Preface
When we are making comparisons among different types of society — which is the very purpose of this book — the categories employed must be meaningful and commonly understood. This requirement is especially important when the comparisons will be read as evaluations, both where intended and where not. We all possess more or less vague conceptions of the Occident or the West, the Orient or the East, and the Aboriginal world in our minds, but when we try to be precise we find them as slippery as Lewis Carroll's "slithy toves" from "Jabberwocky" which "gyre and gimble in the wabe." Carroll also says, via Humpty Dumpty in "The Walrus and the Carpenter," "When I use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." In reality, however, convenient as a Humpty-Dumpty world would be, we are not free to stipulate meanings outside the range of customary usage.

If we are to communicate successfully, we must be sure that the listener hears what the speaker intends. And what the speaker intends must conform more or less to what the listener already understands by the concepts employed. Unfortunately, conventional usage is often confusing and inconsistent. Indeed, conventional usage is often shifting. As late as the 1950s, Turkey was thought an integral part of the Orient. From 1883 until the Second World War — and thereafter intermittently — the exotic Orient Express ran from Paris to Islamic Istanbul, which was not only "the gateway to the Orient" but was deemed an essential part of the "mysterious" Orient itself. When such luminaries as Voltaire, Gustave Flaubert, Walter Scott, Edward FitzGerald, and Thomas Mann referred to the East or the Orient, they customarily meant Arabia.

While words like Oriental or Eastern and Occidental or Western may appear initially to indicate geographical location, we can recognize on closer inspection that they have not only geographical but also historical, ideological, economic, and cultural components — sometimes with emotive overtones, as in the ever "enigmatic" and "inscrutable" Orient. Thus, while modern Japan is geographically and historically Oriental, it is increasingly ideologically and economically Occidental, and its culture clings tenaciously to its Shinto and Buddhist past, threatened constantly by the exigencies of its economic reality. Japanese animal experimenters will on occasion meet ceremonially to offer thanks to the animals they have sacrificed in pursuit of their biomedical goals. Secular science synthesizes with Shinto traditions. Whether Japan is truly a part of the Orient depends on the aspects of Orientalism we are seeking.

A convincing case can be made that Islam is in origin and development more a part of Western than Eastern thought. Yet, of course, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and parts of Malaysia profess the Moslem faith and are decidedly parts of the Orient, and decidedly not a part of the West. Their belief systems are even less compatible with Western secularism than with Hindu polytheism. China, which some may view as the quintessential Orient, currently espouses an ideology developed in Europe and proclaimed by its founder to apply only to societies that have undergone a substantial period of capitalist and industrial growth in the Western manner. While the West may appear at first a rather more homogeneous conception, we may have some difficulty in acknowledging, say, Costa Rica or Jamaica as essentially similar to Denmark or the United States. Because the concepts we employ lack clarity and precision, and may even tend to obfuscation, we may be tempted to abandon them. Yet they are the currency of, and indispensable to, contemporary debate. And they are what this book is about. If inexact, the concepts are nonetheless redolent with meaning.

The term "Aboriginal" is customarily applied to a host of societies from small-scale nomadic foragers through every sort of agro-pastoral society and tribal chiefdoms to expansionist urban state empires such as those of the Maya and the Aztecs. The concept is indeed employed so broadly that we may doubt whether the extremes possess very much in common at all. Certainly, we must be careful constantly to recognize the significant differences among the variety of societies constrained under this conceptual umbrella. But because so many writers today refer generically to Aboriginal societies "at one with nature," it is important to maintain similar terms in response. Moreover, the term is sufficiently meaningful that we know fairly precisely the types of society it excludes. Many anthropologists restrict the use of capitalized Aboriginals to the indigenous population of Australia. However, for the sake of consistency with Oriental and Occidental, with East and West, I have capitalized Aboriginals throughout this book...