A lucrative market for expertise erases methodological self-questioning in a field
Evidence
This is one reason that in none of the established journals (nor for that matter in recent books by established scholars) is there any attention paid to the basic questions Why Middle East and Islamic studies? and For whom are they being transacted? The obliteration of the methodological consciousness is absolutely coterminous with the presence of the market, for news as well as whole clienteles of security-conscious consumers (governments, corporations, foundations): one simply does not ask why one does what one does if there is an appreciative, or at least a potentially receptive, clientele. Worse yet, the scholar stops thinking in terms of the region and the people about whom studies are being conducted. Islam, if it is “Islam” that is being studied, is not an interlocutor but in a sense a commodity. The overall result is a kind of institutional bad faith. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 327
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The observation that market demand makes a discipline’s constitutive questions unaskable — that self-critique correlates inversely with a paying clientele — generalizes far beyond Islamic studies into any funded research ecology.
- XREF: Resonates with the corruption-of-knowledge theme in the reader’s earlier material on impartiality, procedural norms, and institutional trust dynamics. — connects to: Climate and health experts also hide financial ties, making capture profession-wide — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 582