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368 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1966)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0368 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD

Interest in and opinions about Americans abroad are hardly new phenomena.
One traditional school of literature is arch, patronizing, and superior, treating
Americans as ill-educated, bad-mannered children with too much unearned
pocket money.
This school, by far the largest, includes both American authors-writing about
other Americans, not themselves, of course-and non-Americans for whom the
sport seems, for reasons that escape me, to have an endless fascination. Another
school finds us and our country downright sinister and threatening: we carry with
us a degrading cultural blight, or a threat of financial capture, or we are agents
of that semimythical giant octopus, the Central Intelligence Agency, or we are
forerunners of a coming surge of world conquest. And there is, of course,
another school which comments on the folkways and appetites of this strange
tribe in order to entice it to its shores or doors and to cater to it, monopolize
its attention, and absorb its wealth.
There is beginning to be a fourth school of literature which is interested in the
phenomenon of Americans abroad. It is neither supercilious, alarmed, nor ex-
ploitative, but is naturalistic and interested in the phenomenon for its own sake.
The articles in this volume are a sample of such literature by some of the
practitioners engaged in dealing with the flow and by scholars who have chosen
this as a field of study. The tenor throughout is descriptive and empirical, not
judgmental, and that is as it should be.
One thing should be said at the outset about the manner in which we have
selected from this literature. We have chosen in this volume to distinguish
among Americans abroad primarily on the basis of their reasons for going abroad.
Hence, the core of this volume is a series of parallel articles dealing with different
types of Americans according to their work roles. Surrounding it are intro-
ductory articles tracing the recent dispersion of Americans and some of their
distinguishing characteristics as compared with the stay-at-home population,
followed by a general history of the American diaspora, and some concluding
articles examining legal problems of Americans abroad and various aspects of the
American community in India. This choice of emphasizing the reasons for the
foreign sojourn as the primary basis of distinguishing Americans necessarily im-
poverishes the rich variety in the quality of the foreign sojourn which results
from the distinctive personality and sociocultural background of the individual
Americans. By referring to them all as Americans we tend to do what their host
countries do, wipe out their individual differences. Another cost of our way of
dividing up the topic is to obscure the differences among countries as a key
determinant of differences in American experience abroad. We expected to have
an article on the American colony in Italy as a contrast to those on India, but
an author's illness at deadline time forced us to cancel it. Other fruitful ways
of looking at the matter would have been to compare Americans abroad with

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