Human Universals

'This book is a reflection on human universals and what they imply. Some of the implications are far reaching. I conclude, for example, that what we know about universals places clear limits on the cultural relativism that anthropologists have developed and disseminated widely. Furthermore, what we know about universals suggests the need to revise a conception of human nature that anthropologists have helped to shape and that has spread so far beyond the social sciences that it is now embedded in what Robin Fox (1989:24) calls “the whole secular social ideology” of our time. Because these conclusions are far from trivial, it may be worth recounting the experiences that initially stimulated my interest in universals and led, ultimately, to this book. Since this book is only an imperfect step along the way toward the fuller assessment that human universals deserve, I will also point to its shortcomings. In 1974 Donald Symons and I co-taught a seminar on primate and human sexuality. Symons presented an early draft of his book _The Evolution of Human Sexuality_ (1979), in which he argued that there are certain pan-human sex differences. On the occasion that he discussed a list of these differences - it then contained, if I recall correctly, some 5 to 7 items (such as the quicker and more visually-cued sexual arousal of males) - I bet him that I could find a society in which each of the alleged sex differences was reversed. As a typical sociocultural anthropologist trained in the 1960s...I was willing to accept the idea of certain kinds of widespread regularities or tendencies, but I thought it highly unlikely that sex differences would show any complex similarities in all societies. The latter smacked of rigid biological determinism. But I did not win the bet'