page_title: Oriental studies
section_title: "Orientalism" and Oriental studies
hierarchical_section_title: Oriental studies / "Orientalism" and Oriental studies
context_page_description: Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies, while the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
  European study of the region formerly known as "the Orient" had primarily religious origins, which has remained an important motivation until recent times. This is partly due to how the Abrahamic religions in Europe originated in the Middle East, as well as the rise of Islam in the 7th century, and consequently there was much interest in the origin of these faiths, and Western culture in general. Learning from Arabic medicine and philosophy, and the Greek translations from Arabic, was an important factor in the Middle Ages.
context_section_description: The term Orientalism has come to acquire negative connotations in some quarters and is interpreted to refer to the study of the East by Westerners shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. When used in this sense, it often implies prejudiced, outsider-caricatured interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. This viewpoint was most famously articulated and propagated by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), a critical history of this scholarly tradition. In contrast, the term has also been used by some modern scholars to refer to writers of the Imperialist era who had pro-Eastern attitudes, as opposed to those who saw nothing of value in non-Western cultures.
caption: The Women of Algiers, 1834, by Eugène Delacroix is one of the earliest paintings from Western painters in the "Eastern world".
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