XVIII-XIXa. orientalizmas Vakarų civilizacinių paradigmų transformacijos perspektyvoje

ENThe new interest in Eastern and Indian traditions, which arose in the Age of Enlightenment, washy most scholars for a long time related to the broadening of the Europeans' cultural horizons and their search for a positive hermeneutics of non-European cultures. The post-orientalist studies point out that this eighteenth-century interest was able to generale a corpus of knowledge about India that was qualitatively new and different from the Western understanding of India since the ancient times. The body of knowledge about India that emerged in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century orientalism suggests that it was not so much the veracity of orientalists' statements about India that was al issue as their epistemological authority, their power to organize the understanding of the world of Indian culture that was established by adopting radical new conceptions and methodological models. The many inconsistencies of trying to reduce orientalist discourse to the institutional framework of colonialism delineate the main focus of this article which is to view the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalist discourse of the humanities in light of the transforming dominant paradigms of Western civilization wherein orientalism and mainly indological orientalism emerges as the epistemic hegemony of Europe organized to establish the supremacy of Western episteme not only in the form of colonial domination over Asia and India but also as epistemic European colonialism exemplified by German Indology since the time of Romanticism.Therefore, the chief point of the article, which is accomplished by examining the conditions for the shift of dominant paradigms of Western civilization in the intellectual and artistic tradition of Enlightenment, is to demonstrate that orientalism as it was developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, was employed to redesign the historical and cultural past of Europe by establishing new historiographical models and excluding unwanted elements and narratives from that past. This goal was achieved by orientalism once it became a unified body of knowledge integrated in the program of European self-definition and self-transformation, yet it was able to become such only by condemning the Ancient model of arguing for the Egyptian and Asiatic roots of Western civilization.