See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/293958727

Eurocentrism and Orientalism

Chapter · January 2016

DOI: 10.1111/b.9781444334982.2016.x

CITATIONS READS

5 20,509

1 author:

Ilia Xypolia
University of Aberdeen
51 PUBLICATIONS   68 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

The Arab Transformations Project View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Ilia Xypolia on 12 September 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

10/2/2016 Eurocentrism and Orientalism : The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Bibliogr aphic De tails

The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies

E d ite d b y: Sangeeta Ray, Henry Schwarz, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Alberto Moreiras and April Shemak
e ISBN: 9781444334982
P rint p ub lica tion d a te : 2016

Eurocentrism and Orientalism

ILIA XYPOLIA

Sub j e ct Imp e ria l, Colonia l, a nd P ostcolonia l History » Imp e ria l History,

P ostcolonia l History
Ke y-T op ics Brita in a nd Britishne ss, he ge mony, imp e ria lism, orie nta lism, sla ve ry

DOI: 10.1111/b.9781444334982.2016.x

Eurocentrism is the discourse that places emphasis on European concerns, culture, and values at the expense of
those of other cultures. It uses Europe as a cultural rather a cartographical expression, which incorporates the so-
called “West,” in other words, Western Europe and North America. Eurocentrism assumes that Europe is civilized
and has been throughout history and that European civilization has a unique historical advantage that leads to its
permanent superiority over all other cultures.

Eurocentric assumptions may be conscious or subconscious and can be traced in imperialist and anti-imperialist
scholarly work (Hob son 2 0 1 2 ). Though it often incorporates racial presumption, Eurocentrism should not be
confused and equated with racism.

Eurocentrism as a practice is a modern phenomenon that dates back to the sixteenth century, the period of the
Renaissance, and emerges most strongly in the nineteenth. At the end of the Cold War we witnessed a new rise of
Eurocentrism claiming the triumph of the West and the so-called “end of history.”

Though the term was used by various postcolonial scholars in the 1960s, it was not until 1988 and the
publication of Eurocentrism, a major work by the prominent neo-Marxist economist Samir Amin, that the first
scholarly attempt was made to provide a comprehensive account of the notion and conceptualize the term. Amin
(1 9 8 8 ) examines Eurocentrism as capitalism's ideological construct by exploring the historical and social context
and conditions in which it emerged. He considers Eurocentrism to be an ideological distortion and thus describes
it as a worldview fabricated by the domination of Western capitalism that claims European culture reflects the
unique and most progressive manifestation of the metaphysical order of history (Amin 2 0 0 9 ).

Since the 1990s the notion of Eurocentrism has been featured in a series of debates held across the social
sciences and in particular in developmental studies. Literature on Eurocentrism is often criticized, however, as
merely advocating cultural relativism.

Eurocentric approaches neglect the fact that the concept of “Europe” has changed dramatically over time as the
definition of oneself depends on the construction of the “other.” The spatial and temporal sequence Greece–
Rome–Europe is an ideological invention (Dusse l 2 0 0 0 ). The relevant literature has identified two major
Eurocentric constructions, those of time and space.

Europe timed the world by choosing an observatory in London as the basis of a global standard time. Greenwich
Mean Time implies a Eurocentric perspective, as it established England as the regulatory center for measuring
http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/uid=6673/tocnode?query=xypolia&widen=0&result_number=1&fields=author&from=search&id=g97814443… 1/6
10/2/2016 Eurocentrism and Orientalism : The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

time. Similarly, since the sixteenth century the Christian Gregorian calendar has triumphed over others such as the
Islamic Hijriyya, the Indian, and the Chinese calendars. The Gregorian calendar is considered as the standard for
most scholars around the globe. It was only recently that dates designated in English as either “BC” (Before Christ)
or “AD” (Anno Domini, i.e., in the year of our Lord) started to be replaced by dates labeled “BCE” (Before the
Common Era) and “CE” (Common Era) in order to remove Eurocentric and religious connotations. The
periodization of time into ancient, medieval, and modern also has serious repercussions for global historiography,
as it imposes Eurocentric lenses on the study of other cultures. The terminology used to refer to time and space,
therefore, has specific ideological and political connotations.

Geographical knowledge has also been a Eurocentric construction. The imposition of a double axis on the globe
divided it into West/East and North/South. Europe positioned the world on the map putting itself conventionally in
the North. Europe also named the continents, the seas, and even the planets of our solar system. The dominant
terminology that positions continents and territories has its origins in the British Empire. The Indian Ocean was so
named after the European route to India. The East is classified as either Near or Far East according to its distance
from the center of the world, England.

The world maps that were widely used until the mid-twentieth century were based on a projection presented by
the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. In Mercator's map, Europe is portrayed as the center of the
world, appearing much larger than it really is. The inaccuracy of the Mercator projection map is an illustration of
Eurocentrism. Not only are its projections inaccurate in terms of area, distance, and scale, it positions the world
with Europe at the center. The distortion of the area toward the poles has the immediate effect of creating a
distorted view of the world. In 1974 the German geographer Arno Peters, reacting against the Eurocentric image
provided by Mercator's maps, was motivated to replace the Eurocentric biases of Mercator's exaggeration of the
northern land masses (Klinghoffe r 2 0 0 6 ). Peter's projection offered an “equal-areas” view by representing all
areas according to their size.

Furthermore, in purely geophysical terms, Europe should qualify as merely a subcontinent of the great landmass
of Eurasia, like the Indian one, not as a separate continent. Thus the classification of Europe as a distinct
continent was established on certain political and ideological bases.

The main theme of the Eurocentric perspective is the notion of Euro-exceptionalism: the existence of a distinct
culture stressing its commitment to rationalism, progress, and universality. Modernity is conceptualized as an
exclusively European phenomenon. Eurocentric historical accounts avoid referring to the major contradiction in the
so-called “Western” values such as liberalism, human rights, and democracy. Defining “Western values” as stable,
homogenous, and noble is a one-sided and arbitrary effort to evade the destructive aspects of European history.
For instance, in several countries Columbus Day is still celebrated today, honoring the voyage of Christopher
Columbus to the Americas. The voyage itself is characterized as the discovery of the Americas, implying that the
land Columbus discovered was a no-man's-land, and the narrative neglects the human and cultural catastrophe
that followed the discovery. Similar understatement of subjects such as the slave trade and racism are very
common in the Eurocentric narrative of imperial history.

While there is a reluctance to cover the dark aspects of European history, disproportionate coverage is given to
European accomplishments in the arts, philosophy, science, and technology. But it is simply ahistorical to refer to
a single European identity that was solid and coherent from antiquity to the present day; Eurocentric assumptions
are based on a distorted view of the historical facts.

One of the most fundamental myths of Eurocentrism is the notion of universalism, the view that scientific truths
exist everywhere and at all times. Eurocentric assumptions hold that its universalism has concrete meaningful
content valid for all cultures throughout human history. The work of eminent European social scientists such as
Marx, Comte, Spencer, and Weber is accused of representing the Western historical pattern as though it could be
universally generalized. Fundamentally Eurocentric assumptions can be detected in the development of the
European social sciences, revealing the intrinsically ethnocentric nature of its discourses on societies of the non-
European “Other.”

Civilization is viewed in a binary manner, contrasting Europeanness with primitiveness and barbarism. Europe has
underplayed the history of other cultures (G ood y 2 0 0 6 ). The Eurocentric perspective, when analyzing European
wealth, stresses the continent's cultural and ideological supremacy rather than the material conditions that
permitted the emergence of the “European miracle.” Technological and material progress is used to assess
different cultures. A recurrent tendency in Eurocentric accounts is to marginalize other cultures’ contributions to
Western culture. Both quantitative and qualitative means are employed to marginalize other cultures, by giving
very little space to the coverage of their achievements and/or underrating their contributions and qualities. Non-
European histories and legacies have been distorted by being viewed through Eurocentric lenses. The main
underlying premise of Euro-exceptionalism is the inferiority of other cultures.

http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/uid=6673/tocnode?query=xypolia&widen=0&result_number=1&fields=author&from=search&id=g97814443… 2/6
10/2/2016 Eurocentrism and Orientalism : The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Eurocentrism assumes a linear historical trajectory from Ancient Greece to the Roman Empire and then to the
European miracle that took place between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, this claim to
incorporate the achievements of ancient times is arbitrary, as the concept of Europe had a significantly different
meaning then. Tracing biological and cultural ancestry back to Ancient Greece is an arbitrary assumption.

The so-called European miracle, also known as the “Great Divergence,” the process whereby European countries
gradually grew to become the most powerful global economies, overcoming China, is considered Eurocentric.
Traditionally the great narrative of the rise of Western civilization attributed European success to cultural values,
social institutions, and political practices. The Eurocentric narrative stresses the culture and institutions of
European “exceptionalism” that led to the industrial growth of northwestern Europe. By contrast, revisionist
historians who have challenged the Eurocentric narrative argue that the European miracle should be considered
as a process that emerged in the nineteenth century due to two fortuitous circumstances: convenient coal supplies
and access to the abundance of the New World (P ome ra nz 2 0 0 1 ). This view focuses on a more global context
in order to place the so-called European miracle within the evolving patterns of global economic and cultural
interaction (Fra nk 1 9 9 8 ).

Eurocentrism sanitizes European history, neglecting its dark sides by considering them simply as aberrations. At
the same time, Eurocentrism understates the achievements and contributions of other cultures. Revisionist
historiography is looking at the longer duration, placing the centuries of the European achievement within a bigger
picture where the interactions between other cultures are traced. Therefore, the European miracle's achievements
are being seen as the accumulation of breakthroughs achieved in other cultures as well. Scholarly work critical of
Eurocentrism advocates a deconstruction of social sciences from their Eurocentric biases and calls for a paradigm
shift.

Literature that traces and deconstructs Eurocentric practices is often accused of emphasizing other cultures and
thus advocating a different kind of ethnocentrism, such as Afrocentrism or Asianocentrism. However, an
increasing number of scholars criticizing Eurocentrism urge the need to move beyond ethnocentric approaches in
social sciences. And re G und e r Fra nk (1 9 9 8 ) suggests a globological perspective that, avoiding ethnocentrism,
analyzes the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Scholars who highlight Eurocentric biases in the full
spectrum of the social sciences advocate fair and balanced historical accounts in order to understand the
interactions among civilizations, cultures, and nations. Social sciences cannot be value-free and are being
accused of distorting data according to sociopolitical preference. Therefore, scholars who criticize Eurocentrism
urge the need to acknowledge Eurocentric biases and the mechanisms of Eurocentric knowledge. On this view,
European achievements should be understood in a dialectical relation with non-European others.

ORIENTALISM

Orientalism, the theory and the practice of representing “the Orient” in Western thought, is a controversial
concept. Orientalism refers to the study of the Orient (from the Latin for the East) as opposed to the Occident, the
West. Orientalist scholars have systematically explored the culture of societies geographically east of Christian
Europe since the early sixteenth century. Historically, the Orient originally referred to countries lying east of the
Mediterranean, and most probably to the east of the Roman Empire. Yet, as a primarily politically constructed
concept, the geographical demarcation of the Orient has changed dramatically in the course of centuries. During
the period of European imperial expansion, orientalism was institutionalized as an academic discipline. Employing
Eurocentric and imperialist understandings of Eastern societies, that scholarship systematically portrayed the
Orient in an exotic and racial way. Yet, in the aftermath of the decolonization period in the second half of the
twentieth century, an increasing academic literature produced by orientalist scholars challenged the authoritative
claims and knowledge that had been produced in the discipline.

It was the publication of the seminal work Orientalism by the Palestinian American Edward Said in 1978 that
marked a new era in the use of the term. Since the late 1970s the term has acquired a strongly negative
connotation and become a pejorative word. Said's Orientalism, elaborating on Antonio Gramsci's concept of
hegemony and Michel Foucault's theorization of discourse and the close relationship between knowledge and
power, revolutionized the study of the whole region of the Middle East and shaped new fields of study such as
postcolonial theory. Said's book is one of the most controversial scholarly books of the last decades, sparking
intense debate and disagreement. In particular, Said mainly examined Eurocentric discourse on the Islamic
Middle East, exposing the recurrent portrayal of the Orient in colonial literature and art. Said argued that
orientalism is directly linked with European imperialism. In particular, he located the construction of orientalism
within the history of imperial conquest, as empires spread across the globe.

Orientalism explores the preconceived notion held by the “West” of the “East.” The central argument of Orientalism
is that the way the West acquired knowledge of the East was not innocent or objective, but rather the result of a

http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/uid=6673/tocnode?query=xypolia&widen=0&result_number=1&fields=author&from=search&id=g97814443… 3/6
10/2/2016 Eurocentrism and Orientalism : The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

process that reflected certain interests – imperial interests. Specifically, Said argues that the way the West looks at
the Middle East is through a lens that distorts the actual reality of the places and the people that the term refers
to. It calls this lens “orientalism.” Therefore, orientalism is a framework that the West uses to understand the
unfamiliar East and, at the same time, to make it appear different and threatening. Said's work made a significant
contribution on this general process of stereotyping.

Orientalism creates a stereotypical image according to which the West is seen as being essentially rational,
developed, humane, superior, and authentic, while the East is seen as irrational, aberrant, backward, crude,
inferior, and inauthentic. These stereotypes contribute to the construction of a hegemonic system designed to
dominate the Orient and thus promote Western imperialism. The idea that West and East were fundamentally
different from one another was favorable to Western imperialist interests and strategies. Therefore Western
imperialism used orientalism as a significant instrument to ensure its existence and prevalence. According to Said,
the Orient has helped to define Europe as a contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience (Sa id 2 0 0 3 ).
Orientalism interprets the civilization, the people, and the localities. Said maintains the orientalist tradition of
Western writing was founded in Ancient Greece and in particular by Homer.

Said's Orientalism focused mainly on Western perceptions of the Islamic world and, in particular, the Middle East.
It was a study of how Westerners represent the Orient as the “Other,” a process of creation that reflects
configurations of power, authority, and the unconscious structures of cultural domination. The orientalist discourse
assigns to oriental people and culture certain stereotypes: despotic when in a position of power; sly and
obsequious when in subservient positions. Orientalism is a full-fledged discourse and the knowledge is produced
under unequal relations of power, that is, under imperialism. Said analyzed a wide range of colonial texts to
argue that imperial administrative institutions were regularly using large abstract categories to explain different
people. This formal process appeared to construct objective knowledge. But Said's work called attention to the
underlying assumptions of dominance and subjection in orientalist scholarly and popular sources.

Said's controversial thesis on orientalism has launched an extensive scholarly debate, probably the most intensive
in postcolonial theory. It has generated a large number of criticisms ranging from accusations of epistemological
ambivalence to developing a monolithic occidentalism. Polemics against Said have blamed his thesis as essentially
ahistorical. His analysis of a range of cultural products has been accused of being elitist as it neglected popular
art. Orientalism's binary oppositions have been denounced as relatively static categories. Also, his thesis has
been blamed for homogenizing the West and ironically falling into the same trap he criticized orientalist scholars
for. Finally, he has been accused that he gave prominence to the orientalist scholars and discourse at the
expense of other material factors in his understanding of imperialism.

In the last three decades we have seen a shift from materialist to cultural analyses of power. Since 1978, when
Edward Said published his magnum opus, many universities around the world have established courses to study
the phenomenon of orientalism. There has been a movement in academic circles, especially in postcolonial
studies, toward the expansion of the scope and scale of academic curricula in Western institutions in order to
include subaltern scholars and sources. Numerous scholarly studies carried out in the aftermath of the publication
of Said's groundbreaking work extended his framework to cover Western perceptions of the whole so-called East.
Since the 1980s the majority of these works have attempted not only to expand their reach geographically but
also to combine Said's thesis with other eminent approaches in the emerging postcolonial literature of the 1980s,
like the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault. The reconsideration and contextualization of canonical cultural works
that are based on orientalist assumptions have been the main focus of their endeavor.

From the early 1980s the majority of the work in postcolonialism has been increasingly growing around two
themes, Eurocentrism and orientalism. The consistent critique of these two interconnected and often overlapping
discourses has been a constant theme in postcolonial studies since then. Though inherently inter- and
transdisciplinary by default, the institutionalization of cultural studies has given more space for the two notions to
be further explored.

SEE ALSO: British E mp ire ; Colonia lism; He ge mony; Imp e ria lism; P ostcolonia l Stud ie s; Sa id , E d wa rd ;
Sla ve ry a nd Sla ve Na rra tive s

REFERENCES

Amin, Samir. 1988. L'Eurocentrisme: Critique d'une idéologie. Paris: Anthropos-Economica.

Amin, Samir. 2009. Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Dussel, Enrique. 2000. “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism: The Semantic Slippage of the Concept of Europe.”
Nepatla: Views from South (1) (3): 465–478.
http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/uid=6673/tocnode?query=xypolia&widen=0&result_number=1&fields=author&from=search&id=g97814443… 4/6
10/2/2016 Eurocentrism and Orientalism : The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Frank, Andre Gunder (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hobson, John M. 2012. The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Klinghoffer, Arthur Jay. 2006. The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History. Westport,
CT: Praeger.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2001. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. New York: Penguin.

FURTHER READING

Bernal, Martin. 1991. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient
Greece 1785–1985, Vol. 1). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bilgin, Pinar. 2010. “The ‘Western-Centrism’ of Security Studies: ‘Blind Spot’ or Constitutive Practice?” Security
Dialogue (41) (6): 615–622.

Blaut, James Morris. 1993. The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric
History. New York: Guilford Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Modernity: An Introduction to Modern
Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 184–227. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.

Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hostettler, Nick. 2014. Eurocentrism: A Marxian Critical Realist Critique. London: Routledge.

Lampropoulos, Vassilis. 1993. The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 2014. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London:
Routledge.

Turner, Bryan S. 1994. Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. London: Routledge.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1997. “Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science.” New Left Review
(226) (6): 93–107.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite this ar ticle

XYPOLIA, ILIA. "Eurocentrism and Orientalism." The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Ray, Sangeeta, Henry
Schwarz, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Alberto Moreiras and April Shemak (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2016.
Blackwell Reference Online. 10 February 2016
<http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/tocnode.html?
id=g9781444334982_chunk_g97814443349829_ss1-9>

http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/uid=6673/tocnode?query=xypolia&widen=0&result_number=1&fields=author&from=search&id=g97814443… 5/6
 View publication stats

10/2/2016 Eurocentrism and Orientalism : The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Co p y r i g h t

Blackwell Publishing and its licensor s hold the copyr ight in all mater ial held in Blackwell Refer ence Online. No mater ial may be r esold or
published elsewher e without Blackwell Publishing's wr itten consent, save as author ised by a licence with Blackwell Publishing or to the extent
r equir ed by the applicable law.

http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/subscriber/uid=6673/tocnode?query=xypolia&widen=0&result_number=1&fields=author&from=search&id=g97814443… 6/6