I read David Kosofsky's observation with much amusement because people (probably eastern as well as western) have been making such generalisations about racial/regional differences for thousands of years (see Herodotus), maybe 80,000 or a million years.

It is very common in the UK to hear generalisations about Irishmen, Scots, Northerners, West Countrymen, etc, etc. As usual, there is a grain of truth in all of these. However (as has been found in human genetics) there is far more variability within a local population than between the averages of two distant populations.

Let's take it in good humour and enjoy our differences.

Pekinseki Paul


--- David Kosofsky <kayaksky@yahoo.com> wrote:
>I wonder if anyone involved in Korean Studies has ever
>noticed what must surely be one of the earliest
>mentions, at least in a Western language, of a
>regional-character difference between North and South
>Koreans: the claim that people "in the south of Korea
>have less bravery than those in the north," made by
>none other than Baron de Montesquieu, just a tad short
>of 200 years before the political division of the
>peninsula.
> 
>I just blundered on it in "The Spirit of the Laws"
> 
>http://www.constitution.org/cm/sol_17.htm#02
> 
>(See the 2nd paragraph)
> 
>And the whole section makes interesting reading if for
>no other reason than the glimpse it gives into the
>well of misinformation that 18th-century Europeans had
>to draw from in their efforts to understand Asia.  Not
>that things changed all that much in the next century:
>seems to me there are distinct echos of Montesquieu in
>what Marx had to say about the "Asiatic Mode of
>Production," "Asiatic Despotism," etc.
>
>
>David Kosofsky
>Washington, DC
>
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