What is Orientalism? What is Inner Orieantalism?

As a notion orientalism is being used to describe Western people's and traditions' opinions towards to East since 18th and 19th centuries. Orientalism mostly includes prejudices of Western traditions and people which is shaped by the attitudes of European imperialisim towards to outsider interpretations of the East.

Basically orientalism refers to the way in which non-Western (especially Asian) cultures are perceived in the West, by scholars, writers, thinkers, politicians and society at large. Orientalism involves the use of generalizations and stereotypes to describe what Orientalist thinkers understood as the exotic nature of the Far East.

In our opinions, Orientalism is like Western's misunderstanding towards the East. And it is showing Asia as an eccentric and backward place.

Inner orientalism is kind of a orientalism which occurs because of the discriminations according to people's root in one country, especially in multiethnic countries, like Turkey. We think some peoples in society and media instigate it, and makes it even worse.

Group Informations

Topic: What kind of attitude do Turkish people have towards Kurdish people.
Members: Sibel, Zelal, Hasan, Merve, Serkan, Ezgi
Objectives: Get rid of our prejudices and cliches and look at things objectively, elebrate on things, becoming aware of the other side, working out whose problem "Kurdish problem" is, and finally break our taboos.
Methodology: photographs, posters, movies and books, interview.

What we did so far?

12 April 2010

we discussed in class about our subject and thought what can we do.

14 April 2010

we met together and shared things we have to do, some of us searched orientalism and some of us made some researches about our subject

19 April 2010

We showed our researches to each other, collected them and prepeared our questions to ask Şerif.

21 April 2010

We met Şerif and went to a cafe in campus. We had lunch together, we drank tea and coffee. And we interviewed, asked a lot of things Şerif and realized how less we actually know about Kurdish problem. We really got surprised!

26 April 2010

We discussed in class again. We thought about how can we appy peace education and orientalism to our project and we tried to find a good group name.

11 May 2010

We prepared our question for survery. But then we and Mine had decided that the questions are high politics and we should make it less political, more about conditioning of public. We re-prepared and did a small interview in class. We asked some questions to friends and wrote their opinions to show how conditioned they are but ofcourse it was behalf Turkish society, not only for our friends.

13 May 2010

We did last arrangements about our project and discussed how can we do our presentation. What it should be included and so on. Finally decided to collect our interview's questions for tomorrow. We mentioned about our opinions( what did this project add our lives etc.)

14 May 2010

We prepared our presentation together.