All Orientalist writing, even purportedly neutral science, centers a European ego

Evidence

Despite their differences, however, these three categories are not so separate from each other as one would imagine. Nor does each category contain “pure” representative types. For example, works in all three categories rely upon the sheer egoistic powers of the European consciousness at their center. In all cases the Orient is for the European observer, and what is more, in the category that contains Lane’s Egyptians, the Orientalist ego is very much in evidence, however much his style tries for impartial impersonality. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 404

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The claim that even impartial scientific style carries an observing ego anticipates arguments about objectivity and standpoint in later decolonial and Islamophobia criticism.

Related

• Orientalism’s scientific pretense requires positing a permanent, unchanging Orient (similarity 0.86)
• Even putatively impartial scientific Orientalism remains an egoistic interpretive act that rebuilds its object. (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist writing can serve as ego-prolongation rather than impersonal scholarship (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.84)
• Claims to objectivity themselves constitute the culminating Orientalist dogma (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism’s intent was critique, not affirmation of antithetical identities (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist science fails to recognize the will to power feeding its claims (similarity 0.83)
• Europeans claimed to possess the Orient’s souls beyond territorial power (similarity 0.83)
• The word ‘Oriental’ alone invoked a fixed, unchallengeable body of knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist writing edited the Orient to shield European sensibility from its strangeness (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power (similarity 0.83)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (similarity 0.83)
• Even technically accomplished Orientalist scholarship rests on racist and mercenary assumptions. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist description gets obliterated by the imperial ego’s projections (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Orientalist science masks an egoistic will to power #exemplifies (0.95) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 320