Spiritual wealth and neo-orientalism (1998)

Introduction: Neo-Orientalism Edward Said's notion of the complicity between colonialism and Orientalism is well known. In this study, I explore an avatar of Orientalism, namely, neo-Orientalism, which has emerged with sharp definition in the post-World War II era. Like Orientalism, neo-Orientalism continues shape actual knowledge of the Orient into a collection of fragments about the in order tame it; once tamed, is the excavate for its gems. In the present, we continue mine the religions of the East for their spiritual wealth. As I will show in a study of academics, music, and ideas about sexuality and therapy in the 1990's, this is usually done within the Orientalist imagining of a resemblance between East and West, and of the East as the West's salvation, without concern for the religious significance of what is being mined.(1) Here, the focus of my study is not conversion. Instead, I am interested in the ways in which we appropriate aspects of cultures and remove them from their religious contexts, all without converting. Moreover, in this study, my focus is not the intentions of those who participate in shaping neo-Orientalism; rather, I explore the processes and the history that lead neo-Orientalism. What I hope demonstrate is that there is a connection between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western projects in Asia for political, economic, and strategic gains, for the acquisition of academic knowledge, and for the contemporary American fascination with the for personal edification. While former economic, political, and strategic programs were carried out in the colonial period, present projects of self-interest explored here are conducted in the neocolonial world. In short, and though the projects overlap, colonizers in the past appropriated the economic and political wealth of people; now, people with private interests appropriate the Orient's spiritual fortunes and claim that is a right. Further, I will argue that this type of appropriation is itself a strategy of domination. Orientalism: The Trope of Identity and the Trope of Hostility The point of origin for Said's argument is the eighteenth-century Western discourse of hostility toward the Arab-Islamic world. His study of Orientalism traces the development of an academic discipline that is a Western form of thought and an agency of power for wielding control over Arabs and Islam. While Said focused upon the Arabic world, others have broadened his critique include scholarly enterprises associated with non-Arabic regions, including, for instance, India.(2) In words, many scholars argue that the scope of Orientalism is not limited the Middle East. The critique driving these studies, like Said's, focuses on an Orientalism that produced an essentializing difference between East and West, which, by its very nature, constructed a hostile other in need of taming. Jenny Sharp has pointed out that Said dilated on the rhetoric of difference or hostility in early Orientalist writings because his purpose was to historicize stereotypes that preclude a Western identification with Arabs.(3) Said nevertheless has recognized that early Orientalists, such as Sir William Jones - who is credited as the father of modern philology - planted the seeds for establishing a resemblance between East and West in his study of Indian languages.(4) Yet, Jones's sympathy with the culture whose texts he sought translate, namely India, produced an alterity within identity. Like many Orientalists of his day, Jones assumed India be an ancient civilization in decay; thus, he warned that it was found highly dangerous employ natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they [other philologists] could not depend.(5) Still, for Jones, India ultimately was like his West: in positing a common origin between Sanskrit and Europe's Greek and Latin, the Englishman identified with India. …