Originally Posted by loramin
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
That's actually only partly correct ... history lesson from professor Loramin inc ...
Prior to 1800 or so it actually referred to the Middle East (as that was as far East as Europeans went), in the 1800s it referred to India, and it wasn't until the 20th century that it got its current definition. Throughout that time it's always been kind of a loaded term, and a brilliant Palestinian writer named Edward Said wrote about this in his book Orientalism.
(Side note: Sayed, from Lost, was almost certainly based on him.)
Back in the day there were whole departments in European universities dedicated to studying "The Orient", and scholars wrote books about what a crazy place the Orient was. But because travel was dangerous back then, most of those scholars never actually visited, and even the ones who did didn't stay long. This resulted in a sort of echo chamber where a few guys would visit, get opinions based on brief stays (and their own preconceptions from reading other travel writing), and then others would read what they wrote and write still more books compounding the inaccuracies.
A perfect example of this was Marco Polo: if you actually read his writings he actually says stuff like "over there they have the dog-headed people." Obviously he never met those people, but he heard (mistranslated?) it from a local, wrote about it, and then people back in Europe blindly believed that there were dog-headed people in the Orient for awhile after.
But even without crazy distortions like that, "the Orient" was still falsely defined by Westerners, often to emphasize how different/foreign the East was. For instance, Europeans at the time were prude-ish and sex-starved, so when one of them saw a belly dancer or heard about a sultan's harem they fixated on it, wrote about it, got rewritten, and soon you had this idea that harems and belly dancers were all over the Middle East.
The same thing continued to happen throughout history, eg. with British colonials fixating on/misunderstanding the Indian practice of Sati. Or even today, try thinking about Vietnam: does the phrase "me love you long time", or perhaps dirty tricks with a ping pong ball come to mind? Now I'm not saying Vietnam doesn't have whores, but more that every country has whores, it's just that they make up a much bigger part of our perception of Vietnam than they should because a bunch of sex-starved soldiers in the 60s shaped our view of it.
Obviously the word "oriental" isn't directly to blame for all that, but it is tied together with a history of the West falsely understanding Eastern places, and as a result the term "Asian" (which doesn't have that baggage) has become more popular.
|