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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2435 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

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Is there any research on how a nation's (its people) body language, thinking styles, communication styles, attitudes towards self, etc, etc, is affected by a past where the country was subordinate to another country/empire? Slave mentality or the like.

Russian history, perhaps? The Mongol domination was, if memory serves, fairly traumatic for their self-identity. Might be worth doing the legwork and going through a history of the Mongol period and immediately following.

Japan has an interesting postwar phenomenon where the masculine was severely repressed (i.e. pushed down from open representation) in favor of cute feminine and childlike appearances. But I’m not sure this was the American occupation so much as it was the fact that the previous ruling ideology was so overtly masculine and that it totally failed the country to the point of destroying their holdings and getting them occupied.

Thanks for the reply.

The Japanese post war development might be interesting.

I don't think I'll find what I'm looking for in old texts on the Mongols.

Let me explain a little more about what I'm looking for:

The dignity or lack thereof with which they hold their bodies and minds. How lofty their goals of self actualization, "classiness" and ambitions to increase that class and their sophistication etc. How they walk. Do they start their own businesses and strive for perfection or do they settle for modern subsistence "farming".

It's my tentative impression that the average person of the middle class in the previous "lordly" country will have a subtle but important increase in these things as compared to the descendants of the suppressed.

You can find this within a single country too. Just look at the north vs south of England. Their lower vs upper class, which is somewhat divided by north vs south too. The lower class "know their place". This might have roots all the way back to the very severe and thorough "harrowing of the north" that the Norman ruling class orchestrated.

But I’m not sure this was the American occupation

They did rewrite the constitution to give women equal rights to men...

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