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Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule

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Culture & Society

Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule

Jonathan Friedman
Theory Culture Society 2009 26: 85
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409348081

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085-102 TCS348081 Friedman_Article 156 x 234mm 06/01/2010 16:20 Page 85

Occidentalism and the Categories

of Hegemonic Rule

Jonathan Friedman

Abstract
This article applies Jack Goody’s critique of Western classifications of histor-
ical and ethnographical phenomena to the current discourses of orientalism
themselves in an endeavor to understand the sociological basis of what
might be called the shift from orientalism to occidentalism. The argument
compares the current emergence of anti-civilizational and self-critical
discourses to historical examples of similar phenomena and argues that the
current shift itself, so well represented in works that may seem similar to
Goody’s but which are very more narrowly ideological and lacking in a more
general critical stance, are reflexes of the declining hegemony of powerful
imperial centers within global systems.

Key words
cosmopolitanism ■ hegemony ■ ideological inversion ■ modernism ■
occidentalism ■ orientalism ■ Sharia

Prelude

I
FIRST met Jack Goody when I was a poor maître de cours sans porte-
feuille at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and was
living in Reed Hall, a villa off the Montparnasse owned by Columbia
University. I worked in one office and lived in the adjacent office in a most
spartan matter. I thought I was quite alone in this arrangement when one
morning, on my way to the washroom, I heard strange noises like snoring
from an office further down the hall, opened the door and heard a thud; it
was Jack Goody’s head. He had been sleeping in his office in a sleeping
bag. I at least had a real cot in my auxiliary office. After this violent
confrontation we began a season of shared breakfasts and discussions, a

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 26(7–8): 85–102
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409348081

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86 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

very cordial and enriching experience for me. I was in transition to UCL
and later on I visited Goody several times in his huge house in Cambridge,
in which I spent most of my time in the kitchen where there was a Swedish
AGA stove1 to keep me warm. These were also wonderful times for me and
I am grateful for the special support that I was privileged to have had, not
least in a period when I was the target of aggressive if ambivalent attacks
from Jack’s colleague Edmund Leach, who apparently, for some strange
reason, had taken a dislike to me – perhaps something to do with my doctoral
thesis, which in fact dealt with his own doctoral research, or was it my
Marxism?
Jack Goody himself has made an enormous contribution to Social
Anthropology, not only in the wide range of his writings but in the acute-
ness of his critical stances and his engagement with major issues of our
times. He has done much to open up the field to neighboring disciplines
and to make the large-scale issues of civilizational history a major topic in
our field. My discussion below should be taken in the kind of critical spirit
that Goody has done so much to maintain over the years.
Western Categories and the Structuring of History
The Theft of History (2006) continues a sustained attack on a certain set of
Western representations of the past and present, one that reduces a partic-
ular historical period in the empirical sense of a stretch of time to a para-
digmatic historical category. This is the hallmark of all evolutionisms in
which history is broken up into eras, phases or other absolute periodiza-
tions. Part of the critique is important and is close to our own work. Much
of what is taken to be new in history turns out to be a mirage. Capitalism,
democracy, modernity are not inventions of the 18th century but have been
around in one form or another for several thousand years. But this book is
more than a deconstruction of such categories. It is also an exemplar of the
more general critique of Western ethnocentricism and its effects on history
and on Western and non-Western identities alike. The idea of the unique-
ness of the West in any historical sense is rejected here and the arguments
are substantiated, unlike in many of the more popular postcolonial critiques
of the supposed superiority of the West. But since there is no systemic
analysis of the social order itself, there is a tendency to fall into a one-by-
one examination of particular representations in order to debunk them. Thus
the issues revolve around whether or not Europe can claim X, Y or Z as its
own original trait or not. Democracy, capitalism, private property, love . . .
or whether these are mere replications or imports from the East (suggested
by Goody) or some other place. Goody has been engaged for some years in
demonstrating the importance of the East in Western history and this volume
can be understood as a successful product of that larger endeavor (Goody,
1990, 1996, 2003, 2004).
This kind of critique is not new, of course, and it has been part of a
long onslaught on Western ethnocentrism that is paralleled in the popular
work of Edward Said and in much postcolonial literature, debunking any

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 87

specificity of the West other than imperialism. So if Shakespeare was

African, if Greece appropriated its culture from Egypt which got its culture
from Africa, we are witness to an interesting inversion of previously
dominant Western ideology. We may be shifting from orientalism to occi-
dentalism, to put it too simply. The truth of the critique is that, of course,
the West is not unique since it has all happened before and in other parts
of the world. And it should be stressed that the major difference between
Goody’s work and that of the postcolonialists’ is that it is historical rather
than geographical in scope. It is not an advertisement for the Other, but an
argument for the long-term historicity of much of what has been assumed
to be part of the discontinuity of the modern West. One might go even further
in this argument. For example, the production units of late third and second
millennium Mesopotamia were not mere workshops, as Goody seems to
accept, but huge factory operations with hundreds and sometimes thousands
of workers. There was clearly a capitalist economy in the Ancient Middle
East. Diakonoff (1972) and Gelb (1969) were among the first scholars to
argue for the now-accepted notion that private property is a phenomenon of
Mesopotamian antiquity. But all of this has tended to be dealt with as culture
and the spread of culture because there has been no systemic approach to
these phenomena. This is why and where we find a combination of moral
indignation at Western scholarship and a plethora of battles concerning the
origins of cultural phenomena.
Goody’s critique of Wallerstein is a case in point. His argument against
Wallerstein is based on the latter’s a-historical and almost evolutionistic
assumptions with regard to the rise of the West (1974, 2004, 2006) and here
we would agree. But, it should be noted, there are both a number of
historians and the inimitable A.G. Frank who have made similarly critical
statements concerning the arbitrary historical disjuncture that attributes the
origin of the capitalist world system to the 15th century. Frank is explicit
in his claim that what is lacking in Wallerstein is the long-run historical
perspective, one that implies that the rise of the West is related to the
decline of the East (as Abu Lughod, 1989, has argued in more concrete
terms) and that the West was earlier a periphery of the East, a supplier of
raw materials and slaves. This is quite well documented today, at least for
the period preceding European expansion. But the systemic approach that
I represent would not see this in terms of culture and its diffusion and the
question of who was first and most original. On the contrary we understand
these phenomena as age-old phenomena of hegemonic rise and fall, which
include most of the other specific phenomena discussed in this book. To
criticize Wallerstein for his lack of longer-term historical perspective is a
good point,2 but these are still all quite debatable and much-debated issues.
However, there is no discussion of Wallerstein’s more fundamental analysis
of the dynamics of the world system (1974, 2004, 2006), perhaps because
Goody is less interested in this aspect of reality, and here I think that Waller-
stein, like other approaches to global systems, has much more to offer than
is considered here, which can also be generalized in historical terms, an

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88 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

argument that we make below. Braudel (1982, 1984), who is one of the
founders of global systemic analysis, was more open to the longer-term
historical process, and his colleague, Maurice Lombard, offered a powerful
and interesting history of the shifting hegemonic relations between the
Middle East and the Mediterranean, which he saw as an aspect of larger
cyclical processes of expansion and contraction. The sum of Goody’s well-
argued critique of the world-system oriented historians, including sociol-
ogist Wallerstein, consists in pointing out the Eurocentric stumbling blocks
that tend to separate the West from the Rest. I agree entirely here and have
been making similar arguments since the 1970s (Ekholm and Friedman,
1979). Capitalism of one sort or another has been around since the Bronze
Age, and there is certainly a strong continuity in the forms of accumulation
since then. A.G. Frank has, as we said, made exactly the same argument in
several articles and edited books (Frank, 1998; Frank and Gills, 1993;
Denemark et al., 2000),3 and within the recent discussions among members
of the several Historical World Systems groups, he is representative of an
approach arguing for the existence of a single world system for the past 5000
years. It would be interesting to see how Goody might deal with these
discussions. One implication of Goody’s arguments is that the assertion of
a long-term continuity vitiates the need for a concept of capitalism:

The discussion of Braudel therefore leads us to ask whether we really need

the concept of capitalism, which always seems to push the analysis in a
eurocentric direction. (Goody, 2006: 211)

He suggests that the term be used to cover, more generally, ‘widespread

mercantile activity and its concomitants’ (2006: 211). Frank and others
(Ekholm and Friedman, 1979) have argued that it is important to maintain
the notion of capitalism and its specific logic, even if there are sub-
categories or variants of this logic. All capitalisms are based on turning
commercial (whether private or state) wealth into more wealth by almost any
means possible with a predominance of market transactions. Industrial
capitalism and finance capitalism are not two different species but aspects
of one and the same system. Of course there are exclusively mercantile
strategies in certain ancient and not too ancient states, and there are
contexts in which capitalist activity is strictly limited to international trade.
Our own position on this is exactly the contrary. By asserting that capital-
ism is as old as the major civilizations, capitalism is precisely lifted out of
its usual Western context.
Another argument revolves around the work of Elias. The desire for
distinction and its role in the ‘civilizing process’ need not be reduced to the
terms of Western bias. Elias would surely have recognized the possibility of
such processes in earlier civilizations. Of course he had the baggage of
evolutionary assumptions which characterized much of his work, but Goody
may have over-generalized some of Elias’s pronouncements. The process of
production of categories of the primitive, the traditional as examples of the

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 89

non-Western can be dealt with in terms of the civilizing process itself

(Friedman, 1994) and Elias touches on this issue in his discussion of the
European notion of civilization. The primitive ‘out there’ is equated with the
primitive within in a logic that links the socialization of children to the
civilizing of the Other. It could easily be argued that such schematic spatial
ordering of a dominated world is an invariant of all imperial systems. There
are certainly biases in the work of most historians who are located in the
center of any hegemonic order and who live within its categorical frame-
works, but it would be wrong to conflate this critique with the more funda-
mental analytical contributions achieved. Thus the critique of Elias and
Wallerstein, while important with respect to geo-history, also misses the
important mechanisms that these authors have analyzed and which are
relevant to a historical relativization of the kind that Goody has supported.
But if we remove the theoretical contributions we are left with a contest
concerning origins. Who invented what, who was first, etc. In this perspec-
tive, the relations between commerce, capital, symbolic structures and
strategies are separate and unrelated elements. Our own research has led
to a different understanding of these problems, even if the critique of all
‘centrisms’ is implied.
Tendencies toward individualism, democratic governance, the separa-
tion of religion and state, are related to the rapid commercialization of city
states in particular periods and the latter are related to their positioning in
the world arenas of their particular historical contexts. So whether or not
they are European inventions is largely irrelevant for this approach. Instead
the nature of the mechanisms is absolutely crucial, why the phenomena
occur and re-occur, and not who did it first. It implies that dominance is
always relatively short-lived and that new powers replace old. And in the
emergence of large-scale hegemonies we have processes of civilization, of
extravagant lifestyles, of categorical hierarchical schemes identifying the
surrounding world. Thus we agree with Goody in his critique of the absol-
utizing of the Eurocentric position, but we also stress that this is a systemic
phenomenon and not a mere intellectual error or specifically Western
problem. And it would be incongruous to claim that the bias of hegemonic
power is exclusively a Western error, since world history is replete with
identical misrepresentations of the ‘other’. The logic of the argument against
Eurocentrism in our understanding must also be generalized and reconfig-
ured to take on all similar hegemonic orders. This would be a more
consistent use of the kind of critique offered by Goody.
The image that I perceive in all of this is one in which history not only
repeats itself but also repeats itself in other parts of the world as in different
eras. Of course the themes which are common to so many ‘civilizations’ have
not appeared in identical fashion but as variations related to particular
historical trajectories.
Thus I readily concur with Jack Goody in this important statement and
can applaud his caution with respect to falling into the more occidentalist
positions that are easily entailed by the critique of Eurocentrism. Our own

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90 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

‘global systemic’ anthropology began with such a critical positioning

(Ekholm, 1976, 1980, Ekholm and Friedman, 1980), in which we ques-
tioned the assumptions of evolutionary ideology in anthropology as an
outgrowth of colonial classifications of the world. Evolutionary and much
functionalist categorization of the world was based on a broad transforma-
tion of spatial into temporal registers, so that what was ‘out there’ was trans-
lated into what was ‘back then’. This transformation implied a temporal
reorganization of the categories of imperial rule. The traditional tribes and
chiefdoms and primitive societies were understood as fore-runners of the
contemporary world of modern civilization, and their contemporary exis-
tence was evidence of their being left-overs of previous eras. Thus the world
was already constructed in specific terms before the Western fieldworker
arrived. However, we stressed that such classifications were not Western
errors but structures of imperial rule and the classifications that such
imperial orders always generate. Thus one should add to Goody’s critique
the fact that the Western theft of history is also a misrepresentation insofar
as it is assumed to be exclusively Western. All imperial civilizations – and
all civilizations are imperial – engage in similar rewrites of the past and
present. This argument vitiates the postcolonial assumption that the fault is
all that of the West. On the contrary, the fault is much more general, and
even a universal characteristic, of imperial rule.
But there is another issue. If we can all agree that the phenomena at
hand – modernity, individualism, capitalism, etc. – are all historical and
have thus all appeared before and, therefore, are not specifically Western,
are there then any differences of significance in world history and geogra-
phy? If so, then how should we formulate the existence of such cultural
differences in this kind of approach?
My suggestion here is as follows: the essential differences among
cultures, why witchcraft and sorcery play a central role in the social order
in some places while this is not the case in others, can be understood in
terms of the historical trajectories of such social orders within the larger
worlds in which they partake. Thus many of the same kinds of phenom-
ena have occurred in other places and other times, but there are also
important differences which, even if they can be understood as specific
historically generated situations, are still quite distinct as lived experien-
tial phenomena. There are considerable differences in the ways of life,
forms of sociality, forms of consciousness that may exist at any one moment
in world historical time. If the self-identification of Western intellectuals
as modern, an identity defined in opposition to a traditional ‘other’, is an
incorrect rendition of historical reality, the differences between contempo-
rary life forms may indeed be quite real. In other words, the denial of
cultural difference should not be seen as a natural outcome of the critique
of ethnocentrism. The latter argument has been essential among many
anthropologists and postcolonial intellectuals. This is not the kind of
argument made by Goody, but it is easy to see how it can be adopted within
the postcolonial paradigm.

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 91

I have had to face this kind of critique myself. In a brief article

(Friedman, 1994 [1992]) based on field research as well as published work
(Gandoulou, 1984) on a quite contemporary phenomenon that has now
largely disappeared due to the collapse into violence of large parts of
Central Africa, I attempted to analyze the emergence of a set of practices
referred to as ‘la sape’ in the Republic of Congo. This development is one
in which young men first invest their energy in acquiring imported clothes
from Europe and then, if lucky, travel to Europe where they engage in a
strategy of acquisition of haute couture, at such great costs that they often
have to resort to criminal activities. Those who engage in this activity are
or were referred to as sapeurs from the French, se saper, which basically
means to show oneself off. In the article and chapter I traced the history
of this phenomenon and dealt with it as a social movement among poor
Congolese that was in large part religious, where haute couture items from
Paris and Milan were assimilated to formerly existing prestige goods, sacred
objects that embodied the life-force whose possession defined personal
status, and well being. Those engaged in this activity were organized into
clubs referred to as La S.A.P.E which meant société des ambianceurs et
personnes élégantes. They organized potlatch-like parties in which those who
managed to get to Paris, l’aventure, returned with their high-end clothing
and sewed the labels into their lapels, which they displayed when dancing
at a bal des sapeurs held in a local restaurant. Serial success entailed that
one became a grand – a kind of big man – and this, of course, transgressed
the hierarchical order of Congolese society, since these poor people
displayed the kind of clothing that only the political class was supposed to
be able to access.
Without elaborating in more detail, I argued that the logic of this
activity belonged to a deeper logic of prestige acquisition, a kind of magical
accumulation of clothing that contained life-force, equivalent to the life-force
accumulated by chiefs and kings in the past. And the body itself is crucial
in this argument, since it is the body itself and its appearance that defines
a person’s status (Ekholm Friedman, 1994). I argued that this was not a
question of passing, of the flâneur, the Beau Brummel complex in which
such ‘dressing up’ is understood as a false and manipulative attempt to
change one’s social position. In the Congolese model there is no distinction
between essence and appearance, no possibility of exclaiming that such
activity is somehow inauthentic so that the presentation of self is contrasted
to the true self. In the Congolese society appearance equals essence. The
relation is univocal and unambivalent. The very practice of la sape, however,
challenges this situation since de facto low status (relative poverty) appears
as high status, and this contradiction has led to the jailing of sapeurs, and
even violence against them, as well as to their increasing consciousness of
the contradiction between status and its manifestation, whose erasure is
crucial in their strategies. However, despite this emergent contradiction,
there is still a powerful logic involved that expresses a strong historical
continuity in terms of life strategies.

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92 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

The publication was criticized by two anthropologists (Meyer and

Geschiere, 1999) on the grounds that my use of what they call ‘tradition’ is
dangerous as it somehow categorizes the other as ‘primitive’, at best
backward, and at least non-modern. This critique expresses a fear of differ-
ence via absurd evolutionist assumptions that somehow difference can only
be understood on a hierarchical scale of otherness. Thus, in their perspec-
tive, contemporary witchcraft is also modern witchcraft. It has nothing to do
with the past. It is a historically discontinuous phenomenon that can be
accounted for entirely by modern conditions, and the likely cause here as
elsewhere is globalization. In this sense, witchcraft today is modern witch-
craft and it is a reaction to globalization itself, an attempt to intercept the
penetration of capitalism into local society, thereby producing social
closure. Geschiere has compared this to European racism and fascism,
which are also seen as mere reactions to the fears generated by globaliza-
tion. This is all part of a general argument linked to the nation-state, and
especially the national component of the state as the source of all evil. Now
Goody would not presumably have a problem with suggestions of historical
continuity, but there is certain overlap that needs to be clarified. In my
understanding, the ‘theft of history’ is not an argument for occidentalism,
but an argument for the relativization of the reification of the modern as a
Western phenomenon, not so much in relation to so-called traditional soci-
eties like the Lo Dagaa studied earlier by Goody, but in relation to the past
3000 years of civilizational history. The idea that any attempt to maintain
that there are real differences among cultural orders that run quite deep is
somehow reactionary is something quite different. The overlap lies simply
in the fact that both would relativize the ‘traditional’ representations of the
relation between modern and non-modern. It is one thing to say that all this
has happened before in one way or another and quite another to deny
substantive, existentially powerful differences among different forms of exis-
tence.
Occidentalism
What follows is primarily a suggestion as to how Goody’s work can be under-
stood in terms of a global systemic approach. The arguments are a sketch
and thus not fully developed in the short space available here. While we
have engaged in the critique of the categorical classifications used by the
social sciences, not least the categories implicit in evolutionary approaches
in the field, a broader perspective must also include the ideologies of
occidentalism itself, where the critique of Western thought is based on
assumptions of hegemony that are clearly on the wane. To attack the former
claims for the superiority of Western science and rationality, even the Homo
Aequalis of Dumont (1976),4 are all examples that can be interpreted as
occidentalist critique. This latter term refers, following, for example,
Buruma and Margalit (2004), to a general and massive cultural critique of
everything associated with the West. In this sense it is an inversion of the
former Orientalism made famous by Said and which is proper to the era of

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 93

Western hegemony. The resurgence of the ‘other’ and the emergence of

occidentalism are linked, and perhaps aspects of the same phenomenon,
and both are directly related to the real declining hegemony of the West.
According to Buruma and Margalit the origins of occidentalism can be found
in the Occident itself, in those elements of romanticism and primitivism that
are repressed by a dominant modernism (see Figure 1). They see occiden-
talism as a constant reactive aspect of Western modernity that has spread
to other parts of the world in various epochs. Their examples, from Russian
nationalist romantics of the 19th century to Kamikaze pilots of the 20th, are
attempts to demonstrate the reliance of such anti-Western ideologies on
Western philosophical-ideological texts. In our approach, this inverted
representation of the West is part of the logic of its identity formation, but
also part of the distribution of identifications within the global order. The
other within and the external other are constituted simultaneously in the
same process of Western expansion, and, for that matter, any imperial expan-
sion tends to generate a similar identity formation. This is a subject that I
have discussed at length in previous publications (e.g. Friedman, 1994) but
it is perhaps relevant to recapitulate some of it here. The old graphic that
once appeared in the pages of this journal is shown in Figure 1.
Here modern identity space is defined by two sets of polarities:
modernism/postmodernism and traditionalism/primitivism. The four poles
form what I referred to as the identity space of modernity, one in which the
traditional and the primitive are, together, the complementary opposite of
modernism, and where postmodernism embraces them both while rejecting
the totality of modernism. Occidentalism partakes of the same kind of
oppositional relation in an oblique way since it only overlaps with the tradi-
tionalist pole representing the other civilizations that have been ‘by-passed’
in the emerging hegemony of the West. In periods of hegemony modernism

MODERNISM
- culture - nature

+ culture + nature
TRADITIONALISM PRIMITIVISM

+ culture + nature
POSTMODERNISM

Figure 1 The identity space of modernity

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94 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

1968 1998
The national The postnational
The local The global
Collective Individual
Social(ist) Liberal
Homogeneous Heterogeneous
Monocultural Multicultural
Equality (sameness) Hierarchy (difference)

Figure 2 Ideological inversion: what is progressive 1968/1998

tends to be dominant, and in periods of decline the other three poles

compete for dominance. I attempted to document this in a number of case
studies, first of the emergence of indigenous and ethnic minority identities
from the mid-1970s on, and saw this as an aspect of the decline of modernist
integration beginning in this period. Western regionalism, indigenous move-
ments, immigrant identity movements are all aspects of this transformation.
Occidentalism in relation to the general decline in modernist identity can
be understood as derived from the inversion depicted in Figure 2.
Occidentalism is an expression of an opposition to the same charac-
teristics of modernity that are opposed by other ethnic and indigenous
groups. It can be understood as a generalization of the potential conflict
expressed in the various cultural minority and indigenous politics that
emerge in such periods. The non-modern is translated as the non- or anti-
Western in general, an alternative civilizational model to that prevailing in
the Occident, the latter being associated with a decadent individualism, a
lack of authority and discipline, and a crass materialism. Occidentalism,
then, is an inversion of modernism, but one that is entirely complementary
to the latter, so that the two opposites can be understood to form a whole, a
single structure of complementarity. Occidentalism appears in periods of
declining hegemony although it is logically implicit in all periods as part of
the constitution (by negation) of modernism.
Now if this interpretation is correct it should enable us to comprehend
the recent shift in progressive ideology as a series of inversions, a phenom-
enon which has been picked up by scholars such as Todd Gitlin (1995,
2006) and Russell Jacoby, who, in his study of the transformation of progres-
sive ideology, concluded that:

We are witnessing not simply the defeat of the left, but its conversion and
perhaps inversion. (1999: 11)

The emergence of occidentalist tendencies saturates the above ‘inversions’

and is commonly expressed in the discourses of postcolonial globalization

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 95

‘theorists’. And the postcolonial critiques of the theft of history might seem
to dovetail with those of Goody, but this is, in my view, a misunderstanding.
The argument that ‘all this is not specific to the West’ can be applied on an
even wider scale. Goody’s project concerns the relativization of phenomena
that have been assumed to be specific to the West. The postcolonial critique
is more moral in tone and embodies the claim that the rest have all the
qualities of the West and then some. It is an argument of inversion that claims
the superiority of the Other that has been oppressed and/or repressed by the
West in its imperial exploits. Goody’s argument concerns the historicity of a
set of phenomena and not a redefining of the larger political field. If I apply
the above approach to occidentalism itself, I need to ask when and why it
occurs; and, in the model proposed here, it is in periods of hegemonic decline
that the occidentalism within is supplemented by an occidentalism from
without. Thus, the Islamist critique of Western values is one that can be said
to express the assault on a disintegrating hegemony, but it is also one that
finds support from within the West itself. And this may come from unexpected
quarters. Militia groups in the US as well as Palestinian diaspora school
children in Sweden were enthusiastic about the attack on the World Trade
Center, at the same time as many intellectuals claimed that it was ‘our’ fault
and that we deserved it for all our years of Western dominance. Our hypoth-
esis is thus that occidentalism is an aspect of ideological inversion that is
triggered by hegemonic decline. This is not a Western phenomenon, but,
following Goody, one that has occurred many times in history. It is a phenom-
enon inherent in the very structure of imperial civilizations, and, we might
again note, all civilizations are imperial as well as impermanent.
The critique of Western categorizations, then, can be understood as
more than an intellectual rectification. If we ask why it begins in a partic-
ular period we find that such categorizations fail in periods of occidentalist
resurgence and the latter is generated by hegemonic decline itself. Thus, to
be consistent in carrying out Goody’s paradigm, we would add occidental-
ism itself to the occidentalist deconstruction of Western assumptions about
the world. For not only have capitalism, individualism, democracy, romantic
love all occurred before. Occidentalism itself can also be said to have
appeared in previous eras. Among the most spectacular instances is the
advent of Christianity and other ‘Eastern’ cults at the time of the decline of
the Roman Empire. This was a period in which ‘mysticism’ gained in
strength and in which what was called science in that period was on the
decline. It is also a period in which illustrious foreigners became rulers of
Rome itself. The Hellenistic period knew similar tendencies, some at least
as clearly marked. The advent of cynic philosophy is a case in point. Here
the values of the ‘modernism’, if we may use that word, that had been a
dominant ideology in Classical Greece as well as the early Hellenistic
period, are negated. Primitive wisdom, nomadism, the attack on logic, the
critique of the polis as an organizational form and a self-identified
cosmopolitanism, all display interesting overlaps with contemporary post-
modernism. A most important aspect of this is the outspoken and openly

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96 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

relativist criticism of Greek culture itself and its negative comparison with
other cultures (Branham and Goulet-Cazé, 1996: 122). This is also a period
that witnesses an increase in mystery cults as well as a series of ethnic
revivals (such as the Jews who emerged ‘for the first time’ as an ethnic
category in this period; see Cohen, 1991) among populations that had
previously been totally integrated into Egyptian Hellenist or other Hellenist
states. Thus, the occidentalist critique, or, at least, the critical intellectual
component of the latter, can itself be subjected to historical relativization
(Branham and Goulet-Cazé, 1996).
The inversion or reversal of dominance implied in occidentalism (vs
orientalism) is a historical phenomenon that we would ascribe to all declin-
ing hegemonic situations. Now, declining hegemony can imply a mere shift
in centers within a single larger center in which states compete for domi-
nance. Thus the shifts from Italy to Iberia to Holland and the United
Kingdom and then to the United States did not imply the same kind of
geopolitical ideological conflicts that we see today, in which occidentalism
is not merely a local expression but is embodied in a broad anti-Western
mentality in large parts of the world. The latter is radically expressed in the
rise of Islamism, in which the entirety of Western culture is recast as danger-
ously decadent and in need of replacement by a global sharia in order to
restore world order. This notion, as well as calls for the re-establishment
of the Caliphate on a world scale, are emanations of a truly global crisis of
hierarchical order. And the resurgence is clearly rooted in a relation of
asymmetrical complementarity.

Cette idée de déclassement du monde musulman est centrale. Dans l’imagi-

naire musulman, le fait d’appartenir à un ensemble civilisationnel puissant
qui rivalisa, et parfois dépassa l’Occident est essential. Si ce fait historique,
remontant à plus de dix siècles, ce sentiment de déclassement n’aurait
probablement pas cette force auratique. (Laïdi, 2001: 14)5

Occidentalism, in the sense developed here, is part of the larger process of

hegemonic implosion in which the periphery ‘invades’ the center. The
decline of centers harbors a plethora of images that have been invoked
throughout history: fragmentation, ethnicization, internal warfare, barbarian
invasions and the like. And the images are not pure fantasies of course. It
might be unnecessary to invoke the vague concept of civilizations on the
wane here, but it would certainly be enlightening if we could account for
the latter in terms of hegemonic decline itself. This implies that if the entire
system does not collapse under its own weight, leading to a violent regres-
sion, which seems a likely possibility at the moment, we could face the
emergence of a new phase of hegemonic centralization with its epicenter in
East Asia. And then, unfortunately, we may be in for a new round of the
same old stuff: the essentialization that is so essential to empire. But this
time it will come from another direction.

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 97

Finale: Class and Cosmology in Transition – Is There a Big

Picture?
The emergence of occidentalism is the part of a larger process which
includes class polarization within declining hegemonic states. And declin-
ing hegemony is linked to increasing class stratification, which includes
cultural parameters that are logically linked to the internal development of
occidentalism. Here the upper and upper middle classes tend to be
upwardly mobile and identify increasingly outside the nation-state, moving
into the cosmopolitan stratosphere, while downwardly mobile lower middle
classes and working classes identify increasingly with the local and the
rooted. This creates another complementary opposition within this general
class polarization (Figure 3).
This graphic depicts the vertical polarization within states that are
party to hegemonic decline, where stratification increases and those at the
top identify out, whereas those stuck at the bottom see their conditions of
life deteriorate and so become disgruntled at the dominant elites. In this
period we see the emergence of hybrid cosmopolitan as well as indigenized
local populations, and a general polarization of the larger state-encompassed
population. Several informal discussions with members of the Democratic
Party in the United States reveal that there is a self-identification among
intellectual elites in which they are urban cosmopolitan and intelligent, as
opposed to the increasingly dumbed-down mass of the population (i.e.
Republicans). In Europe, political and cultural elites tend to identify in
cosmopolitan terms, and speak negatively of the nation-state, especially the
nation. In research on the transformation of Swedish political culture, we
have found a distinctive identification among political elites with the larger
world as against the national world. The latter represents, increasingly, the

Hybrid Cosmopolitans
Cosmopolitanization

Indigenization

National Migrants National

elites elites
National National
population population
Diasporiazation
Ethnic minorities Ethnic minorities

Indigenes Indigenes

Rooted ethnics

Figure 3 The dialectic of cosmopolitanization and indigenization

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98 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

‘dangerous classes’, just as the incomes of the political class are reaching
unheard of proportions. This trend is documented in France as well (Joffrin,
2001; Juillard, 1997), where the situation is even more polarized by the
persistence of a republican left. At the same time, those at the bottom end
of this process of polarization identify locally or nationally against what they
see as a cosmopolitan elite that has left them in the lurch while very often
supporting the foreign, openness, multiculturalism, etc., that are corrosive
of their way of life. This polarization combines with the already strong
tendency to ethnic and cultural fragmentation to produce a fertile chaos of
conflicts, enclavization, gated communities and social fear. If we place this
in the larger context of geopolitical polarization the scheme is in its turn
included in a larger global oppositional schema that can be (over-)simplified,
as in Figure 4.
Here we have tried to depict the relation between the positions
involved in an emergent occidentalism. The obvious opposition in this
period concerns Islamist politics, but it must be understood from within
Western cosmology itself. Here Western universalism is complementary to
global fundamentalism. These stand for opposites but are also similar in
their constitution. Both have global pretensions but they are not expressed
in the same way. Modern6 universalism is based on an image of basic human
propensities, where fundamentalisms are based on a normative rule struc-
ture that is particularistic but must be extended to the whole world because
it represents the Truth. The argument proffered here is that Islamic

Universalism (Occidental)

Cosmopolitanism

Hybrid Cosmopolitans
Universalization
Cosmopolitanization

Indigenization

National National
elites elites
Migrants
National National West
population population
Diasporiazation
I

Ethnic minorities Ethnic minorities

Universalization

Indigenes Indigenes Rest

Rooted ethnics
II

Islamist world (sharia)

Global Fundamentalism (sharia)

Figure 4 Cosmology class and geopolitics at the end of hegemony

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Friedman – Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule 99

fundamentalism partakes of the same opposition to the occident, and for

similar reasons, but that it has generalized the us/them paradigm to global
proportions. In the broadest sense, both cosmopolitanism and sharia repre-
sent universalist positions, but they differ radically in content, since
cosmopolitanism is based on a set of individual rights whose aim is the maxi-
mization of liberty in the sense of freedom from particularistic rules, while
sharia is based on a specific set of rules. The universal in both cases, but
especially the latter, is an expression of the globalization of the particular
or, as often expressed, the universalization of the particular. The politics
implied are clear. The Other resurgent is the basic process, and its various
expressions are particular versions of the general assault on the Western
nation-state.
If there is a conclusion to this it is that the massive effort that Jack
Goody has succeeded in carrying out, to relativize and thus deconstruct
Western conceptions – or perhaps preconceptions – of the specificity of the
West, however true, opens the door to further elaboration in which the first
and essential question is: why are we thinking in this way just now? In what
kind of a period does occidentalism provide a propitious framework for
cultural self-criticism? The previous self-critical movements, not least in
the relativist cultural anthropology of the first part of the century, are also
crisis phenomena, but I do not wish to assume a total social determinism.
The possibility of critique is always present, but, in terms of social forces,
it takes on a more significant valence in periods of crisis and especially in
periods of real decline. So the deconstruction of Western categories requires
a series of further deconstructions. If we have our essentialisms, we must
ask why this is the case, and if we find that there are structural reasons for
it, and if this leads to a general understanding that what we have done with
our categorizations is typical of imperial orders, then we are suddenly in a
new potential arena of understanding, that of global systemic research. Thus
occidentalism and the critique of Western categories is itself part of the
Western imaginary and, in a larger sense, the global imaginary of the ‘world
elite’.

Notes
1. Swedes had gotten rid of their AGA wood-burning stoves many years before,
replacing them with electric stoves that were more modern but which, of course,
provided no ambient heating.
2. If somewhat exaggerated since he, unlike his predecessors, has taken on a good
half a millennium as his research object. One might add that his goal is to grasp a
certain historical process and not merely the long-term reappearance of particular
forms.
3. Goody is quite aware of this literature and refers to it explicitly in his Food and
Love (1998).
4. Dumont is not, of course, an occidentalist, but the contrast that lies at the basis
of his study might easily be re-interpreted in occidentalist terms, not least in its
powerful relativization of Western civilization.

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100 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

5. In English:
This idea of loss of status of the Muslim world is central. In the Muslim
imaginary, belonging to a powerful civilization rivaling and even overtaking
the Occident is essential. If not for this historical reality, going back more
than ten centuries, the feeling of being degraded would probably not have
the same ideological power.
6. We stress again here that ‘modern’ is a structural rather than a historical or
geographical concept.
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Jonathan Friedman is Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études

en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
at University of California, San Diego. He has done research on the

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102 Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8)

anthropology of global systems and processes, on Marxist theory in anthro-

pology, the study of crises, social and cultural movements as products of
global systemic crisis, as well as specialized research on Oceania, Africa
and Europe. Among his most recent works are the two-volume publication
The Anthropology of Global Systems with Kajsa Ekholm Friedman, Histori-
cal Transformations (vol. 1) and Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions
of Globalization (vol. 2, both AltaMira Press, 2008). [email: jafriedman@
ucsd.edu]

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