Western
Large scale cultural and political distinctions between west and east can
be traced from the Roman Empire through the division in Christianity
between Western and Eastern church to the establishment of a more general
sense of the West as Christian and East as Islam. Western and Eastern
worlds (or occidental and oriental) became more systematically defined from
the vantage point of Eurocentric geography (as near, middle and far East)
in the sixteenth and 17th century (see Said's Orientalism). Near East soon
became generalised as the middle east. Western also works at other scales.
In geopolitics, for instance the word eastern was used to define the Slav
peoples before WW1 and more recently the entire Soviet Block in the Cold
War. All of these shifting meanings - western as not Islam, not Asia, not
Soviet have coalesced in generic definition of Western as societies based
on capitalism and a democratic suffrage system. This, of course, has led to
the complex association of places as far flung (from the old EuroWest) as
Australia and Japan. Western also has a specific set of meanings in the
United States where it refers to both a) movies in which good guys (white
men on horses) triumph over bad guys (American Indians, Mexicans, people
who can't shoot straight and b) a set of values roughly connecting
individualism, the absence of government, masculinism, manifest destiny,
property ownership and big mountains (see Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest
for a critique of this and Drinnon Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian
Hating and Empire Building for a suggestive set of connections between the
American West and wider ideas of empire). Clearly a statement such as
"wanted dead or alive" in the immediate context links all these meanings of
"western." As with "Civilization" western is a flexible and contested term
deployed to distinguish "us" from "then" in strategic instances. Thus in
the Gulf War Saudi Arabia (formally clearly Eastern=islamic) became
"pro-western" just as Iraq (formally considered "westernised" due,
ironically, to a strong wefare state, its opposition of Iran (clearly
eastern) and relative freedom for women quickly became "other")
Tim
Tim Cresswell
Senior Lecturer
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion SY23 3DB
United Kingdom
Tel: 44 (0)1970 622782
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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