GEOG 882
Geographic Foundations of Geospatial Intelligence

3.6 Said - "The Clash of Ignorance"

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As you read Edward Said's response to Huntington in "The Clash of Ignorance" do some critical thinking and ask yourself:

  • What are the implications of the fact that Huntington published his article in Foreign Affairs and Said published his in The Nation?
  • Said attacks the tendency of scholars like Huntington to carve up the world and entire "civilizations" into large blocks, thus losing all the details that make them what they are. (This alludes to the problem of choosing the scale of analysis.) In what ways (both good and bad) does this tendency to agglomerate impact the geospatial intelligence analyst?
  • What is Edward Said's background? How does this background color his cultural filters when looking at Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism?

Required Reading

Read Edward Said's response to Huntington in "The Clash of Ignorance" in The Geopolitics Reader, 2nd edition. (Pages 146-149)