Turbo-folk: Balkanism, orientalism and otherness

Television and Orientalism

Orientalism, proposed by Edward Said (1995), refers to the network of interlocking discourses about the “orient” constructed in western civilization. The orients, in western conceptions, are stereotypically inflated others drastically different from the collective imagination of the civilized West. Said’s argument was initially focused more on Europe and Islamic Culture, but has been applied to...

Book Review: China and Orientalism

Thinking, Recognition and Otherness

There was her body, quiet, used, resting: there was her mind, free, clear, shining: there was the boy and his eyes, seeing what? And ecstasy. Things would hurt when this light dimmed. The boy would change. But now in the sun she recognised him, and recognised that she did not know, and had never seen him, and loved him, in the bright new air with a simplicity she had never expected to know. “Yo...

Orientalism and images of Eastern Poland

A much more ambiguous issue revolves around the origins of these regional inequalities and extends to the broader question of how development plans for the region are interpreted and understood. What seems particularly controversial is the diagnosis of the problems of Eastern Poland as a 'natural' function of the link between economic issues and subjective interpretations of contemporary social...

Orientalism and the Modern Myth of "Hinduism"

a meaningful nitary notion of Hinduism from the Indian phenomena, unless it is done by exclusion..." (Frits Staal [1989], Ritual Without Meaning, p. 397). Orientalism and the Modem Myth of "Hinduism" 165 The work of integrating a vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals, and laws into a coherent religion, and of shaping an amorphous heritage into a rational faith known now as "Hinduism" were ...