Preserving Orientalism

Occidental intellect dominates the global perspective on Eastern culture.

The hegemony of Euro-American academic institutions enforces pressures on all scholars to condense and translate non-Anglo ideas into frameworks comprehensible to Anglo audiences. Furthermore, the interpretation of non-Eurocentric values are further distilled by the cultural illiteracy of Anglo-European audiences of non-Eurocentric canon, propagated by a lack of emphasis on global perspectives in Western academic institutions. This has resulted in the cultural artifacts of “othered” people possessing a more prominent presence as objects of exotic spectacle as opposed to function, which in turn draws barriers in purpose, and therefore design.

Anglo-European notions of binaries

between the East and the West contextualize Eastern nations by their deviations from traditionally Western values, which has the effect of centering Western interpretations of Eastern values.

This bleeds through to every facet of the modern world system, including law, economics, and aesthetics. One exemplification of this can be found in the Anglo-European practice of collecting (displacing) the artifacts of colonized societies into museums, where they are preserved in their acquired state for purposes of educational (commercial) display. The museum functions as a permanent resting ground; as a cultural archive, it inherently removes objects from transformations of time and space. Due to a lack of widespread education on non-occidental culture, the most valued feature of these cultural artifacts is read from their most-immediately perceptible quality — their visual form. Obsessions with ownership of an original (which necessitates the object is accessible by no other) belie attempts at preserving the state of the object at the moment of acquisition. Being “preserved” in a museum strips an object of the continual process of creation that enables its function; it renders it dead.

However, while the museumification of artifacts removes them from their natural life, it also enters them into the western canon. As the global world system revolves around Western narratives, this is undeniably a powerful act. To enter the Western canon is to gain legitimacy as a culturally-significant object, therefore increasing its global visibility. However, there is an underlying violence in the methods by which this is done, which involves the theft of cultural relics and the stripping away of their cultural roots, leading to the immortalization of romanticized or misinterpreted ideas. Eurocentric aesthetics dominate, and therefore dictate what is and isn’t art, and what is and isn’t worthy of preservation. However, design must work; it must function as a living object within a living society. The forms of “Oriental” objects are too often reduced to exotic spectacle, therefore preventing them from crossing into the world of legitimate design. Even housed behind glass as display objects of cultural significance, their underlying ideas must be translated into Occidental motifs. Occidental meaning is imposed onto Oriental objects; furthermore, Eurocentric institutions take the place of Asian experts in defining their cultural narrative. In the context of the global world system, oriental objects are therefore defined by their exhibition value and relation to Anglo-European frameworks.