NYTimes.com Article: Experts Can Help Rebuild a Country

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by tganesh@stlawu.edu.


Where is Ruth Benedict? Where are the anthropologists? Where are the culture 
study managers to explain to the occupation what Iraqi culture is all about? MS

tganesh@stlawu.edu

/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\

Explore more of Starbucks at Starbucks.com.
http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?ci=1015
\----------------------------------------------------------/

Experts Can Help Rebuild a Country

July 19, 2003
 By ALEXANDER STILLE 




 

When the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was asked to
write a report on Japan in the spring of 1945 for the
American Office of War Information, she was working under
difficult conditions. She had never been to Japan and had
no chance of going there during wartime. She did her "field
research" among Japanese-Americans living in the United
States and wrote Report 25, titled "Japanese Behavior
Patterns," in just three months between May and August,
shortly before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima. 

Enlarged and published as a book immediately after the war,
in 1946, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" was an instant
best seller and went on to become a classic of Japanese
cultural studies. 

But most importantly, her government work ended up becoming
the bible of American troops who undertook the occupation
of Japan. 

The choice to rely so heavily on cultural anthropologists
in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular
resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a
stable and viable Iraq, a country that, like Japan, is seen
as both impossibly foreign and forbidding. 

Indeed, at the end of World War II, Japanese militarism was
in many ways a far more frightening and incomprehensible
phenomenon for most Americans than Islamic fundamentalism
is today. Kamikaze pilots were like today's suicide
bombers, symbols of a fanatical culture with no
appreciation for the individual. 

Many experts insisted that there were deep, unchanging
aspects of Japanese culture that made it constitutionally
unfit for Western-style democracy. Emperor worship - the
veneration of a human being as a divinity - was even more
incomprehensible than monotheistic Islam, even of the
fundamentalist variety. The hierarchical nature of Japanese
society, many experts concluded, made it uniquely unsuited
to democratic institutions. In an article in The New York
Times Magazine in 1941, Nathaniel Peffer called
authoritarianism a "principle of nature" for the Japanese.
"There are those who command," he wrote. "Others obey." 

Perhaps surprisingly, American policy makers, facing global
responsibilities for the first time, went beyond such
conventional thinking to understand the cultures of the
countries they were fighting as well as those they might
need to occupy during and after the conflict. The United
States, which did not even have a foreign intelligence
service before the war, hired numerous professors, scholars
and intellectuals of varying backgrounds to prepare reports
to help them understand Germany, including Herbert Marcuse,
(even though he was a well-known Marxist philosopher), the
psychologist Erik Erikson, the great German art historian
Richard Krautheimer and the anthropologist Margaret Mead. 

Benedict, who left Columbia University temporarily in June
1943 to work for the Office of War Information's foreign
morale analysis division, wrote reports on cultures as
different as Romania and Thailand. 

With considerable sensitivity, she managed both to stress
the differences in Japanese society of which American
policy makers needed to be aware and to debunk the
stereotype of the Japanese as hopelessly rigid and
incapable of change. 

Using the tools of anthropology, she pointed out that
Japan, as a classic example of a society based on "honor"
and "shame," was actually quite adaptable. If anything, she
said, "guilt" cultures, like those of the United States and
most Protestant countries, which believe in an absolute
standard of good and evil, were in some ways harder to
change. Shame cultures, by contrast, respond to externally
imposed standards of honorable or shameful behavior: change
the standards, she said, and the behavior will change. 

Thus, Benedict argued, it was possible to change Japan by
working within the norms of its traditional culture rather
than by trying to destroy it. 

In another memo Benedict wrote for the government, "What
Shall Be Done About the Emperor," she countered those who
argued that the only way to change Japan would be to
eliminate the institution of the emperor. 

"Veneration of the Imperial House is a strict religious
tenet of Japan and, however much it offends nations which
espouse other tenets, it commands the deep loyalty of the
Japanese," she wrote. "Every job to be done in
rehabilitation will be less difficult according to the
degree to which it has the sanction of the Emperor behind
it, and more difficult in proportion to our requirements
that he be eliminated." 

Benedict noted that the Japanese were remarkably flexible
in their use of the imperial system. Emperors were removed
to suit changing times and the emperor's closest aides
assassinated in order to effect changes in policy. 

"We must also recognize that another incumbent can, without
violence to Japanese practice, be substituted for the
present Emperor if desired," she wrote. "In propaganda we
need only to apply the traditional Japanese clichés the
militarists have `betrayed the Emperor,' they have not
`eased the mind of the Emperor' - in short, they have
failed, and in Japan what fails is by definition not the
will of the Emperor." 

The symbolic power of the emperor, she said, "is not in
itself synonymous with conquest and concentration camps as
the regime of Hitler was in Germany." The duty of Japanese
subjects toward their emperor, she continued, "could be
just as consistent with a world at peace as with a war-torn
world, or it could be sloughed off in time as Japan's
social objectives change." 

When the Japanese government, led by Emperor Hirohito
himself, accepted the norms of democracy and renounced
militarism, the Japanese people adopted democratic and
pacific behavior as honorable and virtuous and their
opposites as shameful. 

At the heart of Benedict's argument was an idea about
religions that echoes what some of today's experts on the
Islamic world have been saying: "Religions change their
role inevitably with changed conditions, but they cannot be
changed on demand from outside without the gravest
consequences." 

Perhaps the most impressive measure of Benedict's work has
been its consistent success in Japan itself, as Pauline
Kent, an Australian professor of sociology at Ryukoku
University in Japan, recounts in a 1999 journal article in
Dialectical Anthropology about Japanese perceptions of the
book. According to Ms. Kent, Benedict's book has sold an
astounding 2.3 million copies in Japan since its
translation. She notes that a public opinion survey in 1987
found that over one-third of Japanese had either heard of
"The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" or of Ruth Benedict. 

"Although some have criticized it as offering some
over-broad generalizations about Japan, and it has been
superseded by more up-to-date and scientific studies," she
wrote, " `Chrysanthemum' gave a fresh, innovative,
unprejudiced external reading of Japanese culture that
revolutionized understanding of Japan not just in the West
but in Japan itself. Many of its insights are still the
starting point for many discussions of the inner workings
of Japanese society." 

As the occupation of Iraq appears more complex by the day,
where are the new Ruth Benedicts, authoritative voices who
will carry weight with both Iraqis and Americans? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/19/arts/19RUTH.html?ex=1059667293&ei=1&en=a8c4948508acab2c


---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://www.nytimes.com/ads/nytcirc/index.html



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help@nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company