by Jerome du Bois
I first came across anthropologist Donald E. Brown's List of Human Universals in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1994). Pinker later reproduced it, with extensions and updates, in The Blank Slate (2002). (Both books are simply sublime.)
In The Language Instinct, Dr. Pinker introduced the list this way:
. . . Brown has tried to characterize the Universal People. He has scrutinized archives of ethnography for universal patterns underlying the behavior all documented human cultures, keeping a skeptical eye out both for claims of the exotic belied by the ethnographers' own reports, and for claims of the universal based on flimsy evidence. The outcome is stunning. Far from finding arbitrary variation, Brown was able to characterize the Universal People in gloriously rich detail. His findings contain something to startle almost anyone, and so I will reproduce the substance of them here.
Pointing to Dr. Brown's list, before this first day of the new year is over, is my gesture of hope for all of us. According to the best evidence, beyond politics and ethnicity and religion and socioeconomic status and educational level and a lot of other things, this is what we have in common.
Have a good year.
Posted by Jerome at January 1, 2004 06:41 PM | TrackBack