Complexities: Beyond Nature & 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.

Susan McKinnon is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands and coeditor of Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Sydel Silverman is president emerita of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and professor emerita of anthropology at the City University of New York. She is the author or editor of several books, including The Beast on the Table: Conferencing with Anthropologists and Totems and Teachers: Key Figures in the History of Anthropology.