What Is the West?

Before proceeding any further to consider evidence in support of the Easternization thesis it is necessary to return to the issue, mentioned in the introduction, of what precisely is meant by the terms East and West. There it was noted that the latter term, as employed in this work, is defined in a manner that is somewhat at odds with popular usage since it is treated as embracing Islamic cultures rather than excluding them. Now the issue to be faced is more fundamental since it concerns the question of whether terms like East and West should be used at all in cultural analysis. For their usage has been subject to much criticism. In the first place it has been suggested that there is so little consensus over their respective meanings as to warrant concluding that these terms are virtually useless for the purpose of serious academic inquiry.1 Others have claimed that they are so loaded with ideological implications that it is in any case unwise to employ them. Finally there are those, such as Goody (1996) and Huntington (1996), who have criticized the nature of the binary scheme itself, seeing it as simply too crude a device to be used to classify the civilizations of the world. The argument here is that, as Jack Goody puts it, “The world is too complex to be usefully envisioned for most purposes as simply divided economically between North and South or culturally between East and West”(1996, p. 10). Specifically, such a scheme is seen to be inappropriate given that it involves including the civilizations of India, China, and Japan, as well as the continent of Africa, under the single umbrella term the East. At the same time, such a typology has been criticized for encouraging a Manichean perspective, one that, given that these schemes are mainly employed by Western writers, is

then bound to work to the disadvantage of the non-West. This is in effect the accusation that Edward Said makes against Western orientalists.2 The charge being that Western academics, when writing about the East, have tended to give the impression that, as Norman Davies puts it, “everything ‘Western’ is civilized, and that everything civilized is Western. By extension, or simply by default, anything vaguely Eastern or ‘Oriental’ stands to be considered backward or inferior” (Davies, 1997, p. 19). Such Westocentric views are said to be the inevitable consequence of a binary scheme, one that necessarily promotes the difference between the familiar and the strange, between “us” and “them,” and hence, in this case, between the West and the Orient, or the East. Finally we may note that in the current intellectual climate all binary schemes, and not simply that which divides the world into two, tend to be regarded with suspicion, largely as a consequence of the influence of postmodern thought.