Complexities: Beyond Nature and NurtureSusan McKinnon, Sydel Silverman Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from disease to morality—not to mention the presumed characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality—can be explained by reference primarily to genetics and our evolutionary past. Complexities mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology—cultural , archaeological, linguistic, and biological—to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human biological and social life. This book presents evidence to contest such theories and to provide a multifaceted account of the complexity and variability of the human condition. Charting a course that moves beyond any simple opposition between nature and nurture, Complexities argues that a nonreductive perspective has important implications for how we understand and develop human potential. |
Contents
Challenging Reductive Theories of Mind | 21 |
Do Humans Have Innate Mental Structures? | 43 |
How Linguistic | 64 |
A Critique | 106 |
Poetics and Politics of the Female Body | 132 |
Denaturalizing Gender in Prehistory | 157 |
Context and Complexity in Human | 179 |
A Tangled Concept | 196 |
Denaturalizing | 251 |
Language Standardization and the Complexities | 268 |
LongDistance Nationalism | |
17 | |
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Common terms and phrases
adaptive aggression allele Alzheimer's Disease American Anthropology ApoE Apolipoprotein Archaeology argue argument biological blood body brain Buss Cambridge University Press Çatalhöyük chimpanzees claim clinical cognitive linguistics communities complex concept construction contemporary contexts Cosmides cultural dementia discourse diversity dominance environment ethnic evidence Evolution Evolutionary Psychology example female function gender genes genetic knowledge Glick Schiller global Goddess Gumperz hominids human behavior Human Genome ideology individuals innate interactions John Tooby kinship language Leatherman Leda Cosmides long-distance nationalism male Marija Gimbutas marriage mate medicine mental metaphors molecular mother natural netic neural nouns Perspectives Pinker political population predication preference primate primatology processes race racial reductionism reductionist relations relationship reproductive role Science scientific scientists sexual social societies Sociobiology specific Steven Rose strategies structure studies theory theory of mind tion Tooby translating genetic understand verb WHR research women words York
References to this book
Das anthropologische Projekt: Perspektiven aus der Forschungslandschaft ... John Eidson Limited preview - 2008 |