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Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."
A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal) is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all known human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition .
Some examples of these human universals are abstract thought, planning, trade, cooperative labor, body decoration, and the control and use of fire. Along with these traits, humans possess much reliance on social learning. [12] [13] This cumulative cultural change or cultural "ratchet" separates human culture from social learning in animals.
In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. [1] For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of which is green.
One means by which anthropologists combat ethnocentrism is to engage in the process of cross-cultural comparison. It is important to test so-called "human universals" against the ethnographic record. Monogamy, for example, is frequently touted as a universal human trait, yet comparative study shows that it is not.
In his best-known work, Human Universals (1991), he says these universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions." He is quoted at length by Steven Pinker in an appendix to The Blank Slate (2002), where Pinker cites some of the hundreds of universals listed by Brown.
Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green, the form circularity, and the virtue courage. Universals express aspects or features shared by particulars. For example, Mount Everest and Mount Fuji are particulars characterized by the universal mountain. [30] Universals can take the form of properties or relations.
For example, in order to ... This is an important distinction made of human communication, i.e. language as compared to animal communication. ... (ed.), Universals of ...