Summary
Morroe Berger, the Princeton professor of sociology and Near Eastern studies whose 1967 report on Middle Eastern studies Said uses in Orientalism’s Chapter Three, IV as the exhibit of academic Orientalism persisting inside American social science: its canonical judgments repeated as expert assessment, blind to the region’s actual political weight (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.297-298 / printed p.288-289; the name is Morroe in the original, checked — the text copy prints “Marroe”).
Details
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Berger produced his report in 1967 at the behest of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, while president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the professional association founded in 1967; his paper, “Middle Eastern and North African Studies: Developments and Needs,” was published in the second issue of the MESA Bulletin (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.297 / printed p.288).
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After surveying the region’s strategic, economic and political importance to the United States and endorsing government and foundation support programs — the National Defense Education Act of 1958, a directly Sputnik-inspired initiative, and links between the Social Science Research Council and Middle Eastern studies — Berger concluded, as quoted: the modern Middle East and North Africa “is not a center of great cultural achievement,” nor is it likely to become one in the near future, and “Our region is not a center of great political power nor does it have the potential to become one,” the Middle East having receded in immediate political importance to the U.S. relative to Africa, Latin America and the Far East (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.297 / printed p.288).
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Said’s reading: as prophecy this is lamentable, and no chance aberration — both mistakes duplicate the canonical Orientalist opinion that the Semites never produced a great culture, and Berger, writing when the United States was already importing about 10 percent of its oil from the Middle East, ensures the centrality of his own mediating position, since only the Orientalist can interpret an Orient radically incapable of interpreting itself (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.298 / printed p.289).
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Berger was not a classical Orientalist but a professional sociologist, which for Said does not minimize his indebtedness to Orientalism and its ideas, among them the specially legitimated antipathy towards and downgrading of the material forming the main basis of his study (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.298 / printed p.289).
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In Chapter Three, IV’s continuation Berger is Said’s instance of the academic attitude towards the Islamic Orient and of Orientalism’s most current transformation, its conversion from a fundamentally philological discipline into a social science specialty; the new Orientalist begins as a trained social scientist and “applies” his science to the Orient, taking over the attitudes of cultural hostility (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.299 / printed p.290).
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Said lists him among the contemporary Orientalists making bizarre assertions: Berger presuming that, since the Arabic language is much given to rhetoric, Arabs are consequently incapable of true thought; and Berger’s phrase for “the great value men place upon their own sexual prowess” is quoted in Said’s analysis of Arab presence in mythic discourse as number and generative power (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.319-320 / printed p.310-311).
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The Notes cite Berger’s The Arab World Today (1962), p. 158, for a Chapter One passage (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.344 / printed p.335).