Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the âOtherâ - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 

ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic) 

Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other” 

Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-Mahfedi and Venkatesh P 

Abstract 

Based on Edward Said’s Colonial Discourse Theory and his concept of Oreintalism, 

this paper develops a Saidian reading of the Orientaists’ thought in their relationship 

with non-Western people. The paper attempts to decipher the common interface 

between Darwinism and Orientalism. Located within the postcolonial framework, the 

paper methodologically tries to uncover the pervasively Western intellectual and 

scientific mindset which is governed by the Orientalist thought that directs its relation 

with the “Other”. The Eurocentric determinism has been shaped and articulated 

through theories such as Social Darwinism, Functional Anthropology, Modernism, 

Capitalism, etc., which has coincided and materialized in the act of colonialism, 

imperialism and globalization. It is to be noted that colonialism, imperialism, 

Orientalism are Western-based ideologies that caused the epistemological and 

geopolitical drift in the world order, and their aftermaths are still the most discussed 

problematics. The present social and politico-cultural world is re-formulated against 

and/or set in accordance with those resurrected repercussions. Among the still 

debated issues are cultural supremacy and political hegemony, and both are 

legitimized and incited by the “idea” of redemption, in Conrad’s words, or racial 

superiority as in Spencer’s theory. This paper tries to probe into the dormant premise 

of the Orientalist/colonialist thought, and to lay bare the “idea behind it”, to use 

Conrad’s words, too, in order to relate the different parts into the common whole of 

Western, hegemonic cultural and political set-up. 

Keywords: Edward Said; Enlightenment; ideology; Orientailsm; Othering; the Orient; 

politics; power; scholarship; social Darwinism 

This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as scientifically intellectual, 

programmed knowledge of the “Orient”. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical 

framework based on a postcolonial and psychoanalytical synthesis. Analyzing recurrent 

representation of the Orientals in the European intellectual circles, I attempt to demonstrate 

that the Western conception of the East has been built on socio-biological determinism and 

racially politico-cultural functionalism. This intellectual fossilization of the “Orient” created 

by the Orientalist mind-set was the driving force of the Western colonialism and imperial 

expansion. I argue that the fundamental fallacy of Orientalism lay, not in its presumptions 

about the ontological differences between East and West, but in its very conscious and 

deliberate persistence on creating a dichotomy. Therefore, Darwinism and other social and 

anthropological theories have been introduced and utilized to justify the colonial rule whether 

under the pretext of civilizing missionaries or democratic redemption. 

‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al- 

Mahfedi and Venkatesh P 

JPCS Vol 3, No 1, 2012 

1



In order to probe into the latent hidden ideology of the Orientalist construction of the 

“Orient”, or the Oriental “Other”, this study sets forth three premises. The first premise is 

that colonialism is the ultimate product and the materialized object of Orientalism. The 

second premise is that Orientalism as a corporate institutional, intellectual and scholastic 

legitimacy of Western colonial and imperial enterprise is based on racism. The third premise 

is that the Manichean logic and Darwinian Theory provided the scientific, empirical and 

moral justification for the Western colonial and imperial expansionist desire. 

Social Darwinism has played a formulating role in the trajectory of Western social, political 

as well as ideological assumptions regarding the various “Other”. Social Darwinism can be 

defined either strictly, with reference to theories of social and cultural change implied by the 

theory of natural selection developed by Darwin, or loosely, as that distinct family of 

historical theories that claim to be theories of social and cultural change logically entailed by 

Darwinian theory. Social Darwinism, in its different forms defended ethnic, racial, class and 

gender inequality as necessary aspects of a wider conflict from which a technically and 

morally advanced humanity would emerge. Nonetheless, social Darwinists extended 

Darwin's theories into the realm of politics and society to rationalize conflict and conquest. 

The Orientalist/colonialist project, thus, has tended to use Darwinism as a rationale for 

existing forms of exploitation and their extension, especially but not exclusively, in support 

of racism and genocide. 

In fact, one of the central planks in the Orientalist thought and doctrine was the evolutionary 

theory. According to this theory, all biology had evolved upward, less evolved types should 

be actively eradicated and that natural selection could and should be actively aided. 

Therefore, the Orientalists/colonialists instituted political measures to control if not to 

eradicate all non-Western “racial threat”, whom they considered as “underdeveloped”. The 

European Orientalists/colonialists considered themselves by this canon as the higher race 

which ought to subject to itself a lower race as a conceivable natural right. 

The eminent scientists of Social Darwinism shaped Orientalist conception of other nations 

and races and provided what seemed like an irrefutable validation of their racist beliefs 

crowned by the fierce imperial and colonial Western domination. The support of Orientalism 

by Social Darwinism and other scientific establishment resulted in racist, particularly anti- 

Semitic, anti-Islamic thought having much greater influence than would have otherwise been 

the case, as well as an enormous reassurance that one’s prejudices were actually expressions 

of scientific truth. The East-West or Occident-Orient demarcation was engulfed by the 

Orientalist/colonialist ramifications such as colonial and imperial projects, superior/inferior 

classification, racism and dispossession, displacement and alienation, global dualities and all 

other colonial traumas and legacies. 

For long the West has unquestionably maintained to itself the power of drawing the political 

map of the world and deliberately persisted on perpetuating the epistemological notion of the 

Occident-Orient dichotomy in order to keep its supremacy and superiority over the Eastern 




2



people and territories. This idea has been encapsulated in the statement of Marx and 

epigraphed by Said in his seminal work Orientalism (1978) that “they cannot represent 

themselves; they must be represented”. Hence, Orientalism was ultimately a political vision 

of reality “whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, 

"us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").” (43) 

The Darwinian scholastic vision of Orientalism can be easily traced in statements of the 

Orientalsit writers. Henry Kissinger’s classification of developing countries as pre- 

Newtonian cultures, which cannot deal with empirical reality, that is, cultures to which ‘the 

real world is almost completely internal to the observer . . .” (47). Alfred Lyall, on the other 

hand, has argued that ‘accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind . . .” (38). Hamilton Gibb 

has written about ‘the aversion of Muslims from the thought-processes of rationalism’, 

blaming his proposition on what he calls ‘the atomism and discreteness of the Arab 

imagination’ (106). Ernest Renan had earlier dismissed the Semites as ‘an inferior 

combination of human nature’, and their languages as ‘inorganic’, lacking in the capacity to 

regenerate themselves, unlike the living, organic Indo-European languages (143). 

Chateaubriand saw the Crusades as not only ‘about the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre’, 

but also as a fight against a cult that was ‘civilisation’s enemy’, and whose only God was 

‘force’(172). Lamartine, on the other hand, preached the advent of the age of European 

colonialism. To him the Orient was ‘nations without territory, rights, laws or security . . . 

waiting anxiously for the shelter’ of European occupation (197). “The Orient,” Said remarks, 

“was therefore not Europe's interlocutor, but its silent Other” and that “as primitivity, as the 

age-old antitype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed, 

the Orient's actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization.” He has 

concluded that the Western distinction between the Occident and its different “Other” “was 

constituted out of this radical difference” (Orientalism Reconsidered 93- 94). 

The Enlightenment rationality and the Renaissance individuality had been culminated in the 

Victorian Darwinism. Orientalism as a corporate institution was aided by those notions. This 

is supported by a statement of Charles Darwin himself, in his work The Descent of Man and 

Selection in Relation to Sex: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by 

centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the 

savage races throughout the world” (99). Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival justified 

and legitimized the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples and nations and 

validated the conflict between them. It can be safely if reluctantly concluded that Darwin’s 

theory clearly contributed to the death of millions of people in concentration camps, and 

about other millions of humans in wars. 

Once considered as an objective scientific theory of difference within human populations, 

racism has become regarded as an ideology of social domination and exclusion on the basis 

of biological and genetic variation. To put it more simply, the biological difference justifies 

the dominance of certain races over others. Floya Anthias has observed that “racism is not 

just about beliefs or statements. Racism also involves the ability to impose those beliefs or 




3



world views as hegemonic, and as a basis for the denial of rights or equality. Racism is thus 

embedded in power relations of different types”. Racism is “a discourse and a practice 

whereby ethnic groups are inferiorised”. (291, 294) 

Racism has been the powerful and magical instrument by which a dominant group or culture 

justifies its domination, and which often figures prominently in the ideologies that justify and 

promote genocide and other crimes against humanity. Dominant social groups commonly use 

racial categorizations to differentiate other social groups and justify their exclusion and 

marginalization. “The question of racism is treated in a form of bio-politics… a bio-power 

which involves the forms of control carried out in name of race for the welfare of the species 

and for the survival of the population” (Young 10). 

The belief that personality and social behavior are linked to biology and therefore are 

unalterable makes physical removal or annihilation the only possible means of 

solving the perceived problem of undesirable social groups. So, the Orientalist 

thought has been oscillating between the biological base and the cultural face. The 

creation of the “Other” has been interwoven with taming of the “savage”. The 

“fittest” will “survive” and the “superior” will “dominate”. Saeed A. Khan insists that 

Western thought has historically used science to promote racial difference and 

superiority (1). 

The Orientalist representation of the Oriental “Other” and the racial discrimination against 

the non-Europeans were based on biologically determined factors in the first place. In both 

the biological Orientalist discourse and the cultural Orientalist discourse racial determinism 

has been the decisive factor that blames the “Other” for his biological and social inferiority. 

During the Enlightenment, race became a focus of scientific analysis, as biologists and 

anthropologists sought to develop objective measures for differentiating between peoples. 

Scientists were deeply influenced by the assumption that Caucasians were more evolved than 

other races and that Western civilization was superior to all others. The measurement of 

physical attributes of various racial groups, phrenology, the quantification of intelligence, 

and other supposedly objective tools were used to explain the biological sources of the 

preconceived inferiority of non-white groups and to justify their colonization and domination 

by Europeans. Comte Arthur de Gobineau's "Essay on the Inequality of the Human 

Races"(1855) popularized the idea that social differences were linked to biology, and 

inspired extensive scientific study of the biological roots of social distinction and identity. 

Francis Galton, adapting Darwin's ideas on evolution to the study of human development, 

argued in Hereditary Genius (1869) that selective breeding could be used to create a superior 

race of human beings. He coined the term eugenics for this idea, which later influenced the 

development of Nazi and fascist and other genocidal ideologies. 

Racism also justified colonialism and the massacre and subjugation of native populations by 

colonial powers throughout much of the world. Viewing Native Americans as a different, 




4



sub-human race, for instance, allowed Spanish colonizers to feel justified in enslaving and 

slaughtering them in Central and South America, wiping out entire native peoples. The belief 

in racial inferiority likewise allowed colonists in North America to displace, subjugate, and 

kill Native Americans. Colonial conquest of Asia and Africa was promoted as a moral 

obligation for Europeans, the "white man's burden" to bring civilization to supposedly 

inferior races. When indigenous populations resisted conquest, these same ideas of their 

inferiority were used to justify the use of brutal force against them, as in the German 

extermination of the Herero in Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907. Africa was colonized 

after ideas of scientific racism had become widely accepted, and this powerfully shaped 

colonial policy on the continent. In particular, the British and Belgians understood ethnic 

group differences in racial terms, and discriminated among their colonial subjects on the 

assumption that certain "tribes" were better at ruling, others at fighting, and some others at 

laboring. Racism has served as a factor in more recent genocides as well. In the early 1990s, 

Serbian and Croatian leaders in the states of the former Yugoslavia depicted Muslims not 

simply as a religious minority but as a non-Slavic racial group, related to the much-hated 

Turks, who had to be eliminated from the territory in order to purify it. 

It would seem indisputable that modern colonialism in the early twentieth century involved 

racism. Indeed, during colonial occupation, colonizing groups were granted political, 

economic, and social privileges denied to the colonized, and the hierarchy was typically 

sustained by claims that the latter were racially inferior. The historian Partha Chatterjee 

refers to this as “the rule of colonial difference”—the colonized, by virtue of their biology, 

were represented “as incorrigibly inferior” (19, 33). Traditional scholarship has thus treated 

racism as “a built-in and natural product [of colonialism], essential to the social construction 

of an otherwise illegitimate and privileged access to property and power” (Stoler 322). More 

recent scholarship in the humanities has added that the very purpose of colonial discourse 

was “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial 

origin; in order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 70). 

Two sets of ideas have contributed to my analysis of the Orientalist construction of the 

“Orient”. This first inspired by Edward Said’s “colonial discourse” in his seminal book 

Orientalism (1978). The second is the nineteenth century Victorian progress in natural 

sciences which formed the intellectual support of the imperial and colonial enterprise, though 

in recent years, there was a shift from the natural biological division among human beings to 

the socially constructed, and hence historically variable, meanings. However, both the 

biological and the constructivist meanings of racial difference are the underlying premise and 

an integral constitutive part of the Orientalist/colonialist thought. At most, those theories and 

scholarships intimated the representations of the “other” as well as facilitated and justified 

the colonial rule. The Orientalist/colonialist representations of the colonized entailed 

“racism” and that “the display of contempt or aggressiveness… [was] based upon physical 

differences” (Todorov 370). 




5



The Darwinist Orientalist mindset was articulated in the works of western academicians, 

politicians, statesmen, scholars and scientists altogether. For example, Albert Beveridge’s 

speech before the Senate in 1900 referred to the Filipinos as “a barbarous race modified by 

three centuries of contact with a decadent race [the Spanish].” Beveridge’s point was that the 

Filipinos, due to their biological constitution, were incapable of self-government: “They are 

not capable of self-government. How could they be? They are not a self-governing race. It is 

barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in the 

Anglo-Saxon sense. They are Orientals, Malays” ( qtd. in Go 39). Senator Beveridge’s 

derogatory discourse revealed the function that all colonial discourse putatively fulfills: “To 

construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in 

order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 70). 

Race was an operative factor in colonial structure, and that racial difference was deemed to 

be the cause of behavior and inferiority. Nature, in terms of a people’s biology, blood, and 

stock, was the substance of difference. This colonial racial discourse shared underlying 

themes, not least of which was that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was superior and that American 

democracy was a sign of that superiority (Burch 78-101). 

Orientalism in Saidian sense was based on biological racism, Lamarckian environmentalism 

and sociobological distinction. In the Orientalist schema, the “Orient” is the different 

“Other”; the opposite of the European. Cromer says, “. . . I content myself with noting the 

fact that somehow or other the Oriental generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly 

opposite to the European” (qtd. in Said 39). S. Seidman suggests that sociologists might 

learn from Said’s work and take seriously “the problem of difference” and the “production of 

“Otherness” (315). Jukka Jouhki in “Orientalism and India” reflects that “Said obviously sees 

many variations and modes in the ways Europeans have constructed the “Orient” ” (3). For 

Said the differences between Orientalist writers, their personal style and form of writing have 

been explicit, but the basic content of their writing, that is “the separateness of the “Orient” , 

its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine 

malleability” has reflected the more or less unified latent Orientalism. Moreover, latent 

Orientalism and race classifications have supported each other very well, especially in the 

nineteenth century. The “second-order Darwinism,” of Orientalism has seemed to justify 

division of races to backward and advanced, and further, using a binary typology, to 

backward and advanced cultures and societies. The lesser civilizations have been thought to 

have suffered from the limitations caused by the biological composition of their race (Jouhki 

3-4). Hence they have been seen as in need of moral-political admonishment and even 

colonization by Europeans. As other marginalized people, the Orientals have been seen 

through (not looked at) and analyzed as problems (not as citizens), or confined or taken over. 

As Said states, whenever something was designated as Oriental, the act included an 

evaluative judgment. “Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be 

subjected” (Said 206–207). 




6



The Orientalist/colonialist justification is political and, unjustified as its basic theory is, 

actually imaginary and unscientific. This proves Said’s proposition that Orientalism is 

designed to create and construct the “Orient” for ideological, imperial and colonial purposes. 

The dichotomy is forcefully nourished and deliberately maintained as a tool of keeping the 

Western domination as the upper hand beneficiary. 

In the main linguistic, civilizational and racial characteristics of Orientals were undisputed 

central themes in Orientalism during the peak of imperialist era of Europe. Modern 

degeneration of cultures, theories about civilizational progress, belief in the White race’s 

destiny justified colonialism and formed, as Said states, “a peculiar amalgam of science, 

politics, and culture whose drift, almost without exception, was always to raise … European 

race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind.” Darwinism was modified to 

support the view of contemporary Orientals as being degenerate vestiges of a classical 

ancient greatness. Biological and sociobiological “truths” and Darwinist volumes concurred 

with the experienced abilities and inabilities of Orientals. Empirical data concerning the 

origins, development and character of Orientals seemed to give validity to the distinctions 

(Said 232– 233). “The essentialist conception of East-West difference was more extremely 

formulated by the evolutionists in the hard sciences, whose racist position surpassed that of 

their late eighteenth-century predecessors.” (Hung 270) 

The notion of human evolution was more systematically articulated in Esquisse d’un tableau 

historique des progre`s de l’esprit humain (1793– 1794) (Outlines of the Historical Progress 

of the human Mind (1793 - 1794)) by Marquis de Condoercets, a major theorist of the French 

Revolution. The “Orient” or the “Oriental peoples were classified as a society at a low stage 

of evolution, retarded by superstition and ignorance and trapped in a static state of being. 

Nevertheless, the Orientalist thought was dogged by the ideology of progress which regarded 

the idea that Oriental antiquity is representing a Lost Golden Age as nostalgic and running 

contrary to the natural law of evolution (262). Romantic Orientalism, for example, found in 

the East the exotic primitive childhood of man. The sense of wonder and amusement brought 

by the Romantic Orientalists was used to gratify and satisfy the desire as well as to confirm 

the superiority of the European “Self” as opposed to the primitive Oriental “Other”. 

The Romantics were averse to the evolutionary conception of history and indulged in a 

mystical thirst. Jean-Francois Staszak in his article “Other/Otherness” believes that 

“Exoticism constitutes the most directly geographical form of Otherness in that it opposes the 

abnormality of elsewhere with the normality of here”. He adds that “Exoticism is not, of 

course, an attribute of an exotic place, object or person. It is the result of a discursive process 

that consists of superimposing symbolic and material distance, mixing the foreign with the 

foreigner…” (6). Concomitantly, Romanticism as a resistance to evolutionism dissipated, and 

the Romantic respect for the East gave way to scientific racism in the field of Oriental 

studies. Muller’s theory of comparative religion was displaced by the evolutionary paradigm 

that portrayed all non-Western religions as essentially barbaric, fetishistic, and animistic. 

(Hung 269) 




7



This new locus of knowledge production of the “Orient” undertaken by Orientalist scholars 

has been institutionalized into a discourse which covers a far greater fields such as 

anthropology, philology, biology, eugenics, sociology, literature and geopolitics. By the 

1880s, Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection, which began as a controversial 

thesis after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, had been elevated to a biological 

orthodoxy and extended to conceptualize the evolution of cultures or races. Darwinist 

terminology conquered most academic disciplines, expressing itself as eugenics in biology, 

environmental determinism in geography, cultural evolutionism in anthropology, and so 

forth. The result was a constructed dichotomy which was nurtured to serve the western 

ideology of supremacy. The war against and later the occupation of Iraq by the Western- 

American allies was part and parcel of the dictum “ the means justifies the end” ,“civilizing 

mission” , a “redemptive endeavor” and “ a message of peace and democracy” against a 

“despotic” , “savage” and “incapable” Oriental regime. This recalls Beveridge’s speech on 

the Filipinos as “a barbarous race” who are incapable of self-government. 

In his The Races of Man: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Influence of Race over the 

Destinies of Nations (1862), famous Scottish anatomist Robert Knox asserted that the 

“Oriental races had made no progress since Alexander the Great, and that China’s defeat in 

the Opium War of 1839–1842 could be explained by the superiority of the white races to the 

‘‘semi-civilized Chinamen,’’ who belonged to the ‘‘dark races of men . . . [being] animals of 

today, . . . look[ing] not for a to-morrow’’ (qtd in Blue 78). Likewise, in his inaugural speech 

as the president of the “Ninth International Congress of Orientalism” (1892), F. M Muller 

invoked the name of Darwin repeatedly, and proclaimed that the essential difference between 

the ‘‘white and dark men, between the Aryan and the Semite’’ was emphasized as the 

fundamental premise of the field. He continued that at some point in the prehistoric period, 

there had been a ‘‘complete break between East and West,’’ a ‘‘break in the triumphant 

progress of the human race from East to West’’. This break ‘‘determined the course of the 

principal nations of ancient history as the mountains determine the course of rivers’’ (qtd in 

Hung 269-270). In the eugenicist literature of the early twentieth century, non-Western 

peoples were often compared to different kinds of apes. The ‘‘dark races’’ were widely seen 

as lower kinds of animals. (Blue 81) 

The four-decade period between the Berlin Congress and World War I (1878 –1914), 

characterized by Hobsbawm as the ‘‘Age of Empire,’’ was termed as the ‘‘commonplace 

assumptions of an imperialist and colonial age’’ that emphasized the ‘‘advanced nature of 

Western civilization, the ‘higher’ superiority of the Christian religion’’ (Girardot 192–93). 

The new geopolitical reality due to the decline of the bourgeois ideals of liberalism and 

rationalism led to the emergence of ethnonationalism as the reigning ideology of the Great 

Powers. Under this ideology, the concept of nation was conflated with the biological concept 

of race, and the Darwinian tenet of ‘‘struggle for existence’’ was harnessed to justify 

international aggression. Among the prophets of biological doom was the Egyptologist W. 

M. Flinders Petrie, who saw “no advance without strife” – civilisations only reached full 




8



expression by enduring centuries of military and mental struggle, after which they 

degenerated and that man must strive with Nature or with man, if he is not to fall back and 

degenerate. F. W. Headley's Darwinism and Modern Socialism (1909) was an anti-socialist 

tract that used biological reasonings to show that the continuance of competition and Natural 

Selection is essential to the well-being of a civilised community (Crook 63-97). 

The doctrine of colonial discourses defined the goal of colonialism as enlightening and 

civilizing non-Western peoples. Yet, this idea was abandoned and replaced by a more racist 

doctrine that colonized peoples were intelligently inferior and were incapable of being 

civilized. The dark races were going to be extinct in the struggle for existence, and imperial 

exploitation needed no moral justification (Adas 318-42). Imperialist policies were regarded 

as ‘‘biological necessities’’ (Hawkins 207 -09). The imperialist ideologies of the state 

supported by the intellectual hegemony of Darwinism were the dominant academic and 

intellectual Orientalist agenda during the colonial era. This is manifested in Muller’s 1892 

speech which began with a lengthy acknowledgment of royal patrons and governments for 

their protection and support of Orientalist scholarship (Muller 1–2), and ended with a frank 

admission that the ultimate end of Oriental studies was to serve imperialism: 

England has proved that she knows not only how to conquer, but how to rule. It is 

simply dazzling to think of the few thousands of Englishmen ruling the millions of 

human beings in India, in Africa, in America, and in Australasia. . . . Under the 

personal patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, a School of Modern Oriental 

Studies has at last been established at the Imperial Institute . . . [W]e want help, we 

want much larger funds . . . [F]ar higher interests than the commercial supremacy of 

England are at stake. (35–37) 

Scientists such as Konrad Lorenz and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel built on the Darwinian concept 

of ‘the survival of the fittest’, maintaining that the same inexorable law applied to humanity. 

These theorists believed that there existed two types of nations – those still vibrant and 

destined to survive, and those that were old, stagnant and condemned to decline. However, 

the scientific-racist knowledge of the East created another epistemological dichotomy which 

is a natural extension of the biologically determined one. The ‘‘soft version’’ of scientific 

racism and Weber’s conception of East-West differences that he saw the inferiority of the 

East was culturally rather than biologically determined is no less derogatory than a ‘‘hard 

version’’ of scientific racism or the evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer, who derived 

most of his data and ideas directly from the biological sciences of his day. It is worth 

mentioning here that Spencer’s biological imagination was inherited by many modernization 

theorists, who saw modernization following the Western path as a universal, natural, and 

evolutionary process, and that social-scientific Orientalist inquiries today are still haunted by 

the essentialist conception of East-West differences and the unilinear, evolutionary 

conception of social change. (Hung 273- 274) 

The Darwinian Orientalist thought continued to foster the racist intellectual discourse in the 

contemporary era. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Lande’s 




9



suggests that the Europeans were predestined to become ‘‘the winners of the world’’ because 

of their exceptional cultural ethos, and the non-Europeans were predestined to be ‘‘the losers 

of the world’’ because of their cultural inferiority. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel 

(1997) suggests that physical and biological environments determine the courses of the 

evolution of human behavior as much as they determine the evolution of species. The 

triumph of the West is predestined by the specific climate and geographical settings of 

Europe that give rise to the specific path of human evolution there. Cultural determinism and 

evolutionism are back. (Hung 276) 

Hence, history in the Western sense was not a class struggle, as Marx asserted, it was an 

eternal struggle for existence between races, and politics had to be based upon the direct 

application of the laws of nature and struggle. The strongest asserts its will. In short, history 

is the history of the triumphant. 

Nonetheless, we need to be aware of the difference in the ideological contexts in which they 

were embedded. While Darwinian evolutionism at the turn of the twentieth century was used 

to justify the conquest and annihilation of the inferior races, the postwar modernization 

school was enmeshed with the ideology that less modernized societies could be elevated to 

modernity by accepting the domination and guidance of the advanced Western countries. 

Consider the following excerpt from a letter written by Charles Darwin to W. Graham, July 

3, 1881: 

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress 

of civilization than you seem inclined to admit…. The more civilized so-called 

Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. 

Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower 

races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. 

Darwin repeated this sentiment in his book The Descent of Man, he speculated, “At some 

future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will 

almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world” (178) . 

However, Darwin was not alone in his racist ideology. Thomas Huxley, the man most 

responsible for advancing Darwinian doctrine argued that “No rational man, cognizant of the 

facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man… 

The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of 

our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the 

lowest” (20-1). H. F. Osborn, a prominent American anthropologist of the first half of the 

twentieth century proposed an anthropological assumption of evolutionary hierarchy in 

which blacks are placed at the bottom, yellows and reds somewhere in the middle, and whites 

on top. He argues that “the genus Homo is subdivided into three absolutely distinct stocks, 

which … popularly known as the Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negroid…The standard 

of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of 

the species Homo sapiens.”(129) 




10



Early Victorian imperialism was motivated largely by a strong Christian influence. The East 

India Company may have been based on exploitation, but it carried missionaries with it. The 

Christian base of early Victorian imperialism underwent a subtle change as the nineteenth 

century went on. The Encyclopedia Britannica says: 

This new period of imperialism at the end of the 19th century found its spiritual 

support in…social Darwinism, in all the theories glorifying power and success, which 

had swept over Europe…Racial theories seemed to give to this new attitude, which 

was in opposition to all traditional [i.e. Christian] values of morality, a justification by 

"science" and "nature," the belief in which was almost becoming the dominant faith 

of the period (122). 

Thus social Darwinism became the driving force behind imperialism. Instead of "taking the 

gospel to the heathen," the English came to be more motivated by a feeling of racial 

superiority, and felt the need to control "primitive peoples." So there were two motives 

behind colonization – the older, Christian motive and the newer motive based on social 

Darwinism. This is important to note because it shows that ideas have consequences. The 

idea of Darwinian evolution introduced a completely exploitative form of imperialistic 

control over "inferior races." The very idea of "inferior races" comes directly out of Darwin's 

theory. 

Therefore, think of the historical consequences that are the direct and logical results of such 

fatal propositions and premeditated Orientalist/colonialist premises which cause a millions 

Algerians, millions Africans, millions of dispossessed and displaced refugees from Middle 

East, Asia, Africa, Caribbean and crushed races all over the globe. The Western philosophy 

of the superiority of the white race over its “inferior” and “subhuman” various “Other” led to 

the extermination of millions of Africans, Asians and other minorities across the universe. 

It is also significant to note that some of the Crusaders and others who used force to further 

their creeds in the name of God were acting in concord with the Oreintalist/colonialist desire. 

The Christian missionaries acted against the word of God and played religico- political role 

in the Orientalist/colonialist project. The struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that 

did not confine to Orientalist scholarship, hegemonic policy, imperial and colonial 

encroachment, but misused religion as an ideological apparatus of what used to be called 

civilizing mission and redeeming salvation. 

The teachings of Osborn, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer and others like them, however, are 

completely consistent with the teachings of the Orientalsits/colonialists in the same period. 

Indeed, social Darwinism has provided the scientific substructure for some of the most 

significant atrocities in human history. For evolution to succeed, it is as crucial that the unfit 

die as the fittest survive. The concept of evolution demands death and “exterminations of the 

brutes”. On another plane, Orientalist/colonialist thought has observed an interrelationship 

between political economy and biology as trading partners of long standing. 




11



The notion of the racial superiority of Caucasian race which thus obtains a code of laws and 

morals only binding for one part of humanity as endorsed by Orientalist/colonial project have 

its ramifications for imperialism, since the empire that launched its imperial enterprise had 

erased any possibility of cultural diversity . Thorstein Veblen (1899), for example, proposed 

that economics be reconstructed upon Darwinian principles. Alfred Marshall, whose 

Principles frontispiece recorded the same motto found in The Origin of Species , natura non 

facit saltum, opined that “the Mecca of the economist lies in evolutionary biology . . . ” (qtd. 

in Leonard 2) 

The concepts of "struggle for existence", "survival of the fittest" and “Might is right” become 

the threshold concepts of the colonial and imperial schema. However, James Allen Rogers in 

his article “Darwinism and Social Darwinism” remarks that the idea of the struggle for 

existence “was not original with Malthus and in one form or another had been a 

commonplace in Western thought” (269). In his Descent of Man, Darwin came directly to the 

point: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive 

commonly exhibit a vigorous state of Health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our 

utmost to check the process of elimination” (501). Darwin’s “Natural Selection” is consistent 

with the more accurate expression of Herbert Spencer’s “the Survival of the Fittest”. 

Darwin’s biological progress which echoed in Spencer's belief in social progress has been 

appropriated by the Orientalist institution, and culminated and materialized in the colonial 

project. 

In his anthropological classic, Europe and the People without History, Eric Wolf observed 

that the Western intellectual tradition tended to view Europeans – the “people with history” – 

as the driving force of historical change, and “primitive” societies as pristine, unchanging 

survivals from the past – the “people without history” (385). Hence, we can see that 

Classicism and Orientalism emerged and developed as complementary concepts. Classicism 

was the West’s way of defining “who we are,” while Orientalism was the West’s way of 

defining “who we are not.” Classicism preceded Orientalism, with the result that stereotypes 

about the East had been laid even before systematic inquiry had begun. (Brownell 3) 

Those assumptions were found in the classical Greek texts themselves, and classicists 

repeated them and began to elaborate upon them from the eighteenth century on. Herodotus, 

Hippocrates, Aristotle, and other ancient authors had already set out some of the main themes 

of Orientalism: Asian rulers are despotic and excessive; Asians do not care about individuals; 

Asians are faceless hordes of people who live in conditions of servitude. Plato and Aristotle 

were the earliest to associate Asia with despotic political systems. Hippocrates wrote, 

“Europeans are also more courageous than Asiatics” (qtd. in Brownell 3). Neoclassicism was 

an intellectual trend that led to the construction of what we now call “the history of Western 

civilization.” 

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said argues that Oriental Studies arose out of the need for and 

experiences of colonialism. The “Orient” was a cultural construct of Europe, and that served 




12



as an image of the “Other” to Europe; it helped the West to define itself by providing a 

contrasting image; Orientalism is a style of thought based upon a fundamental distinction 

made between the “Orient” ” and the “Occident.” Said’s most important point is to argue that 

this intellectual distinction is part of the Western style of “dominating, restructuring, and 

having authority over the “Orient”.” Said does not believe that academic texts are “merely 

decorative;” they are a form of cultural domination that complements political domination (1- 

3). According to an Orientalist ontological schema, the “Orient” is separate, different, 

conservative or archaic or barbarian, sensual and passive. Accordingly, the “Orient” is far 

away from development; further, its ‘progress’ is measured in terms of, and in comparison to 

“the West”, which implicitly and occasionally explicitly maintains its position of the 

“inferior Other”. (Richardson 18) 

Edward Said has shown that colonialism was premised on Orientalism, i.e. the construction 

of an “Orient” which emphasised the “Orient” as an “other” which is distinct, different and 

inferior. To emphasise, the inferiority of the “Orient” was established through the device of 

essentialising difference – primarily in race and in terms of the universal evolutionary 

principles between the ‘Occident” and the “Orient”. Said argues that it is precisely such a 

construction that rationalised and made possible the hegemony of the coloniser on the 

colonised. Orientaism thus borrowed and was frequently informed by "strong" ideas, 

doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was ( and is) a linguistic “Orient”, a 

Freudian “Orient”, a Spenglerian “Orient”, a Darwinian “Orient”, a racist “Orient” and so on. 

Yet never has there been such a thing as a pure, or unconditional, “Orient” (22-23). In the 

ideological and epistemological scheme of the Western thought, the “Orient” was destined to 

be a scapegoat; a “Calibanic” framework for all that is savage, abnormal, strange, primitive 

etc. the Orientalists saw the “Orient” as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, 

even redemption. The Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological 

determinism and moral-political admonishment. 

According to Said, the rigidly binomial opposition of "ours" and "theirs," was reinforced not 

only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on 

survival and natural selection. An Oriental man was first an Oriental and second a man. 

(227). “Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, 

Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism”. (43) 

In his book Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004), Joseph 

Carroll has observed that many of Arnold’s specific cultural values can be assimilated to a 

relativistic Darwinian model of cultural values. Carroll has maintained that in Arnold’s view 

Western achievements represent the highest level yet attained by any culture. Arnold’s own 

inclusive term of “culture,” is a term that is roughly equivalent to “Western civilization 

regarded as culminating in Victorian gentlemen with a predominantly classical education and 

refined literary tastes.” In order to sustain his own sense of a universal, disinterested 

sympathy, Darwin must also sustain the priority of his own advanced, Western, scientific 




13



civilization. It is for this reason that, throughout his work, he looks forward with equanimity 

or even with satisfaction to the imminent extermination of all primitive peoples (1-12) 

If literature is a figurative representation of human experience, and if the fundamental 

elements of biological existence are organisms, environments, and actions, the figurative 

elements that correlate with these biological elements would naturally assume a predominant 

position within most figurative structures. Evolutionary theory can thus provide a sound 

rationale for adopting the basic categories as well as the theoretical assumptions that govern 

the structural underpinning of human relationship. Hence, in its construction of the “Oriental 

Other”, Orientalism tended to assimilate the Darwinian paradigm. This is obvious in the 

depiction of the Oriental characters, settings, and actions which constitute a single, 

continuous body of stereotypical, essentialist, Orientalist thought. Consider Shakespeare’s 

“Caliban”, Defoe’s “Friday”, or Conrad’s “Niggers,” to mention but a few. In his early work, 

Kipling had made the landscapes and culture of India a fantasy that recuperates the 

sensations of savagery. In She and King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard combines tales 

of fabulous adventure with ethnographic descriptions of Africa. Much of Conrad’s early 

fiction is set in the jungles. In Heart of Darkness, he broods over the spirit of the African 

wilderness. Journeying into the wilderness is “like traveling back to the earliest beginnings 

of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings’” (40). Marlow 

sums his tale of the wilderness as “one of the dark places of the earth” ( 5). In Lord Jim, 

Conrad writes “… that 'giving your life up to them' (them meaning all of mankind with skins 

brown, yellow, or black in colour) ‘was like selling your soul to a brute.'” (284) 

Influenced and encouraged by Darwinism, many Victorians not only scientists and 

anthropologists, but also the popular fiction associated with imperialism and the idea of 

Empire (Griffith 179). The idea of the incompatibility of ethical or cultural norms, then, 

revolved around the sense of racial associations. Diversity, therefore, could be only a codeword 

for racial difference. 

In fact, Darwinian Theory promotes the idea of war, and regards peace as an element that 

retards progress. “Evolutionary anthropology has focused on the origins of war, or rather 

ethnocentricity, because it epitomizes the problem of group selection, and because war may 

itself have been the main agent of group selection” (Dawson 79). This line of thought is 

embodied in Vladimir Jabotinsky’ statement: “Stupid is the person who believes in his 

neighbor, good and loving as the neighbor may be. Justice exists only for those whose fists 

and stubbornness make it possible for them to realize it . . . Do not believe anyone, be always 

on guard, carry your stick always with you – this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish 

battle of all against all” (qtd. in Bruzonsky 19). This is actually the Fascist ideology of 

Darwinism that continues to pose a threat to the world in the 21 st century. Those who have 

the power/knowledge or the force of imposition in the Orientalist/colonialist thought would 

survive chiefly because they were the "fittest”, hence more successful at warfare. "The tamest 

are the strongest," wrote Walter Bagehot, the first avowed social Darwinist. (qtd. in 

Dawson81) 




14



It should be emphasized that all versions of social Darwinism and other assumptions of racial 

determinism, past and present, have been concerned with the evolution of altruism as a form 

of competition and a test of the “fittest”. According to Doyne Dawson “Darwinism” is 

associated with ruthless competition and exploitation even by the educated” (81). If group 

selection is common, then evolution requires group extinction. Though this extinction in 

human sociocultural evolution does not necessarily entail the physical extermination of the 

"Other", it has been achieved through the imposition of sociocultural dictates of one group 

“us” on the other group(s) “them”. 

The fundamental principle behind fascism today is Darwinism. Indeed, such claims as "some 

races have been left behind in the evolutionary process," and "through survival of the fittest, 

the strong survive and the weak need be eliminated" have been the source of numerous 

harmful ideologies throughout the 20th century especially fascism. This Darwinian Fascist 

system is alleged to have been founded by Lycurgus in the 8th century BC. Under the 

Spartan system, peoples’ lives were measured according to whether or not they would be of 

use to the state. Strong, healthy male children were dedicated to the state, while unhealthy 

babies were abandoned to the mountains to die. This Spartan practice was in no way different 

from the Darwinian system that professed the sickly needed to be eliminated to maintain a 

"healthy and superior race." 

In his famous book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1969), Karl Popper, one of the 

foremost thinkers of the 20th century, has found in Plato's fascist tendencies the first source 

of inspiration for oppressive regimes, and called him an enemy of open society. In support of 

his contention, Popper refers to how Plato calmly defended the killing of infants in Sparta, 

and describes him as the first theoretical proponent of "eugenics": 

...[I]t is important that the master class should feel as one superior master race. 'The 

race of the guardians must be kept pure', says Plato (in defence of inf anticide…He 

asks: 'Surely, there is no difference, so far as their natural fitness for keeping guard is 

concerned, between a gallant youth and a well-bred dog?” (51) 

In the process of the Orientalists’ construction of the “Orient”, the doctrine of the indefinite 

plasticity of culture, sometimes called "cultural determinism", is oscillated with "biological 

determinism" attributed to Darwinists. This has been the vision of an integrated scientific 

worldview; a beacon of Western scholarship since the Enlightenment. In fact, the old social 

Darwinism, inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, and other neo-Darwinian theories may be 

considered variants of group selection and all were serviceable to every shade of political 

opinion. However, anthropology as chiefly Western dominating science has been 

monopolized to serve the Orintalist/colonialist desire of creating, and then subjugating and 

segregating the “Other”. “It happened that both the first and second Darwinian revolutions 

were soon followed by dramatic anthropological discoveries that seemed to confirm 

Darwinian interpretations of human evolution” (Dawson 87). 




15



A prime candidate in the Darwinian Orientalist thought is "ethnocentricity," meaning the 

human tendency to form exclusive groups. It is difficult to dismiss the hypothesis that we are 

descended from a cunning and devious ape with innate tendencies to ethnocentricity, 

xenophobia, and male coalition-building, capable of deadly violence against neighboring 

"ethnic" groups when the right triggers were pressed (Dawson 87-90). Cultural preferences 

and biological fitness have actually been two detrimental drives in the Orientalist/colonialist 

construction of the “Orient”. Groupishness, or ethnocentricity, racism, Orientalism, 

imperialism and other socio-political ills are the product of long ages of cultural selection, 

quite possibly abetted by assumed Darwinian genetic selection. 

Unfortunately, “Multicultural” is actually a euphemistic term for "multiracial" or 

"multiethnic," for the ultimate ideology represented by Multicultural West may be described 

as cultural determinism and selection. Western culture would not be what it is without 

Islamic, Chinese, African, and many other cultural inputs. But, Western Orientalist ideology 

pushed to the peripheral limit any cultural input outside Greco-Roman tradition. 

Whereas Darwin’s ideas provided the biologically racial determinism of Orientalism, 

Malthus’s ideas of “undoubtedly an insufficiency of room and food” motivated the imperial 

drive of the colonial powers. Yet, it was Spencer’s notion of competition which preached 

“the survival of the fittest” that mostly guided the Orientalist/colonialist tendencies all along. 

His main idea was that conflict was necessary for progress, and hence all cultural evolution 

must be linked to biological evolution. 

In his chapter “Sartre on Racism” in Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, 

Postcolonialism, Jonathan Judaken has remarked that racism legitimated the exploitation that 

underpinned colonialism. He has also suggested that Orientalism is drawn on a Manichean 

logic, and concluded that the Sartrean Orientalist “gaze”, had frozen the “Orient” to an object 

which is stripped from its identity, and thus becomes vulnerable to the different forms of 

impositions. The dehumanization and ostracism of racialized “Other” are part and parcel of 

the creation of European identity and hegemony (23-41). Talal Asad has put the matter in 

anthropological terms: 

The complex, unequal relations between Western and non-Western locations, I 

maintain, must be understood centrally in terms of a great historical transformation of 

people's ways of living through which the West has hegemonized the non-European 

world. This change involves not the permanent elimination of boundaries but new 

ways of making and unmaking them…It is the evidence of how power has 

constructed a particular difference across various similarities. (720) 

On his part, Andrew Lass opines that “there remains in our work a “vestigial survivalist 

thesis" and that “the study of cultural production, specifically the study of European 

conceptual thought, provides it with the opportunity to gain insight into the practice of 

theory”. (721,722-3) 




16



“Othering” is a systematic discipline that goes hand in hand with the Western epistemology 

and cultural discourse. “Otherness” is due less to the difference of the “Other” than to the 

point of view and the discourse of the person who perceives the “Other” as such. Opposing 

“Us”, the Self and “them”, the “Other” allows humanity to be divided into two groups: one 

that embodies the norm and whose identity is valued and another that is defined by its faults, 

devalued and susceptible to discrimination. In short, Otherness is the result of a discursive 

process by which a dominant group constructs one or many dominated groups by 

stigmatizing a difference – real or imagined – presented as negation of identity and thus a 

motive for potential discrimination (Staszak 1). Saeed A khan has also found that “Western 

thought has used science to promote racial difference and superiority”. He adds, “Western 

thought has for centuries denied the “Other” as different, inferior, and worthy of subjection to 

colonialism”. (1) 

This is actually the backbone idea of Orientalism as a corporative, institutional Western 

discipline in which the asymmetry in power relationship is central to the construction of 

“Otherness”. This trend of thought was very much dominant during the colonial era and 

acted as supportive scientific and scholastic evidence to the Orientalist/colonialist project. 

The “Orient” was created as a stigmatic “Other” which represents the savage race, 

barbarianism, and inferiority. Based on these and other evolutionary empirical data, a form of 

institutionalized colonial geography was established, “geographers (European discoveries) 

sought to document the particularity of the physical environment and tropical societies” 

(Staszak 2). 

The Hegelian concept of universal progress allows societies to be organized hierarchically 

from the primitive “Other” to the civilized European. Hegel claims that “[T]he History of the 

World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the 

beginning” (qtd. in Macfie 3). Darwin’s theory in this regard offers a coherent scientific 

framework to explain species diversity through natural selection. In doing so, Darwin’s 

theory offers a hierarchy of different environments and societies and implemented certain 

differences as principles of exclusion (4). 

The Darwinian theory of evolution was also an underpinning element of literature. One sees 

in British colonial fiction from Defoe’s Robison Crusoe to Haggard’s imperial romances a 

sort of savage native behavior particularly cannibalism. In his essay ““The Eucharist of 

Hell”; Or, Eating People is Right: Romantic Representations of Cannibalism”, Peter Kitson 

argues that “Cannibalism … is the most notorious process of colonial “Othering”, both as an 

alleged practice and as a critical construct”. For example, Kurtz’s infamous dictum 

“exterminate all the brutes” which is equal to Kipling’s view of “the Whiteman’s burden” 

echoed the notorious idea of European expansion as a biological necessity. The eighteenthcentury 

natural historian Buffon accounted for human variety in terms of a process which he 

called degeneration and which he described as occurring through the influence of climate and 

environment – Humanity was originally white with European features but it degenerated into 




17



various other races. J. F. Blumenbach argued in 1775 in his treatise On the Natural Variety of 

Mankind that the originary race of human beings were white and beautiful and that all 

present varieties descended from these, with the European or Caucasian as the least 

degenerate and the Ethiopian and Mongolian or Calmuck as the most degenerate (Bendyshe 

269). 

These kinds of theorizing activities and inhuman assumptions endorsed by the 

Orientalists/colonialists have caused serious wounds and entailed huge and traumatic split to 

the concept of human coexistence. In addition to its dehumanization of the “Other”, the idea 

of the supremacy and superiority of the “West” has led to a process of displacement of 

history. By these terms I mean that the West has tried hard to dismiss and erase the history of 

the “Other” and to replace it with history written by the West. The argument of this paper is 

based on a historical sense of recasting and questioning the dominant forms of culture, in a 

sense that the struggle for history is a political endeavor and this would explain why 

postcolonial writers and critics seriously recognized the central relation between history, 

narrative and politics in their works. I have strongly observed that one of the legacies of 

Orientalism, and indeed one of its epistemological foundations, is historicism which means 

that the history of humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of 

Europe, or the West alone. Historicism is actually an essential component of a modern mode 

of thinking. We cannot conceive of modernity without historicism. The denial of other modes 

of knowledge is part and parcel of the Orientalist mindset. The multiplicity of the past is 

erased. Hence, it needs no further proof to say that Modernism, Historicism, Orientalism, 

Imperialism, Colonialism, and other Western “isms” all work on a Manichean logic and 

Darwinian concept of separation. 

Biography 

Both Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-Mahfedi and Venkatesh P work in the Department of 

English, University of Mysore in India. They specialize in postcolonial literature and theory. 

References 

Adas, M. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western 

Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. 

Anthias, Floya. “Cultural Racism or Racist Culture?”. Economy and Society. 24.2. 1995: 




18



279-301. 

Asad, Talal, et el. “Provocations of European Ethnology”. American Anthropologist. 

99. 4 (Dec., 1997): 713-730< http://www.jstor.org/stable/682520> Accessed: 

16/07/2009 

Bendyshe, Thomas. Trans. and Ed. The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich 

Blumenbach. London: The Anthropological Society, 1865. 

Bhabha, H. K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 

Blue, G. ‘‘China and Western Social Thought in the Modern Period.’’ in China and 

Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge, ed. T. 

Brook and G. Blue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 57–281 

Brownell, Susan. “Western-Centrism in Olympic Studies and Its Consequences in the 2008 

Beijing Olympics”. Esporte e Sociedade , 4, 12( Jul.2009)1-20. 

Bruzonsky, Mark. "Jabotinsky The Legend and Its Power". Israel Horizons. 29. 2. 

(March/April) 1981. 

Burch, H. “Conditions Affecting the Suffrage in Colonies”. Annals of the American 

Academy of Political and Social Science. 19. (1902): 78–101. 

Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York 

and London: Routledge, 2004. 

Chatterjee, P. The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. San Diego: ICON Group International, Inc., 2005. 

–––. Lord Jim. San Diego: ICON Group International, Inc., 2005. 

Crook, P. Darwinism, War, and History: The Debate over the Biology of War 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. 2nd ed., New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1874. 

Dawson, Doyne. “Evolutionary Theory and Group Selection: The Question of Warfare”. 

History and Theory. 38 . 4. (Dec., 1999):79-100 < 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678059> Accessed: 01/02/2009 09:14 

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1946 edition, volume 12, 1946 . 

Girardot, N. J. ‘‘The Course of Sinological Discourse: James Legge (1815–97) and the 

Nineteenth- Century Invention of Taoism’’ in Contacts between Cultures, ed. B. H.- 

K. Luk. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. 188–93 

Go, Julian. “Racism” and Colonialism: Meanings of Difference and Ruling Practices in 

America’s Pacific Empire”. Qualitative Sociology. 27. 1. (Spring 2004): 35-58. 

Griffith, John W. Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma “Bewildered Traveller' 

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, reprinted. 1999. 

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: 

Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1997. 

Hung, Ho-Fung. “Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European 

Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900”. Sociological Theory. 21.3 

(September 2003):254-280. 

Huxley, Thomas. Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews. New York: Appleton, 1871. 




19



Jouhki, Jukka. “Orientalism and India”. J@RGONIA. 2006.1-20. 

Judaken, Jonathan “Sartre on Racism” in Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana 

Existentialism, Postcolonialism, Albany State University of New York Press, 2008. 

Khan, Saeed A. ““Race” and Difference: Orientalism and Western Concepts”. 

Encyclopedia of the Human Genome. Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Nature Publishing 

Group, 2003.1- 4. 

Kitson, Peter J. ““The Eucharist of Hell'; Or, Eating People is Right: Romantic 

Representations of Cannibalism.” Romanticism on the Net. 17 (Feb 2000), 

Accessed: 02, Dec., 

2010 

Leonard, Thomas. “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of 

Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought”. Journal of Economic 

Behavior and Organization. 2007.1-38 

Hegel, G. W F. “Gorgeous Edifice” in Macfie, A. L. Orientalism: A Reader. New York: New 

York University Press, 2003. 

Osborn, Henry Fairfield. “The Evolution of Human Races,” Natural History. 

(January/February 1926); reprinted in Natural History. 89 (April 1980). 

Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies.vol. I, The Spell of Plato. London: 

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. 

Richardson, John E. (Mis)Representing Islam The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet 

Newspapers. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 

2004. 

Rogers, James Allen. “Darwinism and Social Darwinism”. Journal of the History of Ideas. 

33.2 (April/ June 1972): 265-280. 

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978; New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 

2001. 

Said, Edward W. “Orientalism Reconsidered”. Cultural Critique. 1 (Autumn, 1985). 89- 

107 Accessed: 03/04/2010 12:49 

Seidman, S. “Empire and knowledge: More troubles, New Opportunities for Sociology”. 

Contemporary Sociology. 25. 1996. 313–316. 

Siqueira, Alito. “Postcolonial Portugal, Postcolonial Goa: A Note on Portuguese Identity and 

Its Resonance in Goa and India”. Lusotopie. 2. 2002. 211-213. 

Staszak, Jean-Francois. “Other/Otherness”. International encyclopedia of Human 

Geography. 2008.1-7 

Stoler, A. L. “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of 

Rule” in N. B. Dirks. Ed., Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: 

University of Michigan Press, 1992. 319–352 

Todorov, T. “Race,” Writing, and Culture” in H. L. Gates, Jr. Ed., “Race,” Writing, 

and Difference . Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 370–380 

Young, Robert C. J. “Foucault on Race and Colonialism”. 1995. 

Accessed: 25/11/2010 

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Ed. with an Introduction and Notes by 




20



Martha Banta. New York: Macmillan, 1899; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 

Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1982. 




21

Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the âOtherâ - JPCS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?

Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the âOtherâ - JPCS