ABSTRACT

How often have you watched a news report on television, read a newspaper article or been exposed to an advertisement conveying some image of ‘Eastern’ culture? Whether it is a scene of crowds of angry Muslims burning an American flag, a shaven-headed Buddhist monk clothed in a saffron robe and quietly meditating, militant Hindus attacking a mosque or a billboard promoting a perfume that evokes the ‘mystic sensuality’ of India, what all of these images have in common is their involvement in a long history of Western representations and stereotypes of Asia as an ‘other’ – that is as essentially different from the West. One consequence of such images, whether positive or negative in their connotations, is that ‘we’ (the West) become clearly separated from ‘them’ (the East). The acceptance of a basic opposition between Eastern and Western cultures characterizes what has been called ‘Orientalism.’