Occidentalism: the world turned upside‐down

From Said's Orientalism (1978), this article extracts a general model of the production of understandings of alien societies. The model points to aspects and manifestations of this production that have received less attention than those associated with Orientalism. After presenting some of these briefly, the article turns to the most neglected, the way that anthropologists have Occidentalized the West. This Occidentalism is likely to have important effects on anthropological understandings of alien societies. The article illustrates Occidentalism by examining the distinction between gift and commodity societies, and it concludes by considering some of the ways that anthropologists might reduce the twin risks of Occidentalism and Orientalism. Occidentalism, Orientalism, Mauss, gifts, Western society