Left- and Right-Wing Criticism of Orientalism and the Role of Representations of Cultures in Their Self-Interpretation and Development

Abstract

Over the past decades orientalism as an approach adopted in Western studies of nonWestern cultures has been subject to major philosophical analysis. The critical impulse that was transmitted by Edward Said to the scientific community in 1978 was powerful enough to create a universal framework. This conceptual framework makes possible both a revisionist point of view toward the West and a Western offensive discourse toward the so-called internal colonization. When we decompose Orientalism into components, for example through hermeneutic analysis, this phenomenon turns out to be one of the justifiably commonplace problems of the representation of nonWestern cultures in Western academic studies. Orientalists and researchers of non-Western cultures are criticized for mechanistic constructivism applied to the Other, but at the same time, conservative ideologists (René Guénon, Oswald Spengler, etc.) tend to draw attention to the fundamental crisis of Western science, its epistemological dysfunction and unnecessitated plurality that does not bring us closer to understanding the essence. However, both approaches unfairly overlook the factor of already exerted constructive influence on non-Western cultures. Orientalism can be seen not only as a form of exploitation, but also as a form of providing a language of self-interpretation, which have had a visible effect on non-Western cultures' understanding of themselves. This article examines the evolution of perceptions of the possibility and necessity of representations of non-Western cultures, as interpreted by the authors who are commonly classified as equally leftand right-wing ones.

Keywords

• orientalism
• representation
• xenology
• imagology
• culture
• ethnography
• appropriation
• regional studies