Learned fields constrain individual scholarship through cumulative institutional consensus

Evidence

The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, the collective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and social circumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar’s production. A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies, geographical societies, universities), and generically determined writing (travel books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description). The result for Orientalism has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has built his work and research upon them, and they in turn have pressed hard upon new writers and scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 506

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines a field’s ‘cumulative and corporate identity’ — the mechanism by which institutions and past work constrain what counts as a correct statement. This is the scaffold concept of a disciplinary consensus.
• XREF: Directly connects to the later Islamophobia readings: the same mechanism of cumulative, institutional consensus will be doing its work there, and to Gramsci’s notion of the intellectual and ‘common sense’. — connects to: MPS fused disciplines and professions into a transacademic knowledge machine beyond single disciplines — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 86; Scholarly networks create echo chambers that sideline marginal knowledge — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 116
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 506