Defining Orientalism

In Orientalism, Edward Said discusses important issues. Firstly, he postulates that the scholarship fabricated by Orientalism fails to be objective and disinterested, despite its claim to be so. Actually, it advances the cause of Westerners to dominate the Orient geographically. Then, scientific geography should be distinguished from commercial geography. Said believes, “the connection between national pride in scientific and civilizational achievement and the fairly rudimentary profit motive was urged, to be channeled into support for colonial acquisition.” Secondly, Said believes that a society builds up its identity more efficiently by imagining an “other.” Orientalism helped the West to define itself. So the West became superior culturally and intellectually, while the East or the Orient was imagined and reflected as culturally static and inferior. So, according to Orientalism, Westerners and Orientals are in binary opposition of each other. Said quotes Cromer as saying “Orientals are inveterate liars, they are lethargic and suspicious, and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Thirdly, a false and negative picture of the Orient and its culture is drawn by Orientalism. The Orient’s “sensuality,” “despotism,” “aberrant mentality,” “inaccuracy” and “backwardness” are all features of Said’s description of Orientalism. He invests Orientalism with different meanings, which he claims to be interdependent. He presents his academic definition of Orientalism as follows:

Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. Another definition, which he calls imaginative, is a more general one:

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. Edward Said then gives a more comprehensive account of Orientalism, which invests the previous aspects with a historical and material meaning:

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. Edward Said then sees Orientalism as a discourse, a term used by Michael Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and in Discipline and Punish (1975), to understand the system built up by Europeans to create a new Orient in different spheres. His next definition is as follows:

Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Furthermore, Orientalism is referred to as “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts.” Another description calls Orientalism, “an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction but also of a whole series of interests which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, not only creates but also maintains.” Said’s Orientalism, above all, is:

a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do.

In this way the writer of Orientalism satisfies the reader’s curiosity by providing him / her with a range of different meanings to construct a readerly and comprehensive definition for this complex modern notion. All in all, Orientalism is based on the distinction between the West and the East. Said postulates that Orientalism fundamentally becomes “a political vision of reality.” This structure is based on the dichotomy between the familiar Europe or the West and the strange Orient or the East. Almost as often as not, this distinction is drawn by use of the binary terms of “us” and “them.” Orientalism assumes the Orientals as almost the same wherever they are. On the whole, there are Westerners and there are Orientals. The former dominate and the latter must be dominated….