Is there an “Italian mind”? Does one react in a certain way “because one is a woman”? Do “Westerners” exist?
Perhaps. But the same person who is Italian is often also much more, e.g., a woman, a Jew, a rationalist, a Marxist, a feminist, a middle-age person, a mother, a vegan, educated in a Catholic environment, passionate about ski, long-term traveller to Bhutan, not to speak about her job and so on. In other words, even if their were anything like a “typical Italian”, a “typical woman”, a “typical Asian” and so on, still it would not cover but a small aspect of a person’s intellectual life. In this sense, Leonardo, e.g., is not (purely or predominantely) the result of the “Italian genius” (and in fact most Italians did not achieve anything vaguely comparable to what Leonardo achieved in a single year of his life), just like the “Indian spirit” is not enough to understand, e.g., the Mahābhārata. This is not meant to altogether deny the presence of anything like the Italian genius etc., but to stress the fact that complex phenomena cannot be fully understood through one single approach and that the fact of sharing the same birth place of Bruegel does not make you automatically more competent to discuss his art than an art historian.
Can we agree about that and stop “boxing”?
This is really an eternally puzzling issue. While one does not want to commit the error of stereotyping, one cannot overlook the usefulness of certain generalizations. There IS such a thing as “Jewish” humor although non-Jews can write jokes that are similar to the Jewish joke. There IS such a thing as Indian music although it shares similarities to, say, African or Japanese music. We oftentimes make good use of such terms in real life although it is not easy to describe the characteristics of, say, French wittiness. The famous joke about heaven and hell involving the European “tribes” such as Italian and Swiss does have some solid connection to reality: the German do export a lot of machine tools, and the British policemen are more polite than most non-British policemen, etc.
Sure, we cannot live without some generalisations, because we cannot try to know the world anew each time. However, my point is that we should remain aware of such generalisations and avoid closing the “boxes”.