THE SYMPOSIUM
DAY ONE --Monday, December 3, 2001
WELCOME
NATIONAL CHARACTER IN PEACE AND WAR: QUESTIONS ASKED DURING WORLD WAR II AND SINCE SEPTEMBER 11. (View the entire Panel)
"If we were not at war, if the whole world were not at war, if every effort of each human being were not needed to ask the right question so that we might find the right answers in time, I would not be writing this book. I would be on a ship bound for some South Sea island to continue my study of rapidly vanishing peoples in the belief that the knowledge thus accumulated would some day give us adequate basis for building a good society... We are caught in a situation so dangerous, so pressing, that we must use all the tools we have." --Margaret Mead in And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (New York: William Morrow, 1942)
Chaired by:
Richard
Kurin, Director of Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage
- William O. Beeman, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
- Mary Catherine Bateson, President, Institute for Intercultural Studies, Inc.
- Alan K. Henrikson, Professor of Diplomatic History, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
- Michael Mandelbaum, Christian Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
Discussion (10 minutes)
CASE PRESENTATION: Exotic U.S.A. (View the entire Panel)
"As the traveler who has been once from home is wiser than the one who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own" --Margaret Mead, in Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: William Morrow, 1928)
Chaired by
Benjamin
J. Wattenberg, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute and
moderator of PBS's Think Tank
- Deborah Tannen, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University
- Hervé Varenne, Professor of Anthropology and Education, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College, Columbia University
- Amitai
Etzioni, Professor of Sociology, communitarian, George Washington
University
Discussion (10 minutes)
CASE PRESENTATION: Russia (View the entire Panel)
"The Russian Nation is a new and wonderful phenomenon in the history of mankind. The character of the people differs to such a degree from that of the other Europeans that their neighbors find it impossible to diagnose them." -- C Feodor Dostoievsky (1821-81)
Chaired by
James W. Symington, Attorney, O'Connor & Hannon, Chairman, Russia Leadership Program, Library of Congress; former U.S. Chief of Protocol, Representative form Missouri
- Blair A. Ruble, Director of the George Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
- Sergei
Alexandrovich Arutiunov, Chairman of the Department of Caucasian
Studies, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of
Sciences
Discussion (10 minutes)
CASE PRESENTATION: Japan Since the Chrysanthemum and the Sword
(View
the entire Panel)
"More than Arabs, more than the Chinese, the Japanese
have felt the need for patterns and, hence, impose it. Confucius with
his code of behavior lives on in Japan, not in China; the Japanese would
probably have embraced the rigorous Koran had they known about it."
--Donald Richie, 1963
Chaired by
Bernard K.
Gordon, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of
New Hampshire
- Takami
Kuwayama, Professor of Anthropology, Soka University, Tokyo
- Shinji Yamashita, Department of Anthropology, University of Tokyo
- Daniel
Metraux, Chairman of Asian Studies, Mary Baldwin College
- Sergei
Alexandrovich Arutiunov, Chairman Department of Caucasian Studies,
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences
Discussion (10 minutes)
NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR CULTURAL ANALYSIS (View the entire Panel)
"Cultures, the intricate, highly patterned systems of social inheritance through which each group of human beings attains and maintains the separate special version of the humanity of its members, are -- from one point of view -- human psychology writ large... As men learned to tolerate the presence near them of others different from themselves, their wits sharpened by contrast; they come to admire the ways of their neighbors, or to fear them and shape their own customs as defenses against the alien and the strange." --Margaret Mead, "The Restoration of Wonder," in Margaret Mead and Nicholas Calas, eds., Primitive Heritage (New York: Random House, 1953)
Chaired by
William O. Beeman, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
- Mexico: Introduced by Georgette
Dorn, chief, Hispanic Division, Library of Congress, on behalf of
Barbara Tenenbaum, Mexican Culture Specialist, Hispanic Division, Library
of Congress. Ignacio
Duran-Loera, Director General of the Mexican Cultural Institute
and Minister for Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of Mexico
- Iran: A paper by Seyad
Mohammed Mir Shokraei, Director of Anthropological Centre, Iranian
Cultural Heritage Organization, Tehran was read by panel chair
- Ali
A. Bulookbashi, Director, Social Anthropology, Cultural Research
Bureau, Tehran
- China: William
Watts, President, Potomac Associates, former Senior Staff Member,
National Security Council under Henry Kissinger
Discussion (10 minutes)
