Europe’s Stereotypes în the Xviiith Century - East versus West - The Two Faces of Janus

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the cultural stereotypes in Europe during the Enlightenment period. The starting points are Larry Wolff’s and Mariana Todorova’s perspectives upon the Eastern European cultural space that includes countries like Poland, Russia, Greece, and Turkey. The analytical research covers the XVIIIth century, the moment of reason awakening of the Western part of Europe.

What this paper intends to demonstrate on the basis of a historical-comparative work is the fact that Europe’s unity becomes vulnerable because of cultural stereotypes. Stereotypical thinking of the Western countries like France for instance engenders a cultural cleavage between the East and the West and projects false realities.

Despite the fact that the Enlightenment was a period in which culture flourished on every level, whether we refer to philosophy, political sciences, literature, and the thirst for knowledge was reinforced by the publication of the Encyclopédie, the general perspective upon the Easter part of Europe was a distorted one.

The image of the East was constructed mostly of travel memoires be they true or fictional. The true ones used a judgmental angle of the Western way of thinking that would not superpose on the cultural construction of the Eastern space, whether the fictional memoires would provide a false conception following the trend of the epoch. Thus, Eastern Europe was the “unknown” land, a territory populated with savages that would amaze the Occident with their way of living.

This paper is based on the sociological data gathered by Larry Wolff and Marina Todorova analyzed from a consequential point of view as far as European culture is concerned. Europe must construct a solid cultural structure, adhere to unity and not to a gap enhanced by poor knowledge of a cultural space like the East.

Introduction

Great challenges that mobilized nations with immeasurable territorial ambitions have often been justified by the thirst for knowledge, the need to discover what lies beyond the experienced limits, be they geographical or intellectual. Thus, Christopher Columbus’ wish to find the Indies transforms itself into the conquest of America, the intellectual aplomb of the Enlightenment period emphasizes the Western Europe’s need for knowledge in its craving for progress, this being only a pretext for the West to dominate and subordinate the East, the possibility to conquer territories explored in the Orient or in Eastern Europe. The expeditions of the XVIIIth century, whether they have pedagogic purposes or just embody the intention of widening cultural horizons, many times lead to a superficial, insufficient knowledge of the explored fields, which results in creating stereotypes and preconceptions.

According to Bruce W. Stening and J.E. Everett, stereotypes are “generalized beliefs held about a group of persons or objects” that function as an occlusion instrument: they prevent from seeing the concept from different angles. The process of stereotyping is seen in a large acceptation as “a product of man’s need to categorize objects in his environment which he is unable or unwilling to discriminate between at an individual level” The main problem with stereotypes is that they tend to create distorted perceptions of the objective reality, very often as a result of following a historical trend.