Orientalist scholarship reduces lived behavior to a few explanatory categories

Evidence

The executive power of such a system of reference, by which each discrete instance of real behavior could be reduced down and back to a small number of explanatory “original” categories, was considerable by the end of the nineteenth century. In Orientalism it was the equivalent of bureaucracy in public administration. The department was more useful than the individual file, and certainly the human being was significant principally as the occasion for a file. We must imagine the Orientalist at work in the role of a clerk putting together a very wide assortment of files in a large cabinet marked “the Semites.” Aided by recent discoveries in comparative and primitive anthropology, a scholar like William Robertson Smith could group together the inhabitants of the Near Orient and write on their kinship and marriage customs, on the form and content of their religious practice. The power of Smith’s work is its plainly radical demythologizing of the Semites. The nominal barriers presented to the world by Islam or Judaism are swept aside; Smith uses Semitic philology, mythology, and Orientalist scholarship “to construct … a hypothetical picture of the development of the social systems, consistent with all the Arabian facts.” If this picture succeeds in revealing the antecedent, and still influential, roots of monotheism in totemism or animal worship, then the scholar has been successful. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 590

Categorization

• DEFINE: Said’s bureaucratic analogy — the Orientalist as clerk filing individuals under ‘the Semites’ — is the core mechanism by which a totalizing system of reference erases discrete human reality.
• XREF: Directly prefigures the bureaucratic-rationality-and-mass-exclusion thread of the Foundations Module; connects to Arendt’s analysis of bureaucracy and later readings on race-thinking becoming administrative practice. — connects to: Behaviorist accounts of persons fail by omitting their transcendence-transcended principle
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 590