Important book-length, theoretical treatments of human universals have been produced by the German anthropologist, Christoph Antweiler (2007, 2012, 2016). The first two appeared in German; the third, in English, is a condensed and updated version of the former two, with an extensive bibliography that includes more than a few citations that were missed in HU.
Antweiler’s English version (reviewed at greater length in Brown 2017) is a wide-ranging consideration of the concept of universality, touching, for example, on the use of that term in philosophy, where its meaning for millennia has been generally distinct from the meaning of the empirically identified human universals in anthropology. One of Antweiler’s principal arguments is to classify “biotic” universals as a distinct set. Typically or at least often “absolute” universals, they are appropriately studied by evolutionary psychologists. Other universals, which in Antweiler’s terms need only occur in the ethnographic record of unrelated peoples at rates above chance, are more the subject matter of sociocultural anthropology’s comparative studies. And also of Literary Studies: Antweiler specifically cites key papers in this field (e. g. Hogan 1997).
My view is that whether a trait or complex is biotic or not—that is, a feature of human nature or not—widely comparative ethnographic studies, or proxies for them, are the ultimate method for verifying human universals. How to explain or ascertain their kind of universality is the point at which the determination of biotic or not comes into play. Given that the research costs of ethnographic studies in the field are high, and that the extant studies of many peoples commonly omit the relevant details to identify particular universals, a variety of less-than-perfect methods are regularly employed. They may employ cross-cultural samples from existing studies, comparisons of textual materials produced in times and places widely separated, pencil-and-paper experiments conducted in classrooms, comparisons of two or more very distantly related peoples, and so on. Imperfections in the methods for identifying universals are widely discussed (e. g., Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). That claims of universality are ethnocentrically biased is a very common charge, and surely is to be guarded against.
Also book-length and wide-ranging, but with different aims, is William Gairdner’s The Book of Absolutes: A critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals (2008). The critique of relativism is the clear aim of the book, but the extensive marshalling of evidence for absolutes stretches from physics to literature and myth. The Literary Universals Project is cited.
One of, if not the most prolific writer on universals, is the linguist Anna Wierzbicka. The study of linguistic universals was already mature and academically “acceptable” before interest in universals began to rise in anthropology in the 1980s. Thus a suitable classification of the formal types of linguistic universals was readily adapted in HU for human universals, e.g., absolute-, near-, and conditional universals. Wierzbicka’s principal concern has been semantic universals—not merely their existence and enumeration but the cross-cultural utility of employing the “65 universal semantic primes” to illuminate a wide range of anthropological issues (2016: 408). The paper just cited provides references to some of her many volumes on semantic universals, which are, of course, an important part of human universals.
Let me close with the principal regret that I have about HU: that I did not specifically criticize the philosopher Michel Foucault’s denial of the existence of universals, as in his debate with the linguist Noam Chomsky (Chomsky and Foucault 1974). Although associated with human nature in that debate, “universals” were otherwise left wholly undefined. Foucault’s view found an all too ready acceptance in the social sciences and humanities, where it supports suspicions or notions not only that human universals do not exist but, furthermore, that objectivity and truth are to be enclosed in quotation marks as unsupportable and potentially pernicious tools for the post-Enlightenment West’s exploitation of other humans. The thought now that for more than two decades persons searching online for “Foucault” and “universals” might have been able to hit on HU and its argument and evidence—with the educational effect that might have come from that—is a sad thought indeed.
Bibliography
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Antweiler, Christoph. Our Common Denominator: Human Universals Revisited. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Translated from the German by Diane Kerns. 2016.
Brown, Donald. Human Universals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, New York. McGraw-Hill, 1991.
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