Complexities: Beyond Nature & Nurture

By: McKinnon, Susan

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226500233
• ISBN13: 9780226500232
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.3"