Orientalist science emerges by converting personal testimony into official impersonal statements.

Evidence

Residence in the Orient involves personal experience and personal testimony to a certain extent. Contributions to the library of Orientalism and to its consolidation depend on how experience and testimony get converted from a purely personal document into the enabling codes of Orientalist science. In other words, within a text there has to take place a metamorphosis from personal to official statement; the record of Oriental residence and experience by a European must shed, or at least minimize, its purely autobiographical and indulgent descriptions in favor of descriptions on which Orientalism in general and later Orientalists in particular can draw, build, and base further scientific observation and description. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 401

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies the enabling mechanism: a metamorphosis from personal document to official statement that later scholars can build on.
• XREF: This conversion-of-testimony-into-authority mechanism parallels how journalistic/Academic ‘expert’ discourse on Islam gets formalized in the Islamophobia readings that follow.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 401