Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Jewish cultural scripts and the interpretation of the Bible. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(3), 575-599.
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2003.09.002
Abstract:
When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples and traditions, we must approach them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture’s ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts that shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us, they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts that has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations can play a useful role in this regard; it can serve as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca to help minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers.
Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. These are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding — in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible, as literature and (for believers) as the Word of God.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
