Maori 203-25 A (Week two)

The two big O’s (Orientalism and the Other)

• The power of language to mark difference - the use of binaries and dualisms

Orientalism:

• term coined by Edward Said

• European knowledge imagined and represented the ‘orient’ (the Peoples) and cultures of the ‘Orient’) through Europes own version of what the Orient ought to be

• Process included things such as:

  • Romanticisation of aspects of the orient

  • Sexualisation of men and women’s bodies

  • Voyeurism

  • Making themselves the heroes, rescuers, and champions of narratives

  • Erasure of cultures

  • Ridicule of other cultures

  • Appropriation of things they desired from other cultures

  • demonising other peoples

  • dehumanising other peoples

• Enlightenment period - 1700’s/1800’s

• Great chain of being

• Doctrine of discovery - stake claim to lands beyond the European continent (based on religion), more of a claim about the people, not the land

• terra nullius (vacant land)

• hegemony - we believe we are only good with their frameworks, forces the idea of the superiority of western science/thinking

• exoticism

The other:

• term is a shorthand way of describing the multiples ways in which people who are different from the dominant culture, and also women and genders are excluded and positioned as not belonging.

• power dynamics that operate within a society

• dehumanisation