ABSTRACT
There are certainly many ways to analyze and present the historical roots of contemporary independence and interdependence meanings and activity dimensions around the world. However, I am not a historian, and I do not take it as my task in this chapter to provide a comprehensive historical chronicle of these issues. Instead, I consider some highly selective aspects of this history by limiting my analyses to a few Euro-American historical sources that provide insight into some independence and interdependence issues. I realize that such a focus is somewhat risky because analyses of Euro-Americans have fallen into disfavor as they have dominated the social sciences, and as Euro-Americans have been held up as the standard against which other cultures are analyzed and, all too often, misjudged.
