Braindroppings

Thanks for getting back to me. I am really overwhelmed right now, but would like to continue this conversation. I'll write soon. Thanks again. Best, Amir

Khodadad, I never knew that one of the cradles of civilization was in Pakistan! I looked up Mohenjudaro and was quite interested by what I read. Apparently, that city exhibits one of the earliest uses of fired brick for building construction. The firing of brick is a logical extension of pottery making, but it takes a tremendous amount of fuel (whole forests perhaps) to make enough fired brick to build a city! So, it is not surprising that sun dried mud brick is a much more common building material in the ancient world.

Sorry to hear about your dislocated shoulder. Have you been playing kill the man with the ball (definitely one of my favorite childhood pastimes!)? I hope you heal quickly. Enjoy the painkillers while you can. Are you on Oxy? According to Rush Limbaugh, it can really work wonders! :)

I don't know if you like to cook, but if so, I think you will enjoy my new post. Of course, you are welcome to visit anyway and talk about your favorite foods. :)

Thanks god that this trend for at least one period of Iran's history at academia is coming to an end:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/story/2005/09/050929_aa_achaemnid.shtml

Dear Khodadad,

I am amidst a move, an actual moving of my cloths and books; friends visit, as you say, and teaching and trying to learn and produce are constant. But I really am in process of moving, and it’s a hassle, and yet, I feel I can't not respond to this post, because after such a while I feel, you have indulged me with an elaborate and excellent answer to one of my questions.

I would love to take your writing apart but with respect and deference to existential matters, this response needs to be short.

What you say about Eurocentrism based on the Wikipedia-article, which you then complement with your specific concern, something like Eurocentric Historiography?...- this, I don't think I have any great problem understanding. The emphasis is placed in Eurocentric discourse, as you say, on what is relevant to “the West.” The rest are discarded, or overlooked. The Europeans have taken something out of the history of Iran, for instance, which works for them, and if we, Iranians, do the same, we play their Eurocentric game. History does not begin with what it provides as a basis for European ancestry, but rather… with any specific people’s history of themselves.

Here you mention something that I would like to ask you to elaborate on, because unlike most of your article, it seemed a bit less than self-evident to me:

“Our oldest records of settlement in Europe are from around the beginning of the common era, while we have written evidence from the Near Eastern civilisations from 3000 BCE.”

Is “common era” the era that starts with the death of Christ, or something like the current era, 2005 ago? If so, then this judgment doesn’t sound just right to me, especially if you consider Greece or Rome to be in Europe?, but also with regards to the natives the Romans fought with… but I am not sure about this, and I am not sure how to read the preposition “around” in your sentence.

But nevertheless I do detect a certain claim for being older. I am not sure how this works and what it adds to your argument regarding historiographical Eurocentrism, but it is noted that Europe is held to be younger.

“So, in short, as far as history is concerned, Eurocentrism is the misconception that history is an essentially European thing and it can only be applied to other places when they come into contact with Europe. It is the bias that Europe wrote history, and it still continues to write other people's history as well.”

So, Europe does not write other people’s history; and has not written it before. That is just a bias, right? What I get from the whole thing generally is: There are many histories, some much older, and even extinct already by the time we get to Europeans; and these other histories get overlooked -- and you are decidedly against that. That is, for instance you say that the Achamenids are not the most interesting dynasty to rule Iran or the earliest for that matter, and yet they get hyped up by the European and the Eurocentrics at the expense of many peoples before or after them. And that Achamenids are one amongst many, and should get less attention than they do. Something like that?

As you mention in your post, my question came up in regards to your sarcastic tone, in both your recent Persian and English posts, towards those who do exhibit themselves to be “Eurocentric,” – this, perhaps as a condition of some people who "orient" themselves towards a certain "Eurocentric" model (that's the orient express in reverse, right?), in this way losing a certain authenticity, where even if they are proud of something that they think is themselves, this something is actually derived from a European reading or teaching of it... Is this correct?

If so, I must say that I agree with all that, and yet… I don’t know if there is anything outside of that. That is, I am not sure that if you take European and Eurocentrism out, then you’d come up with something pure and authentic and true, in itself. Rather, that place of authenticity is itself, something that comes from within the dominant philosophical discourse, both East and West. I am very suspicious of the usage that the Eurocentism-critiques has in fact lead to in the real existing world, of which it is a part, despite the claims for academic neutrality: quite often it has led to a discourse of authenticity, whether openly in those words, or not, which in turn tries to reach a perfect place, but often just manages to exchange Eurocentrism with some other centrism, at the expense of real-existing conditions. And that this does not get rid of Eurocentrism, but rather reinforces it, under a counter-Eurocentric guise…

Orientalism-discourse of the late 70s, the whole questioning of the tradition, also went parallel to some anti-European discourse of third-world authenticity, - although Edward Said himself wanted to consciously avoid that, and distances himself from it in the Afterward to his Orientalism –

One example is the discourse of "Westoxication" (which always seems to reappear in some “reformed” way,) which led to and still leads to and is followed by slogans like "Neither East, Nor West" ... Is that/has that been, a way out? Or even in learning to be authentic, even as reformed IR-Iranians, do we have to still quote the BBC to make our point?

In relation to the Achamenids specifically, and the Sivand/London-exhibition and the IR Iranians and the English who discuss this matter in the Iranian, the Guardian and the BBC etc. then, it seems that this historiological problem has found a political element which you have decried – while siding with the correct specialists, of course.

The Achamenids were celebrated by the late Pahlavi Shahs, - this is the great subtext - and so in this light, the Pahlavis and anyone who has been influenced either by their, or other similar historical readings of Iranian identity (which the Pahlavi Imperial calendar held to be 25 centuries and change,) is going by a Eurocentric model. A model, as I understand it, which fits with a historical foundation for something like Europe. The figure of Cyrus is important, because it represents an origin for Europe, whereas… what… for Iran, he is according to at least one IR source, the late Ayatollah Khalkhali, just some gay criminal… What I am saying here, is that the anti-Achamenid movement also has a history, and although you don’t talk about it, or perhaps would even try to ignore it, the movement that tries to connect Iran now to the Homo Erectus, at some point wanted to, and succeeded in reconnecting Iran with a 1300 year calendar, and in both cases, it is and was the Achamenids that needed to be dealt with in some way. Firstly it was tried to cut them one way, and when it didn’t quite work, the whole thing needed to be relativized and stretched the other way. This is the Neo-Hezi reincarnation of the Khalkhali fatwa against the Jew loving, westtoxicated dynansty.

So back to the word "Eurocentrism." It is made up of Euro, which does not in the first place have anything to do with EU's currency, (which seems currently to be very instable in its relationship to the IR-Rial) but which is to stand for a whole machinery of Western European identity-production and reproduction, as a way of controlling or setting the keynote or dominating in this case the historiography of other peoples.

Yet the word "Eurocentrism" and its many applications in many fields, is itself reconstructed through something like a reverse engineering but with words rather than chips and microchips and from within this Eurocentric dominant discourse, -- with an implicit leaning towards a “native” Authenticity. This explains the need to be a “native” under this new configuration.

The implication could be that for instance, if these, let's say, gharbzadeh (west-toxicated) or taaquti (evil?), or Orientalistic, or Eurocentric pop- uneducated-, unspecialized-, unschooled- … this mass, about whom and whose attitude towards their own history you write; if this group knew of a more authentic, or native way of looking at history - if they knew better... they wouldn't privilege the Achamenids over the Parthians, the Sassanids, the homo erectus, or whatever is more authentic than them...

But I just don't know why, if one has something, some dynasty that gets mentioned in the Old Testament and by the Greeks, why one would want to de-privilege it, considering that it could possibly lead to better relations... or at least more common connections… no matter how incomplete this is… with Europe, on whose science and technology and philosophy and historiography, after all, not only this very conversation, but also your whole faculty in UCLA depends... What does one get out of doing this?

Well, you say: in the name of pure science and against the political instrumentation of history. But this itself assumes that there is an authentic scientific essence outside of the political. But in fact it sides, again and again, with the systematic “forgetting” of the Achamenids that has been dominant throughout the age of Islamic Republic – and as you bring up a discussion of the “subconscious” – I must say, specifically in the case of a graduate of the “Jalal Ale-Ahmad” High School in North Tehran…

But of course this openness to the West, which Ale-Ahmad discusses as an infection, doesn’t have to stay limited to the West; the same sort of thing could be done with those on the East, if one gives up the “authentic”: in finding some historical precedent to promote a common history with everyone on the East… I am talking about something other than the Chinese “metro” in Tehran and North Korean bomb or Pakestani technology, or whatever… It would be something like going for “Both East and West” followed by the consideration of which one ought to emphasize when.

But why the discounting of the Achamenids?

And specifically in relation to Sivand, if you are as you say, against dams generally, why insist on these “Eurocentrism” denouncements? To save some pure scientific historiography? What do they bring for you? Safe passage on the Oriental Express “the right way around?” What is at stake? The dreaded inauthentic westoxicated ones who like to claim kinship with the Jews and the Greeks are somehow contributing to their inauthentic identity made for them by "the West" or "the Occident" or "Europe" or whatever...? And how about those who actually refer to the Guardian and the BBC? Are they more authentic because the BBC is at peace with the Mulla Republic and for the “right way” also?

Euro-centrism as you talk about it could just be a limit within historiography, though a very big hurdle to watch for in order to be able to be more exact. Something one have to watch for, before one begins to work, especially if in Europe or working within a European language or in a Western environment, as a method of working, or something to keep in mind, in the history department. But the question for me remains: Why the attack on the inauthentic Eurocentric Westoxicated ones? Is the “Persian Empire” not forgotten after all despite what the Brits say? But Jack Straw laughs so hard at Kharazi's jokes; does that not count for something among friends? Can the Mullah Republic not yet take a breather from killing the Shah?

Anyway, thank you for the post. Despite your Islamic Republic sympathies, conscious or subconscious (as you say,) I learned more about where your theoretical assumptions - before the derision of the exiled political positions vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic - find their academic basis. And I follow what you say, as I said, except as it seems implicitly and everywhere (in the way you complain about the LA Iranians' relationship with authentic and traditional Iranian music for instance, or when you denounce their Eurocentric care about a plain that is to be submerged, or a tomb of some Achamedian dude that might be destroyed by humidity...) to depend on an authentic, or native, or just-been-there, in-touch, in-the-know attitude towards the inauthentic, foreign, westoxicated, impure... whatever.

That is where the theory provides problems for me. But without this point, there is little to disagree on Eurocentrism. Any centrism in fact, prevents one from seeing things from greater perspectives; but the need for some center nevertheless goes on. But is there a detached perspective floating above from whence one could say everything at all times, with no relationship with the polis or politics? It seems to me rather, that Eurocentrism is only a problem if it is done "subconsciously," and can become an advantage if done in fact as you say, "selective"ly and with particular ends in mind. As if you could research your archeological sites in down-town Tehran without keeping a constant record of regularly knocking the refugees and the exiles with slogans ("sha'aa'er" as you say in your Persian post) that fit the anti-Pahlavi mold of the blessed Mullah Republic – that is not to say that you do this on purpose, or consciously.

I really just meant to write a little bit, and I feel like I haven’t written anything anyway. Anyway, thank you, get well, and have a nice weekend.

Amir

Amir, thanks for the long response. I thought my commenting system cuts the messages longer than 1000 words, but it apparently, and happily, doesn't.

I will just say something short. First of all, I found out that you are looking at the whole thing from a literal, maybe even post-modernist, point of view (of which I am not well informed), and my point was pure, mechanical and boring actual historiography. I should read on the literal interpretation of history more.

Two things, "common era" (CE) is now the PC way to say AD. I meant it in this form.

Another thing is that the whole struggle to get away from Eurocentrism in history has NOT been exactly a search for authenticity (to which historians seldom lay a claim), rather to look at it from a different point of view and MAYBE find some "truths" in the process. I and everyone else who go against Eurocentrism do not do so because of the "No East/No West" thing at all (most of the followers are "Western" anyway: look up Andre Gunder Frank and Patrick O'Brien).

Anyway, this is a matter that deserves a lot better place than here.

Take care and I hope you survive the move!