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American Values

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio traveled the world documenting that most basic of human behaviors -- what we eat.

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Today on All Things Considered, photographer Peter Menzel and his wife, Faith D'Aluisio, discuss their latest book, What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets. But 16 years ago, Menzel was working on another project, called Material World: A Global Family Portrait. He and other photographers took portraits of 30 statistically average families with all of their worldly possessions displayed outside their homes.

While Menzel has moved on to new subjects, the topic of Material World remains relevant today. More recently, two Chinese photographers, Ma Hongjie and Huang Qingjun, took on a similar venture in their own country. Their project is called Family Stuff. Hongjie says he wanted to do such a project in China because, as he writes in an e-mail, "China is most diversified both geographically and ethnically." Qingjun does not necessarily admit to being influenced by Menzel's project. And yet, Family Stuff looks awfully familiar. What do you think?

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Everything You Own In A Photo: A Look At Our Worldly Possessions

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In 1994, Peter Menzel photographed families around the world posing with everything they owned. A decade and a half later, a similar project takes us on a trip around China.

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Big Think's experts share their insights on music, theater, literature, and even the hidden connections between neurology and modern sculpture.

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A Saudi, an Indian and an Iranian walk into a Qatari bar ... | Maz Jobrani

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Watch The Full Program | Merchants Of Cool | FRONTLINE | PBS

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But what lessons do MTV and other companies draw from this exhaustive and expensive study of teenagers' lives? Does it result in a more nuanced portrait of the American teen? In "The Merchants of Cool," FRONTLINE introduces viewers to the "mook" and the "midriff" -- the stock characters that MTV and others have resorted to in order to hook the teen consumer.

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Although a quarter of the world have some knowledge of English, there are 7,000 recognised languages spoken across the globe. With 2,200 of these being found in Asia, it isn't surprising that 12.44% of the world's population speak Mandarin as their first language. The world's most translated document is the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been published in 300 languages. Surprisingly it is the story of Pinocchio which is available in the most languages after the Bible. The world's most translated author is Agatha Christie, with 7,231 different combinations of books and languages.

Unfortunately it is estimated that a language dies every two weeks, and there are now 2,400 which are classified in the danger zone. There are, however, several artificial languages which have been made up, the most well known being Esperanto.The writer's goal was to create an easy-to-learn, politically neutral language that would transcend nationality and the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, was published on July 26, 1887. Other languages have been the creation of fans of the television series Star Trek and the Lord of the Rings books.

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One young American boy went one further and created his own country to accompany his made-up language! On the 26th of December 1979, 14 year-old Robert Ben Madison of Wisconsin, Milwaukee declared his second-floor bedroom to be an independent, sovereign country. Ben named his creation 'The Kingdom of Talossa,' from the Finnish word talossa, which means 'inside the house.' At 1900 hours, Madison gave his first Speech to the Nation and at that moment, the founder was transformed into His Royal Majesty, King Robert the First of the Kingdom of Talossa. There are now around 35,000 words in the Talossan language, which are enjoyed and 'spoken' by 217 citizens of this micronation that began in a teenager's bedroom!

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50 Awesome Facts About Languages [Infographic]

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Although a quarter of the world have some knowledge of English, there are 7,000 recognised languages spoken across the globe. With 2,200 of these being found in Asia, it isn't surprising that 12.44% of the world's population speak Mandarin as their first language.

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Ethnicity, like race, is a social construct, but it's still a construct with significant implications for the world. How people perceive ethnicity, both their own and that of others, can be tough to measure, particularly given that it's so subjective. So how do you study it?

When five economists and social scientists set out to measure ethnic diversity for a landmark 2002 paper for the Harvard Institute of Economic Research, they started by comparing data from an array of different sources: national censuses, Encyclopedia Brittanica, the CIA, Minority Rights Group International and a 1998 study called " Ethnic Groups Worldwide." They looked for consistence and inconsistence in the reports to determine what data set would be most reliable and complete. Because data sources such as censuses or surveys are self-reported - in other words, people are classified how they ask to be classified - the ethnic group data reflects how people see themselves, not how they're categorized by outsiders. Those results measured 650 ethnic groups in 190 countries.

One thing the Harvard Institute authors did with all that data was measure it for what they call ethnic fractionalization. Another word for it might be diversity. They gauged this by asking an elegantly simple question: If you called up two people at random in a particular country and ask them their ethnicity, what are the odds that they would give different answers? The higher the odds, the more ethnically "fractionalized" or diverse the country.

I've mapped out the results above. The greener countries are more ethnically diverse and the orange countries more homogenous. There are a few trends you can see right away: countries in Europe and Northeast Asia tend to be the most homogenous, sub-Saharan African nations the most diverse. The Americas are generally somewhere in the middle. And richer countries appear more likely to be homogenous.

This map is particularly interesting viewed alongside data we examined yesterday on racial tolerance, as measured by the frequency with which people in certain countries said they would not want a neighbor from a different racial group.

Before we go any further, though, a few important caveats, all of which appear in the original research paper as well. Well, all except for the report's age. It's now 11 years old. And given the scarcity of information from some countries, some of the data are very old, dating from as far back as the early 1990s or even late 1980s. Conceptions of ethnicity can change over time; the authors note that this happened in Somalia, where the same people started self-identifying differently after war broke out. And so can the actual national make-ups themselves, due to immigration, conflict, demographic trends and other factors. It's entirely possible, then, that some of these diversity "scores" would look different with present-day data.

Another caveat is that people in different countries might have different bars for what constitutes a distinct ethnicity. These data, then, could be said to measure the perception of ethnic diversity more than the diversity itself; given that ethnicity is a social construct, though those two metrics are not necessarily as distinct as one might think. Finally, as the paper notes, "It would be wrong to interpret our ethnicity variable as reflecting racial characteristics alone." Ethnicity might partially coincide with race, but they're not the same thing.

Now for the data itself. Here are a few observations and conclusions, a number of which draw from the Harvard Institute paper:

* African countries are the most diverse. Uganda has by far the highest ethnic diversity rating, according to the data, followed by Liberia. In fact, the world's 20 most diverse countries are all African. There are likely many factors for this, although one might be the continent's colonial legacy. Some European overlords engineered ethnic distinctions to help them secure power, most famously the Hutu-Tutsi division in Rwanda, and they've stuck. European powers also carved Africa up into territories and possessions, along lines with little respect for the actual people who lived there. When Europeans left, the borders stayed (that's part of the African Union's mandate), forcing different groups into the same national boxes.

* Japan and the Koreas are the most homogenous. Racial politics can be complicated and nasty in these countries, where nationalism and ethnicity have at times gone hand-in-hand, from Hirohito's Japan to Kim Il Sung's North Korea. The lack of diversity perhaps informs these politics, although it's tough to say which caused which.

* European countries are ethnically homogenous. This is, to me, one of the most interesting trends in the data. A number of now-global ideas about the nation-state, about national identity as tied to ethnicity and about nationalism itself originally came from Europe. For centuries, Europe's borders shifted widely and frequently, only relatively recently settling into what we see today, in which most large ethnic groups have a country of their own. That developed, painfully, over a very long time. And while there are still some exceptions - Belgium has ethnic Walloons and Dutch, for example - in most of Europe, ethnicity and nationality are pretty close to the same thing.

* The Americas are often diverse. From the United States through Central America down to Brazil, the "new world" countries, maybe in part because of their histories of relatively open immigration (and, in some cases, intermingling between natives and new arrivals) tend to be pretty diverse. The exception is South America's "southern cone," where Argentines and Chileans, many of whom originally come from the same handful of Western European countries, tend to be more homogenous. I was surprised to see Canada rate as more diverse than the United States or even Mexico; it's possible that the survey counted Quebecois as ethnically distinct, although I can't say for sure.

* Wide variation in the Middle East. The range of diversity from Morocco to Iran is a reminder that this part of the world is much less monolithic than we sometimes think. North African countries include large Berber minorities, for example, as well as some sub-Saharan ethnic groups, particularly in Libya. The diversity of Jordan and Syria are reminders of their internal complexity. Iran, with large Azeri, Kurdish and Arab populations, is one of the region's most diverse.

* Diversity and conflict. Internal conflicts appear on first blush to be more common in greener countries, which might make some intuitive sense given that groups with comparable "stakes" in their country's economics and politics might be more willing or able to compete, perhaps violently, over those resources. But there's enough data here to draw a lot of different conclusions. One thing to keep in mind is that ethnicity might not be static or predetermined. In other words, as in the case of Somalia, maybe worsening economic conditions or war make people more likely to further divide along ethnic fractions.

* Diversity correlates with latitude and low GDP per capita. The report notes, "our measures of linguistic and ethnic fractionalization are highly correlated with latitude and GDP per capita. Therefore it is quite difficult to disentangle the effectof these three variables on the quality of government." As above, keep in mind that correlation and causation aren't the same thing.

* Strong democracy correlates with ethnic homogeneity. This does not mean that one necessarily causes the other; the correlation might be caused by some other factor or factors. But here's the paper's suggestion for why diversity might make democracy tougher in some cases:

The democracy index is inversely related to ethnic fractionalization (when latitude is not controlled for). This result is consistent with theory and evidence presented in Aghion, Alesina and Trebbi (2002). The idea is that in more fragmented societies a group imposes restrictions on political liberty to impose control on the other groups. In more homogeneous societies, it is easier to rule more democratically since conflicts are less intense.

Here's the money quote on the potential political implications of ethnicity:

In general, it does not matter for our purposes whether ethnic differences reflect physical attributes of groups (skin color, facial features) or long-lasting social conventions (language, marriage within the group, cultural norms) or simple social definition (self-identification, identification by outsiders). When people persistently identify with a particular group, they form potential interest groups that can be manipulated by political leaders, who often choose to mobilize some coalition of ethnic groups ("us") to the exclusion of others ("them"). Politicians also sometimes can mobilize support by singling out some groups for persecution, where hatred of the minority group is complementary to some policy the politician wishes to pursue.

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A revealing map of the world's most and least ethnically diverse countries

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Ethnicity, like race, is a social construct, but it's still a construct with significant implications for the world. How people perceive ethnicity, both their own and that of others, can be tough to measure, particularly given that it's so subjective. So how do you study it?

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Is the American obsession with individual freedom really such a great idea? What other cultures know about how to make good choices.

Sit down at a restaurant in France, and there's a menu. Salmon with rice. French beans. Wine. If you ask for potatoes instead of rice, the restaurant will say no. Because it is their menu. Not yours. To an American, this is nearly unfathomable.
One American model: Give me personal autonomy or give me death.
"In terms of fetishizing the idea of choice, the U.S. is the absolute pinnacle," says Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social change at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. "We want to be able to choose everything that matters, as well as the things that don't."

We want to be able to choose everything that matters, as well as the things that don't.

Rice and potatoes aside, the American desire for choice has manifested in numerous ways: politically, in a demand for a voice in governance; commercially, in the demand for a variety of consumer goods and services; and spiritually, in the demand to choose and create exactly the kind of individual life, and self, you believe in. In the U.S., the overriding perception is that anything you do out of allegiance to tradition and social expectation is inauthentic and not you. Because the real you is the choices you make.

After Protestant colonists brought the concept of personal autonomy to the U.S., the idea was further cemented into the national psychology with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Personal and religious freedom became irrevocably tied to economic freedom from the monarchy and early capitalism. "Americans were truly the only people that brought those ideas together," says Sheena Iyengar, professor at Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing (TED Talk: The art of choosing.) "It made the idea of personal autonomy such a dogma that it almost became a religion itself."

The AMerican cultural responsibility to revere choice has been Present since before America was America. In other words, IT WAS NEVER A choice.

My fellow Americans and I believe that choice allows us to individuate ourselves, to prove that we are free. Our preferences, therefore, become who we are. We feel acutely the need to construct a personal narrative out of our choices and, thus, construct our own identity.

There's a certain degree to which this is sheer lunacy, and also fallacy. Because our cultural responsibility to revere choice has been instilled in us since before America was America. In other words, we never chose choice.
The Amish model: Belonging, not choice, is crucial.
Even within the U.S., not all cultures regard the idea of personal autonomy as sacrosanct. In the Anabaptist religious tradition, for example, there is one major choice to be made: whether or not to be baptized into the church. The Amish are baptized between the ages of 18 and 24 years old, after a "rumspringa," or period in their teenage years in which they experience modern life, including dating, driving and using technology.

The Amish wonder why we're so anxious about our work that we'll tear apart our families and move across the country for a job, to end up living among strangers.

Once they've made the choice to be part of the church - which the majority of young adults do - and are baptized, all other choices are made within the Amish canopy, says Donald Kraybill, senior fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, and author of numerous books on the Amish. For example, because formal education terminates at the end of eighth grade, there are limits to the choice of profession. You can't be a lawyer or surgeon. But within limits, you have every freedom to choose whether to become a small business owner, or carpenter, or baker, or horse trainer, or any number of other occupations. The Amish sense of identity isn't shaped by choices they make but is conferred to them by the community. Instead of choice, they have belonging.

"I have a very intelligent Amish friend who thinks the rest of us are crazy in how we view the professional choices we make," says Kraybill. "We're so anxious about our occupations that we'll tear apart our families and move across the country for a job and end up living among strangers with no family or social support if we get ill or have an emergency. And put that way - how insane does that sound?"

Why should it be any less authentic to be a product of the family that raised you and the culture you grew up in and the religious institutions you participate in? Rather than knowing who you are by knowing your preferences, you know who you are by knowing what you belong to.
One Asian model: Focus on interdependence and harmony, not independence and self-expression.
In some Asian cultures, to fulfill your independent self is not the primary goal of an individual: The goal is to be interdependent and maintain relationships and make them harmonious. In Japan, for example, being a "going your own way" person is to be immature and not culturally sophisticated. Though people obviously have preferences, they often don't choose what they like, because that's not the ideal manner. "Your cultural task is harmony, not self-expression," says Hazel Markus, social psychologist and professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

The idea is that the person is not a whole, but a part, and only becomes whole in connection with others.

Why? Partly because being part of the social organization is a core tenet of traditional Eastern religions. "All of them foster an idea that a person is not a whole, but a part, and only becomes whole in connection with others," says Markus. "The fundamental, ontological understanding of what a person is is as a node in a network."

In Confucianism, especially, the belief is that without knowing your place in the hierarchy, and behaving accordingly, chaos will ensue. Certainly, you can choose not to adhere to the norm; Confucius says not to do certain acts if you don't believe them, says Peter Carroll, associate professor of Chinese history at Northwestern University and author of Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou.

You have the choice to opt in or opt out; the difference is that there's a clear expectation of what the correct choice is. By not doing the correct thing, you are demonstrating that you are less than a full person.

Meanwhile, in America, a similar rhetoric rules. By not exercising your full range of choices, you are demonstrating yourself to be less than a full person - even though most people don't exercise the choices they believe so strongly in, such as the right to vote. This is the fiction of choice in the West, says Carroll. "Individual choice is a powerful received idea, but frankly, it's a bit of a white lie that our culture tells itself," he says.

"We're not the most non-conformist, and we're not the most individualized," says Iyengar. "But what Americans do have is a very strong dogma. We believe ourselves to be the most autonomous; we value autonomy more than any other culture; we value the concept of non-conformity more than any other culture; and we value the concept of individual freedom and individual choice more than any other culture, at least rhetorically. But we're certainly not the most radical in offering freedoms, such as with gay rights or getting women the right to vote. We are not the first ones to actually empower people with autonomy."

As Western consumer culture proliferates around the world, will cultural views on choice change?

Our fixation on individual choice is actually dangerous to our society, because it pacifies our activism, argues Renata Salecl, philosopher and sociologist (TED Talk: Our unhealthy obsession with choice). Making choices based on social and political good actually engineers the most change. In the Scandinavian countries, she notes, it was a political choice to open government to women and make rules regarding energy use and environmental sustainability. If left to the individual, that likely wouldn't have happened.

As Western consumer culture, with its seemingly endless choices, proliferates around the world, will the cultural view on choice change?

In India, studies found that even while young college students become megaconsumers, that picking clothes or music without consideration for what their parents might think is not considered particularly moral, says Markus. In Japan, advertisements explicitly encourage individuals to "follow the trend" and "fit in." Similarly, in Korea, ads for food products advertise that "You might be able to make a dish almost as good as your mother-in-law's" - because the ability to uphold tradition is most valued in driving personal choices, not innovation or individuality.

Still, as countries become more urban, more people will be exposed to diversity and, generally, open themselves up to reflection. Likewise, as more people around the world are educated - and educated in a Western style - the more they will come into contact with different ways of living and the more they will see and deliberate on choices in their own life. The digital revolution vastly accelerates the process.

The American obsession with choice insists that choice be installed globally, whether through geopolitics or consumer goods.

"You have a lot of people around the world consuming an American-style education, and what that does is teach a common language regarding how you discuss and frame your ideas," says Iyengar. "A result of that is that the intellectual class around the world is starting to debate more. That's leading to more conflict for sure, but they are also using this way of arguing when it comes to choices they need to make, even when it comes to defending an absence of choice, like in a political system."

The American obsession with choice insists that choice be installed globally, whether through geopolitics or consumer goods. It's anathema to let people limit their own choices. "It's tied to being free," says Markus. "And how do you know you're free? Because you get to freely choose and do what you want to do and follow your heart and your dream. The way things are now are not the way they have to be tomorrow. It's bedrock for us, for our American selves. Freedom equals choice, and in every human heart is the desire to be free, so that must mean choice for all."

Yet complete radical freedom and individualism creates a life that can't be lived. Tyranny is unacceptable too, of course. But somewhere between tyranny and radical freedom resides a mixture of constraints, social norms, legal constraints and individual freedom of choice that enables people to lead satisfying, meaningful and authentic lives.
Featured image by Lyza/Flickr.

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How cultures around the world make decisions

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Sit down at a restaurant in France, and there's a menu. Salmon with rice. French beans. Wine. If you ask for potatoes instead of rice, the restaurant will say no. Because it is their menu. Not yours. To an American, this is nearly unfathomable. One American model: Give me personal autonomy or give me death.

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This animated map, based on research by art historian Maximilian Schich and a team at the University of Texas at Dallas, traces the place of birth and death of more than 100,000 eminent figures in Western cultural history. With births mapped in blue and deaths in red, it appears, as the narrator says, "a little like a map of budget airline destinations." It's more beautiful, however, than those pages at the back of Sky magazine. And it's an educational, if limited, look at the migratory patterns of Western thinkers and the shifting of cultural centers across cities and continents.

To develop their data set, Schich's team relied on Freebase, Google's "community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things." Information is contributed by community members and rounded up from sources like Wikipedia, meaning that, as with any crowd-sourced effort, it should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Underlying data aside, the result is a moving image of 2,600 years of scientists, scholars, and artists traipsing the globe like so many ants, seeking out more culturally stimulating anthills.

The video and accompanying article, which appear in Nature, an international science journal, have generated some criticism on Twitter, since Nature fails to qualify the phrase "visual history of human culture" with the words "Western" or "European." Still others question how much the places where a man-and these are mostly men-was born and died can really tell us about cultural history.

These critiques are valid, and perhaps they'll be addressed as Schich's team releases further research. But if we take the video for what it is and nothing more-a mesmerizing view of the migrations of people whose contributions Western culture values-it's a compelling look at the interplay between culture and geography.

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Watch 2,600 Years of Western Culture Unfold in One Beautiful Animated Map

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This animated map, based on research by art historian Maximilian Schich and a team at the University of Texas at Dallas, traces the place of birth and death of more than 100,000 eminent figures in Western cultural history. With births mapped in blue and deaths in red, it appears, as the narrator says, "a little like a map of budget airline destinations."