Authors

Liya Xie¹;  ¹ Department of History, Princeton University, United States

Discussion

Ever since Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978, the Saidian paradigm has served as an influential departure point for debates about the relationship between the East and the West. In Russian and Eurasian studies, scholars have debated whether or not Said’s critique of Anglo-American and French Orientalism could be applied to the Russian case, especially after the so-called “imperial turn” in the 1990s, when scholars started to view Russia as a modernizing multiethnic empire with distinct technologies of managing difference on the ground. In the past few decades, the field has expanded its geographical horizons and has produced clusters of scholarship addressing the complex relationship between Russia and the East(s). The predominant epistemic framework has been along the lines of geography, namely the distinction between “Russia’s own Orient” and Russia’s eastern neighbors, such as China, Japan, India, Persia, and Ottoman Turkey. 

This paper reflects upon this geography-centered approach in the historiography of Russian Orientalism, pointing out its strengths and limitations. Above all, I scrutinize how the “internal versus external Orient” framework is predicated upon the assumptions of imperial or national borders, which methodologically reifies the state and geography. I propose an alternative conceptualization of the East as an intellectual, affective, and somatic resource for addressing the dilemmas of inexorably accelerating modern industrial life at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Geographical ambiguity and epistemic homogenization of the East, I argue, was a source of intellectual creativity and productivity for fin-de-siècle Russian skeptics of the liberal, rational, and secular modernity of the West. In other words, these skeptics explored the potential of the multiple “Easts” for solving the crisis of value or meaning of life, in an attempt to find a different path toward modernity. This sense of crisis was manifested in people’s loss of traditional faith, nihilism, rising suicide rates, and other social issues that contributed to the “degeneration” discourse. In my proposed new framework, engaging with the multiple “Easts” was not only about ideas and discursive formations à la Said but also about material objects and somatic practices. I use the case study of Tibetan medicine’s popularity in late imperial Russia to illustrate the potential of this new approach.