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March 1, 2006
Does it matter what the world thinks about America?
A long-time author of ours, German but now teaching in Denmark, has doubts about this project. What is the point?, she asked. It isn't scientific, putting up a website and letting people--who knows who they are--write what they happen to believe about the world's most powerful country. Is this really a gauge of world opinion?
Berkshire is tiny publishing company in a very small town in the eastern United States, 140 miles (225 km) north of New York City and the same distance west of Boston. In spite of this rural location, our focus in the last decade has been the world. We have friendships and professional ties to people in many countries, and after 11 September 2001 we found ourselves, thanks to them, taking a fresh look at the country we live in. And we began an academic project, compiling an encyclopedia that would explain, historically and globally, what people think and believe about the U.S.A. (Note: we always try to use U.S. instead of American, though for the subtitle of this project, we chose to use America, because it sounded better. Our apologies!)
What we discovered is that that academic research on the subject is both active and uneven, globally. And we found that while big, well-funded opinion polls are undertaken occasionally by the BBC or the Pew Foundation, there was no one who had gathered stories, observations, and anecdotal information from individuals. So we decided to approach this the way anthropologists do (you may not be surprised to hear that my partner/cofounder at Berkshire is a cultural anthropologist). Anthropologists start by listening. They try not to have preconceptions. They may not even ask questions. They simply participate, as human beings, and listen.
That's what we're trying to do here: we want to hear what people have to say. Later, yes, scholars will be able to try to explain what it all means. But for now, we're excited by the fact that we've created a place where people can share, much more widely, a conversation that goes on in pubs and offices and homes around the world: Why do Americans behave the way they do? Who do they think they are? Or perhaps, in an east coast U.S. put-down I find funny (I come from California, you see, and am a foreigner here), "Who died and left you the king?"
Posted by Karen Christensen at March 1, 2006 8:22 PM