Philology denied Oriental cultures organic generation, rendering them laboratory constructs

Evidence

For all of Renan’s effort was to deny Oriental culture the right to be generated, except artificially in the philological laboratory. A man was not a child of the culture; that dynastic conception had been too effectively challenged by philology. Philology taught one how culture is a construct, an articulation (in the sense that Dickens used the word for Mr. Venus’s profession in Our Mutual Friend), even a creation, but not anything more than a quasi-organic structure. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 379

Categorization

• XREF: The denial of organic cultural generation links directly to later Islamophobia readings on how the ‘Orient’ is constructed as passive raw material.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 379