Cultural analysis must escape both coarse generality and atomistic detail

Evidence

My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems I have tried to deal with three main aspects of my own contemporary reality that seem to me to point the way out of the methodological or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing, difficulties that might force one, in the first instance, into writing a coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description as not to be worth the effort, or in the second instance, into writing so detailed and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How then to recognize individuality and to reconcile it with its intelligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general and hegemonic context? — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 65

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up Said’s methodological problem: reconciling individual analysis with hegemonic general context, which frames the book’s central analytic move.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 65