Reductive collective labels invent false identities and mobilize murderous conflict

Evidence

The point I want to conclude with now is to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like “America,” “the West,” or “Islam” and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed, their murderous effectiveness vastly reduced in influence and mobilizing power. … We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular discourse. The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence, and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. … Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 48

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the core Orientalism-theory principle: that rubrics like ‘Islam’ or ‘the West’ are socially constructed collective identities, not natural categories.
• XREF: Core scaffolding concept for the reading purpose: the construction of the ‘Other’ via collective identity rubrics, carried into Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Collective violence nearly always activates a we-they boundary from among multiple available identities — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 769; Rising uncertainty across identity boundaries amplifies and sharpens collective violence — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 775
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 48