Complexities

Beyond Nature and Nurture

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Edited by Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published June 2005, 296 pages, paper

ISBN 0226500241

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.