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The adjective '''Oriental''' has a long and complex history.  A number of reference works used in the United States describe ''Oriental'' as pejorative, antiquated or offensive "in some instances". However, the ''American Heritage Book of English Usage'' qualifies this charge by noting:
{{subpages}}
:''It is worth remembering, though, that Oriental is not an ethnic slur to be avoided in all situations. It is most objectionable in contemporary contexts and when used as a noun, as in "the appointment of an Oriental to head the commission". In these cases Asian (or a more specific term such as Vietnamese, Korean, or Asian American, if appropriate) is the only acceptable term. But in certain historical contexts, or when its exotic connotations are integral to the topic, Oriental remains a useful term.''<ref> "Asian." The American Heritage Book of English Usage [http://www.bartleby.com/64/C006/007.html#ASIAN]</ref>
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Random House's ''Guide to Sensitive Language'' states "Other words (e.g., Oriental, colored) are outdated or inaccurate." This ''Guide to Sensitive Language'' suggests the use of "Asian or more specific designation such as Pacific Islander, Chinese American, [or] Korean." <ref>"Race, Ethnicity, and National Origin." Sensitive Language. [http://www.randomhouse.com/words/language/avoid_guide.html#race Random House]</ref> Merriam-Webster describes the term as "sometimes offensive,"<ref>"Oriental." [http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=oriental Merriam-Webster]</ref> Encarta states that when the term is used as a noun it is considered " a highly offensive term for somebody from East Asia" <ref>"Oriental." [http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861684868/Oriental.html] </ref> However, the same reference also defines the adjectival usage as "relating to East Asia (dated)" or "high quality".  
'''Orientalism''' means the study of the Orient (Asia) by Western scholars, and their evaluation of its social and moral values, and its future prospects.  In recent decades scholarship has responded to the arguments of [[Edward Said]] (1978), who denounced much of Orientalism as contaminated by the biases of Western imperialism. This has led to a split of academic societies; the [[Middle East Studies Association]] tends to follow Said's principles, and a new organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, was co-founded by [[Bernard Lewis]] and Fouad Ajami; Lewis was Said's great intellectual opponent. Conservative journals have taken up the fight against Said's view, especially in the fight against radical Islam. <ref name=MEQ-2002-Fall>{{citation
| title = MESA Culpa
| author = [[Martin Kramer]]
  | journal = [[Middle East Quarterly]]
| date = Fall 2002
| url = http://www.meforum.org/500/mesa-culpa}}</ref> For different reasons, Said was criticized by Marxists.


According to widely accepted textbook guidelines, there are many racially insensitive terms and concepts (including the word ''oriental'') which are to be avoided when used in conjunction with Asian people.  [[Diane Ravitch]], a former assistant [[Secretary_of_Education| secretary of education]] under [[Bill_Clinton|Clinton]] and [[George_Bush|Bush]](considered by many to be "one of the country's most spirited and respected education analysts" <ref>http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/6184665p-7139626c.html%20| Sacramento Bee, February 27, 2003 "Editorial: Policing the vocabulary Textbook sensitivity goes fanatic"</ref>) has documented a series of images and depictions which are banned from textbooks and references.
===Edward Said and '''Orientalism'''===
The American-Palestinian scholar [[Edward Said]] argued in his highly influential<ref> It was translated into 36 languages.</ref> book ''Orientalism'' (1978) that western scholars were so contaminated by their European ideas and preconceptions that they could not deal honestly and fairly with Asian topics. Said focused on the discipline of Oriental Studies in Europe, including philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery and translation of Oriental texts. In particular he focused on how western scholars treated the Middle East, his own native region where he was a major political activist.  Said concluded that they looked down upon their subjects as inferior to Westerners, and in general backward and in need of European authority and guidance. He repeatedly complained the Orientalists saw the Orient as unchanging and without an internal dynamic; it lacked internal potential for growth, unless it westernized. Said suggested that the repeated image of a static Orient is what made the Orient static with respect to the West.


===Historical Connotations ===
Said did not comment on whether anyone could deal honestly and fairly with Asia, for he was taking a general postmodern view that complete analysis is never possible, that Orientalism is misguided and uncritically "essentialist' when it assumes there is such as thing as the Orient in the first place.   His argument, however, was phrased as an attack on western specialists, especially  [[Bernard Lewis]], who in turn tried to pick apart his examples, and challenged his basic postmodern epistemology. Said was not an expert on any aspect of Asian history of culture (he was a specialist in English literature from Britain and America), which weakened his arguments with specialists, and led to the criticism that he was as guilty of sweeping stereotypes as the authors he attacked.  As James Clifford noted. Said "sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks"<ref> James Clifford, "On Orientalism" in his ''The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century ethnography, Literature, and Art.'' 1988 p 262)</ref>
In 19th century academia, some works in "Oriental studies" contained inaccurate information that Westerners then used to justify colonization of these countries. Some 19th and 20th century Europeans and Americans who used the term are thought to have held a patronizing attitude toward the region. Many of "these people" saw "the East" as backwards, while the West was seen as logical, rational and more modern. This view was first, and most famously, put forward by [[Edward Said]] in his [[Orientalism]].  


While the term is clearly an example of [[Eurocentrism]] some people do not think Eurocentrism is undesirable. Additionally, many scholarly works in the 19th and 20th Century were riddled with errors, but the outcry to replace words and phrases has not been even-handed or uniform. For example, according to the [[Encyclopedia Brittanica]] and Tim McCaskell of the Toronto Board of Education, the works of [[Charles Linnaeus]], [[Charles Darwin]], [[Francis Galton]] and others have been used to justify many atrocities, including slavery, colonization, and racial genocide. Despite the fact that evil acts were justified by the works of these men, phrases such as the "[[Origin of Species]]"; the "[[Theory of Evolution]]"; the "[[General System of Nature]]"; "[[survival of the fittest]]" et.al., are still in use today. <ref>http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9108541/philosophical-anthropology</ref> <ref>http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jonmorro/race.html</ref> <ref> "A History of Race/ism", Prepared by Tim McCaskell, a representative of the Toronto Board of Education</ref> <ref>http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/victorian/history/empire/Empire.html</ref><ref>http://www.mediamonitors.net/harunyahya37.html</ref>
In 1995,<ref>Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now" ''History and Theory'' (1995) </ref> Gyan Prakash attributed the phenomenal success of ''Orientalism'' to its capacity to unsettle "received categories and modes of understanding": 
:Said's persistent and restless movements between authorial intentions and discursive regimes, scholarly monographs and political tracts, literature and history, philology and travel writings, classical texts and twentieth-century polemics produced a profound uncertainty... in which the established authority of Orientalist scholars and their lines of inquiry came undone. The ambivalent effect of Orientalism invited charges of undisciplined thinking and ideological bad faith, and prompted critics to force its unsettling movement between different positions into an either/or choice which they then targeted for criticism. Significantly, it was precisely such boundary-crossings and stagings of contrary positions that proved to be the most productive and influential maneuvers, inciting further critical studies of the modern West's construction of the Other. Such studies...elaborated and extended its argument, and Said himself went on to produce other studies of the relationship between Western power and knowledge. But Orientalism's authority as a critique of Western knowledge remains unmatched, and continues to derive force from its subversive violation of borders.  


===Serious Opposition to Textbooks and Sensitivity Guides ===
Said's critique of Orientalisms provoked a comprehensive review by postcolonial theorists of the bulk of Western knowledge regarding non-Western countries; this time the analysis was done by experts who did know Asian culture. Specialists on colonial South Asia, in particular, have taken off from Said’s work to look in detail at the construction of colonial knowledge, the reification of religious and racial categories, and the administrative practices of British colonial rule. The postcolonialists argued that Orientalist literature buttressed the colonial notion of a civilizing mission. Gender studies plays a major role, as postcolonial feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Rajeswari Rajan analyze and condemn Western feminism's ideological complicity with Orientalist and imperialist ventures.<ref> Md. Mahmudul Hasan, "The Orientalization of Gender." ''American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences'' 2005 22(4): 26-56. Issn: 0887-7653 </ref>
Supporters of the traditional usage of the term ''oriental'' are frightened by how easy it is to ban a word from American textbooks. Toby Merrill of the [[Yale]] Book Review states:
::''All it takes to forever banish a word or image from schools across the nation is a well-placed, vocal group to lobby the Board of Education in either of these states. It is in the California market that publishers feel the most pressure from the left.'' <ref>http://www.yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/summer03/review12.shtml.htm Yale Book Review</ref>


Although the definitions found in most dictionaries are sufficiently vague to argue for or against the appropriateness of the term ''Oriental'' in some contexts, many Americans feel that banning words and images has gone too far. Judge [[Robert Bork]] in ''Slouching Towards Gomorrah'' writes, "Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture."
===Early modern Europe===
The concept of Oriental despotism allowed early modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds that were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress but were rather political and moral.


Scholarly works such as "[[The Language Police]]", "The Battle of the Books" and "Challenging the Myths about Multicultural Education" have argued for the continued usage of politically incorrect terms including ''Oriental''. <ref>http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1994/PTrev.html</ref><ref>Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America 1993 James Atlas published by W W Norton & Co Inc</ref><ref>The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn by Diane Ravitch (c) 2003 published by Knopf</ref><ref>http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ497173&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&objectId=0900000b8003e14e Challenging the Myths about Multicultural Education by Carl A Grant</ref><ref>"Multicultural Education Through the Lens of the Multicultural Education Research Literature." by J.A. Banks and C.A. McGee Banks (eds.). Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education NY: Simon. and Schuster Macmillan</ref> [[Diane Ravitch]] has documented the existence of an elaborate and well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and implemented by textbook publishers, states, and the federal government. "Publishers practice self-censorship to sell books in big states." <ref>http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375414824</ref> Ravitch has  documented "the 'bias guidelines'" for major publishers of texts and tests. "The "bias guidelines" consist of advice to writers and editors about words and topics that must be avoided."<ref>http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003695</ref>
The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) situated India within a global context of history and cultural exchange. He helped create a recognizable entity, "India," in the Western imagination by studying selected texts and focusing on a romanticized ideal of India as an Oriental paradise. Voltaire's motivation was primarily the Enlightenment attack on the Catholic Church and more specifically Voltaire's claim that many of the most important Christian rituals had their origin in Hindu rituals.<ref>Jyoti Mohan, "La Civilisation la plus Antique: Voltaire's Images of India." ''Journal of World History'' 2005 16(2): 173-185. Issn: 1045-6007 Fulltext: in History Cooperative, Project Muse and Ebsco </ref>


Laurie Morrow, a former Salvatori Fellow of the [[Heritage Foundation]] and professor of English mocked proponents of political correctness and attempt to imply extreme sarcasm when she wrote the following in support of traditional usage of the term ''oriental'':
{{Image|Lettres_persanes.jpg|left|200px|Montesquieu's ''Lettres persanes (1721).}}
::''Although the Japanese proudly consider themselves eastern--from the Land of the Rising Sun (remember that World War II flag?)--don't call them "Oriental," for this is Eurocentric, and one should have no center in the happy world of cultural equivalence. (One wonders whether the language police would object to a Tokyo resident's using the term Occidental?)''<ref>http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2003/September/bk2pub.asp</ref>


Professor Morrow also writes:
The Western use of the harem as a metaphor for aspects of Western life appears as early as 1721, in Baron de Montesquieu's widely-read ''Persian Letters.'' Lewis (2004) studies historical attitudes toward Ottoman women expressed in 19th century writings by European women as well as the Ottoman women themselves. Lewis tracks the determination by these different women to emancipate Ottoman women. In her book, Lewis shows how the Western woman author was able to successfully print and sell unique accounts of harem women who were forbidden to Western men. In this way, harem literature was monopolized by European and Ottoman women.


::''The language police seek to eliminate anything that might cause students discomfort or distress. The world is, however, a difficult and trying place, full of ideas that must be resisted and fought. What students need to learn are courage and perseverance in the face of difficulty, so that they can confront what should be resisted--including censorship by the language police.''<ref>http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2003/September/bk2pub.asp</ref>  
===German scholars===
In 1808, [[Friedrich Schlegel]] (1772-1829) published his ''Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier'' (1808). This work distilled his long study of Sanskrit and Indian literature and introduced evidence and hypotheses regarding the affinities between Sanskrit and the languages of Europe, especially Greek, Latin, and German. This kinship had earlier been suggested in the writings of Brisih Sanscrit expert Sir [[William Jones]]. Schlegel's work also explored Indian and Oriental philosophies and suggested that these, like the language, had been transmitted to Europe in the remote past. In fact, there was a growing interest in Indian civilization, symbolism, and religion in the Romantic era, and interest also visible in the ideas - often derived from etymological research - of Franz Bopp, Joseph Görres, and Friedrich Creuzer. These writers probed the area of comparative mythology with particular eagerness. Accurate or not in its speculations, German Orientalism was significant in part because it contributed to the ideological formation of a German identity in the l9th century, and not just where the emergence of the anti-Semitic notion of an "Aryan Race" is concerned. In this, the Germans' imaginative explorations were rather distinct from those of the British scholars whose views of India were often gained and conditioned by the colonizing experience. Schlegel modeled his studies on the humanistic project of the Renaissance but predicated on the assumption that all European cultures were united around a Germanic core originally influenced by the Asian East.<ref>Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, "India and the Identity of Europe: the Case of Friedrich Schlegel," ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' 2006 67(4): 713-734. Issn: 0022-5037 Fulltext: [ 1. Project Muse and Ebsco </ref>


However, even those who support traditional usage of words and terms do not support an end to all sensitivity. Sybil Maimin writes:
===British thought: Disraeli===
::'' Ravitch does not call for elimination of bias and sensitivity panels but rather for their work, now behind closed doors, to be open to public view. She believes that teachers or school districts rather than state officials should choose books for the classroom, which would decrease the power of pressure groups and lessen uniformity. She has confidence that “language evolves in response to social change. Lots of words disappear naturally,”'' <ref>http://www.educationupdate.com/archives/2003/june03/issue/spot_ravitch.html Education Update</ref>
[[Benjamin Disraeli]] (1804-1881), a popular novelist and politician (later prime minister), was outspokenly philo-Semitic. He was a romantic who embraced his own Jewishness (although he had become a member of the Church of England as a young teenager) and in culture, habit, and political policy followed a pattern of Orientalist (spiritual, intuitive, and emotional rather than rational and practical) behavior. He clearly believed that Orientalism, rooted in Turkish and Semitic - both Arabian and Jewish - tradition, if supported and protected by the colonial powers, could offer much of value to the Christian West. Fueled by contemporary ethnology and race theories, Disraeli argued that Jews were a superior, "aristocratic" race destined to become the spiritual and intellectual guides for modern Europe. Enabling such claims was Disraeli's skillful manipulation of Orientalist discourse, whereby he routinely reversed its stereotypical privileging of West over East. Following the example of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 satiric response to Disraeli in the story "Codlingsby," however, Schweller (2006) argues that Disraeli's "strategy of reversals" ultimately failed because it did not adequately comprehend traditional Western associations and meanings of "aristocracy," a fundamental misunderstanding that, for Disraeli's political enemies and critics, exposed him yet again as a foreigner, an Oriental, and a Jew.<ref>Ivan Davidson Kalmar, "Benjamin Disraeli, Romantic Orientalist." ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2005 47(2): 348-371. Issn: 0010-4175 Fulltext: in Cambridge Journals;  Russell Schweller, "'Mosaic Arabs': Jews and Gentlemen in Disraeli's Young England Trilogy." ''Shofar'' 2006 24(2): 55-69. Issn: 0882-8539 Fulltext: in Ebsco </ref>


Proudman (2005) presents a detailed critique of Said's representation of Disraeli as the archetypal Orientalist. Far from functioning as a producer of knowledge about the East that undergirded imperialism, Disraeli remained consistently sympathetic to Islam, both in his 1847 novel ''Tancred'' and in his political involvement with the Balkan crises of the 1870s. The novel, published one year after the division of the Tory party, was primarily a critique of British liberalism, in which Disraeli used a romanticized vision of the Orient to attack the values of post-Enlightenment Europe. Said, in failing to take into account Disraeli's political environment, committed factual errors that included erroneously holding him responsible for the occupation of Egypt in 1882.<ref> Mark F. Proudman, "Disraeli as an 'Orientalist': the Polemical Errors of Edward Said." ''Journal of the Historical Society'' 2005 5(4): 547-568. Issn: 1529-921x Fulltext: in Ebsco </ref>


===Alternative terminology===
==Refeences==
Those who consider the term derogatory or archaic prefer to employ geographical terms for people and places typically described by ''oriental'', e.g., ''South Asia'', ''East Asia'', and ''South-East Asia''. Although the ''Far Eastern'' is considered more politically correct than ''Oriental'', ''East Asian'' is preferred because this verbiage is significantly less Eurocentric. Other alternative terms include ''Asia and the Pacific'' or ''the Pacific Rim'' or ''the Pacific Basin''. Terms such as these may also be preferred because they do not collapse East and South-east Asian peoples into the same group.
{{reflist|2}}[[Category:Suggestion Bot Tag]]
 
==Current Usage of Oriental and Related Depictions ==
The term is used widely across a broad spectrum of North America.
 
===In Government===
Although the term Oriental is "sometimes offensive", the term remains inoffensive sometimes and wide use in across the United States. This usage is evidenced by many sources. The term is used on a great number of governmental document and websites across in the USA describing place names <ref>http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/pr2004/pr04_61.html</ref>, medicine<ref>http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/pubs_forms/cons_guide_2002.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.health.gov/nhic/NHICScripts/Entry.cfm?HRCode=HR2824</ref>, wildlife <ref>http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/2003/January/Day-10/i491.htm</ref><ref>http://ecos.fws.gov/species_profile/servlet/gov.doi.species_profile.servlets.SpeciesProfile?spcode=B03C</ref> plants<ref>http://www.in.gov/dnr/invasivespecies/oriental_bittersweet_1.pdf</ref>, food<ref>http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/heart/other/syah/orierice.htm</ref><ref>http://hawaii.gov/health/about/rules/11-29.pdf</ref> and people <ref>http://bioethics.gov/transcripts/jun03/session2.html</ref><ref>http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cis_ofis_fis_1043_24817_7.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.fws.gov/midwest/horicon/nativeamericans.html</ref> or communities.<ref>http://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/sociology.html</ref><ref>http://vitalrecords.alaska.gov/dph/bvs/PDFs/1999/annual_report/Introduction.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/info/census/Folder.2005-11-23.1639/ec02-reference/small_diner_condensed_final.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.nps.gov/archive/manz/hrs/hrs10i.htm</ref><ref>http://www.va.gov/vetapp/files1/9401243.txt</ref><ref>http://www.michigan.gov/documents/GBFT0203_61996_7.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.nifl.gov/nifl-health/1998/0198.html</ref>  The term is even found on Equal Opportunity Employment<ref>http://ocp.dc.gov/ocp/frames.asp?doc=/ocp/lib/ocp/information/solatt/attachment_j.04_eeo_compliance_documents.doc&open=|34644|</ref> and Fair Housing <ref>http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/library/part109.pdf</ref> documents.
 
Conversely, at least two state legislatures have passed or proposed legislation declaring a preference for terms other than Oriental in official documents. A finding by the Washington State legislature held that
:''the use of the term "Oriental" when used to refer to persons of Asian descent is outdated and pejorative. There is a need to make clear that the term "Asian" is preferred terminology, and that this more modern and nonpejorative term must be used to replace outdated terminology.''<ref> RCW 1.20.130: "Preferred terminology in government documents." [http://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=1.20.130 Revised Code of Washington]</ref>
In 2005, the California senate mandated that the terms "oriental massage" and "oriental medicine" in existing statutes be changed to "Asian medicine" and "Asian massage." <ref>[http://www.sen.ca.gov/sfa/2005/_05_DL11.HTM California State Senate]</ref> Despite this "mandate" businesses and schools across California and the country continue to employ the term. <ref>http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/education/schools.htm</ref><ref>http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypMap.py?Pyt=Typ&tuid=12363968&ck=2317990383&tab=B2C&tcat=8106973&city=Monterey&state=CA&uzip=93940&country=us&msa=7120&cs=4&ed=3Cjhzq1o2TwW0JlAiouvxdEhci7IWZ92n2SEvi.yLw_KCQ--&stat=:pos:0:regular:regT:2:fbT:0</ref><ref>http://www.csomaonline.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3289</ref><ref>http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypResults.py?stx=oriental+medicine&stp=a&tab=B2C&city=Los+Angeles&state=CA&uzip=90012&country=us&msa=4480&slt=34.052170&sln=-118.243469&cs=4&Submit=Search</ref> California has not purged the term from current documents or websites and the term remains on many pages which display "© 2007 State of California". <ref>http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/law_reg/art35</ref><ref>http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/exams/stats_mar2006.htm</ref> <ref>http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/mpacms/at/article.php?id=27949&MERCURYSID=719fb03a0214a10a71b0f5217cfbddae</ref> 
<ref>http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/law_reg/1399_45_modtext.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/pubs_forms/cons_guide_2002.pdf</ref>
 
===In Business===
Businesses such as [[Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company]], [[Mandarin Oriental]], [[Oriental Financial Group, Inc.]],[[Orient Thai Airlines]], [[Orient Steam Navigation Company]], [[Orient Watch Co.]], [[Neptune Orient Lines]] are just a few of many successful enterprises to share this term as a part of their name.
 
===In Academia===
Many universities no longer accept the usage of the term ''Oriental'' when describing people. <ref>http://www.freewebs.com/bannedwords</ref> However, the highly-regarded [[American Oriental Society]] and many others continue to use the term in its publishings. <ref>http://www.degruyter.de/journals/zac/261_5290_ENU_h.htm</ref><ref>http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/default.html</ref><ref>http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/linguist/index.html</ref><ref>http://www.ksi.edu/seke/cpol.html</ref>
 
===Other===
According to the [[FBI]], some Asian gangs, the "OPB" ("Oriental Playboys"), and the ORB ("Oriental Rutheless Boys"), refer to themselves as ''oriental''.
<ref>http://www.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel03/release121903.htm</ref><ref>http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2003/feb2003/feb03leb.htm</ref>
 
Conservative commentators <ref>http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16541</ref> and prominent Filipina [[Michelle Malkin]] regularly employ the term. <ref>http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000239.htm</ref> <ref>http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006107.htm?print=1</ref> <ref>http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000239.htm</ref><ref>http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&pg=aq&aqmode=s&aqa=oriental&aqp=&aqo=&aqn=&aqb=&kgs=1&kls=0&dt=tmperiod&d2=0&dfr%5Bd%5D=1&dfr%5Bm%5D=1&dfr%5By%5D=1980&dto%5Bd%5D=4&dto%5Bm%5D=11&dto%5By%5D=2006&filetype=&rc=dmn&swd=michellemalkin.com&lh=&nbq=10</ref>.
 
The Oriental Food Association <ref>http://www.orientalfood.org/</ref>, Oriental Bellydancer Association  <ref>http://www.orientdance.ru/index_e.htm</ref><ref>http://homepage.realtv21.com/?userid=obda_1&pagetype=&viewno=94</ref>, The Association of Oriental Arts <ref>http://www.art-virtue.com/demo/2006-TaoArt/index.htm</ref>, the Shriners <ref>http://www.webruler.com/shriners/oriental.htm</ref><ref>http://www.ladiesorientalshrine.org/home.html</ref> and other social groups continue to use the term. The American Association of Oriental Medicine and many other state-specific associations of oriental medicine still use the term. <ref>http://www.aaom.org/ Website of American Association of Oriental Medicine</ref> The World Wide Web has a profusion of "oriental" [[pornography]] and so-called [[mail order bride]] sites that exploit stereotypes as well desperate individuals on both sides of the transaction. <ref>http://www.oriental-bikini.com/</ref><ref>http://www.orientals.com/</ref><ref>http://www.orientalcompanion.com</ref>  The Oriental Martial Arts College and other martial arts organizations employ the term regularly. <ref>http://www.omacworld.com</ref><ref>http://www.west-meet-east.com/martialarts.htm</ref><ref>http://www.orientalmartialarts.org/</ref>
 
===Regional Variations===
Major objections to the use of the word "Oriental" are chiefly limited to certain elements in [[North America]]. Its usage is not controversial in [[Europe]], where the word is considered neutral and in widespread usage as evidenced by its usage on the online British Monarchy Media Centre.<ref>http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/page5495.asp</ref> In France the terms "l'Occident" and "l'Orient" are used without any negative associations in academic contexts. In Europe the term is often used to describe such things as [[Eastern world|the East]]'s cuisine and goods, ancient culture, and religions, at times to denote an exotic quality with upmarket or mildly positive connotations. In the UK the term "[[Asian]]" has become almost exclusively tied to the [[Indian subcontinent]], as evidenced through [[BBC Asian Network]], a radio station of the BBC devoted to the [[British Asian]] community - though the term ''South Asian'' is becoming more widely-used.<ref>''BBC Asian Network'': '[http://www.bbc.co.uk/asiannetwork/documentaries/dontcallmeasian.shtml Don't Call Me Asian].' 9th October 2006.</ref>
 
==Further reading==
* [http://www.modelminority.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=183 On ''Asian'' and ''Oriental''] Model Minority posting by Alan Hu
* [http://www.freewebs.com/bannedwords/ Banned Words] For comparative analysis: a list "banned" words (including ''Oriental'') as documented by Diane Ravitch.
* [http://www.amazon.com/Language-Police-Pressure-Restrict-Students/dp/customer-reviews/0375414827 The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn] Explains how "Oriental" and other terms were "banned" from textbooks
 
==Notes==
<div  class="references-small">
<references/>
</div>
 
 
[[Category: Linguistics Workgroup]]
[[Category: Sociology Workgroup]]
[[Category:CZ Live]]

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Orientalism means the study of the Orient (Asia) by Western scholars, and their evaluation of its social and moral values, and its future prospects. In recent decades scholarship has responded to the arguments of Edward Said (1978), who denounced much of Orientalism as contaminated by the biases of Western imperialism. This has led to a split of academic societies; the Middle East Studies Association tends to follow Said's principles, and a new organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, was co-founded by Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami; Lewis was Said's great intellectual opponent. Conservative journals have taken up the fight against Said's view, especially in the fight against radical Islam. [1] For different reasons, Said was criticized by Marxists.

Edward Said and Orientalism

The American-Palestinian scholar Edward Said argued in his highly influential[2] book Orientalism (1978) that western scholars were so contaminated by their European ideas and preconceptions that they could not deal honestly and fairly with Asian topics. Said focused on the discipline of Oriental Studies in Europe, including philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery and translation of Oriental texts. In particular he focused on how western scholars treated the Middle East, his own native region where he was a major political activist. Said concluded that they looked down upon their subjects as inferior to Westerners, and in general backward and in need of European authority and guidance. He repeatedly complained the Orientalists saw the Orient as unchanging and without an internal dynamic; it lacked internal potential for growth, unless it westernized. Said suggested that the repeated image of a static Orient is what made the Orient static with respect to the West.

Said did not comment on whether anyone could deal honestly and fairly with Asia, for he was taking a general postmodern view that complete analysis is never possible, that Orientalism is misguided and uncritically "essentialist' when it assumes there is such as thing as the Orient in the first place. His argument, however, was phrased as an attack on western specialists, especially Bernard Lewis, who in turn tried to pick apart his examples, and challenged his basic postmodern epistemology. Said was not an expert on any aspect of Asian history of culture (he was a specialist in English literature from Britain and America), which weakened his arguments with specialists, and led to the criticism that he was as guilty of sweeping stereotypes as the authors he attacked. As James Clifford noted. Said "sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks"[3]

In 1995,[4] Gyan Prakash attributed the phenomenal success of Orientalism to its capacity to unsettle "received categories and modes of understanding":

Said's persistent and restless movements between authorial intentions and discursive regimes, scholarly monographs and political tracts, literature and history, philology and travel writings, classical texts and twentieth-century polemics produced a profound uncertainty... in which the established authority of Orientalist scholars and their lines of inquiry came undone. The ambivalent effect of Orientalism invited charges of undisciplined thinking and ideological bad faith, and prompted critics to force its unsettling movement between different positions into an either/or choice which they then targeted for criticism. Significantly, it was precisely such boundary-crossings and stagings of contrary positions that proved to be the most productive and influential maneuvers, inciting further critical studies of the modern West's construction of the Other. Such studies...elaborated and extended its argument, and Said himself went on to produce other studies of the relationship between Western power and knowledge. But Orientalism's authority as a critique of Western knowledge remains unmatched, and continues to derive force from its subversive violation of borders.

Said's critique of Orientalisms provoked a comprehensive review by postcolonial theorists of the bulk of Western knowledge regarding non-Western countries; this time the analysis was done by experts who did know Asian culture. Specialists on colonial South Asia, in particular, have taken off from Said’s work to look in detail at the construction of colonial knowledge, the reification of religious and racial categories, and the administrative practices of British colonial rule. The postcolonialists argued that Orientalist literature buttressed the colonial notion of a civilizing mission. Gender studies plays a major role, as postcolonial feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Rajeswari Rajan analyze and condemn Western feminism's ideological complicity with Orientalist and imperialist ventures.[5]

Early modern Europe

The concept of Oriental despotism allowed early modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds that were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress but were rather political and moral.

The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) situated India within a global context of history and cultural exchange. He helped create a recognizable entity, "India," in the Western imagination by studying selected texts and focusing on a romanticized ideal of India as an Oriental paradise. Voltaire's motivation was primarily the Enlightenment attack on the Catholic Church and more specifically Voltaire's claim that many of the most important Christian rituals had their origin in Hindu rituals.[6]

Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721).

The Western use of the harem as a metaphor for aspects of Western life appears as early as 1721, in Baron de Montesquieu's widely-read Persian Letters. Lewis (2004) studies historical attitudes toward Ottoman women expressed in 19th century writings by European women as well as the Ottoman women themselves. Lewis tracks the determination by these different women to emancipate Ottoman women. In her book, Lewis shows how the Western woman author was able to successfully print and sell unique accounts of harem women who were forbidden to Western men. In this way, harem literature was monopolized by European and Ottoman women.

German scholars

In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) published his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808). This work distilled his long study of Sanskrit and Indian literature and introduced evidence and hypotheses regarding the affinities between Sanskrit and the languages of Europe, especially Greek, Latin, and German. This kinship had earlier been suggested in the writings of Brisih Sanscrit expert Sir William Jones. Schlegel's work also explored Indian and Oriental philosophies and suggested that these, like the language, had been transmitted to Europe in the remote past. In fact, there was a growing interest in Indian civilization, symbolism, and religion in the Romantic era, and interest also visible in the ideas - often derived from etymological research - of Franz Bopp, Joseph Görres, and Friedrich Creuzer. These writers probed the area of comparative mythology with particular eagerness. Accurate or not in its speculations, German Orientalism was significant in part because it contributed to the ideological formation of a German identity in the l9th century, and not just where the emergence of the anti-Semitic notion of an "Aryan Race" is concerned. In this, the Germans' imaginative explorations were rather distinct from those of the British scholars whose views of India were often gained and conditioned by the colonizing experience. Schlegel modeled his studies on the humanistic project of the Renaissance but predicated on the assumption that all European cultures were united around a Germanic core originally influenced by the Asian East.[7]

British thought: Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), a popular novelist and politician (later prime minister), was outspokenly philo-Semitic. He was a romantic who embraced his own Jewishness (although he had become a member of the Church of England as a young teenager) and in culture, habit, and political policy followed a pattern of Orientalist (spiritual, intuitive, and emotional rather than rational and practical) behavior. He clearly believed that Orientalism, rooted in Turkish and Semitic - both Arabian and Jewish - tradition, if supported and protected by the colonial powers, could offer much of value to the Christian West. Fueled by contemporary ethnology and race theories, Disraeli argued that Jews were a superior, "aristocratic" race destined to become the spiritual and intellectual guides for modern Europe. Enabling such claims was Disraeli's skillful manipulation of Orientalist discourse, whereby he routinely reversed its stereotypical privileging of West over East. Following the example of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 satiric response to Disraeli in the story "Codlingsby," however, Schweller (2006) argues that Disraeli's "strategy of reversals" ultimately failed because it did not adequately comprehend traditional Western associations and meanings of "aristocracy," a fundamental misunderstanding that, for Disraeli's political enemies and critics, exposed him yet again as a foreigner, an Oriental, and a Jew.[8]

Proudman (2005) presents a detailed critique of Said's representation of Disraeli as the archetypal Orientalist. Far from functioning as a producer of knowledge about the East that undergirded imperialism, Disraeli remained consistently sympathetic to Islam, both in his 1847 novel Tancred and in his political involvement with the Balkan crises of the 1870s. The novel, published one year after the division of the Tory party, was primarily a critique of British liberalism, in which Disraeli used a romanticized vision of the Orient to attack the values of post-Enlightenment Europe. Said, in failing to take into account Disraeli's political environment, committed factual errors that included erroneously holding him responsible for the occupation of Egypt in 1882.[9]

Refeences

  1. Martin Kramer (Fall 2002), "MESA Culpa", Middle East Quarterly
  2. It was translated into 36 languages.
  3. James Clifford, "On Orientalism" in his The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century ethnography, Literature, and Art. 1988 p 262)
  4. Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now" History and Theory (1995)
  5. Md. Mahmudul Hasan, "The Orientalization of Gender." American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 2005 22(4): 26-56. Issn: 0887-7653
  6. Jyoti Mohan, "La Civilisation la plus Antique: Voltaire's Images of India." Journal of World History 2005 16(2): 173-185. Issn: 1045-6007 Fulltext: in History Cooperative, Project Muse and Ebsco
  7. Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, "India and the Identity of Europe: the Case of Friedrich Schlegel," Journal of the History of Ideas 2006 67(4): 713-734. Issn: 0022-5037 Fulltext: [ 1. Project Muse and Ebsco
  8. Ivan Davidson Kalmar, "Benjamin Disraeli, Romantic Orientalist." Comparative Studies in Society and History 2005 47(2): 348-371. Issn: 0010-4175 Fulltext: in Cambridge Journals; Russell Schweller, "'Mosaic Arabs': Jews and Gentlemen in Disraeli's Young England Trilogy." Shofar 2006 24(2): 55-69. Issn: 0882-8539 Fulltext: in Ebsco
  9. Mark F. Proudman, "Disraeli as an 'Orientalist': the Polemical Errors of Edward Said." Journal of the Historical Society 2005 5(4): 547-568. Issn: 1529-921x Fulltext: in Ebsco