The changing face of Arab culture

摘要

It makes one feel like an intellectual fossil to encounter a book that harks back to a subdis-cipline that is now virtually extinct, but which was still in vogue when one was a graduate student. Cultural psychology flourished in the wake of the Second World War as a result of desire to understand totalitarianism. Following in the intellectual footsteps of anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, scholars interested in the Middle East and North Africa sought to document and explain the details of the regions cultures and what they viewed as its distinctive personality types. Daniel Lerner's landmark study, The Passing of Traditional Society (Macmillan, 1958), was the definitive statement of the cultural, personal and developmental consequences of the clash between tradition and modernity in these regions.