The Orientalist’s role shifted from guild scholar to representative of Western supremacy.

Evidence

If I have concentrated so much on imperial agents and policy-makers instead of scholars in this section, it was to accentuate the major shift in Orientalism, knowledge about the Orient, intercourse with it, from an academic to an instrumental attitude. What accompanies the shift is a change in the attitude as well of the individual Orientalist, who need no longer see himself—as Lane, Sacy, Renan, Caussin, Müller, and others did—as belonging to a sort of guild community with its own internal traditions and rituals. Now the Orientalist has become the representative man of his Western culture, a man who compresses within his own work a major duality of which that work (regardless of its specific form) is the symbolic expression: Occidental consciousness, knowledge, science taking hold of the furthest Oriental reaches as well as the most minute Oriental particulars. Formally the Orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Orient and Occident, but mainly by reasserting the technological, political, and cultural supremacy of the West. History, in such a union, is radically attentuated if not banished. Viewed as a current of development, as a narrative strand, or as a dynamic force unfolding systematically and materially in time and space, human history—of the East or the West—is subordinated to an essentialist, idealist conception of Occident and Orient. Because he feels himself to be standing at the very rim of the East-West divide, the Orientalist not only speaks in vast generalities; he also seeks to convert each aspect of Oriental or Occidental life into an unmediated sign of one or the other geographical half. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 628

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘representative man’ and essentialist history connects forward to how Islamophobia discourse treats Muslims as unmediated signs of a monolithic culture — the same anti-historicism the field critiques.
• DEFINE: Defines the instrumental shift from academic to political knowledge-production about the Orient, a core scaffold for later readings on how expertise is weaponized.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 628