The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. Growing up, however, she found herself transitioning to non-fiction, psychological, and self-help books. Furthermore, also in anticipation of Edward Said, we had begun to discuss the ways in which our own social science disciplines, anthropology in particular, played a major role in what Talal Asad called the Colonial Encounter.. Edward Said put forward several definitions of Orientalism in the introduction of his book, , Edward Said builds up his argument and analysis in three (3) long chapters. The book won him universal recognition for innovative and provocative explorations of the interrelationship between textsliterary and otherwise. It is because of Orientalism that the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. Comments on Orientalism 1 st paragraph In part II of the Introduction to Orientalism Said says that the Orient is not a fact of nature, but an idea. Affirming Said's multifaceted and enormous critical impact, this collection features essays that highlight the significance of Said's work for contemporary spatial A good example of this is what used to be called Islamic legal studies, studied only through certain canonic texts, and posited on the notion that the master story was one in which modern legal codes imported tout court from the West quickly supplanted so-called traditional Sharia law, confining it simply to the area of personal status. However, prior to the colonial era, Orientalism was a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts, research, and conceptualizations. For Said, as it was for Foucault, knowledge is power. Critics use the personal and the political to muddy the waters, not only of Edwards critique itself but also of anyone who can reasonably, or unreasonably, be associated with it. Said carefully examines what he calls 'Orientalism' in an attempt to show how different cultures view each other . Said's Orientalism is the foundational work on which postcolonial literary theory developed. His mother was a Lebanese and his father was a Palestinian book merchant. For this purpose, his major focus is on the works of French Orientalists, such as Sylvester de Sacy, and works of English Orientalists like Edward Lanes Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). According to Said, the Orient is a semi-mythical construct imposed on a set of countries east of Europe. What Is Orientalism? As challenging the idea, that differences involve hostility, a frozen and reified set of essences in opposition, and the whole polemical knowledge built on this basis. Interesting to Know: Orientalism & Technology: A Primer on the Techno-Orientalism Debate. The Concept of Other and Alter Ego in Saids Orientalism, 2. His family was exiled from Mandate Palestine during the 1948 Nakba, and he went on to live in Lebanon, Egypt and the United States. EDWARD W. SAID 163 most committed partisans- usually scholars, professors, experts, and the like- claim it is. Read more: By calling them so, they defined themselves as rational, civilized, hardworking and refined. But Orientalists arent exclusively tucked away in ivory towers. Lastly, the Orientalist scholars are the product of the system they come from. Said argues that by minimising the rich diversity of Southwest Asian and North African peoples, Orientalists turn them into a contrasting image against which the West seems culturally superior. Educated in British colonial schools and elite US universities, Said linked the experience of being at once an insider and an outsider to the disparity he felt between his own identity as a Palestinian Arab and how Arabs are represented by the West. Orientalism served as an ideological basis for French and British colonial rule. Edward Said: Biography, Orientalism Theory, & Postcolonialism This means reading Orientalism as carefully as its author would wish and then being able to understand its role as the first part of a project which required the construction of alternative methodologies as its complement. Said claims that his analysis is quite objective and neutral. In Foucaults view, knowledge is power and also the way of gaining power. Said notes that there has been a fair amount of interchange over the last few centuries over these two theoretical fields of coming to terms with the Orient. Edward Said also rejects the validity of the terms Orient and Occident. This is the more significant as our own thinking contains either unexamined assumptions from the Orientalist period or, at the very least, questions which we cannot help students to answer properly because we do not know how to frame them or where to look for answers. Said argued that powerful groups control the intellectual framework within which ideas are discussed and determines what constitutes knowledge. It is the field of writing, research and teaching about the orient. So, a discourse is the product of interaction between power and knowledge interconnected in a never-ending circle. Said stated this clearly in the afterword of Orientalism: human identity is not only natural and stable, but constructed, and occasionally even invented outright.. What is the main argument of Edward Said book Orientalism? Rather, it is a constructed understanding of what citizens believe the Orient to be. This concept of a foreign and strange East forms a set of cultural, political, religious, and linguistic contrasts which, in turn, has enabled the West to think of itself as a distinctand superiorentity. This was partly the result of his inclinations, character, and training. Due to this, they cant help but to misrepresent the Other. In his book, Edward Said clearly stated that Orientalism was not the product of colonial rule. This means reading Orientalism as carefully as its author would wish and then being able to understand its role as the first part of a project which required the construction of alternative methodologies as its complement. Bad Orientalism encourages the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. They contrast themselves with the others, the orientals. Orientalism: A Critical Introduction & Analysis , the direction from which the sun rises. Therefore, they had to be dealt with by maintaining the power of choice. This condition was timeless according to the Europeans. This, for me, is a curious construct and one which Said may well have adapted as necessary or as beneficial for his use while being aware that this contains a . He also highlights their efforts to encourage the Easterners to judge themselves by Western criteria and to work for achieving the Western goals. It also is worth noting that the personal tone of the book helped to make things even worse. The basic idea behind imperialism was that the people of east are uncivilized and they cannot govern . In short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. Moreover, it is a way of coming to terms with the Orient (the East) that is based on the Orients special place in European Western culture and experience. These four categories are: Popular Image and Social Science Representation. This identity was typically expressed as one of superiority and dominance over the Orient, which Western writers, travelers, and, later, imperialists reduced to a series of crude and reductive stereotypes and generalizations. Orientalism Edward Said Edward Said's Definition Of Orientalism - 848 Words | Bartleby PDF Said-Introduction and Chapter 1 of Orientalism Said demonstrated how policy makers seek out the specialist, in this case the Orientalists, to shape their policies. In this context, the Europeans define themselves looking at the mirror of the orient. Like the Orient, this term reduces a variety of peoples to a discrete set of traits and temperaments. The West (by which we refer primarily to Europe and North America) in turn forged its historical identity against the foil of the East or Orient. Said admits that his understanding of orientalism is based on personal dimension as he had witnessed the prejudices of the Westerners towards the orient. For instance, we can see them at work in the ways the United States and European Union have endowed themselves with the authority to impose what a 2022 UN report called suffocating economic sanctions against Syria. Edward Said also described Orientalism as a discourse, a definition he takes from the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. In 1993, he published his most comprehensive works on Post Colonial study Culture and Imperialism and Representations of The Intellectual. Given the vast changes in the world in the 1960s and the great desire to liberate ourselves from the world views of race and empire, it was only natural that young persons like me should have turned to the new fields of economic development, social history, sociology, and, particularly, social anthropology for our alternatives using them, as best we could, to re-read, and then re-shape and re-use, major modern era texts like Gibb and Bowens Islam and the West, Halil Inalciks articles worrying at the notion of Ottoman decline, and Albert Houranis own work on the so-called Islamic city., Given the temper of these times, it was also natural that those early social science critics of Orientalist scholarship should band together in workshops around joint projects designed to employ what we identified as the German-style 19th century critique both to expose the lack of real explanatory value in traditional Orientalism and to begin to provide what we took to be a more useful way of studying the modern Middle East. We should continue to challenge the ways Orientalism shapes our perception of Southwest Asia and North Africa countries and peoples. There were several critics and thinkers who criticized Edward Saids contentions but he refuted the charges quite rationally. Although he restricted his discussion to academic study of the history and culture of Middle Eastern Africa and Asia, Said clearly asserted that Orientalism is, and does not merely represent, a significant dimension of modern political and intellectual culture.. Said himself acknowledged this. According to Said, Orientalism is a "created body of theory and practice" which constructs images of the Orient or the East directed toward those in the West. The first Orientaliststhe 19th century scholarstranslated the writings of the Orient into English. The basic assumption is that the Orientalist knows the Orient better than Orientals do themselves. Define the term "Orientalism" as coined by Edward Said. Said was born in Jerusalem. In the introduction to Orientalism Said presents the definitions of orientalism in the following manner: Orientalism is a way of coming to terms with the orient that is based on the orients special place in European Western experience, It is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the orient and the occident., It is a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient., It is particularly valuable as a signs of European-Atlantic power over the orient than it is a verdict discourse about the orient.. Whether youre conscious of it or not, you likely have a vivid mental image of what the Middle East looks and sounds like. He understood it as an interconnected system of institutions, policies, narratives and ideas. First, while Orientalism presents itself as an objective field of study, it was used to justify the political domination of the East by the West.
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