Orientalism

28 August 2000
What are the blinders we wear when we deal with another culture? (Or, for that matter, what are the blinders we wear in looking at our own culture?) Anthropology wrestles with this question implicitly and sometimes directly, and it lies behind all efforts to understand and describe what we observe. It is often argued that we construct reality, that our categories and names are more or less arbitrary partitionings and labelings... and that this is even more true across cultural boundaries. We idealize and caricature and stereotype in our attempts to deal with others, and only with great effort (and usually imperfectly) do we incorporate others' ways of perception or expression. And yet we keep trying...

Edward Saïd's Orientalism (1978) --which focuses on European framing of the discourse (including definitions of the image and characteristics) of 'the Middle East', to enable the region to be dominated and managed-- was very influential through the decade of the 80s, but its applicability to East Asia has been debated at length. Nick Clifford's posting to H-ASIA, with answers, gives a flavor of the issues. See the Review Symposium on the book in Journal of Asian Studies (1980) for more detail.

A New York Review of Books archive search for 'orientalism' led me to a review of Jonathan Spence's The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds by Richard Jenkyns. And that put me in mind of a text that epitomises transcultural cross-threading: a letter from the Ch'ien Lung Emperor to George III (1793)

This and some others are available as texts from Fordham's Modern History Sourcebook:

(See also East Asian Sourcebook)