American Examples, or, How I Stopped Being an Americanist and Learned to Study Religion in America All Over Again

The Report brings you news on the latest projects, initiatives, and developments from around the field. Michael J. Altman of the University of Alabama relays his experience in moving from subfield expertise to field-critical theorizing and how he brought others along for the journey. American Examples provides intellectual space for early career scholars to reframe a particular interest in things American into provocative illustrations of identity and social formation. With support from Altman’s home institution and later the Henry Luce Foundation, participants workshop and enhance their teaching, research, and public humanities efforts.

Cartas de Norteamerica: Life en Español e a Guerra Fria Cultural (1953-1957)

Em 1953, em plena Guerra Fria, a revista norte-americana Life, do grupo Time-Life, lançou uma versão em língua espanhola com os objetivos de aproximar-se mais do público latino-americano, difundir o american way, combater o antiamericanismo e promover o anticomunismo no subcontinente. O período foi marcado por uma série de tratados e de organizações que visavam regular as relações interamericanas, sob a hegemonia dos Estados Unidos. Caracteriza-se também pela implementação de organismos e programas estatais destinados à promoção de uma política cultural voltada para conquista da hegemonia mundial, estratégia denominada de “guerra psicológica”. A revista Life en Español, dirigida por Henry Luce, integrou a ampla rede de colaboradores que ajudaram a efetivar esse projeto político-cultural dos Estados Unidos. Nesse sentido, a partir da perspectiva teórica de Soft Power, de Joseph Nye, o artigo discute a relação da publicação em língua espanhola com os objetivos estratégicos norte-americanos no campo cultural.

Translating religion and development: Emerging perspectives from critical ethnographies of faith-based organizations

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

The American Folklore Society-China Folklore Society Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project, 2013-2016

Emphasizing its museum-focused sub-project, this report describes the second phase of the China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project (2013-2016). Supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the larger project links these two national scholarly societies in a program of professional exchanges, scholarly meetings, and joint inquiry around issues of intangible cultural heritage policy and practice. The museum sub-project has included joint exhibition development work, travel to local communities in the United States and in Southwest China, and other collaborative initiatives. This report describes the project's history, funding, outcomes, and some lessons learned.

The Predicament of National Character

“National character” has a curious history in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead wrote the first anthropological account of the United States in 1942, but the history of national character as a concept runs through social psychology and anthropology between the wars, the cultivation of “morale” during the Second World War, and the deployment of social science in postwar American military occupations. That history is the subject of this chapter: what “American character” revealed and obscured, both nationally and internationally. Mead was the Henry Luce of anthropology: her life and writings offer a miniature of the science of characterology in the American Century. The chapter begins as an institutional and intellectual history, but concludes with new readings of three postwar texts. Characterology was indeed a science, of a kind, but it was also an art. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a remote ethnography of Japan, is a parable of American power and its limits. Mead’s New Lives for Old, recounting her return to New Guinea in 1953, becomes a sermon about a Polynesian city upon a hill. David Riesman’s classic of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, closes one frontier of national character but opens another. To consider national character as narrative and ideology illuminates American character’s imprint on the world.

Introduction

As “American dream” became a cliché in the twentieth century, the contrary refrain of American nightmare was probably inevitable. This book adopts the phrase “nightmare envy” to capture an atmosphere of transatlantic disparity, projection, recrimination, and longing. But the phrase’s ambiguity is deliberate: it isn’t always clear who is envying whom, or for what reason. Examples from Margaret Mead, David Potter, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, and William Faulkner offer variations on the theme. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories proposes an “Americanist century” that stands in curious tension with the American Century heralded by Henry Luce in 1941. The protagonists are the Americanists who negotiated the imperatives of military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe, as well as Japan. The introduction closes with one of the paradigmatic figures of the Americanist century, Ralph Ellison, and offers an interpretation of his European fictions, as well as previously unpublished manuscripts.

Accidental Allies

Most accounts of the Vietnam War describe it as a war of choice, but this chapter argues that it was, in many ways, a war of necessity. Attempts to implement a purely pragmatic, minimalist Cold War strategy in Asia were doomed when the Korean War drew the United States into an unplanned but then-vital nation-building campaign with accidental allies in South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually South Vietnam. This chapter traces the origins of this moralistic component of Cold War policy and politics, particularly the Christian missionaries and their heirs, like publisher Henry Luce, who formed the China Lobby and Asia First bloc. By helping to frame the Cold War and America’s commitment to Asia as an epic struggle between good and evil, they set the stage for Indochinese refugee admissions based on moral, rather than legal, grounds, and as the very least America could do to atone for its failure to protect stalwart anti-communist allies.