Martin Needler's article on "Politics
and National Character: the Case of Mexico" (1971) is perfectly
correct as far as it goes, but it must be pointed out that the
personality traits which he identifies as Mexican are products of a
considerably wider and much older cultural entity. Mexico is a
peripheral and very distinctive example of the Latin American
cultural area which is itself a peripheral and somewhat distinctive
example of the Mediterranean cultural area.
Some time ago I identified the whole cultural area and
the personality structure it tended to produce as aspects of "the
Pakistani-Peruvian Axis" (1966:1112-1122, reprinted as
1968:452-463). If I am correct in this, Needler is parochial in
attributing "Mexican national character" to a combination of "the
Indian's fatalism and the proud self-assertion of the Spaniard"
(Needler 1971:757).
A broader view of this subject would show that Mexico
is a peripheral example of the "Pakistani-Peruvian cultural area"
and that Mexican national character is merely a local variant of
the personality structure of this larger area. That is why
Silverman's picture of south Italian personality is so similar to
Needler's idea of Mexican character (Silverman 1968).
This Mediterranean personality type is marked by
various traits mentioned by Needler: low self-esteem, fatalism,
defeatism, distrust of all persons outside a narrow kin group,
pessimism, preoccupation with death, self-assertion, and
machismo.
These traits, however, should be associated in clusters
and correlated with other cultural manifestations such as: (1) low
respect for manual work, especially for agricultural work; (2)
higher esteem for urban residence than for rural living, associated
with neglect of the countryside, damage to natural vegetation, and
much cruelty to animals, especially to domestic animals; (3)
emphasis on honor, both personal and family, as a chief aim of
life; (4) dietary customs which mix protein and vegetables within a
nest or container of starch, on the same plate and in the same
mouthful, unlike the core of Western civilization, which tends to
segregate these three kinds of food, on the same plate or even into
separate dishes.
The personality traits of this larger area tend to
cluster about two points:
(1) The restriction of personal trust and loyalty
within the kinship group (usually the extended or nuclear family)
with a consequent inability to offer loyalty, trust, or personal
identification to residential groups (villages, neighborhoods,
parishes), voluntary associations, religious beliefs, or the
secular state, resulting in large-scale lack of "public spirit,"
combined with "corruption," and paralysis of these other kinds of
associations.
(2) The combination of powerful patriarchal social
tendencies with female inferiority (except as a mechanism for
producing sons) leads to many psychological ambiguities: strong
emphasis on female premarital virginity (both as a symbol of family
honor and as an economic good), segregation of the sexes in social
life, fear of women as a threat men's virility (witches and belief
in "the evil eye"), the need to demonstrate male virility by social
"touchiness" and other behavior, including fantasies of
demonstrations of male dominance over bulls, other men, and
unattached women.
In the last generation or two, we have had numerous
local studies of the culture-and-personality type dealing with
portions of this wide area (Pitt-Rivers and Kenny on Spain;
Banfield, Moss, Cancian, Silverman, and others on Italy; Campbell,
Kavadias, Kanelli. and others on Greece; and numerous studies of
the Near East or North Africa). Many of these consider the
personality types they observe as consequences of local conditions
of economic, national, religious, or historic origin.
A few have seen the wider range of what they observe.
Thus Balikci (1966:164) wrote, "Behind obvious cultural
differences, many Mediterranean societies share certain basic
cultural patterns... [with] basic cross-cultural similarities in
regard to sex behavior, certain family roles, the position of the
family in society, and the dichotomy of kinsmen and strangers."
Opler (1970:866) recognizes both the areal spread and
the deep historical roots of these traits when he writes, "The
Southern Italian family is in great measure understood if one
considers it as a peasant society, as a circum-Mediterranean type,
as one influenced by Roman history or even by the earlier pagan
Classic Greek, or later Hellenistic traditions."
What I wish to emphasize is that this personality
structure is geographically wider than the Mediterranean, since it
extends to Latin America, and is the consequence of historical
experience going back even earlier than the ancient Greeks. There
are works (Peristiany 1966) which see some of the geographic range,
but from both points of view, the most suggestive work is Raphael
Patai's Golden River to Golden Road (1962), whose original title
(now abandoned in a 1971 edition) shows that his attention extends
from Rio de Oro to Samarkand.
The Pakistani-Peruvian axis does not now demark the
area of a functioning society or civilization. This is one of the
chief keys to its personality types. It is now largely an area of
debris of traits and peoples surviving from the wreckage of
deceased civilizations.
The existing traits have historical origins covering
thousands of years.
For example, the diet, sexual symbolism of bull and
"eye," architecture, and other traits come from the archaic
cultures before 600 B.C., including Minoan Crete; the urbanism and
low esteem for manual labor derive from Classical Mediterranean
society; while the emphasis on honor, female inferiority, and
kinship groups flow from pastoral invaders, both from the northern
grasslands (Indo-European) and the southern grasslands
(Semites).
Other traits, such as fatalism, distrust of strangers,
cynicism toward the state or the local community, come from the
difficulties of farming in the Mediterranean environment or from
Mediterranean history.
Historically the Mediterranean has passed through three
distinct experiences: (1) as a frontier area of cultural diffusion
from Western Asia during the Archaic period (4500-600 B.C.); (2) as
the central backbone of Mediterranean civilization in the Classical
period (600 B.C.-A.D. 600), and (3) as a boundary conflict area
between the three post-Classical civilizations (Byzantine, Western,
and Islamic) since A.D. 600.
The shift from the second to the third of these was so
disruptive of community life in the area from the Golden River to
the Golden Road that its problems have not been solved since,
especially in view of the social and ethical failures of the two
post-Classical religions, Christianity and Islam, on either side of
the line from Tangier to Batum.
These failures of religion, whose consequences were
clearly seen by Christ and Mohomet, made it impossible to create
any religious, territorial, or social community, and forced living
patterns back toward the "amoral familism" of the extended family.
In extreme cases this broke down further to amoral nuclear familism
or even to amoral individualism.
This basic outlook and personality type was given a
distinctive twist in the Iberian peninsula, from Saracen and
anti-lslamic influences. The export of this distinctive type to
America and the changes made in it by the shattering of American
Indian cultures gives us the distinctive Latin American personality
patterns which Needler (1971) sees as "Mexican national
character."
These patterns have been modified in various
circumstances by the "culture of poverty ," by modem industrialism
and nationalism, by various nineteenth century ideologies such as
Marxism, and by other influences, but the basic Pakistani-Peruvian
outlook is still identifiable.
What is distinctly Mexican, and potentially
revolutionary, is the new political ideology which Needler reports
thus: "the cynicism and alienation of Mexican respondents. . . did
not extend to two elements of the political system: the president
himself and the idea of the Mexican Revolution" (1971:760).
Any discussion of Mexican national character should
recognize the revolutionary implications of these exceptions and
the remote sources of the other aspects of Mexican personality.
Silverman, who has a good appreciation of this
Pakistani-Peruvian cultural area, has also glimpsed the nature of
its northern boundary. This boundary, which roughly follows the
lines of the Highland Zone of the Old World, is marked by the
southern limits of the archaic peasant cultures, in which rural
life was valued higher than urbanism, the land was loved (as a
female entity), pride in skillful tillage was evident, fertility
was prized over virility, and the cow was more valuable than the
bull (whose usefulness was increased by castration).
In this peasant culture the southern concept of honor
was non-existent, female virginity or chastity were considered
unnatural, pre-marital sexual relations were practiced (often
condoned by a betrothal ceremony), and marriage often followed
pregnancy, rather than preceding coition as in the south.
This peasant culture accepted a female centered
house-hold and tended to revere local, semi-pagan, female saints
(or Mary seen as a Mother rather than as a Virgin) instead of the
rather war-like male saints popular farther south. Above all, in
the north the basic social units were territorial (villages or
parishes), not kinship groups, and functioned as communities.
Studies of these distinctions are frustrated today by
academic specialization, both areal and chronological, so that
students attribute cause to whatever social feature strikes them as
significant. This includes ethos (Banfield 1958), agricultural
organization (Silverman 1968), transhumance pastoralism (Campbell
1964), Bedouin Arabism (Carmichael 1967), urbanism (Pitkin
1963:123.129), social hopelessness (Cancian 1961), and many
others.
A comparison of the similarities of values and
personality between a rural pastoral people like the Saracatsan
(Campbell 1964) and a modern, professional, urban Greek family
(Kanelli 1963) will show the need to seek explanation on a wider
and deeper areal and historical foundation.
This foundation must be a historical-cultural framework
similar to that used in historical geology, so that local
outcroppings of earlier cultural strata can be identified and
coordinated.
I gave a brief outline of such a framework for the Old
World in 1961, but other historians have rather scorned any efforts
at establishing a matrix of macro-history.
Feeble efforts are now being made to remedy this lack
in other disciplines, including anthropology and sociology, but
these attempts will find almost insurmountable difficulties so long
as historians do not do their part of the task.
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