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Args to block out Said oversimplifies east-west relations. he overlooks the intellectual power of people in the orient Science.Jrank.org <a href ="http://science.jrank.org/pages/10519/Occidentalism -East-West-Dialogue-Other.html"> Occidentalism - East- west Dialogue And The Other</a> 2001 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashion ing Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001. While the discussion of Occidentalism is often in juxtaposition with that of Orientalism, it can also amount to a criticism of the latter. Edward Said's critique of Orientalist writingshttp://science.jrank.org/pages/10519/Occidentalism-East-West-Dialogue-Ot her.html and studies raised important questions about the Western hegemonic power in shaping the imagery of the "Orient." But like the Orientalists, as Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi charges, Said, in presenting his thesis on the Western discursive hegemony, underestimates and overlooks the intellectual power and contribution of the people in the Orient. In his study of the Persianate writings in history and travelogue by Iranians and Indians during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Tavakoli-Targhi notes that prior to the spread of European power, the Asians not only traveled to and wrote about Europe, contributing to Persianate Europology, but they also helped the early European Orientalists to acquire a knowledge of the Orient. In other words, in the exchanges between East and West, the East was not a passive, silent Other, as portrayed by the Orientalists (and also, ironically, as endorsed by Edward Said). Rather, argues Tavakoli-Targhi, the Persianate writers displayed equivalent intellectual capability to engage in cross- cultural communications with their Western counterparts. That the Orientals contributed to the gestation of Orientalism has also been noticed by Arif Dirlik in his study of South and East Asian history, although he casts this contribution in a more critical light. The Critique¶s Obsession with Representations Blocks ANY Productive Change to International Relations - It Creates an Unavoidable epistemological crisis Morten Valbjørn, PhD in the Department of Political Science @ Aarhus, µ4 [ Middle East and Palestine: Global Politics and Regional Conflict, ³Culture Blind and Culture Blinded: Images of Middle Eastern Conflicts in International Relations,´ p. 67-8]] As mentioned before, the relational perspective is a critique of both the neglect of the issue of Otherness by the IR mainstream and the way in which proponents of an essentialist approach relate to the Other. For this reason, it would be natural to assume t hat proponents of this second attempt to "culturalize" the study of international relations would be particularly keen to address the question of how to acknowledge cultural diversity without committing the sins of orientalism. Indeed, this is also what Said is stressing in the introduction to Orientalism: The most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or nonrepressive and non-manipulative perspective. (1995: 24) However, he then goes on to add that " these are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study" (Said, 1995: 24). Looking at other analyses based on a relational conception of culture, it becomes apparent that the latter remark is very telling for this kind of understanding of culture as a whole (e.g. Doty, 1993: 315). Despite a blank rejection of the universalism of IR mainstream and, at least in principle, a recognition of the existence of different Others who are not only projections of own fantasies and desires, in practice, proponen ts of this alternative approac h nonetheless usually leave the question of how to address and approach the actual cultural Other unanswered. This might very well be an unintend ed outcome of the pre viously mentioned radical constructivism associated with this approac h. Thus, by

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