“Drink for the soul”: coffee tree and coffee as a symbol of the Arab national mentality

Abstract

In the complex geopolitical situation of the beginning of the 21 century and with the change of the vector of interests towards the countries of the East, attention to all aspects of the life of the peoples of these countries is increasing due to the urgent need to understand their cultures, lifestyle, and the world around them. These peoples are increasingly active in the international arena, their role in various fields is becoming more noticeable, and it is important to interact with them at various levels. To do this, it is necessary to know what this people lives by, what their priority is, what is important or secondary for them. The complexity of intercultural communication lies in the fact that the national character and mentality of representatives of different linguistic cultures is based on the existing realities of a particular people’s life, its moral values and attitudes, through which various ethnic communities identify themselves and fix their place and purpose in this world. Symbols and images reflecting these ideas take either a material or verbal shell and convey an ethnic picture of the world of a particular people, which is completely different from the ideas of other ethnic groups about what surrounds them. To understand a representative of another linguistic consciousness, mastering the vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language may not be accurate enough. Significant elements of language in their semantic part also contain an extra-linguistic component, the socalled background knowledge, which can be gleaned from the history, mythology, literature, folklore of the people with whom we are interacting. This extra-linguistic component, according to the author, is of great importance for understanding the national mentality and national character. It helps to identify other driving forces of the actions of different peoples in the process of intercultural communication, along with their political and economic interests. In this article, the author considers one of the symbols of the national mentality of the Arabs – the coffee tree and its derivative – a coffee drink, which plays an important role in creating a national collective portrait of the Arabic society, as well as makes an attempt to show how and why they occupied such an important place in the Arab national consciousness.