Orientalism

Orientalism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures by Westerners. It can also refer to the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists.

Edward Said and "Orientalism"

Despite this often mixed tradition, the word "Orientalism" carried no negative freight. Respected institutions like the Oriental Institute of Chicago carried the term without reproach. "Oriental" was simply understood as the opposite of "occidental" ('western').

Related Topics:
Oriental Institute of Chicago - Occident

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The word began to develop negative connotations following the publication of the groundbreaking work Orientalism by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture.

Related Topics:
Palestinian - Edward Said - Michel Foucault - Islamic - Arab

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Taking a comparative and historical literary review of European scholars and writers looking at, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the peoples of the Middle East, Said sought to lay bare the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized in those texts. Said's writings have had far-reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to studies of imperialist Western attitudes to India, China and elsewhere. It was one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said later developed and modified his ideas in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993).

Related Topics:
Middle East - India - China - Postcolonial studies

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Many scholars now use Said's work to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the West's idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If "Europe" evolved out of "Christendom" as the "not-Byzantium," early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto) certainly defined itself as the "not-Turkey."

Related Topics:
Christendom - Battle of Lepanto

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Said puts forward several definitions of Orientalism in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• "A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience." (p. 1)
• "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'."
• "A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (3)
• "...particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient." (6)
• "A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts." (12)

Criticisms of Said

Critics of Said's theory, such as the historian Bernard Lewis, argue that Said's account ignores the many genuine contributions to the study of Eastern cultures made by Westerners during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras. While many distortions and fantasies certainly existed, the notion of "the Orient" as a negative mirror image of the West cannot be wholly true because attitudes to distinct cultures diverged significantly. In any case it is a logical necessity that other cultures will be identified as "different", since otherwise their distinctive characteristics would be invisible, and that the most striking differences will hold up the mirror to the observing culture.

Related Topics:
Bernard Lewis - Victorian era

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~