What Is Orientalism?

Edward Said’s Orientalism and his critique of the West has been called both controversial and groundbreaking. In his book, he outlines the different ways the Western world since the beginning of time has “othered” the East and therefore taken advantage of and exploited its peoples and cultures all while serving its own imperialist schema. While I agree with the argument that the West is responsible for a number of injustices against “orient,” namely that the West created a binary division of the world in order to commit and justify violence towards the “other,” Said himself is a perpetrator of the same binaries he cautions his audience to think against. Further, Said names Herodotus as the chief perpetrator of early Orientalism, but in his …show more content…
When arguing that Orientalism began with Greek intellectuals, Said states, “In classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving, and existed to prove that Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of people” (Said, 57). At a first glance, it is plausible that this impression of binaries fits into the agenda of Herodotus because he is constantly comparing one culture to another and remarking the differences between them, however, as Redfield notes in his chapter “Herodotus the Tourist,” Herodotus compares cultures because he has a love of systems and categorical oppositions is one way in which he “attempts to discern the ordered structure of the inhabited world.” (Redfield, 106). Redfield’s argument is in defense of Herodotus as a tourist because he notes that Herodotus as a traveler and a tourist respects what he calls the “nomos” of the places he visits. Herodotus then, according to Redfield tries to understand and organize the known world he comes across through systematic …show more content…
As stated in Orientalism, imaginative geographies are a fixed boundary that the west imposes onto the east and these boundaries “accompany the social, ethnic and cultural ones in expected ways,” (Said, 54). What he’s getting at is basically that when the distinction between “our land” and “their land” is made, it makes sense that the cultural aspects and ethnicities of that divide are in accordance with its geographical boundaries. The culture and ethnicity of the east will obviously have nothing to do with the culture and ethnicity of the west and those two will remain separate from each other and that is why the west can Orientalize the east and call it “backwards” and “not