April 13, 2006  Practice sentences in introductory language textbooks rarely impress students with their profundity, and yet Roderick MacFarquhar still remembers an important insight gleaned from his beginning textbook in Japanese.

"I remember noticing that so many of the sentences in the book were about nature, and I began to get a sense of how important nature is to the Japanese."

Adam Kern studies Japanese comics, or manga. He has recently finished a book-length study of the early history of manga, 'Manga from the Floating World,' which explores manga's origins in 18th century Japan. (Staff photo Justin Ide/Harvard News Office)

The history and politics of modern China has become MacFarquhar's major field of interest, but his realization about the power of language to highlight key aspects of a foreign culture remains vivid.

"Social scientists in my field - comparative politics - are rarely going to be without linguistic training if they hope to be any good, but if they go through some of the same training that humanists go through, they will be able to make comparisons with far greater self-confidence, comparisons that are more rooted in reality."

Roderick MacFarquhar: 'Knowing the history, language, culture, and religion of a country helps you ... relate to the people's basic knowledge, their formative experiences.' (Staff photo Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office)

Now the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science and director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, MacFarquhar sees the humanities as essential for anyone who hopes to understand or interact meaningfully with a foreign culture.

"Knowing the history, language, culture, and religion of a country helps you not only to understand its politics, but to relate to the people's basic knowledge, their formative experiences."

As an example, MacFarquhar cites a political leader he has studied extensively, Mao Zedong.

"No Chinese leader can be without some feeling of the enormous weight of history upon his back - it's the opposite of the early United States where the leaders were creating something from the ground up. Mao was always quoting Chinese history. He quoted Chinese history more than he quoted Marx."

Going global

MacFarquhar's remarks about China's "Great Helmsman" remind us how drastically the world has changed in the past few decades and how much more interaction there is between cultures than there was in the past. Before Nixon normalized relations with China in 1972, for example, ordinary Americans were forbidden to visit. Today, thousands of American tourists go to China each year, walk along the Great Wall, stroll through the Forbidden City, and float down the Yangtze. Even living in China for extended periods is not considered that unusual, and many students, researchers, and business people take such sojourns in stride.

Other countries once considered so remote and exotic that the chance of the average American visiting them seemed about as likely as setting foot on the moon have been pulled, through the global forces of economics and politics, into a closer orbit. Throughout the world, people are traveling and emigrating in greater and greater numbers. Consequently, Azerbaijanis, Brazilians, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Laotians, Serbs, and Tibetans are no longer outlandishly dressed strangers captured in the pages of National Geographic. They are our classmates, our co-workers, our neighbors.

Considering these changes, the need for Americans not only to learn about and appreciate individual cultures but to adopt a more global, less ethnocentric point of view grows evermore pressing. As MacFarquhar points out, perhaps the most effective way of adjusting one's outlook to a more culturally diverse world is through the study of language, literature, art, architecture, music, philosophy - in other words, the humanities.

Ali Asani: 'Religion as a phenomenon is tied to history, economics, politics, art, social institutions. You can't understand religion unless you understand it in its multiple contexts.' (Staff photo Maggie Mastricola/Harvard News Office)

A poet discovers Korea

Among those countries whose political and economic importance vis-à-vis the United States has grown tremendously in recent years is Korea. This growth has been reflected at Harvard by an increase in Korea-related programs and course offerings and the hiring of additional faculty.

David McCann, considered one of the West's leading authorities on both traditional and modern Korean literature, joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1997. He traces the beginning of his scholarly career to a chance encounter in 1966 with a Korean poet. McCann was in Korea as a member of the Peace Corps. One day, while browsing in a bookstore in Seoul, his eye fell on a dual-language volume of poetry by Kim Sowol, an important Korean poet of the early 20th century.

An immersion program in Korean language and culture had given McCann some facility with the language, and he bought the book hoping that by comparing the poems with their English translations he could develop a greater knowledge of the language. Eventually McCann, a poet himself, decided to try writing his own translations of the poems. What happened after that surprised him.

"I discovered that everywhere I went, people were very interested in the fact that I was interested in Korean poetry."

It is not unusual to see in the Tokyo subway a middle-aged businessman absorbed in a manga publication. (Staff photo Justin Ide/Harvard News Office)

McCann's newfound interest served as a key to the Korean literary world, and through the contacts he made, his acquaintance with Korean writers expanded. Now the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, McCann has maintained his relationships with Korean writers and intellectuals, and through those ties he has developed a penetrating and nuanced view, not only of Korean literature, but of Korean society in general.

"My approach to Korean culture is that it's not a given. It is constantly being renegotiated, constantly changing, through the reconfiguration of new and traditional elements."

While the dynamism of South Korea might be obvious to anyone who has witnessed its rise into an economic powerhouse and its transformation from dictatorship to democracy, McCann's facility with the Korean language and his knowledge of the contemporary literary scene give him an insight into the Korean point of view that might not be available to someone for whom the humanities are of little concern.

McCann's engagement with Korean culture has proven to have a dynamic and evolving element as well. This summer, he will lead a group of students on a five-week exploration of Korean literature, history, art, music, and dance, in a Harvard Summer School course based at Ewha Women's University in Seoul. McCann hopes that the experience will expand his own knowledge of contemporary Korean culture as well. Among other things, he plans to check out the burgeoning Korean hip-hop scene.

"I'm always trying to make what we teach more relevant and more interesting," he said.

Everyday life in the Arab world

Another Harvard professor who uses literature to open students' eyes to the often-overlooked human aspects of a foreign culture is William Granara, Professor of the Practice of Arabic on the Gordon Gray Endowment. In his Core course, "Modern Arabic Narratives: Self, Society, and Culture," and in his seminar, "Arabic Autobiography and the Novel," Granara uses fiction and first-person narratives to explore themes such as the conflict between tradition and modernity, anti-colonialism, nationalism, civil war, poverty, alienation, religion and politics, and changing gender roles. He believes that fiction is ideally suited to such cultural exploration.

"In the Arab world, arguably the most honest depiction of life is in novels and short stories," he said. "History writing, the media, cinema, theater are all far more subject to state censorship, but Arab fiction writers are able to clothe their meaning in such a way that it escapes censorship and yet is obvious to the discerning reader."

What many of Granara's students are surprised to discover is that Arab writers can be extremely critical of their own societies, a perspective that is rarely reflected in the media or in political writing.

"Arab literary texts are much more critical of their own societies than they are of others. In a lot of texts, especially by women writers, you find a critique of male-dominated systems, which is a point of view that doesn't come out in other kinds of texts."

Adam Kern: 'It was fascinating to find out about myself through the perspective of another culture. In Japan I thought I was just learning about Japanese culture, but when I re-entered the United States I realized I could see various stereotypes from the opposite point of view.' (Staff photo Justin Ide/Harvard News Office)

Arab novels and short stories by writers such as Tayeb Salih, Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammad Choukri, as well as prominent women authors, such as Hanan Shaykh and Sahar Khalifeh, generally reflect a secular viewpoint that receives little attention in the Western media, Granara said. Many of these texts portray characters whose feelings and motivations are surprisingly familiar to American readers.

"Students see that Arabs are concerned with the same things we are, like earning a living or getting their kids into college. They realize that not all Arabs wake up in the morning and see themselves as Shiite or Sunni or think about whether Israel should exist."

Understanding the 'other'

Ali Asani emphasizes a similar message in his courses on Islam, but he does it with a different array of materials and a somewhat different approach. Asani, professor of the practice of Indo-Muslim languages and cultures, aims to give his students an understanding of Islam and its role in the communal and individual lives of Muslims by striving to go beyond the simple teaching of doctrines, rituals, and practices.

"People may understand religion from a faith perspective but not from a cultural perspective," he said. "Religion as a phenomenon is tied to history, economics, politics, art, social institutions. You can't understand religion unless you understand it in its multiple contexts."

Accordingly, Asani employs literature, art, music, and film as lenses through which students learn to understand the role of religion in the community. He chooses these materials with an eye toward reaching all interests and learning styles, and engaging his students through an appeal to the senses.

The experiences available on the course Web sites are many and varied. In addition to reading assignments, there are recitations of the Quran in different styles, examples of Islamic art and calligraphy, music from the Muslim world from traditional liturgies in praise of the Prophet Muhammad to the songs of a Pakistani rock group that sets mystical Sufi texts to a pounding beat.

David McCann has maintained his relationships with Korean writers and intellectuals, and through those ties he has developed a penetrating and nuanced view, not only of Korean literature, but of Korean society in general. (Staff photo Maggie Mastricola/Harvard News Office)

Many of the assignments have a creative, hands-on component. After learning to write "Allah" in Arabic script, students create their own calligraphic rendering of the name. Another assignment asks them to design a mosque.

Asani believes that by being exposed to a variety of ways in which the world's Muslims experience Islam, students are able to overcome the stereotype of Muslims as "other" and learn to see them as members of a religious tradition that shares many of its roots with the West.

"The politicization of religion has created a cultural distancing," Asani said. "The point of the course is that through cultural expressions in literature and the arts you can discover bridges to help you understand communities which prevalent political discourses have demonized and dehumanized as the other."

Deciphering laughter

It is often claimed that film is a universal language, and the gross receipts of certain Hollywood blockbusters certainly support that, but Elvira Di Fabio believes that certain films are more universal than others. Di Fabio, senior preceptor in Romance languages and literatures and undergraduate adviser in Italian, teaches the course "Italian Comic Cinema," which is designed to acquaint students with what is unique about Italian culture.

"We all cry for the same reasons, but we don't all laugh for the same reasons," Di Fabio said. "You have to understand something about a culture to understand why people laugh."

In her class, students view films of Italian comic stars from Totò to Roberto Benigni and analyze them from the point of view of Italian culture.

"The students have to develop a sharp sense of what it means to be Italian. And by comparing these films with American films they are able to see the differences."

Looking at Japanese pop culture

Adam Kern, assistant professor of Japanese literature, has discovered another type of visual art that offers fascinating insights into the culture that produced it - Japanese comics, or manga. Contemporary manga has begun to make inroads in the West, but in Japan it is a hugely popular art form whose many different characters, story lines, and styles appeal to all classes and age groups. It is not unusual to see in the Tokyo subway a middle-aged businessman absorbed in a manga publication, Kern said.

Kern has recently finished a book-length study of the early history of manga. Scheduled to be published by the Harvard University Asia Center, "Manga from the Floating World" explores manga's origins in 18th century Japan. These sophisticated narratives blending text and pictures and making frequent allusions to both high and low culture open a revealing window on Japanese life of the period.

"In order to interpret them, one must not only have a knowledge of the previous 1,000 years of Japanese literature, but one must also be familiar with clothing fashions, hairstyles, mannerisms, slang expressions, and so on."

Kern, who discovered these examples of early manga while working at Kyoto University, said his immersion in Japanese language and culture has had surprising benefits. It has enabled him to see his own culture far more clearly.

"It was fascinating to find out about myself through the perspective of another culture," he said. "In Japan I thought I was just learning about Japanese culture, but when I re-entered the United States I realized I could see various stereotypes from the opposite point of view."

For example, he said, a prevalent American view of the Japanese is that they are conformists, possessing a kind of herd mentality, compared with Americans who supposedly idealize the virtue of rugged individualism. But from the Japanese perspective, Kern discovered, Americans frequently seem selfish, while Japanese conformity, seen from within, reflected the positive value of getting along with others.

"It was an unexpected education for me to learn about American culture and myself as an American," he said.

An American in Paris

Kern is by no means alone in extolling language study and foreign travel as a way of discovering the world and discovering oneself. Raymond Comeau, director of foreign language study for the Division of Continuing Education and a teacher of French, remembers his own junior year abroad as a young American in Paris.

"I can only describe it as an awakening and a revelation," he said.

What stood out for him was the exhilarating but often terrifying sense of freedom.

"You are the only person on the entire continent who knows who you are, and you are alone to make your own decisions and experience your own freedom."

Foreign language study at home gives one the ability to take one's first steps in a foreign culture, to experience its pleasures and navigate its complexities, Comeau said. Language study, he believes, is the ideal preparation for travel, and ideally he would like to see all college students undertake both as a regular part of their education.

"Language itself contains within it an entire culture," he said.