Scientific terminology enabled anyone to speak for the Orient impersonally

Evidence

What Sacy, Renan, and Lane did was to place Orientalism on a scientific and rational basis. This entailed not only their own exemplary work but also the creation of a vocabulary and ideas that could be used impersonally by anyone who wished to become an Orientalist. Their inauguration of Orientalism was a considerable feat. It made possible a scientific terminology; it banished obscurity and instated a special form of illumination for the Orient; it established the figure of the Orientalist as central authority for the Orient; it legitimized a special kind of specifically coherent Orientalist work; it put into cultural circulation a form of discursive currency by whose presence the Orient henceforth would be spoken for; above all, the work of the inaugurators carved out a field of study and a family of ideas which in turn could form a community of scholars whose lineage, traditions, and ambitions were at once internal to the field and external enough for general prestige. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 333

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘discursive currency’ of a field whose authority speaks for its object prefigures Foucault’s author-function and the discourse/power nexus — exactly the scaffolding the reader needs.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 333