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The dialectical relationship between Occident and Orient as discussed by Edward Said is a manifestation of “us versus them.” According to Said, Western culture has proven to be the most ethnocentric culture because of “anthropocentrism in alliance with Europocentrism.” (Said, 98). Said was born and raised in the Middle East (Jerusalem) and received his degrees from Princeton and Harvard, making him a liminal figure in the academic realm. Although such experiences grant him authority on the topic of the West’s relationship to the East, his argument displays a strong partisan attitude towards Oriental culture. Orientalism is an account of the West’s collective view of Eastern culture through what Said argues is a distorted lens called the Orient. Inspired by the Baconian assumption that knowledge is power, Said believes that this view has altered the reality of the people and culture of the East, inadvertently stripping them of their humanity with ethnocentric Western definitions. With a fundamental belief that the origins of the conceptual division of Occident and Orient stem from geographic differences, he concludes that a history of misrepresentation is the culprit for the predominant Western view of an Eastern