Conventional wisdom: Imagination, obedience and intersubjectivity

Under the Opacity doctrines of the Pacific, wise listeners are skeptical about taking others' speech at face value. But among the Mopan Maya, who also espouse a version of Opacity, this is exactly what the wisest listeners are expected to do. When receiving the instructions of elders, virtuous Mopan listeners (here dubbed “Acceptors”) act as counterparts to Goffman's Principal, assuming the risks of faithful obedience regardless of their own momentary mental states, which are considered vulnerable to error and self-interest. A degree of cross-cultural variation is thus found in the domain most globally characterizable as “intersubjectivity”. We should be cautious in appealing to universal attributes of human nature as we chart this domain.