Institutional accreditation replaced personal testimony as the mark of serious Orientalist scholarship

Evidence

An Orientalist was no longer a gifted amateur enthusiast, or if he was, he would have trouble being taken seriously as a scholar. To be an Orientalist meant university training in Oriental studies (by 1850 every major European university had a fully developed curriculum in one or another of the Orientalist disciplines), it meant subvention for one’s travel (perhaps by one of the Asiatic societies or a geographical exploration fund or a government grant), it meant publication in accredited form (perhaps under the imprint of a learned society or an Oriental translation fund). And both within the guild of Orientalist scholars and to the public at large, such uniform accreditation as clothed the work of Orientalist scholarship, not personal testimony nor subjective impressionism, meant Science. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 489

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘Science’ meant in the Orientalist context — institutional accreditation, not method.
• XREF: This is the professionalization/knowledge-industry mechanism that the later Islamophobia readings on institutionalized expertise build on.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 489