European curiosity about alien cultures grew from trade, conquest, and need
Evidence
Even if we leave aside “the new and totally different” and therefore (by assumption) pure intellectual curiosity — which no one else who has tried to read and interpret a text has ever been fortunate enough to possess — there is much too much to be accepted on faith here. From reading such cultural and colonial historians as Donald Lach or J. H. Parry, one would conclude that European interest in alien cultures was based on actual encounters with those cultures usually as a result of trade, conquest, or accident. “Interest” derives from need, and need rests on empirically stimulated things working and existing together — appetite, fear, curiosity, and so on — which have always been in play wherever and whenever human beings have lived. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 307
Categorization
- XREF: Reinforces the core Orientalism argument that knowledge follows power; connects to the anthropology-ethnology complicity debate cited later at 308.
Related
- Colonial expansion made alien cultures interpretable in the first place (similarity 0.85)
- Knowing another culture needs uncoercive contact and interpretive self-consciousness (similarity 0.81)
- European encroachment boosted Orientalism’s confidence while draining its originality (similarity 0.80)
- Enlightenment Europeans knew Orientals only through fantasy and conquest-serving reportage (similarity 0.79)
- Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.79)