QUOTES: The Civilization of Educated Savages

What?: Explain the three meanings of Orientalism discussed by Said. What distinction is necessary in order for the concept of “The Orient” to exist? How is discourse a form of power and oppression? Doe discourse determine what is said or thought about the Orient?

So What?: Huntington and Said are two world-renowned scholars. How do their viewpoints on the Orient differ? Is Huntington’s argument an Orientalist discourse? Review the critiques of ethnography discussed in class. Explain how the same critiques can be applied to Huntington’s conceptualization of culture, or explain why you do not believe these critiques are relevant to Huntington’s argument.

Now What?: Provide an example of an “othering” discourse in the news, social media, Hollywood, etc. that applies to the people at your community partner site. How is this discourse central to the structural inequalities that people at your community partner site must confront?

“The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over” (Said 1).

“Unlike the Americans, the French and the British…have had a long tradition of…Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (Said 1).

“Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic ‘Oriental’ awareness” (Said 2).