Orient: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Orient employs a Latin term Oriens referring simply to the rising of the sun, to imply "the East". Similar terms are the French-derived "Levant" and "Anatolia" from the Greek anatole, two further locutions for the direction in which the sun rises.

"Orient" and "Oriental" were formerly used in English to refer to both Near and Far Eastern countries. The image came to convey a cliché "oriental" fantasy consisting of an image of seductive women and dangerous men living amid luxuries in a static decadent society full of superstitions but with a glorious but long-gone past. When Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a steamy vision of a harem (illustration, right), a place that only Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had ever actually penetrated, he made his steamy Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. Nevertheless, if his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," the scandal would have ended his career. The exotic Orient made sensuality acceptable. Similarly, through the 20th century, the only breasts photographed in National Geographic were brown-skinned, in exotic cultures without automobiles.

In less academic hands, Ingres' orientalizing degenerated into increasingly realistic and detailed soft-core "odalisque" pornography before the end of the 19th century.

Unless one is travelling on the Orient Express, the "Orient" is a vague destination. The area is not homogeneous, and the term now refers chiefly to orientalism, the collection of Westerners' fantasies about the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. For discussion of history or current events, more specific words such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or individual country names are preferred.

Though "Occident" has no similar patronizing connotations, it is being sympathetically dropped from usage, as contemporary English speakers struggle to achieve history's first culturally-neutral language.

Many of the essentially dismissive and patronizing concepts associated with "Oriental" as expressed above are summed up— but in reverse orientation— in the epilogue to the "Chapter on the Western Regions" according to the Hou Hanshu. This is the official history of the Later (or ‘Eastern’) Han Dynasty (25-221 CE), which was compiled by Fan Ye, (died 445 CE), and it succinctly expresses the Han opinion of the Western Hu culture (in what is now western China):

The Western Hu are far away.

They live in an outer zone.

Their countries’ products are beautiful and precious,

But their character is debauched and frivolous.

They do not follow the rites of China.

Han has the canonical books.

They do not obey the Way of the Gods.

How pitiful!

How obstinate!

See also: Orientalism, Orient Watches, Occident (the opposite of Orient).