The 1970s saw the academy increasingly turn its attention away from attempts to discover a set of illusory and illusive “universal modes” of human behavior. Universalism subsequently came under attack from various constituencies as little more than another form of political and ideological hegemony, the will to power of a dominant group over others. This shift in emphasis, driven in large part by postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment project, questioned many of the operating assumptions that were traditionally assumed as de riguer, including traditional binary oppositions such as center/margin, male/female, white/non-white, and the interpretive strategies that tended to privilege the first term of each of these constructs at the expense of the second.