Postcolonialism

Colonial and Postcolonial Knowledge

Since the European Enlightenment, Western knowledge has played a key role in both colonialism and postcolonialism, alongside military and economic domination. Edward Said has analyzed a European American colonial discourse and knowledge system he called Orientalism. Originating in 18th-century European travel accounts, literary imaginings, and academic scholarship of the Middle East, this discourse positioned the Orient in a binary structure of knowledge vis-à-vis the modern West, whereby the West was always assigned the favored and superior position in the binary: rational/emotional; materialist/spiritualist; scientific/superstitious; advanced/backward; active/passive; mature/childlike; male/female; egalitarian/hierarchical or despotic; dynamic/unchanging; and so forth. Through Orientalism, the West was able to define itself, shore up its sense of superiority and self-confidence, and see itself as assuming the “White Man's Burden” of “liberating” and converting the rest of the world. When Orientalism was adopted by people from the Orient, they often reduced their sense of cultural self-worth, which hampered their imaginations of what their native religious traditions could offer to postcolonial modernity.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian has critiqued the construction of time in Western depictions of the Other, calling it a “denial of coevalness.” The Other is denied historicity; it is represented as frozen in the past. Even though every society in the modern world has been undergoing great social transformation, importing new cultures and technologies that mix with, displace, or enrich traditional religious life, the denial of coevalness ignores these deeply ingrained habits and suspends these societies as being outside the modern present.

Another powerful discourse of knowledge and power in colonial and postcolonial eras was social evolutionism. Nineteenth-century European American social evolutionism taught that societies evolved through a “survival of the fittest” in a linear path to “progress” through stages of development. It was thought that the modern West, with its science and technology and superior social institutions, was more evolved and advanced, while weaker societies would fall by the wayside or be absorbed by the strong. Typical of such thinking was that of the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, who in 1905 outlined an evolutionary history of religions in which the lowest stage of “savages” (“the Veddahs of Ceylon, Andaman Islanders, Bushmen, Australian negroes, Hottentots,” etc.) worshipped “fetishes” and the next stage of “barbarians” who possessed agriculture and cattle had progressed to “animism,” worshipping gods in the forms of men and animals and holding notions of the immortal soul. Finally, with the “highest stage of civilization,” religion evolves with the subordination of all the gods to a chief god, found in the achievement of “monotheism,” the Reformation, and then modern science. Both Christian and secular Westerners subscribed to social evolutionism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with many believing that Protestantism was the highest form of religious development and that science was the most advanced human attainment. These evolutionary discourses spread quickly to the colonies, justifying European colonization but also gaining currency among many native elites and nationalists.

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