Orientalism’s denigration of its subject creates an inner contradiction for scholars who study it

Evidence

Among those ideas is the specially legitimated antipathy towards and downgrading of the material forming the main basis of his study. So strong is this in Berger that it obscures the actualities before his eyes. And more impressively still, it makes it unnecessary for him to ask himself why, if the Middle East “is not a center of great cultural achievement,” he should recommend that anyone devote his life, as he has, to the study of its culture. Scholars—more than, say, doctors—study what they like and what interests them; only an exaggerated sense of cultural duty drives a scholar to the study of what he does not think well of. Yet it is just such a sense of duty Orientalism has fostered, because for generations the culture at large put the Orientalist at the barricades, where in his professional work he confronted the East—its barbarities, its eccentricities, its unruliness—and held it at bay on behalf of the West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 736

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s concept of scholarly habitus and to how a field’s founding prejudices shape practitioners’ self-contradiction.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 736