The Orient was converted from lived testimony into impersonal categorical definition for the West

Evidence

Truchement derives nicely from the Arabic turjaman, meaning “interpreter,” “intermediary,” or “spokesman.” On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Orient had become, as Disraeli said, a career, one in which one could remake and restore not only the Orient but also oneself. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 421

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key mechanism: Orientalism filters raw or garbled experience through regulatory codes and classifications into a simulacrum — the imaginary museum without walls where everything Oriental becomes categorically Oriental.
• XREF: The ‘imaginary museum without walls’ and the conversion of tradition into impersonal archive connects to Anderson’s imagined community and to Foucault’s discursive formations; also to how later Islamophobia readings treat the Muslim subject as a constructed category.
• ADDENDUM: The filtering of raw experience into regulated classification parallels the scaffolding described in my trees-as-infrastructure piece about how infrastructure (here, epistemological) naturalizes a constructed order.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how modern think tanks and policy institutes operate as ‘imaginary museums without walls’ for Islam, converting lived Muslim experience into categorical, departmentalized expertise for Western consumption.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 421