Culture and commerce

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

Geertz, Clifford. 1974/1984. ‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding. In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Edited by Robert A. LeVine and Richard A. Shweder, 123-36. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 126.