All cultures transform other cultures into knowledge fitting their own needs

Evidence

One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. … Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental. This process of conversion is a disciplined one: it is taught, it has its own societies, periodicals, traditions, vocabulary, rhetoric, all in basic ways connected to and supplied by the prevailing cultural and political norms of the West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key distinction: cultural transformation of the other is universal, but Orientalism’s institutionalized form is what matters
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 181
• XREF: connects to: Indigenous knowledge and Western science can coexist as complementary polycultures — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 487