Orientalism

Orientalism: Orientalism, Western scholarly discipline of the 18th and 19th centuries that encompassed the study of the languages, literatures, religions, philosophies, histories, art, and laws of Asian societies, especially ancient ones.

Such scholarship also inspired broader intellectual and artistic circles in Europe and North America, and so Orientalism may also denote the general enthusiasm for things Asian or “Oriental.”

Orientalism was also a school of thought among a group of British colonial administrators and scholars who argued that India should be ruled according to its own traditions and laws, thus opposing the “Anglicanism” of those who argued that India should be ruled according to British traditions and laws. 

In the mid-20th century, Orientalists began to favour the term Asian studies to describe their work, in an effort to distance it from the colonial and neocolonial associations of Orientalism.

More recently, mainly through the work of the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, the term has been used disparagingly to refer to the allegedly simplistic, stereotyped, and demeaning conceptions of Arab and Asian cultures generally held by Western scholars.

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