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The Relationship Between The Orient And The Orientalist

3873 Words16 Pages
So the cultural game, is the game of the dominant class to distinguish themselves from the dominated ones. In other words, the powerful legitimize their distinction from the powerless, they legitimize their tastes as pure and label other 's taste as vulgar. This distinction according to Bourdieu, is the tool of the dominant class to dominate. And to legitimize their taste over others, or to legitimize this distinction as superior, they constantly have to engage themselves in the cultural games. The process of legitimizing taste and domination through the cultural game keeps continuing and the habitus keeps on structuring and being restructured. The habitus of an Orientalists, is now not hard to imagine. The relationship between the Orient and the Occident was a relationship of power and domination, a relationship of hegemony and in most cases, a colonial relationship. The Orient was always in the dominated and the Occident was in the dominant position. And the habitus of the Orientalists or any European who was doing Orientalism, was the habitus of the dominant class. Starting from the early travelers like Marco Polo to the Medieval European scholars, all experienced the Orient through the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotypes, and the polemical confrontation. "These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception and the form of the encounter between East and the West" (Said, 1978, p. 58). The habitus of the
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