Prof talks on Egypt sojourns

Continuing a year-long series sponsored by the Middle East Studies Center, Professor Arthur Goldschmidt of Pennsylvania State University spoke on the long tradition of Egyptian sojourns enjoyed by many of history's most celebrated people. His lecture -- drawing from the initial research done for a book-in-progress -- conveyed a sense of the manner in which the human personality responds to a new environment. Goldschmidt's book builds upon a little-known hypothesis in sociology called the "sojourn theory," which examines how living in an "alien" culture profoundly affects some people while leaving others unresponsive. "It's like spotting Elvis in a magazine since I see it so rarely," Goldschmidt said in reference to the hypothesis. "I'm selecting people who are interesting and represent, in part, the sojourn theory." The lecture, entitled "They Drank from the Nile: Foreign Sojourners in Egypt," detailed both the time spent in Egypt by famous people as well as their. responses to this experience. A young Agatha Christie, who had not yet begun writing, traversed the desert of Egypt as an 18-year-old debutante, collecting the experiences that would later to serve as the basis for her novel, Death on the Nile. A 14-year-old Theodore Roosevelt logged his impressions of a voyage on the Nile River during a vacation with his parents. And the sojourn theory and the experiences of such people may affect the lives of students studying abroad, Goldschmidt noted. The college age represents a time when men and women test the limits of how they communicate with the ideas of an alien people, while also seeing where they fit into the world, according to Goldschmidt, who chose Egypt out of his knowledge and fondness for the country. "I've worked very hard at Penn State to get students to travel," he said. "Very often young people fail to take advantage of an opportunity to live among another people and gain an understanding of those people and themselves." Adding a lighter side to the study of famous people's visits to Egypt, Goldschmidt also provided historical anecdotes about the experiences of others spending time in Egypt. Mark Twain ended his Innocents Abroad journey in Egypt and wrote a humorous account of his betting a suspicious Arab $100 to jump headfirst off the top of the pyramids. After his offer to build a sculpture for an Egyptian viceroy at the head of the Suez Canal was rejected, Auguste Bertoli offered his work of an Egyptian peasant-woman to the United States as the Statue of Liberty. The recounting of stories of popular historical people abroad -- as Goldschmidt's book will endeavor to do -- fills a void that has existed within the forum of American academic literature since the 19th century, according to Peter Gran, a Middle Eastern History professor at Temple University. "There's an absence across the board of books for a general educated audience in America -- look in a library and see the great many text books and technical books and very little in between," Gran said. In the 19th century, prominent writers and historians brought knowledge to the general public in the form of encyclopedias, almanacs and dictionaries, he said. Goldschmidt's talk continues a year-long series of lectures designed to reach members of the University community interested in Middle Eastern topics, according to Barbara Von Schlegell, the series' organizer. Funded by the federal government, the Middle East Studies Center traces its origin to legislation growing out of Cold War tensions that lead lawmakers to address the American student's lack of knowledge about the world. The 1957 launching of the Russian Sputnik began a period of great academic expansion that lead to an increase in funding for such projects as the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America Centers at the University, said Roger Allen, an Asian and Middle Eastern Studies professor. "Americans thought themselves advanced in knowledge about the world -- a world under competition -- and one morning they woke up and something was beeping at them from space they hadn't put there," he added.