Orientalists abandoned the term yet continued using it in practice

Evidence

The confusion is readily apparent in a piece written by the historian Bernard Lewis, one of the foremost Orientalists of the twentieth century. In an attack on Edward Said’s Orientalism and on all critics of the discipline, he says that the “term ‘Orientalist’ was not (‘in the past’) as vague and imprecise as it appears now.” It is “by now … polluted beyond salvation … and had been in fact abandoned by those who previously bore it. This abandonment was given formal expression at the Twenty-ninth International Congress of Orientalists, which met in Paris in the Summer of 1973.” After a long debate in that congress over the designation and what it meant to the participants, the “institution was strong enough to prevent the dissolution of the congress.” The “movement to abolish the term ‘Orientalist’ was, however, successful.” In the last sentence of his diatribe, as indeed throughout the body of his text, Lewis nonetheless continues to use the term (arguing, interestingly, that the “most rigorous and penetrating critique of Orientalist, as of any other, scholarship has always been and will remain that of their fellow scholars, especially, though not exhaustively, those working in the same field”). — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 523

Categorization

• CANDY: The International Congress of Orientalists formally voted to abolish the term ‘Orientalist’ in 1973 — a fun footnote-worthy detail.
• XREF: connects to: Obsolete common-law doctrines lingered for centuries rather than being abolished openly. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 92