THEORY OF ORIENTALISM

Theory of Orientalism

Theory of Orientalism

A central idea of Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978) is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to "Western" societies. This a priori knowledge sets up "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Such to the east information is assembled with scholarly texts and historical notes that often are of restricted comprehending of the facts of life in the Middle East. (Roberts, 2007, 25-83)

Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and well liked conceiving, in specific considering European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said contended that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a contradictory inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was furthermore important in shaping Edward Said's investigation in this area. In specific, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramsci's idea of hegemony in comprehending the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and reporting, and their relative to the exercise of power over the "Orient".(Roberts, 2007, 25-83)

Although Edward Said restricted his consideration to academic study of Middle to the east, African and Asian annals and heritage, he asserted that "Orientalism is, and does not merely comprise, a significant dimension of modern political and thoughtful culture." (p. 53) Said's consideration of academic Orientalism is almost solely limited to late 19th and early 20th years scholarship. Most learned locality investigations departments had currently forsaken an imperialist or colonialist paradigm of scholarship. He titles the work of Bernard Lewis as an example of the proceeded reality of this paradigm, but accepts that it was currently rather of an exception by the time of his writing (1977). The concept of an "Orient" is a vital facet of attempts to characterise "the West". Thus, past records of the Greco-Persian conflicts may compare the monarchical government of the Persian domain with the popular custom of Athens, as a way to make a more general comparison between the Greeks and the Persians, and between "the West" and "the East", or "Europe" and "Asia", but make no mention of the other Greek city states, most of which were not directed democratically. (Richardson, 1990, 16-19)

Critics of Said's theory, ...