Orientalism

EDWARD SAID's Orientalism (1979) is a remarkable turning point in the genealogy of this term. Before the publication of his book, Orientalism generally referred either to an artistic genre or to the scholarly discipline, which concerns itself with the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Orient. Said pointed out two other definitions: a style of thought that establishes [Page 807]epistemological and ontological distinctions between the Occident and the Orient and a corporate institution that defines, authorizes views about, and rules over the Orient.

Redefining Orientalism, Edward Said revolutionized the understanding of how the West looked at the East.

Said did not dispute the existence of idiosyncratic differences between the geopolitical categories. Instead, he criticized the way in which the differences are hierar-chically organized in order to justify ahistorical, culture-centric judgments about self and the other. Specifically, for Said, Orientalism involves the creation and perpetuation of discourses and practices that endorse political as well as cultural superiority of the Oc-cident over the Orient. Moreover, it represents the Orient as an exotic, mysterious, and dangerous space upon which the Occident is justified to inscribe its technologies of governance and self.

Orientalism, as a worldview, operates through rigid, mutually exclusive binary oppositions such as rational/irrational, normal/different, dynamic/stagnant, self/other, and Occident/Orient. The qualifiers on the same side of each binary are grouped together and identified as the irreconcilable opposites of the qualifiers on the other side of the binary. These juxtapositions are then articulated through prevalent political and cultural paradigms so that they refer to a tangible social group, ideology, or belief system.

It is, however, necessary to note that Orient and Occident do not refer to fixed categories but to timebound discursive constructs. In other words, their geographical and substantial scopes vary across time on the basis of shifting power relations. Yet, the transformation does not eradicate the inequalities and incon-gruities that binaries imply for political, cultural, and subjective identity-formation in the newly designated geopolitical categories.

The Orientalist categorization of social reality has particularly served to legitimize colonial administrations, political mandates, and racist and sexist practices. If a group is associated with the undesirable side of binary oppositions, it calls forth the assistance and/or the guidance of supposedly superior groups. An interesting example is the mainstream Western feminism's treatment of Oriental women as always oppressed individuals who are presumed to have neither the resources nor the capacity to break away from their patriarchal bondage.

Another example is the association of Islam with religious fundamentalism, political extremism, terrorism, and a backward social structure. Besides suppressing the genuine voices of supposedly inferior groups, Orientalism therefore provides the allegedly superior groups with a positive image, self-reliance, and cultural resources of power.

Orientalist perspective has been an influential undercurrent in the social sciences as well. The three major theories, that is, classical Marxism, classical liberalism, and structural functionalism, view Occidental societies as the ultimate apex of modern civilization and Oriental societies as units in the process of development. In a similar vein, modernization theory explains the un(der) development of Oriental societies with their adherence to obscure traditions and beliefs. Said's critique refuted the validity of such analytical reductionisms. It reinforced the cultural/textual turn in the social sciences, motivated the emergence of postcolonial studies, and strengthened the currency of poststructuralism and the Foucauldian paradigm.

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