Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture

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.