Overcoming the Eurocentrism in Psychological Anthropology with Lexical Universals: A Response to Naomi Quinn

Naomi Quinns article A Critique of Wierzbickas Theory of Cultural Scripts: The Case of Ifaluk Fago is a rare case of scholarly critique whose aim is clearly a search for truth and understanding rather than an attempt to win arguments or undermine approaches different from ones own, and so it clearly deserves an answer. I will start my response with two quotes from Quinns opening paragraph. The first quote sums up the main idea of the NSM program: In a long-term, two-part program, the linguist Anna Wierzbicka, in collaboration with her colleague Cliff Goddard, (1) has developed a short list of 60 or so concepts (at last count, 63) that are universal in the sense that these researchers have identified lexemes for them in all languages of the world . . ., and (2) has argued that these basic concepts, . . ., along with a limited number of grammatical rules for combining them, provide what she calls a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) that can be used to define the meaning of more culturally distinctive lexemes. The resulting reconstructions of the meanings of such terms are called cultural scripts.