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Title:
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Are These Truths Self-Evident? Language, Culture and Human Rights in the U.S. and China
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Author:
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Jason Patent
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of California, Berkeley
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2003
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
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Subject Language(s):
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Chinese, Mandarin
English
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Director(s):
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Eve Sweetser
Kaiping Peng
David Collier
George Lakoff
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Abstract:
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American advocates of international human rights often assume that the notion of human rights is somehow 'universal,' or understood in the same way across all linguistic and cultural communities. Critics of this view often resort to universalism's logical opposite, radical relativism, which holds that no concepts are stable across cultures. Strong universalist and relativist claims tend to be a priori.
What is missing is empirical investigation. Cognitive linguistics offers useful tools for such an investigation. In this study, human rights is treated as a complex cultural category which can only be understood through underlying cultural models of what a human is: cultural expectations of how humans do and should behave, especially with respect to societal institutions such as the family and the state. The category human rights is compared to its closest Chinese counterpart, rénquán, in a similar way: by unpacking the underlying Chinese cultural models.
What emerge are two complex systems of cultural models that serve as the basis for the differences and similarities between human rights and rénquán. Awareness of these differences points the way not only toward a deeper understanding of how these two cultural categories are related, but also to some deeply important aspects of American and Chinese culture. This can facilitate better cross-cultural communication about any number of issues.
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Page Updated: 28-Nov-2009
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