overt concept of ‘number’ when talking about generational difference, to have a strong

understanding of persons who are zero or two terminological generations apart (as

well as persons on the same side of a river, etc.) as being in one type of relation, and

of persons who are one generation apart as standing in another. A neo-extensionist

account deriving this gestalt structure of categories from the kernel of parent-child

difference will likely be incomplete and non-parsimonious. It also likely projects into

Dalabon life an individualist ideology that personal biological genesis is more basic

than social organization.

The greatest anthropological interest I see in NSM is its character as a thoughtful

project by an exceptionally well-informed professional linguist to create a utopian

language or register capable of overcoming the heterogeneity of previously existing

languages. In a longer commentary, useful connections might be drawn between NSM

and the several projects of utopian desire for an ‘other’ language discussed ethno-

graphically in the preceding number of this journal (Volume 23, Issue 3). Compari-

sons and contrasts with such projects would help draw out the culturally distinctive

foundations of NSM itself.

Please send correspondence to Rupert Stasch: rstasch@ucsd.edu

Rejoinder

Anna Wierzbicka

Australian National University

I’m very grateful to Richard Shweder for his generous words about my work and for

his deep engagement with the NSM program (which Cliff Goddard and I have been

developing for over twenty years as equal partners). I can only reply here to two points

(several others are addressed in Goddard and Wierzbicka, in press, Words and Mean-

ings, OUP).

Q.: ‘‘Why shouldn’t we entertain the possibility that there are many universally intelligi-

ble and readily graspable concepts (…) that are not primes?’’

A.: We should. This is what the NSM theory of universal ‘‘semantic molecules’’ is all

about: concepts like ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are universal, even though

they are not primes.

Q.: Can’t speakers of Tikopian have a recognisable ‘‘core concept’’ of ‘moral obligation’ even

though Tikopian has not developed linguistic resources for talking about it?

© 2013 Australian Anthropological Society28

A. Wierzbicka

A.: No doubt Tikopian does have linguistic resources for talking about it. Before investigat-

ing this, however, we need to identify the intended ‘‘core concept’’ without the English/

Anglo slant inherent in a word like ‘right’, a post-Enlightenment tool of Anglo rational-

ist ethics (Wierzbicka 2006, English: Meaning and Culture). Here is a start: ‘‘I know

that if I don’t do this, it will be very bad; because of this I can’t not do it’’.

Many thanks also to Rupert Stash for his comments. I will address three.

1 ‘‘She [Wierzbicka] ultimately holds that a concept cannot exist for people unless

they have a word for it’’. What I hold is rather different: First, that the existence of

a word provides evidence for the existence of a concept; second, that even though

a concept can ‘‘exist’’ in people’s heads when these people have no word for it, this

should not be used as an excuse for attributing English concepts embedded in cul-

ture-specific English words (e.g., loyalty, odd number, generation or sibling) to

speakers of languages that have no such words; and third that a coherent interpre-

tation couched in people’s own words is superior to one couched in technical

English.

2 Stash contends that NSM primes are not ‘‘up to the task of parsing [complex] cul-

tural categories’’, and prefers ‘‘to retain a full interpretive language instead of

adopting a drastically reduced one’’. He doesn’t address the key point that this

‘‘full interpretive language’’ is nothing but academic English, alien to people whose

thinking he seeks to ‘‘discern accurately’’. (See my Imprisoned in English, in press,

OUP).

3 Stash describes my approach to Dalabon kinship as an ‘‘extensionalist account’’

deriving ‘‘from the kernel of parent-child difference’’. He misses the point that

Dalabon doesn’t have words for either ‘parent’ or ‘child (of)’, and that conse-

quently I wouldn’t dream of basing my account on such concepts. Dalabon does,

however, have words meaning ‘mother’ and ‘father’, and it is on these concepts

(among others) that my account is based (see scripts [A] to [H]).

Please send correspondence to Anna Wierzbicka: anna.wierzbicka@anu.edu.au

© 2013 Australian Anthropological Society 29

Translatability and the scripting of other peoples’ souls