Scholarly authority over the Orient rests on compressing present diversity into an originary type

Evidence

The profession of specialized research conferred unique privileges. We recall that Lane could appear to be an Oriental and yet retain his scholarly detachment. The Orientals he studied became in fact his Orientals, for he saw them not only as actual people but as monumentalized objects in his account of them. This double perspective encouraged a sort of structured irony. On the one hand, there was a collection of people living in the present; on the other hand, these people—as the subject of study—became “the Egyptians,” “the Muslims,” or “the Orientals.” Only the scholar could see, and manipulate, the discrepancy between the two levels. The tendency of the former was always towards greater variety, yet this variety was always being restrained, compressed downwards and backwards to the radical terminal of the generality. Every modern, native instance of behavior became an effusion to be sent back to the original terminal, which was strengthened in the process. This kind of “dispatching” was precisely the discipline of Orientalism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 588

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the term ‘dispatching’ and the mechanics of how Orientalist scholarship converts living present-tense individuals into monumentalized categorical types.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffold on representation and construction of the ‘Other’ — the compression of variety into a terminal generality is the representational mechanism underlying later Islamophobia analyses. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”
• DEEPTHINKING: The two-level ‘structured irony’ — living people versus their monumentalized type, with the scholar alone manipulating the gap — is a dense, load-bearing formulation of the entire Orientalist epistemology.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 588