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What We Cannot Say: A Cultural Encounter East vs. West

by William L. Nute, Jr.

150 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-0583; ISBN 1-4120-5685-3; US$15.00, C$17.25, EUR11.69, £7.75

What happens in an encounter between two groups of people, each having a set of unconscious assumptions about themselves and the natural order of things, and each deriving these from different backgrounds and histories?

About the Book

We all make assumptions that we don't realize we're making. When the early American Protestant missionaries entered the Ottoman empire in the 1820s, they brought in their heads a set of assumptions quite different from those inherited by the peoples of that empire. This book narrates some of the experiences of the Americans in Turkey, examines the origins of their assumptions, and compares them with those of the Armenians in the empire with whom they were chiefly engaged.

The Americans inherited a set of thought patterns deriving from the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the individual. They didn't keep referring to the Renaissance, they were not consciously exemplifying its values, they simply assumed them. They were part of American culture.

But the Renaissance did not happen east of the Adriatic. The peoples of the East, then as now, tended to think in terms of the group, however it might be defined.

Since the determined objective of the missionaries was a matter of religion, a key unspoken question was, independently of the specific religious tradition one adhered to, what does it mean to be religious at all? Nobody ever asked this question explicitly. This book explores, necessarily by inference, how it might have been answered.

About the Author

Born in New York in 1916, Dr Nute was brought up partly in Turkey, where his parents and maternal grandparents were or had been Protestant missionaries. Schooled partly at home and briefly in Switzerland, he attended Andover prep school, Swarthmore College, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. To him Turkey was always a second homeland, and in his turn he served nearly two decades there in a series of different posts. Returning to the US in 1965, he served for a few years a the National Council of Churches, then for twelve years as a Senior Public Health officer of the New York City Health Department. But from childhood his passion was history, and in retirement he undertook this examination of a curious and fascinating cultural encounter.