Orientalism in Dominions

[Gregstrom]

As mentioned further above, Caelum has some Zoroastrianism involved as an afterthought.

[Psykmoe]

This has been an interesting read. Since I've had one of my intro level literature classes deal with Orientalism and some of those other -isms ( ) mentioned, I can see what the OP is getting at.

I don't know, I didn't see it as any sort of criticism (and observing something is not generally synonymous with 'railing against' something).

The OP has been saying that he's not judging anything, after all!

I'm not very good with the topic (though one of my profs specialized in portrayal and self-portrayal of asians in literature or some such), so to me it was just kind of a neat curiosity to bring up and remind me of one of my more interesting college classes

[VedalkenBear]

I may be misunderstanding something here, but while I tend to rail against Yomi and Sinuyama for not accurately representing historical Japan, they very accurately portray mythical Japan... and that's mythical Japan to the Japanese. Now, granted, it's mythical Japan ca. 1700, but it seems distinct from other areas represented.

Perhaps that can be chalked up to Japan's overall successful attempt to integrate into the politics of the late 19th century, instead of, well, China's rather different approach.

[HoneyBadger]

zzcat: I'm working on a mod based on pre-Muslim mod Nation based loosely on the Parthian Empire. There's no graphics for it yet, but I should be able to start on them within a few months, if I can get the two Nations I'm working on now, wrapped up by then. The great gods of procrastination will decide, ofcourse

[Boronx]

Any "true" Orient is completely irretrievable.

Three points.

We're blessed by a great deal of literature from precolonial times in the Orient.

In mathematics, it's possible, once a distortion is understood, to deconvolve a signal to wholly or partially remove it.

Is it really true that in a country as large and insular as China, that everything is distorted by Orientalism?

Not that it matters, but I'd take the East to be any place East of the Roman empire, so pretty much all of Asia East of the Euphrates.

[HoneyBadger]

I honestly don't buy the whole orientalism argument, though. I mean yes, if you were landing on an alien planet for the first time, as a human being among sentient bugs or whatever, then perhaps forever beyond that point, there would be a taint of humanness that-as long as human culture was accepted and spread-would remain forever to change that culture, that world, irrevocably.

But the idea that there *is* such a thing as an "Orientalism" that is any more valid and any more immutable than the actual original, preserved culture of whatever geographic location in Asia we're talking about, the thought that we in the West have coated the East with an indelible ink, is just bizarre to me. Japan has the culture it does, because the Japanese themselves have embraced it.

They've embraced elements from the West, true, but they've also embraced traditional Japanese culture, and *modern* Japanese culture, and their culture remains Japanese. The same with China, India, Egypt, any country that could concievably be called 'Oriental'.

It's just human culture, in all it's splendor, and judging a culture as being "infected" by the West, and somehow less itself, is as bad as any effort to actually change that culture. If people accept ideas from the West, embrace them, make them their own-even if they're ideas about their very selves, their very nature, then that's theirs. That becomes their culture. And there's nothing wrong with that.

What *is* wrong is trying to fit that culture into a mould-even if it's one where only they exist. If Orientalism is the idea of the West trying to steriotype the East, then the opposite-the West trying to take the West *out* of the East, to separate the two, is just as wrong.

[Omnirizon]

Well the beautiful thing about Orientalism is that it is not imperative. So it is not telling you how to interpret something. It is not didactic pedagogy (i.e. telling you how to think). It is Socratic pedagogy (i.e. showing you implications of your thought). It intrinsically believes that everyone is capable of imagining new possibilities, and only tries to show us how our thought does not spring deterministically from a concrete or unitary history. The very act of articulating Orientalism presupposes that all people are capable of new possibilities.