Othering

History of the West's Others

Historically, the most significant form of othering is Orientalism. This is Edward Said's (1978) critical term for a binary imagined geography that divides the world into inside and outside, Occident and Orient. This geopolitical division, he argued, is written throughout the texts of Western culture. The inherently different natures of Orient and Occident were based around a series of unequal binary pairs within which the Western character was always inscribed with value and power.

Said argued that from the Enlightenment onward the achievements of science were seen to make all the clearer the difference between European man and peoples of the Orient. Science, and its practical application in such forms as medicine and engineering, seemed to demonstrate the separation of European man from nature. Whereas Europeans had conquered nature through mining and agriculture, conquered space and time via new forms of transportation, and were on their way to conquering the body through the application of medical science, Oriental peoples were, according to this view, still subject to the forces of the natural world, trapped in place, and ignorant of the workings of the human body. Thus, non-Europeans were excluded from civilization, placed in the nature they could not control, and therefore under the stewardship of Europe along with nature. Moreover, new forms of science could [Page 1071]be used to demonstrate the fundamental difference between the West and other in more direct ways.

Said has been critiqued for presenting too homogenous a picture of European Orientalists, and some have argued that there were different responses to non-Europeans with Indian culture, for instance, receiving more respect than Africa (see Cohn 1996). Nevertheless, later into the nineteenth century the “science” of race used “objective” measures to establish racial categories “because nineteenth century Europeans believed that machines, skull size, or ideas about the configuration of the solar system were culturally neutral facts, evaluative criteria based on science and technology appeared to be the least tainted by subjective bias” (Adas 1989, 145–146). Racial categorizations, which placed European man at the top, placing other races in a taxonomy of difference defined by their deviance from this norm, were created by measurements of skull size, face angle, and other bodily measurements.

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