"Throughout this book I have argued· that. the problem with orientalism is not just one of bias or o( bad motives and hence, confined to itself. The problem lies in my view, with the way in which the human sciences have displaced human agency on to essences in the first place. Taking up some leads of Collingwood, I have tried to show how an alternative approach that focuses on human agency might be constructed, and how it might be used, as a vantage­ point from which both to criticize previous scholarship and to reconstruct our knowledges of the human world. (264)"