Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A quality, mannerism, or custom specific to or characteristic of the Occident.
  • noun Scholarly knowledge of Occidental cultures, languages, and peoples.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The habits, manners, peculiarities, etc., of the inhabitants of the Occident.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the scholarly knowledge of western cultures and languages and people
  • noun the quality or customs or mannerisms characteristic of Western civilizations

Etymologies

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Examples

  • As Bilgrami wants to define it, Occidentalism is not only a property of modern Islamic fundamentalism but is to be found in Gandhi, in Nietzsche, in aspects of German romanticism and eighteenth-century English deism.

    Byron and Romantic Occidentalism 2008

  • Whether they know it or not this week's accused belong to a long tradition of what the writer Ian Buruma – a clever man like Edward Said – called "Occidentalism" in a book he co-authored (Atlantic Books £8.99) with Avishai Margalit in 2004.

    Roshonara Choudhry: a sad and misguided case Michael White 2010

  • In his response to Bilgrami's "Occidentalism" essay, Bruce Robbins voices a cosmopolitan suspicion of enchantment itself, particularly what he sees as a tendency in Bilgrami's interest in pantheism and deism to introduce Nature as

    Byron and Romantic Occidentalism 2008

  • It seems to me that Bilgrami's position on modernity has shifted somewhat between this essay and his "Occidentalism" essay eight years later.

    Notes on 'Byron and Romantic Occidentalism' 2008

  • What Bilgrami calls "Occidentalism" we could thus rename "Romantic Occidentalism" — adding the codicil that it is a romanticism constructed by critics of a certain kind: left-liberal agnostic humanists whose intellectually formative years were the 1950s and

    Byron and Romantic Occidentalism 2008

  • "Occidentalism" names not only non-western stereotypes of the west but also a persistent response to western-style modernity within the west itself.

    Byron and Romantic Occidentalism 2008

  • That's why the founding fathers of radical Islam — such as Qutb and Mawdudi — borrowed heavily from what Ian Buruma and Avi Margalit call "Occidentalism" — an ideology with its origins in Heidegger's criticism of the West, adopted by Japanese fascists, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge and, more recently, Al Qaeda and their ilk.

    Archive 2007-02-01 enowning 2007

  • [2] I would have to endorse this, since Avishai Margalit and I made the same point, using many of the same examples as Berman, in our article "Occidentalism," The New York Review, January 17, 2002.

    Revolution from Above Buruma, Ian 2003

  • I assume because without some superficial "Occidentalism" about the moral degeneracy of the West there would be little point to this article.

    The Guardian World News Nesrine Malik 2010

  • The installation Atlas of a Genealogy (2005), maps the notion of "Occidentalism," meaning the conventional perspective of the West as other or separate from the identity of the East.

    Powered by Joomla! 1.0 2009

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