ORIENTALISM BY EDWARD SAID

Though Orientalism by Edward Said has been severely criticized by some scholars, it is a very influential and enlightening book. In Orientalism, Edward Said analyzes what it means for the “colonists” and the “colonized” the act of building up cultural structures in reference to their economies, ideologies, geographies, academic understandings, values, and positions in the world. He explores the extent to which the Orient is perceived as a European invention, due to the representational character of “Orientalism.” In this regard, Said emphasizes “the Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture” while orientalism assumes a mode of discourse with “supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery and doctrines” (1-2).

Said defines a number of interdependent thoughts concerning Orientalism. One of them has to do with showing Orientalism as a Western style of belief “based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident” (Said 2). As a cultural discourse, Orientalism has been a “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient” by making statements about it, describing it, and ruling over it since the late 18^th century (Said 3). Said argues that, in speaking about Orientalism, we must refer to a British and French cultural enterprise, a project of disparately imaginary dimensions that includes the whole India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and other complex arrays of ideas derived from the British and French’s experiences of the Orient (4). Said questions issues such as the lack of consistency between Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient, the configurations of power, the verisimilitude in the created bodies of theory and practice, and the systems of knowledge in relation to hegemonic endeavors as well as the “detailed logic governed not by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” (8).

Said uses Orientalism, mainly, as an excuse to expose other topics, including the use of knowledge to manipulate and intervene in neighboring cultures. Knowledge may be used for imperialist purposes, serving Empires to distinguish what is of economic, sociological, or historical value, and what is not worth keeping. In talking about the Western imperialist plot with regards to the “Oriental” world, Said says that “it is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly (…) and philological texts; it is an elaboration and a whole series of ‘interests’; it is a certain will or intention to understand, control, manipulate and incorporate what is different, alternative or novel; it is a discourse produced by various kinds of power” (12). As part of a greater entity called knowledge, Orientalism also provides the points of departure, an established path of thought, cannons of taste and value, “so as to enable what follows from them” (16-19).

In his study of the authoritarian character of knowledge, Said employs two concepts. One of them is the strategic location, which refers to “the way of describing the author’s position in a text,” and the strategic formation that involves a method for analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which they acquire “mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (20). As Said affirms, “Orientalism responds more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object,” which, ironically, has been also produced by the West (22). From this perspective, the Oriental world gains intelligibility and identity after it has been manipulated, encapsulated and represented by the dominating frameworks of the West (Said 40). That is why, when travelling in the country of his specialization, the Orientalist was more interested in proving the validity of “musty truths” by applying them to the natives (Said 52) than in really learning from the people and their culture.