It's a Don's Life (14 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
Orientalism ... or, what’s in a name?
1 October 2007
On the front door of what was the Faculty of Oriental Studies in Cambridge, I have just spotted a new notice. Next to the
stern warnings about not leaning your bicycle against the windows (a hopeless prohibition in Cambridge) is the following equally
stern announcement: ‘Name Change. We are now known as the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.’
I am sure that this has been the subject of long discussions. And I can see why they wanted to change. The word ‘Oriental’
now reeks of unacceptable ‘orientalism’, a nastily Western construction of any culture slightly to the east: decadent, effeminate
but at the same time slightly menacing. (It’s what the Greeks felt about the Persians, and the Romans in their turn about
the Greeks, and so on westwards.) How, for a start, do you explain to a group of new first year undergraduates what an ‘Oriental’
Faculty is all about, and why it doesn’t exactly mean what they might think it does? More to the point, how do you get them,
in the first place, to apply to something with a name like that?
It’s a bit like having ‘Women’s Studies’ being called the ‘Department of the Second Sex’.
All the same, I can’t help feeling that it might have been more courageous and confident to sit it out with the old name.
There would, after all, be some good company in that project. The Oriental Institute in Chicago shows no sign of turning itself
into an Institute of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. And the School of Oriental and African Studies likewise seems happy
enough with the title.
Wouldn’t the cleverer strategy have been to try to reclaim the adjective ‘Oriental’ as an acceptable label again?
There are all kinds of example of this sort of problem. One recent commenter on this blog took me to task for using ‘BCE’
instead of ‘BC’, and I must say I think he had a point. I’ve tended to fall into this politically correct habit recently.
But, no, BCE doesn’t honestly seem any less ‘Christian’ in its emphasis than the old BC. If BCE stands for ‘Before the Common
Era’, then (unless you change the counting system) isn’t it simply admitting that Christian time IS the Common Era? And why
should that satisfy any other of the world religions?
In my defence, I’d like to say that I haven’t given in with the word ‘pagan’ – which I continue to use of traditional Greek
and Roman religion, despite the fact that it was a disapproving Christian coinage hardly ever used by ‘civic polytheists’
(as we’re supposed to say) themselves.
I haven’t got my head entirely in the sand here. It’s not that I think that the precise words we use are unimportant. But
being blown by the political wind is not always the best political course of action. Isn’t it better, and smarter, to reclaim
the language of oppression? Look at the word ‘black’. When I was a kid, you were told off fiercely if you were ever caught
using it. Some version of ‘negro’ was the order of the time ... which would now sound like a terrible bit of colonialism.
The same is true too for ‘queer’. When I was a student, it was enough to get you thrown out of the college bar. Now we all
use ‘queer theory’.
So, wouldn’t it have been smarter to rebrand ‘Oriental’, not change the name into a temporarily acceptable periphrasis?
Comments
If the Orient, with its fascinating mysteries, is to be banished, what is to become of its nearer cousin, the Levant, one
may wonder?
DR VENABLES PRELLER
Cambridge is of course merely engaged in slavish imitation either of the British Library (Oriental & India Office > ‘Asian
and African Studies Reading Room’, c. 2005) or of Liverpool Arts Faculty (School of Archaeology, Classics & Oriental Studies
> ‘Sch. of A., C. & Egyptology’, 2004) ... The problem is not that the category ‘Oriental’ is not tainted, but that any alternative
categories are of course equally open to knowledge/power manipulation. ‘Levant’ is just a French (via Italian) word for ‘Orient’
= rising.
SW FOSKA
Oriental is probably a better name here – who the hell decides what is the Whole East and in relation to what? and then who
gets to be Far East and who Middle East and who Near East?
XJY
Tips for new students – from an old don
8 October 2007
The first week of term has ended, and our new students have just gone through the increasingly absurd ritual that is ‘Freshers’
Week’. I don’t much mind the old-fashioned rites of passage that many of them organise for themselves: a bit too much alcohol
and getting off with the wrong bloke to huge, but temporary, embarrassment all round. It’s the ridiculous quantities of ‘information’
that we now feel obliged to impart.
They have lectures, workshops and leaflets on safe cycling, safe sex, how to write an essay, how to recognise meningitis,
what plagiarism is, how the library works (in triplicate), how to deal with budgeting, how to have a good time without it
getting in the way of the 2.1 of your dreams – and that’s before they have even met their Director of Studies, received their
work schedule or been to a lecture.
We must be mad. In the rest of our teaching lives, we are only too well aware of how much information the average highly intelligent
young person can possibly absorb in an hour. At the beginning of term we simply ignore that. Though you only have to look
at the behaviour of many of our first years on their bicycles to see that the safe cycling advice falls on deaf ears. Luckily,
for most of them, experience teaches that one.
So why do we do it? It’s partly unthinkingly well-meaning, and it’s partly ‘tick box’ again, I fear. Do you explain to your
students about AIDS/plagiarism/loan management ...? asks some higher authority (whether the government or the students’ union).
Yes, sir, we can reply.
Left to myself, I’d cut it back down to a speedy hour or so.
But what would you say, if you could give them just one piece of advice?
Obvious: GET A DIARY. That’s the single piece of advice that would lead to most benefit, efficiency, good work routine and
happy living over the first year at ‘uni’ (as they now say). You would be amazed to discover how many students try to manage
a complicated timetable and routine without one. Overall, more classes are missed by simply failing to write down the time
and place in a little book (or even a BlackBerry) than by laziness or whatever.
After that, it’s a bit more difficult to know what to put first. But I would go next for TAKE CARE WITH YOUR FACEBOOK. Yes,
it’s a wonderful medium of new communications. But your lecturers may well have registered, too, you know. So when you say
(
pace
my last point!) that you couldn’t turn up to your supervision because you were sick – when you have just posted 67 new photographs
of that excessive party at which you had such a good time, they will know!
Finally, TREAT YOUR LECTURERS AS THE HUMAN BEINGS THAT THEY ARE. I get really fed up with being treated as some kind of teaching
automaton, programmed to deliver information on Roman history come rain or shine ... no feelings involved. On numerous occasions
(... oh dear, back to missing classes again) students have apologised for not making a supervision a few days before with
a cheery ‘Sorry I didn’t turn up, I wasn’t well’. You don’t just fail to turn up for a dinner invitation because you’re ill:
you get a message to your host in advance. Same courtesy for us, please.
Comments
It is both scary and wonderful to know that you have some of the same problems with your students that I have with mine at
a US two-year college. So, from Cambridge on down, students are students, eh?
PHILOSOPHERP
The only thing I remember from my Freshers’ Week was the Domestic Bursar holding a paper towel up in the air and telling us
not to flush them down the toilet, but feel free to use them to pull our hair out of the shower plugholes.
JENN
The only thing I can remember from our Freshman’s pep talk by the Dean was the utterance: ‘You will have to matriculate, of
course – don’t worry, it won’t make you blind.’ I did wonder why no one else laughed. Poor fellows, maybe nobody had told
them.
OLIVER NICHOLSON
19 October 2007
Most people go into Amazon to buy books: easy shopping, and it would be an entirely admirable enterprise, if it wasn’t systematically
killing all our local bookshops. Authors, though, sneakily visit Amazon to check how their books are selling, to plot their
progress up (and down) the Amazon sales rankings – the bit that says ‘#47,543 in books’.
Actually, there are some odd things about this calculation. I was rejoicing the other day that my new book on the Roman Triumph
(soon to appear in the UK) had reached number 2 in the Amazon.com (that’s the US site) rankings ... but in the niche subcategory
of ‘General Geometry’. (Quite how it got classified as ‘geometry’ beats me, but I guess it felt nice even so.)
But what every author wants to know is how many sales does it take to get you zooming up the Amazon ranks. I’ve always suspected
that we were dealing with single figures here. But proof came the other day when the husband decided to buy 4 copies of his
own book on icons, which seemed almost as cheap, and a lot easier to obtain from Amazon than from the publishers. The result
was that he zoomed more than 250,000 places up the rankings.
Then there are those innocent customer reviews. Are they all written by real punters, or by the author’s paid-up friends or
enemies? Is it like those suspiciously frank hotel reviews on TripAdvisor (‘Quite the best hotel in Beachville and far better
than the awful Hotel Sunny next door’)?
Just occasionally the reviewer confesses his or her bias (‘Happy declaration ... I live with the author’). But mostly we are
left to guess whether these usually pseudonymous critics are the author’s best friend, lovers or publishers or not. Frankly
I suspect (though couldn’t possibly prove) that big publishers have a small team of Amazon reviewers enthusing over their
new books under the banner of ‘Jeremy in Cambridge’.
22 October 2007
I’ve had several emails asking what on earth do you dons do. When I tell people that my main formal obligation is that I am
asked to give 40 lectures a year, it usually produces some such reply as ‘Surely you meant
week
?’ ... and then howls of disbelief when I say, ‘No,
year
.’
Actually, 40 lectures per year or not, the workload in term time amounts to a more than 12 hour day, 7 days a week.
The best I can do is give you an hour-by-hour account of one typical day last week. This is not in the spirit of complaint
– because actually I love the job. But there are a few misapprehensions about our leisurely life that need to be put right.
OK, so let’s take last Wednesday.
Work started at 7.00 a.m., with three long student essays to read and comment on. True, on another day I might have marked
them the evening before. But I had spent most of Tuesday evening giving a practice job interview to a young colleague, and
when I got home I read one of my graduate students’ work – and that took till 1.00 in the morning or so and I just couldn’t
manage the essays.
I biked off to my Faculty at 9.00. The journey takes 20 minutes, as I’m a bit more sedate than some, but I managed to think
about my upcoming lecture on the way. I ought to have done a bit more thinking when I arrived, but instead I had a meeting
with one of my college colleagues about plans for student teaching – and I just about had time to photocopy an extra sheet
for the handout, before the lecture at 10.00.
So at 10.00 I was talking to 120 first years about the Persian Wars and Orientalism. How many had read any Edward Said? None
(but this was the group who had done much better on the map test than the previous year, so I half forgave them).
At 11.00 I had an hour with the PhD student whose work I’d read the evening before. Then at 12.00 one of my MPhil students
came to talk about the seminar on Roman freedmen he is due to give in a couple of weeks’ time.
So I ended up being late for the weekly meeting of our nineteenth-century history project (12.30–2.00), partly because I went
via the Buttery to get a sandwich to eat on the hoof. We were discussing two pre-Darwinian texts on female beauty – fascinating
stuff, but I had to slip out before the finish in order to get back to college at 2.00 for a two hour supervision on Roman
religion with a group of three second-year undergraduates, whose essays I’d read first thing in the morning.
At 4.00 there was just time to look at the mail and some of the 50 or so emails that had come in since I’d last switched on,
before I had to bike off to the station to get the 5.15 train to a college
alumnae
event in London. On the way, and on the way back, I got through one article submitted to a journal that I help edit and I
read the papers for some job interviews and a Faculty Teaching Committee meeting that were both happening the following day.
Home on the 9.52 and getting back just before 11.30, I dealt with the backlog of emails and started to read the big chunk
of work sent by another PhD student, but by 1.00 in the morning I was fading fast and went to bed – intending to be at work
again by 7.00. (I nearly made it but not quite.)
And yes, I had – I confess – by then consumed rather more than the 1 unit of alcohol now recommended for us middle-class professional
women.
Comments
Isn’t it interesting how Oxbridge academics are never asked about any working time rules, or work out our actual hourly rate
of pay?
At present I am seriously considering dissuading people from an academic career: the hours are long; recognition abysmal;
pay poor (our students earn more a year or so after graduation); apparently pension contributions may be increased leading
to a real-terms pay cut; administrative duties overwhelm and the one reason we choose the career, research, is always pushed
on to the back burner. Frankly, in Cambridge all of my junior colleagues and I typically only manage to support ourselves
by virtue of having a better-paid partner.
This sounds unfair and I love the research and the teaching (barring the exceptionally illiterate undergrads with whom one
is occasionally confronted), but how the University plans to recruit and keep the best staff at present is beyond me. We seem
to be relying on reputation (and the cachet that brings to academics) alone.
JS
I’m sure JS is right that Oxbridge academics are especially busy, having college tutorials as well as lecturing (on the other
hand, terms are shorter). And certainly academics are badly paid (me included). But it’s misleading to say that ‘Frankly,
in Cambridge all of my junior colleagues and I typically only manage to support ourselves by virtue of having a better-paid
partner.’ Plenty of people (incl. in the expensive South-east) earn less than academics, and still manage to survive ... And
other employers (including other universities!) don’t sweeten the pill of bad pay for new employees with so much subsidised
accommodation, food and drink, etc. as is provided by (many) Oxbridge colleges. My girlfriend is a Cambridge academic. Is
she going to have to leave me for a City millionaire?!
RICHARD