Образ Востока в системах мышления и структурах социального действия

Abstract

The images of geographical space and historical time, born in the practices of poetic experience and philosophical reflection, subsequently migrated to the subject-matter domains of sociology, political science, economics, and other social sciences, under­going a long conceptual as well as analytical evolution. In fact, they turned into ef­fective tools for scientific analysis of social, political and economic processes with the scope of application ranging from theoretical constructs and expert assessments to managerial decision-making and futurological forecasts. Moreover, cultural and historical images, arriving into the sphere of theoretical as well as expert-and-analyti­cal knowledge from pre-scientific practices, came back to the sphere of everyday life and began to play an increasingly important role in self-identification, as well as in individual and collective searches for identity. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the newly formed concepts of the East and the West, the Modern and the Ar­chaic, in their dynamic dimension, gave birth to the “procedural” derivatives thereof, the most well-known and the most broadly applied among which is the concept of modernization, which manifested itself, inter alia, in the emergence of a theory or even many theories of the same name. At the same time, the concepts of westerniza­tion and archaization have been less fortunate: in fact, they have turned into the terms used in the conceptual space of the same theory of modernization. The rarest to be used is the fourth of the concepts in question – the concept of orientalization. This article deals with the very few instances of the use of this term found by the author in modern scientific literature.