Human Universals

Written in 1991, Human Universals made the case for what was a minority position in anthropology: that there is a fundamental human nature that is reflected in all cultures. Now, biological differences between human populations are debated. In the battle of ideas, we've made a lot of progress. Reading this book, I realized how rarely throughout history truth has been able to triumph over ignorance. The majority of this work in on the history of anthropology and where it went wrong. The author goes as far as saying that the subject had stopped being about the study of man and became the study of culture, as something impossible to reduce to anything else (psychological or biological). In the first chapter some of the great anthropological myths are dealt with one by one. The most influential was Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, written in 1928. To back up her claim that Western civilization was responsible for such things as neurosis and jealousy, Mead help up the Samoan people as her noble savages. Supposedly, teenagers had complete sexual freedom and were much the better for it. Unfortunately for Mead, other scholars who studies Samoa for longer than she did showed her claims to be false. People of the island had the charming cultural practice of forcibly deflowering a girl by sticking two fingers into her vagina, which would force her to marry the attacker. One of the girls who was interviewed for Coming of Age even admitted that they were pulling the young researcher's leg. Another famous falsehood was the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf's claim that the Hopi Indians had no concept of time in the Western sense. Though their verb system is complicated and difficult to explain, the claim that the Indian language lacks tense is simply wrong. Whorf also said that the Hopi never used space metaphors for time (as in "long time") but his own Hopi-English dictionary contradicts him. It was once believed that color classification was completely arbitrary. Since the color spectrum is continuous, physics seems to give no indication of where to draw the line. Contrary to what the linguistic relativists once claimed, prototypes for different colors in different languages tend to be the same (in English, "blue" is a prototype, "dark blue" isn't because it needs qualification). Some languages only have two colors, but if they do those two are black and white. If there are three, the third is red. Then comes green or yellow, green or yellow again, blue and brown in that order. English has four more (purple, pink, orange, and gray), giving it the maximum of eleven. In other words, no language has purple but not blue or has orange or pink but not red. Academic fads come and go, but truth will always be there, waiting for us to discover it.

This is a comprehensive survey of the anthropological study of human universals, human nature, culture vs. biology, etc. It's also a critique of the field of anthropology, and one given from a refreshing outside-looking-in perspective. Brown deals with several influential cases (such as Margaret Mead's study of Samoan adolescence) and shows where they erred. He discusses the processes of defining and demonstrating universals, takes us on a grand tour of the history of universals in anthropology, presents the basic gamut of how universals have been and can be explained. In the final chapters he lays out his position and leaves cultural relativism thoroughly refuted. Cultural relativists, he demonstrates, have relied on universals even in their attempts to show cultural relativity. Among even the most dissimilar human languages, for example, the similarities (grammar, syntax, rhythm, content, etc.) still far outweigh the differences. Anthropologists have historically focused on the differences while remaining blind to the (often more fundamental and important) similarities. I'm a little leery of some of the traits Brown ends up calling universal; he does acknowledge the "working" nature of such a list. But what precisely shall be found to be universal is less important than simply the shift to an orientation that would seek to understand human nature in such terms. This is what Brown proposes. He understands the place of anthropology in the social sciences, the field's potential, where and how that potential has gone unrealized, and how anthropologists will need to alter their approach if they're to be fruitful in the future. I haven't even scraped the surface here; the book is a gold mine of interdisciplinary connections and it brims with insights. More than anything, it's a sensible, biologically-informed, (dare I say) reality-based account of human nature. The tone is that of a genuine pursuit of truth, as opposed to the trend among some social scientists to search high and low for anything that supports established theory. This book is packed, and in many ways it only aims to lay the framework of a better approach to the subject.

This is a very welcome counterbalance to the many voices that stress differences among cultures at the cost of losing sight of what we humans share. With extensive use of anthropological studies, Brown alerts the reader to those almost innumerable and too easily taken-for-granted elements of humanity. We all smile when happy, mourn the loss of a child, negotiate a place in a social setting with specific traditional roles. We all eat, experience hunger, learn which foods are acceptable, connect eating with social occasions, use food-related activities as basic metaphors for aspects of life. (The annotated bibliography is especially good for its lists of shared human factors.) Those who stress differences among people now usually do so to promote tolerance of "the other." But a good basis for tolerance is to recognize the common humanness within all the differences. This book does that well. It is good but highly readable anthropology.

This is a very welcome counterbalance to the many voices that stress differences among cultures at the cost of losing sight of what we humans share. With extensive use of anthropological studies, Brown alerts the reader to those almost innumerable and too easily taken-for-granted elements of humanity. We all smile when happy, mourn the loss of a child, negotiate a place in a social setting with specific traditional roles. We all eat, experience hunger, learn which foods are acceptable, connect eating with social occasions, use food-related activities as basic metaphors for aspects of life. (The annotated bibliography is especially good for its lists of shared human factors.) Those who stress differences among people now usually do so to promote tolerance of "the other." But a good basis for tolerance is to recognize the common humanness within all the differences. This book does that well. It is also highly readable anthropology.