Occidentalism: The West in the East

It's highly multifaceted to determine one's perception of the world in the ongoing modern era. One of the circumstances individuals encounters is being at a loss as to which to live: the complexity between the discourses which are shaping and standardizing the consciousness with the idea of occidentalism while creating stereotyping meanings and the traditional way of existence.

To research into the dilemma, one must have a clear state of mind on what occidentalism does mean. For the word "Occident", Oxford Dictionary says: "The western part of the world, especially Europe and America" (Hornby 624). The origin of the word "Occident", comes from a Latin word "Occidēns" means "Setting" (Hoad 126). These descriptions leave us no choice but consider the underlying core meaning of the very key idea of occidentalism. This paper is intended to show some notable ideas on occidentalism and its reflections in the eastern societies.

To come to this point, occidentalism and its reflections in the society has been subject to many works such as James Ketelaar's Strategic Occidentalism: Meiji Buddhists at the World's Parliament of Religions, Meltem Ahiska's Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern and Couze Venn's Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity.

One of the main discussions on occidentalism is the question that: Is there a way of rejecting occidentalism for the eastern societies? Buruma and Margalit raise the idea that the resistance of the east to the effects of occidentalism produces provision confronting the facts of the modern way of life (36). According to their idea, the process is valid for every communal point, which is an eradicator of the borders seen in the society, including political opinions, religion differences and social classes. As far as Buruma and Margalit are concerned, it does not matter to have a critical understanding of the western ideas, even one consciously rejects it, s/he will end up with being a part of the sections of modern western integrity (41).

Predictably, there have been emerged many counter views to Baruma and Margalit's idea. One of them is the anti-thesis of Noel Rooney, a poet and essayist. His anti-thesis is mainly focused on the overall impropriety of Baruma and Margalit. He asserts the idea:

"Buruma and Margalit don't escape their own orientalism for long enough to be

accurate or objective, so such answers as they come up with are superficial and

ignorant. To start with, comparing the West, a relatively homogeneous cultural

concept, with the endless diversity of those cultures we call 'Eastern' is likely to

require prodigious scholarship, and the authors show no signs of it. And then

distilling the extraordinary breadth of non-Western thought into a bespoke myth

suffusing both academic and popular views of the West, and demonstrating its

ubiquity, suggests analytic powers beyond the scope of this book" (p. 2)

To extend their idea, Baruma and Margalit allege critical milestones from the history like literary movements, raising political ideas and anticipated social transformations. In reference to them, every invisible and driving factor has a role in the conclusion and since the conclusions are greatly similar all around the world, it would not be wrong to say that occidental idea is such an influential perception that is unavoidable (43).

On the other hand, it would be wisely to analyze the east societies themselves throughout the history. In his dissertation, Jouhki Jukka expands on the background saying:

"According to Shaobo Xien the scholars of the former colonies of the West seem to

cling to Orientalism and are not producing counter-hegemonic discourse. In other

words, they do not want to respond to the “Orientalist gaze.” Although I think Xien’s

view is rather exaggerated, he is, in my view, right to claim that the Occidentalism of

the Orientals often produces as strong a Eurocentrism as Western Orientalism has done.

The purpose of counter-hegemonic postcolonial research is to critically probe

Eurocentric patterns of knowledge." (68).

As it can be seen, this idea supports the view of Baruma and Margalit at a certain level by suggesting that east itself creates the occidentalism by adapting western patterns of knowledge. To enlarge this idea, Ge Sun has made a particularly explicit attempt to refocus debates on orientalism onto the Asian use of ideas of East and West."In the hands of the Asians" she notes, Orientalism "it is not positioned against the Western world from the perspective of the East, but rather against an image of the West constructed in Asia" (337).

From over the eastern societies, as in China, some particular elements seem to become integrated with the ideas of western politics as of the last quarter of the 20th century. Tang, who works on "nationalism in China, identifies how it both enforced ‘subordination’ to a European linear and Eurocentric view of modernity, whilst enabling a new Chinese national and global imagination to form, thus ‘reassert(ing) space in cognitive principle" (Bonnett 6). Thus Tang concurs with Chatterjee’s point saying that: "Nationalist thought accepts the claim to universality of this ‘modern’ framework of knowledge. Yet it also asserts the autonomous identity of national culture. It thus simultaneously rejects and accepts the dominance, both epistemic and moral, of an alien culture" (107).

To conclude, discussions on occidentalism and its reflections in the societies are continuously proceeding amongst the scholars. There is not a certain authenticity to accept and put into practice with regards to the social differentiation and meaning. Resulting from all the discussions and statements, it is clear that there are routinely struggles for meaning, hegemony, representation and discourse. Since analyzing the occidentalism is needed to combine history, sociology, philosophy, politics, media theory and psychology, it can be seen as a part of cultural studies, which is "an anti-discipline" (Althusser 27) because of its pluralist nature.

 To my opinion, understanding and interpreting the occidentalism is all about how a particular phenomenon, which is belong to the west, relates to the matters of east such as ideology, nationality, social classes, gender, religion, familiarity, traditions, invention and the way of life including a range of elements from the image of laughter to the sound of saying a word. The ethnicities living in the western societies like Pakistani in the British society can be an interesting point to start to work on how a particular western knowledge changes an unfamiliar group of people. The "in-betweenness" (Bhabha 378) of the group can be regarded as a clash of occidentalism and orientalism. On the other hand, due to its geographical condition, Turkey is a problematic country for this contradiction. Although it is always accepted as a struggle between tradition and modern way of life, it can also be got across the opposition of one direction to the other. However, the domination of occidentalism in the 21st Century is not evitable and cannot be ignored since it is in the every subject and aspect of daily life for the eastern societies.