As Said himself explained in an afterword to the book, written in 1994, “The construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic woolgathering.” In this way, the engine and mechanism of the production of history and anthropology were the objects of Said’s study. And it was the inclination of that engine toward division, toward definition of the “us” and the “other,” that for Said was itself a consequence and perhaps necessary component of the act of observation.
