Even modernists drawn to Eastern wisdom retained Orientalist mistrust

Evidence

If we reflect that Raymond Schwab brought out his brilliant biography of Anquetil-Duperron in 1934—and began those studies which were to put Orientalism in its proper cultural context—we must also remark that what he did was in stark contrast to his fellow artists and intellectuals, for whom Orient and Occident were still the secondhand abstractions they were for Valéry. Not that Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Arthur Waley, Fenollosa, Paul Claudel(in his Connaissance de l’est), Victor Ségalen, and others were ignoring “the wisdom of the East,” as Max Müller had called it a few generations earlier. Rather the culture viewed the Orient, and Islam in particular, with the mistrust with which its learned attitude to the Orient had always been freighted. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 650

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The persistence of mistrust despite intellectual curiosity anticipates the later scaffolding point that appreciation and othering co-exist within the same Orientalist frame.

Related

• Orientalism’s denigration of its subject creates an inner contradiction for scholars who study it (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist training typically converted initial fascination into a debunking project (similarity 0.83)
• Sympathetic German Orientalism also enabled anti-imperialist critique of Western academia (similarity 0.82)
• European encroachment boosted Orientalism’s confidence while draining its originality (similarity 0.82)
• Sympathetic Orientalists distort Eastern thought by forcing it into Western frames (similarity 0.81)
• European confidence in cultural superiority rests on doubting the Orient produces anything new (similarity 0.81)
• Academic Orientalist expertise legitimizes rather than corrects crude stereotypes (similarity 0.81)
• Studying other cultures without repression requires rethinking knowledge and power (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.81)
• Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity (similarity 0.81)
• Learned Orientalist scholarship pressed ideological myths into service (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is a symptom, not the cause, of modernity’s epistemic disorder. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist cultural borrowing mixed admiration with denigration, not pure contempt (similarity 0.81)
• Europe’s doubt about Oriental novelty serves as its cultural weapon (similarity 0.81)