Anthropos: Anthropos, 100.2005

Anthropos, 100.2005

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschrift

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

Persistenter Identifier:: BV043334262

Titel:: Anthropos

Erscheinungsort:: Fribourg

Verlag:: Ed. St. Paul

Erscheinungsjahr:: 1906

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Wissensgebiet:: Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie > Allgemeines

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenband

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711755

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711755

Persistenter Identifier:: 1510223378432

Titel:: Anthropos, 100.2005

Erscheinungsjahr:: 2005

Signatur:: LA 1118

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenheft

Titel:: Bd. 100, 2005, Heft 1

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenartikel

Titel:: Transnational Orientalism. Henry Corbin in Iran

Sonstige Person:: Bos, Matthijs van den

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Anthropos 100.2005: 113-125 Transnational Orientalism Henry Corbin in Iran Matthijs van den Bos Abstract. - A convergence of German, French, and Iranian interests cast the career of French Orientalist, philosopher, and theologian Henry Corbin (1903-1978). Corbin’s Orientalism was in crucial respects a transnational project. This fact stands in contrast to Edward Said’s thesis, which portrays Orientalism as unilateral imposition. The reality of collaboration in the construction of a “mystical East” is reinforced by another paradox: whereas “Corbinism” emerged in conjunction with the prerevolutionary polity in Iran, some of his pupils developed it towards Islamic Republican ideology. Thus, antihistoricist hermeneutics merged once more with indigenous representa tions of the self. [Iran, Shiism, transnationalism, hermeneutics, Orientalism, representation] Matthijs van den Bos is a researcher at the Institute for Mi gration and Ethnic Studies (IMES), University of Amsterdam. He graduated in Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Amsterdam) and in Iranian Studies (Utrecht University), and obtained his Ph. D. in the Social Sciences (University of Amsterdam). In 2001-2003, he was affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modem World (ISIM) in Leiden. His dissertation, “Mystic Regimes” (Leiden 2002), investigates the long-term social, cultural, religious, and political development of two Shiite Sufi orders in Iran. Henry Corbin’s presence in Iran from 1945 figured in a confluence of interests, ideas and passions, both French, German, Iranian, secular, and reli gious. The present essay explores the full com plicity of “Easterners” and “Westerners” in the creation of Corbin’s Orientalism, and thereby counters the paradigm that reduces the construc tion of “the Orient” to Western hegemony. Two of Corbin’s preoccupations in particular, the critique of the Western loss of “tradition” and religiously inspired hermeneutic analysis, linked up seamlessly with Iranian concerns for the legitimacy of Shiism in the face of modernity. The modem construction of Shiism by Corbin and several Iranian intellectuals had Shiism as a mys tical and essentially nonpolitical project. But since the Islamic revolution of 1978-1979, Corbin has paradoxically retained a presence in pro-regime representations of the self in the Islamic Republic. Thus, Corbin’s transnational Orientalism assumed à second life after his demise in 1978. These instances of transnational Orientalism elude the conceptualisation of scholarship on Islam by Edward Said (1991 [1978]). In his analysis, Orientalism has been conceived of as a Western discourse, which stems from an unequal world order, helps sustain it, and reflects its contexts of production rather than its object. What has been termed “Orientalism in reverse” (al-'Azm 1981) - the representation of the self in “the Orient” in terms of Orientalist construc tions - is a concept that similarly documents Western presence and Eastern absence. “Oriental Orientalism” thus constitutes a residual category that bespeaks precisely the terms of passivity and the defiance of “agency” (Ortner 1995) that Said confronted, as both projection and imposition, in Orientalism. The denial of an interactive, constmctive imag ination in “Oriental Orientalism” as much as in the “Occidental” variety, compares to what critical an thropology posits - although with inverse political sentiments and implications - as the “denial of co

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