Edward Said on Specialization

Having never before read anything about Edward Said, I admittedly had not expected to find myself consistently agreeing with his ideas. However, of particular interest to me was Said's rejection of specialization as forming "cult[s] of professional expertise" and the idea that it "has led to an extremely sharp break between critics and the reading public." Anybody that has sat through a high school English course can attest to this, even if they cannot phrase it so eloquently. The amateur reader's chief complaint about the study of English is that critics are "over-analyzing" the text. Though this is to some extent an exaggeration made by uncritical students, Said's "cult[s] of professional expertise" have definitely not made their ideas accessible to the amateur reading public, who more often than not prefer a general or "amateurist" approach.

This would not be so bad if specialists were more willing to assimilate the ideas of those outside of their specializations, but this is not the case. Rather, one is more likely to see the sort of heated exchange that, save its technical jargon, is more suited for playground brawls than it is for critical academic discourse. Intellectuals are not working with one another to help the world, as, according to Said, they should; instead, they are creating high-school cliques that justify their own superiority to other intellectuals by discoursing only or primarily with those they agree with (confirmation bias). It was this closed system of ideas increasingly abstracted from reality that set the stage for Orientalism, including modern-day misunderstandings of the "East" and "West".

As a student studying both English and Anthropology, I agree with Said that breadth of knowledge is more important than supposed "mastery" of a specialization, especially given how frequently academic discourse devolves into bickering between specializations. As an American, I am also well aware that what I know has been passed through a filter of Western dominance, and that I am just as susceptible to stereotyping and succumbing to misunderstandings of the East and West as the next person.  However, I hope that this class will give me greater breadth of knowledge and contribute to my own sense of what Said refers to as "worldliness," so that I will not be as likely to succumb to those stereotypes and misunderstandings anathema to international cooperation.