Orientalist scholarship resurrects and creates its object through philological techniques

Evidence

The modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient’s lost languages, mores, even mentalities, as Champollion reconstructed Egyptian hieroglyphics out of the Rosetta Stone. The specific Orientalist techniques—lexicography, grammar, translation, cultural decoding—restored, fleshed out, reasserted the values both of an ancient, classical Orient and of the traditional disciplines of philology, history, rhetoric, and doctrinal polemic. But in the process, the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed dialectically, for they could not survive in their original form. The Orient, even in the “classic” form which the Orientalist usually studied, was modernized, restored to the present; the traditional disciplines too were brought into contemporary culture. Yet both bore the traces of power—power to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power that dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and of anthropological generalization. In short, having transported the Orient into modernity, the Orientalist could celebrate his method, and his position, as that of a secular creator, a man who made new worlds as God had once made the old. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading on representation and the construction of the ‘Other’ — the Orientalist ‘created’ the Orient rather than discovering it. — connects to: Modern Philhellenism fused barbarism and culture in German scholarship; Orientalist painters invented imagery of Eastern despotism they never witnessed
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which the scholar becomes a ‘secular creator’ — the power of the philological tradition to constitute its object.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 332