Orientalism
Edward Said’s seminal work “Orientalism” proceeds to speak about the binary contrast between the “superior” Occidental world view and the “inferior” Oriental world view. The ” Orient ” signifies an imaginative perspective with which the people of the West consider everything related to the East : its geography, its people, its history, its knowledge and its culture. Said’s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe’s ‘others’ has been institutionalised since at least the eighteenth century as a feature of its cultural dominance. The very term ‘Oriental’ shows how the process works, for the word identifies and homogenises at the same time, implying a range of
knowledge and an intellectual mastery over that which is named. Since Said’s analysis, Orientalism has revealed itself as a model for the many ways in which Europe’s strategies for knowing the colonised world became, at the same time, strategies for dominating that world.
This interest in the East was instigated by the commendation of the Sanskrit language by the founder of Asiatic Society, William Jones who praised this ancient language as more varied and copious than Greek and Latin – the two cornerstones of Occidental classical culture and civilisation – and at the same time, having some similarities with both of them. Thereby the Western society gained a keen interest in observing the lingual and cultural ties between the West and the East by both professional and academic pursuit – which is popularly known as Indomania. The effort to know the East was ,however, consciously turned into the socio-political propaganda of underestimating the heritage and culture of the East by deliberately showing it as inferior to the sophistication and the scientific and cultural development of the West. The Eastern people and their ability were rendered questionable, as Lord Cromer wrote in 1908 that, while the European’s ‘trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism’, the mind of the Oriental, ‘like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry’. The inferiority was also shown in the degeneration of the ‘non-European’ branches of the Indo- European family of languages. In this respect, Orientalism, despite the plethora of disciplines it fostered, could be seen to be what Michel Foucault calls a ‘discourse’: a coherent and strongly bounded area of social knowledge; a system of statements by which the world could be known.
Orientalism, the fruit of Said’s own ‘uniquely punishing destiny’, is based upon the colonialistic master-subject orientation which the colonial powers of the West used to exploit their Eastern colonies. By gradual brainwashing in a planned manner they implanted in the subconscious of the colonised a sense of inferiority, which would make them deliberately surrender before the “superior” and “Enlightened ” colonial masters. That’s why Said always associates Orientalism with political interest and imperial-colonial ideals. Thus,
Orientalism has ‘more often been thought of as a kind of testimonial to subaltern
status—the wretched of the earth talking back —than as a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself.
Structurally, the idea of Orientalism can be categorized into three chief gateways of execution : academic, style of thought and institution. As per the academic branch is concerned, Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice. A conscious endeavour to show East mainly by focusing on its negativities was the agenda and the Western community, as expected, constituted their idea of the Orient as something dangerous and mysterious and uncivilized. As a style of thought it is ‘based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction’ between the Orient and the Occident. The third definition of Orientalism as a corporate institution is demonstrative of its amorphous capacity as a structure used to dominate and authorise the Orient.
The Orientalist representation has been reinforced not only by academic disciplines such as anthropology, history and linguistics but also by the ‘Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection’, whereby the Orientals are understood to be ethnically inferior to the so called pure Aryans of the West. This racial discrimination by means of theological, scriptural and cultural parallelism was so characteristic of some philosophers like Schlegel who used to criticize Islam and other Oriental metaphysical cultures. Moreover, the tendency to objectify the Orient was commonly prevalent and such objectification entails the assumption that the Orient is essentially monolithic, with an unchanging history, while the Occident is dynamic, with an active history. An interesting fact is that the West comes to construe the idea about the East from the biased and agenda-based Orientalist texts instead of a first hand experience of physical visit or direct communication. Consequently, it is the texts that create and describe the reality of the Orient, given that the Orientals themselves are prohibited from speaking. Instead of reflecting the reality both with its pinnacles and pitfalls,‘the Orient’ itself becomes a constituted entity, very consciously removed from the originality.
To sum up, the depiction of Orientalism, in all its many manifestations,as a ‘discourse’ has raised a storm of theoretical and methodological argument, but it has given an unparalleled focus and political clarity to the complex range of activities by which Europe gained knowledge of its oriental other. The essence of Said’s argument is that to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to be able to know the world in one’s own terms. When this ‘something’ is a whole region of the world,in which dozens of ethnicities, nationalities and languages are gathered under the spurious category ‘the Orient’, then the link between that knowledge and the power it confirms becomes profoundly important.
