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Occidentalism An Occidentalism is a distorted and stereotyped image of Western society, which can be held by people inside and outside the West and which can be articulated or implicit. The term emerged as the reciprocal of the notion of Orientalism, itself a generalization by anthropologists of †Said’s (1978) Orientalism, his name for a particular distorted rendering of the Middle East by Western academics. Behind both Orientalism and Occidentalism

is an assumption about how people define themselves and others. One’s own social unit and the alien unit are compared, and certain features of each are identified as contrasting elements that are taken to express the essences or crucial distinguishing features of the two units. The resulting characterizations are dialectical, because they emerge only as the negation of each other. Said (1978) describes at length the emergence of an essentialist rendering of the Orient, but pays less attention to the paired rendering of the West to which it is opposed. These renderings are shaped by political rela-

tionships within the societies in which they exist. Thus, in one of the earliest uses of ‘Occidentalism’, Nader (1989) describes Orientalist and Occidentalist renderings of the place of women in Middle Eastern and Western societies by Middle Eastern and Western commentators. She suggests that in each case, the pairs of depictions served the political purpose of protecting existing gender relations by describing the place of women in the opposed society as being much worse. Likewise, Carrier (1995) describes

essentialist renderings by Western scholars in which the West is Occidentalized as the land of autonomous, calculating individuals. He suggests that such renderings reflect the self-conception of powerful groups in the West, and that they serve to legitimate that power by defining as deficient those in the West who do not conform to the stereotype. Some studies of self-conceptions among Paci-

fic societies anticipate the idea of Occidentalism even though they do not use the term. For instance, Thomas (1992) describes how some Pacific people generate an essential, Orientalist definition of themselves in opposition to a West that they Occidentalize as a land of mercenary individuals. Thomas makes the point that these opposed Occidentalisms and Orientalisms are conspicuous in colonial settings. Finally, Carrier (1992) has argued that

anthropologists themselves are prone to Occidentalize the West, which facilitates anthropologists’ Orientalist renderings of non-Western societies and so helps exaggerate the difference between Western and non-Western societies. He argues that critics of anthropological Orientalism have erred in failing to consider how these Orientalisms are shaped and sustained by anthropological Occidentalisms. Because the politics of self-representation is

an important issue in the discipline and in Western societies, it seems likely that interest in Occidentalism will increase in anthropology.