More than 2 million children under five die each year in India

New Delhi, 9 August 2008. - More than two million Indian children - under five years 22 percent of total world-die annually, according to UNICEF, child policy which states of India as "key" to achieve The fourth objective of the UN millennium.
Based on 1990, the UN aims to reduce by two thirds the global rate of infant mortality in children under five in 2015, but to achieve that goal, according to UNICEF, more effort will be needed in areas such as southern Asia.
"The Governments of South Asia do not spend much on health, just 1.1 percent. That spending should increase, because we can not act without public funding, "he told a press conference in New Delhi the director of UNICEF in the region, Daniel Toole.
The organization presented its annual report this week on the state of childhood in the Asia-Pacific, which qualifies as "insufficient" progress made ​​so far by the countries of southern Africa, where he died a third of the world's children.
The region has serious structural weaknesses, as there are countries at war, like Afghanistan, with areas of corruption, poverty and huge disparities in access to food and health, as in rural India.
"India is key to significant progress in the MDGs. If India fails, we will have failed all, "he told the same press conference the director of UNICEF Health for this country, Marzio Babille.
In South Asia there are 300 million undernourished people, of which much has the Indian nationality, a country where every year 8.3 million children are born underweight.
The main cause is malnutrition of their mothers, who suffer constant discrimination and women in most societies of South Asia.
The region is unique in the world where the girls born weighing less than boys. The female life expectancy is less than the male and one third of women suffer low birth weight.
"In India there are 50 million women who simply have disappeared as a result of feticide, abortions ... Nobody knows what happened to them. In many areas, mothers pay more attention to the male child and give it an advantage over girls, "Toole told Efe.
The son preference is that the child is the guardian of the lineage and heritage and is responsible for the care of parents when they age, while the daughter leaves home with an expensive dowry under the arm at the time of marriage.
Without access to education or family planning, women in the subcontinent are married at early age and it affects one in five mothers give birth between 15 and 19 years, with little energy to nurse children who arrive in a row.
"Sometimes, the habits of the mothers are rooted in incorrect traditions. Many believe that the child's death is normal. We have internalized "says Babille.
Force mothers and malnourished babies bred grass anemia, pneumonia and dysentery, causing havoc in India's rural areas, where access to primary health care is reduced to 22 percent of the population.
Thus, less than half of children between one and two years, UNICEF indicates vaccines are mandatory, especially in rural areas, with an infant mortality rate 50 percent higher than in the booming cities.
The gap between urban and rural society, India added the consequences of socioeconomic inequality and its caste structure, which has historically deferred to 167 million "untouchables".
Children "Dalits" (untouchables) are worse in school meals and their parents have access, when they have the worst jobs, and health services. Three out of four women "Dalits" give birth without assistance, interestingly three of every four children "Dalit" have anemia.
To output the complex maze child labor, UNICEF is planning further investment in health and a more defined for the population groups at risk, taking into account income, gender, caste, ethnicity or geography.
"In India there is a political will (to change things). The problem is how to reach the poorest, who live outside of the main routes of communication, "said Babille.

Orientalism

The term "Orientalism" refers to the imitation or the example of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, but also makes ref erence to the empathetic attitude towards the region by a writer or any other person . An "Orientalist" may be also the person in charge of academic Oriental Studies.

The meaning of u n turn acquired the controversial work of Edward Said of the same name, published in 1978. Said uses the term to describe two traditions, artistic and academic, hostile and contemptuous views of the East by the West, partly influenced by the era of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Used in this sense, the "Orientalism" includes interpretations of Eastern culture marked by prejudice. Said criticized the academic tradition, custom writers such as Bernard Lewis. In contrast, the term has also been used by other scholars to refer to writers of the old imperialist attitudes favorable to Eastern culture.

Meaning of témino. Orientalism comes from the Latin word "oriens" (East) and also the Greek he'oros' (the direction of the rising sun). East West is the opposite, non-trivial issue in the old order of the known world: Western Europe was considered and the east end of the world was known East. Hence the conception of the Orient, with its Eurocentric varnish, has changed over time: for the Roman Empire "East" referred to the current Middle East. L did not know then as flourishing cultures of the Far East, just as in the Far East was unknown in Europe.

Over time, the meaning of "East" was moving east as western explorers reached new heights. The "wise men" biblical "East" came from the "East", with the probable meaning of Arabia and the Persian Empire. Europe, however, became aware that beyond this, reaching the Pacific coast, whose space was called the Far East. In the West, these changes in meaning over time add to the confusion (historical and geographical) to Oriental studies.

Are however areas where "East" and "oriental" denote definitions and outdated. The "oriental spices" come from regions between the Middle East and Indochina. Travel in the "Orient Express" just come to Istanbul in the east side of Europe.

In Spanish, "oriental" is a term referring to the peoples, cultures and gods of the areas of East and Southeast Asia populated by Mongoloid races.

The arts. Imitation oriental style. One of the meanings of Orientalism is adopting motifs, styles and arguments in art, architecture and design. The "turquerie" as they called that old fashion, began in the fifteenth century and reached the century.

Early use of motives taken from the Indian subcontinent has been sometimes called the "Indian style". In this stream there are many examples in the UK, the main actor of imperialism in the area, as Sezincote Guildhall or house, but also in Potsdam, Stuttgart and Toronto.

The term "chinoiserie", French, includes fashion by Chinese motifs in the decoration of Western art, in successive waves since the seventeenth century, with a special place during the Rococo period. Since the Renaissance, European designers were trying to imitate the technical sophistication of Chinese ceramics, with modest success. The "chinoiserie" (chinería) appears most f orce in countries with active East India Companies, as the United Kingdom, Denmark, Holland and France. In the European imagination was of particular importance china, imitated in the Dutch city of Delft or German Meissen.

Chinese-flavored appeared gardens and recreational areas in the Rococo German palaces and the tiles of the palace of Aranjuez, in Madrid. Tables for tea and Chinese toilets, sober pictures of the furniture Xing start to populate the noblest halls of Europe. There are small pagodas in the chimneys and larger parks.

For art inspired by Japan, the key date is 1860, with the arrival of Japanese woodcut prints and their influence on artists such as Monet or McNeill Whistler.

Representation of the East in art and literature. The representation of the "Moors" or "Turkish" begins in the Middle Ages and continues through the Renaissance and Baroque. The first outlines of orientalism in Western art biblical scenes appear in the first Dutch painting, where some secondary figures, such as Romans or Jews, are dressed in exotic costumes and wearing turbans include the nearby this contemporary. Renaissance Venice shows a particular interest in the Ottoman Empire in painting, with Gentille Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio to the head. At the time, were already more accurate representations, and the men were already white.

In the nineteenth century, increase oriental scenes. In many works repeats the myth of an exotic and decadent East, dominated by corruption. These works focus on the Middle Eastern Islamic cultures. Artists such as Delacroix, Gérôme or Roubtzoff Islam reflected in his paintings, often collect odalisques. Ingres, director of the French Academy of Painting, painted a Turkish bath in which generalized the Eastern eroticism and became socially acceptable in the eyes of France. Although all bodies probably belonged to the same model, had called the play "A brothel in Paris", this would have been controversial. The sensuality and was considered an integral part of the East, and this view persisted in the early twentieth century, as seen in Matisse's nudes. In these works, the "east" is often a mirror of Western culture itself, even as a way to express their faces hidden or illegal.

The use of exotic East and went back into the world of cinema, particularly in some successes of Rudolph Valentino. Later, the rich Arabic became a popular resort, especially during the oil crisis of the 70. In the nineties, that image gave way to a more negative: the terrorist villain common in western movies.

Edward Said, "Orientalism." A central idea is that Edward Said on the Middle Western knowledge is not built on facts but on imagined constructs that see Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and different characteristics shared crucial to the West. There is thus a priori knowledge that sets a opposite East West. Knowledge of the East is built with literary texts and historical data that often have a limited understanding of the facts of the Middle East.

Before Said's book, "Oriental" was used as opposed to "Western". Comparisons between the two entities were often unfavorable to the East, although the term was used by respectable institutions. But the word "Orient" fell into dispute with the birth of the term "Orientalism". Following ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in the field of thought-both academic and popular-especially with the European vision of the Islamic world. For Said, East and West acted like two sides of the coin, in which East was only a negative complement Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, also influenced the perception of Said. In particular, Said used the concept of hegemony to analyze the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations among Western scholars.

Said limited his academic discussion to the study of Middle East culture and history of Africa and Asia, but also said that Orientalism is a significant dimension of modern political and intellectual culture. His perspective of the late nineteenth century, when the departments in the area had left the colonial paradigm. Still, this paradigm continued in works such as Bernard Lewis as late as 1977. The idea of an East is key to define the West. Therefore, the study of Greco-Persian wars affect the comparison between the democratic tradition of Athens and the Persian Empire's authoritarian system, but as a way to extrapolate to a more general comparison between Greeks and Persians, and also between East and West, between Europe and Asia, without reference to the many Greek cities also were governed by authoritarian regimes.

Said tries to unravel the power relations colonizer - colonized latent in the texts of writers and academics in Europe. His work has implications beyond the Middle East, particularly on attitudes towards China or India. "Orientalism" is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Later, Said developed and modified his ideas in the 1993 book "Culture and Imperialism."

Many scholars now use Said's work to try to alleviate Western ideological bases, often taken for granted without critical discussion. Some have come to maintain the idea that the West's self was constructed from the difference with others. If Europe is left of Christianity as non-Byzantium, modern Europe from the end of the late sixteenth century defined itself as the "not-Turkey."

Said sets out some definitions of "Orientalism" in the introduction to his work. Some have been more influential than others.

• "A way of approaching East based on the special place it occupies in the Middle Western European experience.
• "A style of thought based on ontological or epistemological distinction made ​​between" East "and" West. "
• "Western style for dominating, restructuring and show his authority over the Orient".
• "Orientalism is particularly valuable as a sign of power on the East Atlantic-European rather than true speech of the East ".
• "Distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic texts, academic, economic, sociological, historical and philological.

In his preface to the 2003 edition, Said made ​​a warning against "falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities" with terms such as America, the West and Islam, "leading to what he considers a" clash of civilizations "prefabricated .

Positions contrary to Said. Critics Said's theory, as the historian Bernard Lewis, argue that the review contains errors conceptual, methodological and factual. Said ignores many genuine contributions to the study of Eastern cultures made ​​by Westerners during the Enlightenment and the Victorian era. Said's theory does not explain why the French and English studied Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long before that will control the Middle East. And he was criticized for having ignored the contributions of Italian scholars, Dutch, and especially Germans. For Lewis, the intellectuals of these countries are more important in European Orientalism than the French or the English, despite the disconnect between the studies and their colonial presence. And Said's theory, says Lewis, does not explain why studies failed Orientalists advance the causes of imperialism.

"What purpose served imperial deciphering the ancient Egyptian, for example, and the restoration of knowledge and pride Egyptians for its old and forgotten past" (B. Lewis).

Lewis argued that Orientalism is born of humanism. A different ideology of imperialism, and sometimes opposed to it. The Orientalist study of Islam born of rejection of religious dogma, and served to spur awareness of alternative cultures. Lewis calls "intellectual protectionism" the argument that only those beyond a culture can usefully discuss its components.

Said Lewis responds to the arguments by saying that this should be placed in context. One of the main arguments is that Orientalism Said was used as an instrument of the Empire, and the author claims that criticism of Lewis is not disinterested, but part of the neo-imperialist positions of Lewis, sometimes masked.

Lewis is aligned with schools of thought that promote neocon vision for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Most intellectuals are lined with Said, which is criticized by supporters of Lewis as a bias that has led to funding cuts in those academic departments. The website www.campuswatch.org , for example, encourages students to report the prejudices of their teachers.

Bryan Turner criticizes the work of Said saying that there are multiple ways and traditions of Orientalism. So Said criticizes attempts to place them all under the same light. Other critics point out that, despite the fantasies and distortions, the notion of "East" as a negative mirror of the West is not usually because the view changes according to different cultures. In any case, it is a logical necessity that other cultures are identified as "different". And there are some who maintain that Said criticizes the "essentialism" of Orientalists in categorizing the East, but he falls into the stereotype of the characteristics of the West.

The West viewed from the east. In contrast, many of the concepts associated with the derogatory "Orientalism" short-western but with a reverse direction, in the epilogue of "Chapter of the Western Regions" of Hou Hanshu. This is the official history of the Han Dynasty (25-221 years). The book is compiled by Fan Ye (d. 445) and succinctly expresses the Han opinion "Western" culture Hu, in the current western China.

Hu Westerners are far

They live in an area outside.

The products of their country are beautiful

But his character is corrupt and frivolous.

They follow the rites of China

Han has the canonical books.

They do not obey the way of the gods.

What a pity!

What stubborn!

Although this quote refers to the west of China, there are plenty of stereotypical representations of Western works of Indian artists, Japanese and Chinese. But, in contrast, some Eastern artists adopted western styles. The Indian painter Ravi Varma painted works of some images indistinguishable Western Orientalists. In the late twentieth century, many Western cultural motifs and images began to appear in the Asian culture and art, especially in Japan. The English words and phrases are prominent in popular culture and advertising in Japan. Many characters, themes and mythological figures of the "anime" Japanese are derived from various Western cultural traditions.

Recently, the term "Occidentalism" has been coined to refer to the negative view of the West present at times in the current Eastern societies.