The English Ethnopsychological Personhood Construct Mind "Deconstructed" in Universally Intelligible Words

Abstract

The dominance of English as the international lingua franca has led to rampant Anglocentrism and the reification of concepts that are in fact culturespecific. One such concept, often thought to refer to a universal human “attribute,” is the ethnopsychological personhood construct mind. In this paper, I argue that the best weapon to combat Anglocentrism is the English language itself—or rather, a metalanguage based on what English shares with all other languages of the world. That metalanguage, which has existed for some time, is known as the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)”. This paper shows how far NSM practitioners have come in their efforts to demonstrate that the word mind is a cultural construct that has nothing universal about it and that cannot be used to define the ethnopsychological personhood constructs of other languages. Instead, it is just as culture-specific as any other ethnopsychological personhood construct and does not deserve any special status.