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The Discourse of Civilization and Decolonization
Prasenjit Duara
University of Chicago
| For entire generations of scholars, continuing in many cases until today, the term "civilization" was relatively unproblematic, reflecting meanings that were relatively secure in their usage. For instance, "civilization" represented a standard to determine rights in international law, and to this day it serves as a rationale for area studies. When we look back to the usage of the word over the last hundred years or so, it is actually quite astonishing to observe how much difference and contention there has been in the meaning of the term "civilization." While we have become increasingly conscious of the problem—not only with the term "civilization," but in the human disciplines generally—of subjecting our analytical categories to analysis, we are not quite sure how to deal with it.1 |
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Before pointing out some of these differences to convey the vast terrain the term has occupied in the last century, let me try to indicate the "bookends" that have held the term civilization together over this period. Most of these uses have shared an understanding of "civilization" as a way of identifying and ordering value in the world. The identification of value, however, sometimes implies the identification of a community of value, and civilization can also become the means of marking the Self from the Other. In this respect, civilization may resemble other identity forms like nationalism, with which it often becomes conflated. However, what distinguishes the civilizational idea from nationalism is its appeal to a higher, transcendent source of value and authority, capable of encompassing the Other. |
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Thus, while the concept of Western civilization was an important means of justifying imperialist domination of the rest of the world in the late nineteenth century, it was accompanied by the ideal of the "civilizing mission," a mission that exemplified the desire not (simply) to conquer the Other, but to be desired by the Other. In this period, civilization represented values associated with the Enlightenment, including the state protection of rights—of life, freedom, and property—and other values and practices ranging from the pursuit of material progress to civilized manners and clothing. Notably, it was the disillusionment during World War I with the idea of the civilizing mission that also encouraged the visibility of other civilizations—Confucian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American—often tied to decolonizing movements as more genuinely universalizing alternatives. |
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Norbert Elias pointed to this dual dimension of the civilization idea as it developed in Europe as a temporal phenomenon.2 Before the nineteenth century, the idea of civilization expressed a process—"the civilizing process"—extending out from the courts to wider reaches of society. By the nineteenth century, however, it had become a rather inflexible expression of national identity that was intertwined with national conflicts, for instance, between the French and the Germans. Elias's temporal difference really indicates a difference in two distinct types of society in their attitude toward the Other. Civilization in the period of nation-states does indeed tend to be more exclusivist than in prenational societies. Still the difference may be somewhat overdrawn. |
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