Human Universals
Definition
Human universals are features of culture, society, language, behaviour and mind found in every human group ever documented — the residue that remains when cultural variation is subtracted.
Brown's Study
The reference work is Donald E. Brown's Human Universals (McGraw-Hill, 1991).[1] Brown, an anthropologist, argued that his discipline had spent a century documenting difference and had systematically neglected sameness — partly for good historical reasons, as a corrective to nineteenth-century racial theorising, and partly because difference is more publishable.
He compiled a list of several hundred traits attested in every society on record, and constructed a composite figure, the Universal People, to present them as a coherent portrait rather than a list.
Items include: language, with grammar, phonemes, metaphor, poetry and lying; kinship terms; a distinction between insiders and outsiders; incest avoidance; division of labour by sex and age; status distinctions and some form of leadership; gift-giving and reciprocity; property; law and sanctions; conflict and its mediation; marriage; child care; music, dance and narrative; humour, play and games; tools and toolmaking; fire; medicine; ritual and mourning; magical or religious belief; aesthetics and body ornamentation; facial expressions of the basic emotions; standards of sexual modesty; and a self distinguished from others.
What Counts as Universal
Brown's own distinctions matter for using the list responsibly:
- Absolute universals — present everywhere without exception.
- Near-universals — present nearly everywhere, with documented exceptions.
- Conditional universals — present wherever a stated condition holds.
- Statistical universals — occurring far more often than chance without being invariable.
The crucial caveat is that universality of a category says nothing about universality of its content. Every society has kinship terms; the systems differ radically. Every society has modesty standards; what they cover varies completely. Confusing the two produces the common misuse of the list, in which a local arrangement is presented as human nature.
Debate
The universalist programme is contested. Critics argue that some entries are artefacts of ethnographic categories rather than findings, that the sampling is uneven, and that "universal" too easily slides into "natural" and thence into "unchangeable." The Pirahã case, and the broader dispute over recursion in language, is the best-known live disagreement about a claimed universal. Defenders reply that documenting sameness is not an argument for any particular arrangement, and that a discipline unable to say anything about human beings in general has given up more than it gained.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The list is a useful instrument for a specific question this field keeps encountering: which behaviours around new technology are new?
Very few, on inspection. Status competition, gift exchange, gossip, in-group and out-group marking, ritual, humour, ornamentation, storytelling and reciprocity all appear online immediately and without instruction, because they are what people do. The technology changes the cost, speed, scale, visibility and persistence of these behaviours — and those changes are consequential — but the behaviours themselves are not inventions of the medium.
This cuts against the two default explanations in technology writing: that a platform has created a new kind of human being, and that it has destroyed an older one. The more defensible claim is usually that it has altered the economics of something people were already doing. Compare paralanguage, reinvented from scratch in text, and status, recomputed automatically.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Brown, Donald E. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. The list is reprinted as an appendix to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002).
