[Buddha-l] Zen War Guilt/Zen and the Sword

[jkirk]

The
> way in which Said's critique of "Orientalism" helps to explain
> this is quite simple: Said argues that there is a strong tendency
> for Westerners to project their fantasies and desires on to
> everything "Oriental", and in doing so, they fail to see what is
> really there. It would be difficult to imagine a more striking
> example of this phenomenon than the one we are now discussing.
> - Curt
================
Said's cirtique went much farther than merely reacting to western
fantasy projections. His critique was focussed on colonialism as
the agenda for orientalism, as he saw it. However, what Said had
to say for western discourses on Arab cultures was not apt for
the early, pre-Raj project in India (Jones et al.), as this author
pointed out in the following:
Kopf, David. Hermeneutics versus History. JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES, 
vol.XXXIX, 3: 495-506, 1978.  (Review article of E.W. Said's ORIENTALISM.)

Joanna