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Oriental Subject
Hamilton Gibb was a 20th-century historian and Orientalist, born in Egypt and educated in Scotland and England, who ended his career in the United States. As an Orientalist, the initial focus of Gibb’s studies was Semitic languages. Apart from his early life, most of Gibb’s contact with the Orient was through Orientalist scholarship and institutions; he studied at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies, which was founded by the British Government in 1917. Although Gibb’s training was in the study of languages, much of his scholarship focused on the religion of Islam, which he described to his Western audiences as a unitary and overwhelming force over the lives and culture of its adherents. In doing so, he demonstrates a key feature of Orientalist discourse, by which expertise in one area (for Gibb, Arabic) is understood as expertise to explain anything and everything about the Orient (in this case, Islam). Gibb’s scholarship also indulges in the typical assumptions of Orientalist discourse, like constructing an Orient and a group of Oriental subjects that are hegemonic, monolithic, and unchanging across time. In Orientalism, Gibb represents for Said the culmination of the academic institution of Orientalism, as well as the pivot in the 20th century away from the academy and the humanities and firmly toward government institutions and social sciences. Gibb was a strong advocate for the expansion of Anglo-American Oriental Studies programs in the name of political power.
Hamilton Gibb Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Hamilton Gibb or refer to Hamilton Gibb. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3, Part 3
Quotes
Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient […] as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist […] who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood […] to be making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things and the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.
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Hamilton Gibb Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Hamilton Gibb or refer to Hamilton Gibb. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3, Part 3
Quotes
Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient […] as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist […] who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood […] to be making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things and the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
