Scientific validity in Orientalist writing requires canceling the human content of its subjects

Evidence

It shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 188 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anthology selection masks the Orientalist’s editorial censorship as natural typicality; All Orientalist writing, even purportedly neutral science, centers a European ego; Orientalist representation is a closed, self-reinforcing system immune to empirical data — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 188 (+5 more)

Related

• Oriental representations become repetitive pseudoincarnations serving narcissistic Western needs. (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalist representation is a closed, self-reinforcing system immune to empirical data (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalist aesthetics repress affect to achieve clinical exactness of detail. (similarity 0.88)
• Holistic Orientalist vision is fundamentally conservative and self-confirming (similarity 0.87)
• Academic Orientalist expertise legitimizes rather than corrects crude stereotypes (similarity 0.86)
• Empiricist assumptions locked Orientals into unescapable determining origins (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist science and personal utterance alike erase the modern Orient’s human reality (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism’s coherence depends on the permanence of its object (similarity 0.85)
• All Orientalist writing, even purportedly neutral science, centers a European ego (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism is studied via its internal consistency, not its correspondence to a real Orient (similarity 0.84)
• The word ‘Oriental’ alone invoked a fixed, unchallengeable body of knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Anthology selection masks the Orientalist’s editorial censorship as natural typicality (similarity 0.84)
• The general Oriental category precedes and constrains any specific individual instance. (similarity 0.84)
• An institutional network of interests sustains unchanging orientalist dogma (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism undermines the possibility of nonpolitical scholarship. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Orientalist science and personal utterance alike erase the modern Orient’s human reality #corroborates (0.92)
• Orientalist representation is a closed, self-reinforcing system immune to empirical data #corroborates (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 188
• Orientalist discourse reduces human plurality to a few fixed collective abstractions #corroborates (0.82)