[HoneyBadger]

I honestly don't buy the whole orientalism argument, though. I mean yes, if you were landing on an alien planet for the first time, as a human being among sentient bugs or whatever, then perhaps forever beyond that point, there would be a taint of humanness that-as long as human culture was accepted and spread-would remain forever to change that culture, that world, irrevocably.

But the idea that there *is* such a thing as an "Orientalism" that is any more valid and any more immutable than the actual original, preserved culture of whatever geographic location in Asia we're talking about, the thought that we in the West have coated the East with an indelible ink, is just bizarre to me. Japan has the culture it does, because the Japanese themselves have embraced it.

They've embraced elements from the West, true, but they've also embraced traditional Japanese culture, and *modern* Japanese culture, and their culture remains Japanese. The same with China, India, Egypt, any country that could concievably be called 'Oriental'.

It's just human culture, in all it's splendor, and judging a culture as being "infected" by the West, and somehow less itself, is as bad as any effort to actually change that culture. If people accept ideas from the West, embrace them, make them their own-even if they're ideas about their very selves, their very nature, then that's theirs. That becomes their culture. And there's nothing wrong with that.

What *is* wrong is trying to fit that culture into a mould-even if it's one where only they exist. If Orientalism is the idea of the West trying to steriotype the East, then the opposite-the West trying to take the West *out* of the East, to separate the two, is just as wrong.