Welcome to the Macat Multimedia Series, a Macat analysis of Edward Said's Orientalism. Edward Said was one of the most important cultural figures of the late 20th century. In his 1978 book, Orientalism, Said made the influential argument that scholarly writing from America and Europe presented inaccurate misleading and stereotyped cultural representations of the East. He argued that the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined.
Said believed these biased perceptions hindered a true understanding of Middle Eastern and East Asian culture. To understand Said's theory, let's imagine a scholarly university professor writing an academic report on the party scene. For research purposes, he decides to go to a party.
When he arrives, the party is in full swing. Most guests are casually dressed and dancing to loud electronic dance music. Others are sitting around lounging on the floor, kissing and laughing.
The whole situation is alien to the professor. He has his own set of values and finds it difficult to understand or appreciate the behavior of the partygoers. He can't identify himself with them or understand what made them who they are. In the same way, Said argued, when Western scholars studied Eastern culture, they couldn't understand it because it differed from their own.
So they portrayed the East as exotic, enigmatic, and curious, judging and romanticizing it without ever understanding it. Deep down, the professor feels his values are justified. After all, he is an academic.
His distaste for the party-goers'lifestyle confirms to him that his perspective is correct. He publishes his report, portraying the party-goers as raucous, sensual, uncultured and unintelligent, because they deviated from his own personal values. Just as the professor saw himself as superior to the party-goers, Said believed the West thought its society was superior to Eastern society.
But Said went further. He thought Western scholarship held strong ties to the domineering imperialist societies that produced it, concluding that much Western scholarship was inherently political and intellectually dubious. Said argued that stereotyping became a justification for the Western colonization of Eastern countries.
The West painted a picture of an Eastern world that needed civilizing. Invasion was framed as salvation, rescuing the inhabitants who were too lazy and too pleasure-focused to be fit to govern themselves. Said deduced that either the West is blinded by its own failings and doesn't recognize it as stereotyping, or it believes its own culture is superior.
Edward Said's book became the foundational text for post-colonial studies and transformed Middle Eastern studies. His theory still remains critically relevant today, so much so that it has become part of our language. The term Orientalism describes a patronizing Western attitude towards other cultures.
A more detailed examination can be found in the McCadd analysis.