Orientalism is uniquely a totalizing field covering an entire half of the world.

Evidence

Yet any account of Orientalism would have to consider not only the professional Orientalist and his work but also the very notion of a field of study based on a geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic unit called the Orient. … To speak of scholarly specialization as a geographical “field” is, in the case of Orientalism, fairly revealing since no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it called Occidentalism. Already the special, perhaps even eccentric attitude of Orientalism becomes apparent. For although many learned disciplines imply a position taken towards, say, human material (a historian deals with the human past from a special vantage point in the present), there is no real analogy for taking a fixed, more or less total geographical position towards a wide variety of social, linguistic, political, and historical realities. A classicist, a Romance specialist, even an Americanist focuses on a relatively modest portion of the world, not on a full half of it. But Orientalism is a field with considerable geographical ambition. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 148

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the distinctive totalizing geographical ambition that makes Orientalism unlike other disciplines, including its asymmetry with a nonexistent Occidentalism.
• XREF: This totalizing, asymmetrical gaze directly prefigures how Islamophobia as a discourse scans a vast demographic-ethnic whole.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 148