ORIENTALISM

Orientalism is a Western creation that deals with

a fabricated concept: the Orient.
Orientalism constructed a specific image of the
East – known as the Orient – as a means to
approach it. team of researchers was responsible
for defining Orientalism, and the “experts” on the
East were known as Orientalists. This concept was
fleshed out by other colonial powers, most
notably Britain during the 19th century, and was
the lens through which the West viewed the
entire Orient, which was considered to include
the Middle East, Asia and the Far East.

The resulting image of the East was an exotic,

erotic and irrational one, while Eastern
stereotypes found in travel journals, newspapers
and scientific publications began to proliferate.
These presented

the Orient as exotic and unfamiliar; as one equally

strange and foreign entity, regardless of country,
people or culture; and as the place where
unseemly passions could run amok. the people of
the Orient were perceived as irrational and
incapable of logic; the accompanying assumption
was that the opposite of these traits were
considered Western trait.

Orientalism was influenced by economic and

political interests, and claimed knowledge about
the Orient that the Orient didn’t have.
Orientalism was able to establish itself as an
authority over the people in the Orient, as it was
steered by “experts” who ostensibly knew more
about the ancient Orient than the very people of
the Orient. These scholars and linguists found and
translated ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and
uncovered previously unknown archaeological
digs, revealing ancient Egyptian monuments.

This knowledge made it easier for the Orientalists

to assert their dominance and influence over the
local people.
Socioeconomic developments forced Orientalism
to change and adapt.
French poet Gérard Nerval, for example, once
romantically wrote about a past Orient that he
had never actually witnessed, but which he simply
dreamed up in his book Voyage en Orient.

When he did finally visit the Orient, he was

shocked to find that it didn’t line up with his
vision, an image created by Orientalist practices
and documents. They created fantasies.
resistance movements and revolutions gave the
Orient power, and Orientalists had three ways of
responding to this disturbance.

In the first two ways, they would continue to

observe and document the Orient as if it were a
static object dictated by texts, and they would
also attempt to determine how one’s vision of the
Orient had to change given recent events. The
third way of responding to the Orient’s newfound
influence was to entirely give up the study of the
East as “the Orient” – but this approach was
seriously considered by only a handful of
Orientalists.

Orientalism tried to prove its main findings about

the Orient in different ways.
After the resistance and revolutionary movements
in the East, the West found it increasingly difficult
to disseminate its so-called discoveries.
Orientalism responded to this trend in a few
different ways.
categorizations developed by Orientalists clouded
the nuances of the cultures in question.

A number of practices and categories created by

the Orientalists made it particularly difficult to
observe each culture’s complexity.

Categories such as Oriental, Semitic, Arab,

Muslim, Jew, as well as categories of race,
mentality, type and nation, while somewhat
helpful, would simultaneously lump variations and
diversity within individuals, families and cultures
under the same umbrella, thereby obscuring their
numerous differences.

THE SCOPE OF ORIENTALISM

Edward Said's Oreintalism describes how the
science of orientalism developed as a system of
knowledge in modern times. According to Said,
the Western Orinetals structured the world as
made of two opposing elements, ours and theirs.
The West and East were to be cultural
distinctions, differences in civilization or lack of it.
In Western eyes orients were incapable of taking
care of themselves, they were lazy, lustful,
irrational and violent but also exotic and
mysterious. The self-proclaimed superiority of the
West over the East also led Western scholars to
think that they are more apt to understands the
orients than the orients themselves, thus
"orientalizing" them and subjecting them to
Western standards which did not favor them.
According to Edward Said researchers and men of
administration took a very Eurocentric and
therefore biased and selective approach to
understanding the Orient and the orients. All
accounts of the Orient according to Said were
prone to generalizations, attributing collective
significance to acts of individuals. The West also
used its own terminology to define and analyze
the Orient, applying terms were unknown to their
subjects. This is how concepts of the Orient were
developed by Western eyes and for Western eyes.

Orientalism for Said was fundamentally a system

of self projection. The Orient served as a mirror
for the West who wanted to see himself as
superior. By describing the oriental as uncivilized
the West attempt to proclaim its own civilization.
Said also employs the Freudian mechanism of
projection, arguing that Europe projected
everything it didn't want to acknowledge about
itself onto the Orient (including sexual fantasies).
The point of Said's chapter 1 of Orientalism is that
Western Knowledge of the East was never neutral
since it was always involved with a political and
cultural agenda.
Part 1 of chapter 1 talks about The initial creation of a framework of
domination during the 18th and 19th centuries allowed for domination to occur. This framework
was initially characterized as an "us" versus "them" dichotomy, established by those who were in
power, and thus in a position to act as knowledge producers. Said states that this is the basis of
the "main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism."

At its core, Orientalism represented a system of

"knowledge" and perceived "power" regarding
the Orient that framed interactions with the
West. Said concludes the chapter by setting up
the historical timeline for the development of
Orientalism through the 18th–20th centuries he
goes on to describe in later parts.
Chapter 2