Orientalism

After reading pages 11-129, I learned a few key terms when talking about and trying to understand Orientalism. First off, Orientalism is defined as a term popularized by cultural theroist Edward Said that refers to the ways that Western cultures concieve of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures as other and attribute to these cultures qualities such as exoticism and barbarism. Orientalism sees binary opposition between the West (the Occident) and the East (The Orient) in which either negative or romanticized qualities are attributed to the latter. For Said, Orientalism is a practice found in cultural representations, education, social science, and polotical policy. For instance, the stereotype of Arab people as fanatic terrorists is an example of Orietalism. Next I wanted to define the term binary opposition. In the book it is defined as the oppositions such as nature/culture, white/black, male/female, mind/body and so forth, through which reality has traditionally been represented. Although binary oppositions can seem immutable and mutually exclusive, contemporary theories of difference have demonstarated the ways in which these oppositional categories are interrelated and are ideologically and historically constructed. This leads to the exclusion of other positions in the spectrum between these binaries. For example, sexuality exists along a continuum and not soely in the form of two poles of identity, male and female. The historical reliance on binary oppositions points to the way that differences is essential to meaning and how we inderstand things.

However, binary oppositions are reductive ways of viewing the compexity of differnece, and as philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued, all binary oppositions are encoded with values and concepts of power, superiority, and worth.

The capacity of the photograph to establish both norms and otherness is highly evident in contemporary advertising, in which ads attach notions of exoticism to their products through images of places that are coded as distant and outside the world of consumptio the implied locale of the rice paddy and the use an Asian model give ordinary women's clothing a peasant quality. Here the hats worn typically by workers in rice paddies in order to shield their faces from the sun are recorded as signifiers of exoticism. We are not intended to think these women are actually performing the labor of working in the rice paddies . Rather the paddy offers an exotic location in which highly paid models and expensive clothing can be put on display.

In the Safari Ralph Lauren ad, the ad invites the consumer/viewer to assume the role of the liberated travler who moves through and unidentified exotic locale. The ad is arranged like a travelouge or scrapbook. The consumer is interpellated in these ads as a westerner who can buy an authentic exotic expierence. The consumer is also promised a virtually authentic experience as tourists in consuming the product.

One of the primary binary oppositions that is reiterated and debated in contemporary representation today is that the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. The difference formerly was captuered in the terms Occidental and Oriental, with Orientalism describing the tendencies of westterners who have fetishized, mythologicalized, and feared the culrues, land, and people of Asia and the Middle East. Photographs and other forms of representation are central elements in the production of Orientalism.

Cultural theorists Edward Said emphasized that the Orient is not strictly a place or culture in itself, but rather a European culture construction. Orientalism he expalined is about " the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is alos the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other". Said argued that the concept of the Orient as other serves to establish Europe and the West as the norm.