Human Universals and Understanding a Different Socioculture

Abstract

historically constituted, and a recognition that many previously alleged universals were over generalized facets of Western life and culture. Although these attitudes and ideas have neither run their course nor spent their useful? ness, intellectual developments over the past decade make it auspicious to bring universals back on center stage. One relevant change is a new openness to the existence of human universals, wrought by developments in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and their combination, for example, evolutionary psychology. The greater cogency of some current theories in the universalistic disciplines of biology and psychology ? in comparison with predecessors ? renders the ex? istence of universals more plausible. Enhancing the opportuneness of attend? ing to universals in relation, particularly, to understanding other sociocultures is the provocative character of the general picture that emerges from the con? vergence of these developments, namely, that because of a shared evolution? ary past, humans possess an identical modular mind, whose components are responsible for universal as well as variable behaviors and features of social life. A second pertinent large-scale change is the ever more pervasive convic? tion that the basic issues posed by understanding "foreign" cultures do not differ in principle from those posed by understanding members of one's own culture whose behavior is baffling, opaque, or alien. This change arises, among other things, from the supersession of the conception of societies and cultures as distinct, unified islands by the conception of them as pragmatic demarca? tions of large-scale units within a complex and fluid field of practices, dis? courses, and institutions. On this new conception, people from a given unit might engage in practices etc. whose unintelligibility to other members ofthat