Wierzbicka, Anna (1993). The alphabet of human thoughts. In Richard A. Geiger, & Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (Eds.), Conceptualizations and mental processing in language (pp. 23-51). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
As human beings, we cannot place ourselves outside all cultures. This does not mean, however, that if we want to study cultures other than our own, all we can do is describe them through the prism of our own culture, and therefore to distort them. We can find a point of view which is universal and culture-independent; but we must look for such a point of view not outside all human cultures (because we cannot place ourselves outside them), but within our own culture, or within any other culture that we are intimately familiar with. To achieve this, we must learn to separate within a culture its idiosyncratic aspects from its universal aspects. We must learn to find “human nature” within every particular culture. This is necessary not only for the purpose of studying “human nature” but also for the purpose of studying the idiosyncratic aspects of any culture that we may be interested in. To study different cultures in their culture-specific features we need a universal perspective; and we need a culture-independent analytical framework. We can find such a framework in universal human concepts, that is in concepts which are inherent in any human language.
If we proceed in this way, we can study any human culture without the danger of distorting it by applying to it a framework alien to it; and we can aim both at describing it “truthfully” and at understanding it.
