Orientalism is a used by scholars to describe the depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern and East Asian cultures (Eastern cultures) by people from the West. Edward Said's landmark academic text Orientalism published in 1978, highlights the general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies. In Said's insightful analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static, undeveloped, lazy, feminine and thus fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, reduced, and depicted. The Occident (West) can thus transmit an image of the Orient through popular culture back to the Orient to be learned by the Orientals. This is the internalization of oppression. Juxtaposed on the fabricated image of the Orient is the idea of Western society as developed, rational, hardworking, and masculine. To help students understand the fabricated image of Eastern cultures a video analysis of an obviously biased depicted of the Orient such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Students should notice how people who are not European are depicted, what false foods are eaten in the east, the settings the characters find themselves in, etc. To understand complex historical concepts, students should engage in an analysis which readily highlights the principle arguments of a concept.
To understand why an idea was first created, one must study the author as Edward Hallett Carr once said: "Study the historian before you begin to study the facts." Further, one must understand the historical context in which it was first created.
