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Edward Said was a “Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic who examined literature in light of social and cultural politics and was an outspoken proponent of the political rights of the Palestinian people and the creation of an independent Palestinian state” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). Born in Jerusalem in 1935, his family moved to Cairo in 1947 to “avoid the conflict that was beginning over the United Nations partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab areas” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). His education brought him to the United States in 1951 where he attended prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard with the purpose of furthering his studies in English Literature. He eventually became a professor at Columbia University during which he published Orientalism, where he argues that the studies of Westerners conducted in the “Orient” of the Arab world were “biased and projected a false and stereotyped vision of “otherness” on the Islamic world that facilitated and supported Western colonial policy” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). He was elected to the Palestine National Council and focused his writings on supporting Arab and Palestinian causes and rights. His work is said to be controversial in an American society, however, in reading Orientalism, his political activism on the subject contained much validity after discovering the various dynamics of power and their contributions to a Western colonialism-focus mindset.

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Said’s Definition of Orientalism:  “the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.””

Alternate definition: “is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous.”

http://arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism

Orientalism vs “Arabic, Islamic, Jewish” seeing them all as one body of people

This book was used to connect the history of these ideas and the origins of these ideas to the modern standing of “the West’s” relationship with “the East”

The idea of Orientalism is that people and cultures are exotic and primitive if they are not part of the European world. The only way to save these people and offer them the "enlightenment" that we share in the West is to educate them on our values. If they don't change or conform then they are a threat. We must expand into their world and take over their people in order to make sure that everyone is on the same European Christian page as it were.

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The Concept of Orientalism- Western Eyes vs Eastern Realities

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The Concept of Orientalism- Western Eyes vs Eastern Realities

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Dehumanizing people from Asia

Subjugating them in order to rule them

The need to “show them the way” of how to live “better”

The idea of what Asia is and who Asians are based on assumption, myth, and rumor

Even when people experience it they aren’t seeing the real place just what they want to see to fit in with their stereotypical beliefs

These Asian people , according to Said were not seen as human beings but as exotic creatures to be controlled and molded into the Western desired image. The English and French, and later on the Americans, used Asia, and the Middle East for their own means and ignored that these were actual people (especially when oil became popular and more widely used). Since so little was known, mostly because there was no effort to truly "know" these people, people filled in the blanks in their minds. As Claude Levi Strauss explained, once a person filled in enough of these blanks for themselves, they became their own subject matter experts. As a result, others would look to them to define what they knew about Asia and Asian people. It became and remained a vicious cycle in that way.

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Two Forms of Orientalism: Latent vs. Manifest

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Two Forms of Orientalism: Latent vs. Manifest

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Edward Said compares and contrasts the concepts of "Latent Orientalism" and "Manifest Orientalism" (Chapter 3, Part 1).

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Connecting the Middle East Today with Orientalism of the Past

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Connecting the Middle East Today with Orientalism of the Past

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The ideas of colonizing and taking over nations to make them in our image as “The West”

What we need to show them

“Knowledge as the basis for power”

The connection with the relationship with the Middle East today is one of the most important factors when considering Orientalism. The relationship of America and western Europe with the countries and people of the Middle East is complicated and cannot be explained singularly through this idea of Orientalism but you can see how the attitudes we have towards each other originated, at least in part, due to this philosophy and need to colonize the world. Europeans and later Americans saw Islam and the nations that practiced it as a threat and that attitude, sadly, is still pervasive today. When we talk about how there was no separation of the different cultures of the East, it also served to stop the people of each country from having their own identities. This can also be seen today. I think you would have a difficult time getting most Americans to distinguish between Iran and Iraq or Saudi Arabia and Syria for example. We tend to treat the Middle East as one massive singular entity and that ignores the intricacies of the different cultures and people there.

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The Anthropological Impact of Orientalism

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The Anthropological Impact of Orientalism

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Through his work with Orientalism, Edward Said provided a model for how anthropological work should and shouldn’t be done. He points out various fallacies that are important to avoid when properly understanding a culture or ethnic group through an unbiased lens.

The Single-Story:

Seeing the “Orient” and its culture as one to be studied causes anthropologists to treat cultural/ethnic groups as so, rather than seeing the people for who they are and listening to their individual voices and narratives.

White Savior Complex:

As the West begins to anthropologically study the “Orient” humanity with the goal of benefiting individual cultures, it continues to utilize these techniques to further colonialize and suppress the culture, seeing its Western position as superior and exemplary.

A Lack of Historical Context:

Many anthropological works focus on the contemporary culture and its impacts relative and comparable to those seen in the West. There is a large gap of background missing which excludes the historical context and interactions. If historical context was explored, it was based off already biased sources rather than a text-based method that takes root in the culture itself. "Studying the historical dynamics ...is more demanding than sliding back into stereotypes" (Said 2003, 334).

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White Savior Complex and Orientalism as seen in Western Media

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White Savior Complex and Orientalism as seen in Western Media

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Lawrence of Arabia: 1962 film about a British Army Officer who helps the Arabian people by leading a revolt against the Ottoman Empire (Lean, 1962).

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Neo-Orientalism: Orientalism in a Post 9/11 Society

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Neo-Orientalism: Orientalism in a Post 9/11 Society

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In the time since Edward Said’s writing of Orientalism, the path of manifestation has gained momentum toward a revived form of Said’s philosophy called Neo-Orientalism. In the timeline of Orientalist thought, Neo-Orientalism takes root in the September 11th terrorist attacks and the Western attitudes toward the Islamic world after the event.

“The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had and continued to have an enormous impact on global politics in general and Arab-American relationship…in which the Americans see Arab Muslims as fanatical, violent, and lacking tolerance” (Altwaiji 2014).

“Orientalism, often colliding with racism, Islamophobia, selective prejudice, model minoritization and other doctrines of civilizational difference has been the crux” of the irrational fears that many Americans have toward terrorism moving forward from the event on September 11th, 2001 (Kumar 2012).

“So, associating Al-Qaeda or ISIS violence with Islam, and then Islam with the scenes of veiled women walking in the streets of Amsterdam or Berlin instantaneously conjure up the image of Muslims and Islam as Europe’s cultural Other” (Bayat 2015).

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Altwaiji, Mubarak. "Neo-Orientalism and the Neo-Imperialism Thesis: Post-9/11 US and Arab World Relationship." Arab Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 313. Accessed February 22, 2020. doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.36.4.0313.

Bayat, Asef. 2015. “Neo-Orientalism.” The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World. Accessed February 22, 2020. https://futureswewant.net/asef-bayat-neo-orientalism/.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. November 2019. "Edward Said." Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. Accessed February 22, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Said.

Kumar, Malreddy Pavan. “Introduction: Orientalism(s) after 9/11.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 3 (July 2012): 233. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.678707.

Lean, David. 1962. Lawrence of Arabia. Culver City: Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment.

Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.