Silvio Carta – University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
Anthropology is a discipline immersed in the study of difference. Since the publication of Said’s Orientalism, a number of scholars have come to the conclusion that difference is what anthropology is expected to produce. The epistemological and moral attacks of Orientalism have contributed to anthropology’s self-reflexivity about genre constraints and enduring rhetorical forms deployed in studying Others. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the categories by which the map of the world is represented within anthropology, providing a discussion of the ways in which anthropologists have Occidentalized the West. The paper aims to suggest that the spatial imageries deployed by anthropologists in orientalising and exoticising the “culture” of alien societies are produced dialectically through the mobilisation of stereotypical representations of the West. The West, often identified and simplified as a commodity system or employed to mean Europe, operates within anthropology as stable geographical metaphor without an original referent.
Keywords
Anthropology, Orientalism, Occidentalism.
