Ascribing static attributes to subjects strips them of history and agency.

Evidence

The governing verb is show, which here gives us to understand that the Arabs display themselves (willingly or unwillingly) to and for expert scrutiny. The number of attributes ascribed to them, by its crowded set of sheer appositions, causes “the Arabs” to acquire a sort of existential weightlessness; thereby, “the Arabs” are made to rejoin the very broad designation, common to modern anthropological thought, of “the childish primitive.” What Macdonald also implies is that for such descriptions there is a peculiarly privileged position occupied by the Western Orientalist, whose representative function is precisely to show what needs to be seen. All specific history is capable of being seen thus at the apex, or the sensitive frontier, of Orient and Occident together. The complex dynamics of human life—what I have been calling history as narrative—becomes either irrelevant or trivial in comparison with the circular vision by which the details of Oriental life serve merely to reassert the Orientalness of the subject and the Westernness of the observer. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 631

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘circular vision’ mechanism — details reassert the category rather than the person — is the exact structure later Islamophobia readings find in media coverage that treats any Muslim act as confirming Muslimness. — connects to: The obscene is revealed facticity stripped of its acts and situation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 993; Additive data without narrative structure produces meaninglessness akin to Dadaism — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 133
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism by which descriptive enumeration produces ‘existential weightlessness’ and banishes narrative history is dense and transferable far beyond Orientalism.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘childish primitive’ designation and the circular vision that reasserts category over individual — a key representational tool.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 631