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What is (Iranian) National Character? A Sociolinguistic Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

William O. Beeman
William O. Beeman*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

It is surprising, somehow, to witness the degree to which the concept of national character doggedly maintains its intuitive appeal in the social sciences. Despite widespread criticism of the use of the concept as the basis for studying human societies, few researchers find themselves able to deny that different societies seem to have a distinctive “feel” to them, and it is a rare field worker indeed who doesn't speak, informally at least, of the members of a society in which he has worked in terms of collective “psychological” characteristics. Widely used anthropological concepts such as “ethos,” “value system,” and even “culture” itself reflect this feeling in differing degrees. The inherent intuitive appeal of the national character concept persists, then, despite our best efforts to repudiate it.

In trying to understand this phenomenon, it seems a vain effort to return once again to the question: “Do national characters exist?”. In place of this well-worked exercise, I feel it more profitable to turn away from the natives and focus on the epistemology of the observer.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Winter 1976 , pp. 22 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1976

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