Leaving one’s cultural home enables detached judgment of it and other cultures.

Evidence

No less important for Auerbach—and this fact is of immediate relevance to Orientalism—was the humanistic tradition of involvement in a national culture or literature not one’s own. Auerbach’s example was Curtius, whose prodigious output testified to his deliberate choice as a German to dedicate himself professionally to the Romance literatures. Not for nothing, then, did Auerbach end his autumnal reflections with a significant quotation from Hugo of St. Victor’s Didascalicon: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 667

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘every soil is foreign’ principle defines what cultural detachment means for exile scholarship — a core stance connected to the outsider position Orientalists occupied.
• XREF: This detachment-from-home insight connects to the later Islamophobia-field theme of the observer’s positionality; also to exile-writing scholarship like Homi Bhabha’s.
• SHARE: The Auerbach/Hugo of St. Victor passage is exactly the kind of nugget a comparatist or exile-studies scholar would treasure.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 667