Cultural Exoticism Quotes

Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.

Most of us, when we go out with a camera in our own country, try to find exotic subject matter to photograph.

In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food... they've never even tasted it!

I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

It's only interesting when you're from somewhere else, like America or Japan. The further away the more interesting it is.

The English are very exotic to me.

The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.