Topic: Nationalism and Culture
From The Margaret Mead Symposium: Whither the United States in the World?
Commemorating the centennial of the birth of Margaret Mead.
December 2 & 3, 2001
Sponsors: Library of Congress and The Smithsonian Institution
Political Boundaries Influence on Culture
Speaker: Alan K. Hendrickson
Professor of Diplomatic History, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Speaker: William O. Beeman
Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
Speaker: Wilton Dillon
Smithsonian Institution, Senior Scholar Emeritus
Hendrickson talks of Mead’s own explanation of her use of the term “national character,” in that she believed it related to a society behaving nationally, and in that light discusses the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Beeman argues that political boundaries tend to concentrate experience, and discusses “Beeman’s law,” that is that every social reality has a linguistic effect. Dillon talks of the cultural distinctiveness that can be found even between Virginia and North Carolina.
Quicktime (8.76MB)- Windows Media Player (10.67MB)
Culture and Nation Are Two Separate Things
Speaker: Herve Varenne
Professor of Anthropology and Education, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College, Columbia University
Speaker: William O. Beeman
Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
Beeman believes that though notion of “national character” is a valuable and widely used theoretical tool, it is misnamed because it is often used a more local levels than that of the nation state Mead was explicit in that it could be used at a small or large group level, he argues.
- Quicktime (6.29MB)
- Windows Media Player (7.59MB)
