discipline’s reflexive assessment of its own authoritative modes of inscription and more with underscoring the impact of the power differential between dominant and dominated societies on processes of cultural translation (Asad 1986). Asad was also deeply skeptical of the subversive and emancipatory powers of celebrated critical theoretical interventions. In other words, to critique something in theory, say by underscoring the fact that it was socially constructed, is not equivalent to undoing its hold in practice. “Western legal discourse,” Asad writes, “participates in processes of power by creating modern realities of a special kind, and it should not be thought of as a form of representation that can be subverted by scholarly argument.” (Asad 1991, 321). And last but not least, Asad’s analytical predilection for sounding the work of empire at the level of deep tectonic shifts was coupled with a pessimistic political temperament with regards to the emancipatory possibilities of practice, whether it is political or intellectual (Bardawil 2016). Asad’s anthropology of imperial hegemony, to my mind, singled out and underscored the second half Marx’s (1869[1852]) famous sentence from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte— “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” In Asad’s conceptual figuration though, Marx’s circumstances, become much closer to an “imposed fate” (Asad 1992, 345).
IV
As Asad moved from his early critique of colonial anthropology to the anthropological investigation of empire, the scope of his investigations was stretched extensively. His work went far beyond calling into question the authoritative status of Orientalist discourses, colonial anthropological assumptions, and the top-down premises of modernization policies. It became a fully-fledged interrogation of modernity. Throughout early and later work, anthropology retained its filiation with empire, but the character of that filiation changed over time. What it means for anthropology to be the “child of imperialism,” to borrow Kathlyn Gough’s (1968) words once more, was different in each case (12). In the early works I discussed in the first part of this essay, anthropology’s theoretical objects, such as culture and ethnicity, were complicit with erasing the imprints of colonial power by reifying difference and failing to account for historical changes and structural societal transformations which political economy illuminates. In later works, and as Asad’s investigations of empire came to encompass the Enlightenment, the discipline becomes complicit, albeit in a much more minor role than stronger ones like statistics, in the modern thrust towards the homogenization of the world. Asad writes that anthropologists “should learn to treat some of their own Enlightenment assumptions as belonging to specific kinds of reasoning—albeit kinds of reasoning that have largely shaped our modern world—and not as the ground from which all understanding of non-Enlightenment traditions must begin” (Asad 1993 200). Anthropology as a minor child of the Enlightenment comes to occupy a small corner in the much wider terrain of his anthropology of empire.
Asad’s genealogical investigations and his conceptual reconfigurations can be read as ventures to gnaw away the authority of the West. Given Asad’s tectonic and agent-less conceptualization of empire and his skepticism regarding the value of intellectual labor, the activity of gnawing away seems more apt than the more familiar postures of anti-colonial resistance, oppositional critical intellectual work, or speaking truth to power. This is also because Asad does not anchor his anthropology of empire in the subject’s own experience, whether it is an experience of injury, say by racializing orientalist discourses, or a mixture of injury and pride displayed in some nativist positions (e.g., “You may dominate me materially but my spiritual values are superior to yours”). Much of his own work on the powers of empire can be characterized aporetically as a speaking back without speaking back, to the West. And that is because of his own conception of the West and also because his work is not articulated as a speaking from a particular subjective experience or identity, not to mention a speaking up for a particular constituency, be it political, ethnic, or religious. It is a speaking back without it being a speaking from and a speaking up for.
Coda
I would like to bring these two essays to a close by touching very briefly on the new direction Asad’s thought has taken in the past decade, albeit one which is still part and parcel of his longstanding reflection on the question of empire. His most recent work reveals a more intimate engagement with the Islamic tradition, which goes beyond an anthropological reconstruction of a discursive and embodied tradition. Rather, Asad’s later works draws on the Islamic tradition as an ethical source to illuminate an alternative way of being together in the world. In doing so, he increasingly inhabits the tradition from the inside to address ethical and political theoretical concerns. “Instead of answering the question, ‘A secular or a religious state?’” Asad writes, “one might try to imagine what politics not focused on the sovereign territorial state might look like” (Asad 2015, 210-1). Note that this displacement re-articulates the political question away from the common ground—the modern state and the question of sovereignty—that many Islamists and secularists inhabit together despite their ideological antagonisms.
Asad’s late ethical and intersubjective turn is to my mind the most interesting dimension of his recent work. As I have been arguing, Asad’s work has for decades sidelined the subject in multiple ways. His critique of colonial anthropology was undertaken from the perspective of anthropological objects—the discipline’s theoretical building blocks—while clearly arguing against taking the personal motives and political orientations of anthropologists into account. His critique of colonialism and his anthropology of empire were joined by a critique of the centrality of the practice of fieldwork with its empiricist assumptions, its focus on meaning and the local, as well as its tendency to sideline the apprehension of complex economic, political, and ideological structural transformations that are not objects of direct personal and intersubjective experience.
In contrast to most of his thinking life, the question of subject and ethical intersubjective relations are today at the heart of Asad’s preoccupations. But why so? My view is that this turn can be read as an offshoot of Asad’s long-term thinking about the question of empire as modern power. His interest in forms of life, embodiment (habitus and the heart-body-mind nexus), and Islamic ethics are integral to his own intimations of ways of being in the world which are not fully regimented by secular modern grammars, and which in turn led him to reappraise his longstanding critique of fieldwork. “My initial criticism of the focus in anthropology on ‘fieldwork’,” Asad wrote a couple of years ago, “was motivated by a dissatisfaction with the notion that it was a direct and therefore reliable observational method (its empiricism). It was only later that I came to value it as an indispensable way of learning about and understanding what Wittgenstein called forms of life” (Asad 2020, 3). Does this recent reappraisal of fieldwork mean that we can read Asad’s late work as rehabilitating an ethnographic apprehension of empire? I need to think more about this question, but I lean more towards the position that Asad’s reappraisal of fieldwork can be more easily tied to his interest in thinking about ways of being in the world that have not been fully subsumed by the powers of empire rather than by seeking to understand it ethnographically.[1] Asad was still criticizing “the pseudoscientific notion of fieldwork,” as late as Formations of the Secular, in which he fleshed out his project for an anthropology of secularism (Asad 2003, 17).
Having said that, Asad’s ethical and intersubjective turn is not reducible to his reappraisal of fieldwork. Asad also overcame his reserve about talking about his own biographical-intellectual trajectory and offered a commentary on his father’s own important intellectual work (Asad 2012). And last, but not least, ethics and the subject are also at the heart of the question of friendship which has preoccupied Asad, both personally and conceptually, as a principle to organize relationships away from the legal principle of citizenship (Asad 2023; 2015). This late style, in its turn to the ethical, the intersubjective, and the embodied, is as close as we get to Asad’ formulation of an alternative way of being together in the world which is not fully regimented by the powers of empire.
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Alireza Doostdar, Nada Moumtaz, David Scott, and Ana Vinea who have read, and commented, on earlier versions of this essay.
Dr. Fadi A. Bardawil is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2010), his work also draws from, and engages questions arising from, critical theory, global intellectual history, and postcolonial theory. His research explores the different relationships cultural production (creating and thinking), political practice (acting) and generational dwelling (living) entertain in different sites (Global North/South). Bardawil has conducted most of his ethnographic and historical research in Lebanon. Having said that, in analyzing the archive of critical Arabic thought, which has been produced in multiple languages (predominantly Arabic, French, English), in different geographical sites, and in conversation with multiple intellectual traditions his research moves beyond methodological nationalism and monolingualism. His book Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation focuses on how the 1960s Arab New Left addressed the question of mediation between theory and practice. The book moves beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony and unidirectional notions of translation. It does so by engaging in ‘fieldwork in theory,’ which not only sheds light on how theory is produced, translated, and put to use, but also on how it seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. By excavating the long-lost archive of the Arab New Left the book also rethinks dominant topoi of contemporary Arab thought and stages a conversation between this tradition and postcolonial and western critical theories.
Notes
[1] See Asad’s rendering of the weekly conversations he held in 2009 with Shaykh Usama Sayyid al-Azhari during his several months stay in Cairo which centered on “the formation of personal virtue within Islamic tradition” (Asad 2015 173). These conversations reveal dimensions of forms of life which are different from those associated with secular modernity. “The conception of time here,” Asad writes, “stands in clear contrast to the linear time of historical progress. In the former, time can be completed, the past bound to present and future; in the latter there is no completion, only continuous improvement into an indefinite future, and an indefinitely accumulating past that is left behind (174). An earlier stance of relying on fieldwork to provide a counterpoint to modes of Enlightenment critical reasoning, which precedes Asad’s explicit reappraisal of his longstanding critique of fieldwork, appears in the chapter on Nasiha as a practice of moral-political criticism—“The Limits of Religious Criticism in the Middle East: Notes on Islamic Public Argument”—in Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993).
Works Cited
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