Sedentary Western societies can treat politics as autonomous while disordered ones cannot

Evidence

To understand Middle Eastern society as a whole must remain our great aim. Only a society [like “ours”] that has already achieved a dynamic stability can afford to think of politics, economics, or culture as genuinely autonomous realms of existence and not merely convenient divisions for study. In a traditional society that does not separate the things of Caesar from those of God, or that is entirely in flux, the connection between, say, politics and all other aspects of life is the heart of the issue. Today, for example, whether a man is to marry four wives or one, fast or eat, gain or lose land, rely on revelation or reason, have all become political issues in the Middle East. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 757

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘dynamic stability’ framing of who gets to treat realms as autonomous connects to the reader’s scaffolding concern with how Orientalist knowledge-production licenses itself; parallels Gramsci’s hegemony where the ruling viewpoint presents its own position as the neutral baseline.
• DEFINE: Shows the Orientalist self-justification mechanism: the West can afford the luxury of ‘objective’ autonomous disciplines, while the disordered East can only be studied holistically — a key move in the knowledge-production critique.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 757