This is especially relevant in light of the continuing debate over the "tribe" strategy in Afghanistan. I haven't read Porter's book (it's another addition to my ballooning to-read list next to this, this, and this), I think one of the attractions of the strategic Orientalist approach to people is that it allows them to use an somewhat idealized enemy persona as a means of pushing certain unorthodox ideas. The enemy is always a wily foe who is frustrating a stodgy and rigid West--ergo we need to become more wily to beat him."In my polemic book that came out last year, I argued against widespread and endlessly recalled notions of the Eastern warrior, the primordial ‘tribal’ Pashtuns of Afghanistan, frozen in time, visceral and imprisoned by their culture. In embracing and weaponising culture, the military was in danger of reviving old and ahistorical fictions – such as the notion of the pristine, premodern tribe. Since publishing it, it has been hard to fight a sense of pessimism that these Orientalist notions will always be with us. That no matter how hard we try, the dragon will never be slain."
This is kind of similar to the Easterner who bohemians have told us is wiser than us in philosophy, health, sexual attitudes etc. It's a message that never grows old--you can find 1950s Beats and New Age gurus today suggesting it. But usually the Easterner they depict isn't anything close to the real thing--it's an idealized construction used to advance a certain unorthodox idea.
Perhaps the solution is to make arguments for certain approaches on their own merit without the use of some kind of imagined Eastern adversary. But I have a feeling (as does Porter) that this trope will be around for a long time.
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