Donald E. Brown
Autore di Human Universals
Opere di Donald E. Brown
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Brown, Donald E.
- Data di nascita
- 1934
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Attività lavorative
- anthropologist
university professor - Organizzazioni
- University of California, Santa Barbara
Utenti
Recensioni
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Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 6
- Utenti
- 116
- Popolarità
- #169,721
- Voto
- 3.9
- Recensioni
- 3
- ISBN
- 11
Brown clearly how this cultural relativism/determinism was based on very inadequate field research, and biased assumption. Brown's own position will be clear by now: according to him, there indeed are universal characteristics that transcend local cultures, and these are simply the result of general human evolution in the Darwinian sense. Brown draws mainly on evolutionary psychology, which was just emerging when his book was published (1991). I must admit that in his treatment of what these universal values are in concrete terms, he remains rather vague and general: for example, that language is very important for all people and in all cultures, both in dealing with the environment, with others and with oneself. Well, I could have come up with that myself. Brown is a little more concrete when it comes to family and kinship: that a family is primarily a mother and children, and that this usually also involves a man and some form of marriage or institutional commitment. But then again: what use are statements like that? Maybe it’s merit just lies in proving cultural determinism wrong, nothing more than that. But perhaps I should see Brown's work as a starting point: it is already 30 years old, and maybe others have built on it to arrive at much more concrete delineations. I keep on searching.… (altro)