This paper introduces the notion of “nesting orientalisms” to investigate some of the complexity of the east/west dichotomy which has underlain scholarship on “Orientalism” since the publication of Said's classic polemic, a discourse in which “East,” like “West,” is much more of a project than a place. While geographical boundaries of the “Orient“ shifted throughout history, the concept of “Orient” as “other” has remained more or less unchanged. Moreover, cultures and ideologies tacitly presuppose the valorized dichotomy between east and west, and have incorporated various “essences” into the patterns of representation used to describe them. Implied by this essentialism is that humans and their social or cultural institutions are “governed by determinate natures that inhere in them in the same way that they are supposed to inhere in the entities of the natural world.” Thus, eastern Europe has been commonly associated with “backwardness,” the Balkans with “violence,” India with “idealism” or “mysticism,” while the west has identified itself consistently with the “civilized world.“
At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West, while the West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in this clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell you, Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East on the West, and the West on the East, to acknowledge only heavenly Jerusalem beyond us, and here on earth-no one.–St. Sava to Irinej, 13th centurySince the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been brought to public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both within Yugoslavia and outside of the country. While the causes of the crisis were initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the past several years have seen increasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts of the country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on an ontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and (south)east
Using Arvind Sharmas's comparative method of reciprocal illumination, this essay examines two contemplative methods, the Hindu yogic, as de fined in Patafijali's Yoga-sutra, and the hesychast, as developed primarily within the Eastern Christian monastic tradition. Despite differences in the overall theological context, the similarities in several aspects of the tech nique are worth noting as they point out that the practice, rather than the ory reveals the common ground - a similar understanding of the nature of human mind, and its inner workings
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