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The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai. Book review by Lloyd F. Jordan
foreign culture and national character,
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| of psychoanalytic theory, interaction theory, child development theory, and learning theory with standard anthropological research methods to construct models of the contemporary cultures of wartime enemy countries, Japan and Germany. Indeed, Ruth Benedict's classic study The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is an example of this multidisciplinary approach to national character research which evolved in the World War II period. |
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| Since the appearance of Ruth Benedict's book in 1946, national character studies have fallen into two broad categories despite some differences in terms of approach, focus, and explicitness of conceptual framework. Until the late 1950's, national character studies tended to be focused on the modal personality (i.e., the statistically most significant personality construct in the group studied, and not necessarily that of the majority) of a group or a nation. The research findings derived from the application of psychological, sociological, and psychoanalytical theories were combined with other materials, such as autobiographical literature and folklore, to produce a general description of the modal personality. The studies of this period tended to be more descriptive than analytical, and the modal personality construct tended to be related to the total culture, or at least, its salient features. |
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| In the late 1950's, a new line of research emerged alongside the earlier type of national character study. The later studies tended to be narrower in focus than their predecessors, in that they concentrated on the relationship of personality traits to subsets of a given society or a given category of roles of that society, rather than on the identification of relationships between personality and the social structure as a whole. In addition, a number of comparative studies appeared such as Francis L. K. Hsu's Americans and Chinese and Almond and Verba's Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. A greater effort was also made to use more precise measurement techniques. Large samples of given populations, the projective psychological test, and public opinion polling techniques were increasingly employed. Richard Solomon's Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture is a good example of a recent attempt to integrate the use of a number of these techniques. |
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| Viewed against these two general categories of national character research, The Arab Mind belongs more to the earlier than the later tradition of research in this field. Patai's approach is very similar to that employed, for example, in the Benedict and Hamady studies already cited, and by Dinko Tomasic in Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics. In these studies the authors used information derived from formal and informal interviews, personal observations, and a knowledge of the history, arts, and religion of the society. These types of data were all integrated by means of concepts in linguistics, psychoanalytical theory, and child-learning theory to produce the national character construct. While Patai used three surveys carried out by others, there is no evidence that he employed polling techniques, large population samples, or psychological projective tests in his research. He cannot be criticized for not having used the psychological projection tests because, despite the fact that such tests have been used in a number of national character research works, their validity in such research remains controversial. |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
Last Updated: May 09, 2007 06:59 PM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
