Beyond the Orientalist Tradition: Late Marx's Critique on John Phear's Ethnological Study
The tradition of Orientalist discourse is devoted to the control of the West over the Eastern colonization and the maintenance of its legitimacy. Marx's early studies on Indian society, which rely on the Orientalist knowledge tradition, mainly tend to explain the social changes and material progress brought about by technological dissemination. In this discourse, the construction of Indian society itself inherits the traditional narrative of Orientalism to a certain extent, and in his later years, Marx made a more in-depth critical study of this issue, which is typified by his critique on the ethnological research work of John Phear on Indian village community. From Marx's critical examination of John Phear's ethnological research, as we can see: First of all, Marx's analysis of the current situation of Indian society is based on objective records, of which the ethnographic studies of John Phear are the most recent and new documentary texts; Secondly, John Phear recorded the current situation of the Indian village after the destruction of British colonial rule that exclude by the traditional Orientalist narrative, its direct result was the emergence of a large number of proletarian tenants, and has led to a highly distorted and destabilized state of the existing social structure in India, shattering the original Orientalist narrative on rural India as a closed and constant society; Finally, Marx always took the ideal of proletarian revolution and strong opposition to colonial rule as the basic starting point of his critical attitude in his concern for Indian society, which in no sense can be called a representation of Orientalist discourse.
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