Whither the United States in the world? This was the central focus of the international symposium, The Interplay of Cultures, commemorating the 2001 centennial of anthropologist-humanitarian Margaret Mead (1901-78). She has been described as the most influential 20th century social scientist after Freud. Held December 3-4, 2001 at the Library of Congress, and organized by the Smithsonian for Mead's Institute for Intercultural Studies, the symposium reflected the world shock of 9/11 a few months earlier. It explored the contributions of history and behavioral sciences to understand cultures of rivals, adversaries, present and future allies, and our selves.
Transnational terrorism dramatized the need for a critical new look at World War II concepts of national character. Views expressed in this "time capsule" document of 2001 are increasingly relevant. Globalization is rampant, but also inspires people to cling to earlier identities. Nationalism is not dead. Racism, greed, corruption, territoriality and religious absolutism endure. Mead believed war is learned behavior and could be unlearned.
With recent improvements in U.S. international relations, citizens need all the more to improve their cultural literacy. For starters, try Internet links with the Library of Congress Foreign Area Studies and Margaret Mead Archives. Various Smithsonian websites lead to cultures of the Americas, the Arctic, Africa and Asia/Pacific.
The Symposium
DAY ONE --Monday, December 3, 2001
- Library of Congress, Prosser Gifford, Director of Scholarly Programs
- Institute for Intercultural Studies, Mary Catherine Bateson, President
- Smithsonian Institution, Wilton S. Dillon, Senior Scholar Emeritus
National Character in Peace and War: Questions Asked During World War II and Since September 11. (View the entire Panel 
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"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)
