Introduction

Starting in the late 1980s, a number of developmental psychologists and philosophers (e.g., Astington, Harris, and Olson 1988; Carruthers and Smith 1996) recast the issue of the role of intentions in interpreting people’s actions, words included, in terms of the so-called “theory of mind,” a term originally introduced by David Premack and Guy Woodruff (1978) in their work on primates’ cognition. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, linguistic and cultural anthropologists entered this tradition of studies not so much to claim cross-cultural differences in the capacity to read other minds, which they took to be a human universal, but in the need and willingness that members of different communities express and demonstrate to engage in introspection or in guessing what others might be thinking, wishing, or feeling. As shown in the following quote by Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey, the doubts that Michelle Rosaldo and I, and others, had raised in the 1980s about whether we need to involve individual intentions to interpret human action were reframed as issues of ideological control.

Starting from the observation that, according to existing ethnographic accounts, people in a number of societies in the Pacific have been said to claim – or to imply through their behavior – that it is impossible to know what goes on in another person’s mind, Robbins and Rumsey (2008) put forward the hypothesis that members of these societies subscribed to what they called “doctrine of the opacity of other minds” and that such a doctrine “matter[s] to how people operate socially” (Robbins and Rumsey 2008: 414).