Philology founded Orientalism as a science driven by European imperial acquisition
Evidence
From the last decades of the eighteenth century and for at least a century and a half, Britain and France dominated Orientalism as a discipline. The great philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones, Franz Bopp, Jakob Grimm, and others were originally indebted to manuscripts brought from the East to Paris and London. Almost without exception, every Orientalist began his career as a philologist, and the revolution in philology that produced Bopp, Sacy, Burnouf, and their students was a comparative science based on the premise that languages belong to families, of which the Indo-European and the Semitic are two great instances. … From the outset, then, Orientalism carried forward two traits: (1) a newly found scientific self-consciousness based on the linguistic importance of the Orient to Europe, and (2) a proclivity to divide, subdivide, and redivide its subject matter without ever changing its mind about the Orient as being always the same, unchanging, uniform, and radically peculiar object. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 272
Categorization
- XREF: Philology as the founding discipline links to the reader’s later exploration of how bureaucratic/rational knowledge production underwrites exclusion. — connects to: Orientalism expanded from scholarly practice to signify imperialist ideology
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 272