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Orientalism and Occidentalism: When the Twain Meet
 
PIIS086919080006515-3-1
DOI10.31857/S086919080006515-3
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Dinara V. Dubrovskaya 
Occupation: Senior Research Fellow
Affiliation:
Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
State Academic University for the Humanities (GAUGN)
Address: Moscow, Moscow, Russia
Journal nameVostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost
EditionIssue 5
Pages77-82
Abstract

 

manifested by the Chinese elite in the 18th century — and in this narrow meaning it contrasts with E. Said’s socio-politically-loaded Orientalism. To define Occidentalism as a phenomenon, the article looks at the way it partly mirrored Orientalism, which as an art movement existed in European culture and art since at least the 16th century, only earning its present name in the 19th century (care is taken to differentiate between the ways Orientalism and Occidentalism are understood in sociology vs art history). The two trends are compared by looking at their origins; similarities; differences in scope; and a noticeable asymmetry demonstrated in the interest of one part of the inhabited world towards another. Still, even though Far Eastern (and in particular Chinese) Occidentalism was a far less pronounced cultural phenomenon than European Orientalism, it was not through some historical inevitability. The author reviews a historical episode illustrating how Ancient Chinese statesmen pursued potential contacts with Ancient Rome and gives her view of why, ultimately, it was the Western interest that prevailed as a vector of intercultural inquiry. The article also touches upon the modern tendency to see the East–West interface as having much older roots than previously thought, and highlights some questions within the domain of this Orientalist-Occidentalist discourse that seem to point towards productive areas of research.

KeywordsOrientalism, Occidentalism, Chinoiserie, Edward Said, Oriental Studies
Received25.09.2019
Publication date16.10.2019
Number of characters16446
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1 Mutual penetration, influence, and any at all interaction of notions that have been traditionally (sometimes for centuries) used to define East and West – as well as their ways of learning about each other – is a great body of problems that touch upon the whole range of humanitarian knowledge and interweave in the most frustratingly multi-disciplinarian way possible. The present work aims, however modestly, to add another one to the plethora of terms that describe the study of the East in the West and the West in the East – the notion of Occidentalism1. Partly it mirrors (the already commonplace) Orientalism, popularised by Edward Said [see, e.g.: Alaev, 2018; Schimmelpenninck, 2010]; but here, we suggest that it be utilised in a narrower scope limited to the domains of Culturology, Art History and Criticism. It is plainly evident from recent conferential talks and frequent publications [see., e.g.: Volynskiy, 2019] that academic community is keenly interested in this interdisciplinary topic. To achieve the goal in question, therefore, the author will try to make a short survey of the relevant terms used in historiography and art history. 1. A more (although not excessively) familiar usage of Occidentalism in social and civilisational studies is to understand it simply as enmity towards the Western world (the Occident), seeing it in terms of dehumanising stereotypes. Such ideological perceptions of the West can be found in, e.g., [Carrier, 1995], [Xiaomei, 2002], and [Buruma, Margalit, 2004 (with critique to the latter work in [Jacques, 2004]). As such the term is often understood as a counterpart of Said’s Orientalism (admittedly more mellow). However, as stated elsewhere, the present author's ambition is to capitalise on the term's novelty in art historical and culturological studies, and use it net of any ideological encumbrances.
2 The East’s and West’s ambitions to comprehend one another, immortalised by Kipling as early as 1889 in his abundantly cited Ballad of East and West2, were always quite painful. As a problem it was first attested in European historiography probably during Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC) in their depiction by Herodotus (484–425 B.C.) and his younger contemporary general Thucydides (460–400 B.C.), and in the East – China being this author’s traditional focus – during the times of the first centralised dynasties (Qin and Han 221 B.C. – A.D. 220). The reason for this painfulness is quite clear. The two great civilisational cauldrons – Europe, which birthed the first Western empires (the Hellenistic Empire of Alexander the Great and Ancient Rome), and the East with its gentleman’s set of great imperial formations, ranging from Neo-Assyrian Empire and Alexander's contemporary Persian Empire of the Achaemenides to the Far Eastern civilisational hub of Ancient China beginning from Han (206 B.C. – A.D. 220), eventually recognised each other's existence on the other pole of the oecumene. And while this realisation readily extrapolated to the realm of legends and myths, palpable artefacts (such as silk or works of applied arts) as well as less material but no less factual things (like beliefs, gods, fantastic beasts, and graphic motifs) were also in ample evidence. These couldn’t be easily discarded, nor easily reconciled with the existing fabric of life. Similarly, the Great Migration Period (4th to 6th centuries A.D.), when whole peoples from the East re-settled to the West, effected a radical change in the European civilisational paradigm. 2. “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
3 It dawned on thinkers and potentates of the West rather early, therefore, that differences between civilisations in the opposite ends of the Earth were many and momentous. And, despite all the attempts to work out at least some consolation vocabulary3, they were acutely aware of the fact that from the East came not only light (Ex Oriente lux), but also darkness (Russian word t'ma / тьма, both meant “darkness” and denoted Mongol hordes in Turkic and Russian languages). As a result, the space in the European thought discourse reserved for Eastern countries and peoples was drastically different from the Western space, where, despite all controversies and wars, people and events were perceived as «our own». Already in this setup we discover the roots of the phenomenon which Edward Said would immortalise by appropriating the word more commonly found in the thesaurus of historians of art and culture – Orientalism. 3. The word barbarians (βάρβαρος) was, of course, coined in Ancient Greece around the times of Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 B.C.) independently from Ancient China; the latter had a whole collection of names for non-Han peoples already since the times of Confucius (551–479 B.C.). Moreover, Confucius didn’t anticipate that the people he so clearly distinguished from barbarians – to him people of Zhong Guo (Middle Kingdoms, plural) in the era of Eastern Zhou (770–256 B.C.) – would in future be called Han.
4 This appropriation, while apt, gives rise to an important difference. We should distinguish between Orientalism as a term for Westerners studying East (and all the complex attitude problems inherent therein), Oriental Studies, which we owe to Edward Said4 (1978), and Orientalism as an art movement. 4. Said claimed that in the works of Western academics “…the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual)” [Said, 1978, p. 73].
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Fig. 1. Attributed to Gentile Bellini. Portrait of the Sultan Mehmet II Fatih. 1480. Oil (19th-c. repaint) on canvas, transferred from wood. 69.9×52.1 cm. © National Gallery, London
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Fig. 2. Vincent van Gogh. Portrait of Père Tanguy. 1887. Oil on canvas. 65.0×51.0 cm. © Musée Rodin, Paris
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This latter phenomenon became easily discernible around late 15th– early 16th century, when Europe encountered the Ottoman Empire. It was then that artists like Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) not only painted great rulers – like Mehmed II Fatih, the captor of Constantinople (1432–1481) (Fig. 1) – but also provided pictorial evidence of various events (diplomatic, anthropological, and genre) to European spectators in the West [see: Nefedova, 2009(1); Nefedova, 2009(2)]; finally, around the 19th century, this artistic fascination with remote alien subjects at last got its own umbrella term. Now, if we try and decompose this Orientalism in art into notable movements that succeeded one another, we will see that, in Europe, the most prominently represented ones were turquerie (since 16th c.); then chinoiserie (the movement existed in European culture since the middle of the 17th century); and lastly, japonisme – a term introduced originally by the French art critic Philippe Burty (1830–1890) in 1872, and one to which even Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) paid tribute (Fig. 2).

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