Orientalism lagged behind the methods of the human and social sciences

Evidence

One index of the crisis, according to Abdel Malek, was not simply that “national liberation movements in the ex-colonial” Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic “subject races”; there was in addition the fact that “specialists and the public at large became aware of the time-lag, not only between orientalist science and the material under study, but also—and this was to be determining—between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of orientalism.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 294

Categorization

• XREF: The methodological time-lag critique prefigures later postcolonial criticism of area studies and the Islamophobia field’s insistence on bringing the social sciences into the study of Muslims. — connects to: A 1985 ethnography uncritically accepted orientalist golden-age narratives — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1997; Social-science methods smuggled Orientalist racism past academic scrutiny — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 261
• ADDENDUM: This ‘methodological time-lag’ mechanism parallels the tree/grafting essay’s claim that old infrastructure gets outrun by new conditions it cannot absorb.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 294