Introduction

Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870-1930

Bibliographic Data

ID20073498
AuthorsHugh Paul (0000-0002-9365-6329, Leiden University, corresponding author), Herman Paul
Year2019
Pages1-16
Publication date2019-06-05
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueScholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870-1930 (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/9789004406315_002
OpenAlexW2973401027
ISBN9789004406315
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

philological heritage could be heard.Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) was the most outspoken of these critics.Although his doctoral dissertation on Het Mekkaansche feest (1880) still contained a few polite words on his Doktorgrovater, his dissociation from Dozy became apparent when, in 1884, he deemed it necessary to travel to Mecca to do fieldwork in the center of Islam. 3 Such fieldwork required different qualities than manuscript study as practiced by Dozy.It demanded not only active command of, in this case, Arabic, and the ability to gather relevant data, but also, as Snouck's adventures illustrated, social and political skills for acquiring funding, organizing research on foreign territory, and winning support from local communities -not to mention contempt for death in the case of scholars reckless enough to join the Hajj. 4 Recent scholarship mostly treats this late nineteenth-century dissatisfaction with "armchair philology" as indicative of a paradigm shift that took place in Arabic studies.Suzanne Marchand, for example, distinguishes between the "lonely Orientalists" between 1820 and 1870, who devoted most of their energies to "specialized, historicist study," and a generation of "furious" Orientalists in the decades around 1900, who for various reasons dissociated themselves from a philological heritage and instead attached increasing value to conducting fieldwork, studying contemporary problems, and rendering services to colonial administrations.Consequently, in Marchand's assessment, "going there" became nothing less than a career requirement. 5 Likewise, Sabine Mangold highlights the frustration that German Arabists around 1900 felt about the philological inheritance of especially Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801-1888), the influential Leipzig Orientalist.Drawing on the cases of Carl Heinrich Becker (1876-1933) and Georg Kampffmeyer (1864-1936), among others, Mangold shows how an increasing interest in Arabic realia (economics, politics, religion) went hand-in-hand with growing disdain for philological text fetishism. 6 Obviously, not all fields of Oriental studies underwent the same changes as did Arabic studies around 1900.At the time, Orientalism (Orientalistik, orientalisme) was the name of a cluster of fields, including but not limited to Islamic, Sanskrit, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese

Art · Literature · Orientalism · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

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