Classification into types is a prerequisite for Orientalist knowledge

Evidence

A fourth element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types. The greatest names are, of course, Linnaeus and Buffon, but the intellectual process by which bodily (and soon moral, intellectual, and spiritual) extension—the typical materiality of an object—could be transformed from mere spectacle to the precise measurement of characteristic elements was very widespread. Linnaeus said that every note made about a natural type “should be a product of number, of form, of proportion, of situation,” and indeed, if one looks in Kant or Diderot or Johnson, there is everywhere a similar penchant for dramatizing general features, for reducing vast numbers of objects to a smaller number of orderable and describable types. In natural history, in anthropology, in cultural generalization, a type had a particular character which provided the observer with a designation and, as Foucault says, “a controlled derivation.” These types and characters belonged to a system, a network of related generalizations. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Foucault’s work on classification and discursive control, a core scaffolding concept for critical theory vocabulary.
• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism by which natural-history classification becomes a template for cultural-racial typecasting of the Orient.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 327