“The science of the concrete”

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “science of the concrete” names the mind’s drive to arrange the world by noticing, distinguishing, and assigning significance to its contents. Edward Said uses the concept to show how such acts of classification can make contingent cultural boundaries seem natural: once a group gives unfamiliar territory and its inhabitants a place in an ordered scheme, those distinctions can acquire apparent objectivity and help define the group’s own identity.

Classification and the Need for Order

Said introduces Lévi-Strauss’s account through a primitive tribe that assigns a definite place, function, and significance to every leafy species in its immediate environment. Some grasses and flowers have no practical use; their inclusion nevertheless answers a mental need for order. By placing each noticed thing somewhere secure and recoverable, a society gives it a role in an economy of objects and identities.

This ordering is systematic without being universal. A green fern may symbolize grace in one society and be considered maleficent in another. The difference shows that classification follows a logic, but not one whose rules are predictably rational or shared by all cultures. Distinctions carry values, and those values have histories that may be arbitrary even when they appear settled.

Assigning Meaning to Things and Places

Fashion offers Said a familiar example of meanings that come and go. Wigs, lace collars, and high buckled shoes appear and disappear over decades; utility and beauty may contribute to their appeal, but neither fully explains their historical standing. If objects and places are made meaningful through human history, then their roles can come to seem objectively valid only after people have assigned them.

The process is especially visible in the treatment of what a society regards as uncommon, including foreigners, mutants, or “abnormal” behavior. A distinctive object may be constructed by the mind and appear to exist objectively while possessing, in Said’s formulation, only a fictional reality. Classification does not merely record a ready-made significance: it can help produce one.

Imaginative Geography and Identity

Said extends the argument from objects to territory. A group living on a few acres can establish a boundary around its land and call the territory beyond it “the land of the barbarians.” The distinction may be arbitrary; it does not depend on the people beyond the boundary accepting the name or division. It is enough for the group to establish the distinction in its own mind. The outsiders then become “they,” their territory is marked as different, and their mentality is classified as unlike “ours.”

Such boundaries help form identities negatively, through the distinction from what is deemed foreign. Said observes that a fifth-century Athenian was likely to feel himself nonbarbarian as well as positively Athenian. Geographic distinctions thus accompany social, ethnic, and cultural ones. Yet the imagined “out there” may rest on an unrigorous idea of what lies beyond familiar territory, crowded with suppositions, associations, and fictions.

From Mental Ordering to Orientalist Knowledge

The concept clarifies how geographical classifications can become consequential rather than remain private impressions. Said describes Orientalism as a body of Western knowledge modernized through encounters such as Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. The expedition’s collective scholarly monument, the Description de l’Égypte, helped make Egypt—and subsequently other Islamic lands—a setting for Western knowledge about the Orient. The movement from encounter to classification and scholarly representation gives an ordered account institutional form.

That form is visible in the learned societies, professorships, and periodicals that expanded Orientalist knowledge during the nineteenth century. It is also visible in the museum proposed by Silvestre de Sacy: a vast depot of objects, drawings, original books, maps, and voyage accounts, intended to let students feel transported into the societies they studied. In Said’s account, the collection and its system of dictionaries, grammars, editions, and translations converted varied, fragmentary experiences into a regulated body of knowledge. “The science of the concrete” therefore illuminates both the mind’s ordering impulse and the larger process through which classifications of difference can be accumulated, displayed, and treated as authoritative descriptions of the world.