Cultural Orientalism was admiring and varied, unlike institutional Orientalism that served colonialism.

Evidence

When studied within culture and the arts, Orientalism is not monolithic, as various scholars have argued. In her analysis of British and French writing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, American studies scholar Lisa Lowe shows that not only are there differences between the two imperial nation’s literary works but that the “other” is represented differently at different moments. Historian John MacKenzie argues that culture is extraordinarily heterogeneous and, like Makdisi, notes that internal others played a role in the construction of external others. Furthermore, various artistic forms relied on cultural borrowing. Writers like Goethe drew from Persian and Arabic literary styles and European architects similarly were influenced by ancient Egyptian aesthetics. MacKenzie argues therefore that Orientalism is a constantly changing, versatile and protean form which is “as often consumed by admiration and reverence as by denigration and deprecation.” … In what follows, I focus on institutional Orientalism, or a system of ideas and practices that Abdel-Malek, Said, Turner, and others have argued helped consolidate colonialism. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 167

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘institutional Orientalism’ as distinct from the heterogeneous cultural-artistic Orientalism that Lowe, MacKenzie, and the Romantics studied.

Related

• Cultural Orientalism mixed reverence with denigration and shifted across moments (similarity 0.92)
• Orientalist scholarship was internally diverse and historically contingent, not monolithic (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist scholarship varied internally but shared the racial category (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism was internally divided rather than a monolithic colonial tool (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.83)
• Islamic Orientalism resisted internal critique while cognate fields engaged it. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship includes anti-imperialist activists, not only empire-serving scholars (similarity 0.83)
• Institutional Orientalism rests on four interlocking civilizational assumptions about stagnant Eastern societies (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist dissenters defended Islam’s internal diversity against essentializing stereotypes (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.82)
• Early Orientalism studied classical texts, not living societies (similarity 0.82)
• Anti-colonial cultural criticism predates Orientalism in the colonized world (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism metamorphosed from scholarly discourse into an imperial institution (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism persists by being internalized by the Orient itself and by new imperialism (similarity 0.82)