Abstract

On the current international scene of discourse studies, the mainstream traditions of research often prize themselves on their joining with one or the other discipline – or with more – say, linguistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and/or media studies. This cross-or multi-disciplinarity is held out as the best, if not the only, method of guaranteeing knowledge, because such disciplines are presupposed to share the same universality of rationality and reason: fundamentally, they all represent the human world in some neutral, objective way, and therefore they are simply true and hence applicable across all cultures; culture itself is but an epiphenomenon. There is rarely any reflection over, or passing discussion of, where they come from historically and culturally, or whether there might be culturally other, different systems of theory and methods.