Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
At the foundation of †cultural anthropology lies the notion of a great feult line sundering the world of human culture from the rest of the living world. On this view, part of our human constitution falls on one side of the line, the side explicable by biological and allied sciences. On that side we resemble other animals.
But on the other side, dominated by our capacity for learning, language and the use of symbols, we reach beyond the ken of biology and attain our essential, unique and, so to speak, super-animal character. In his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958, †Leslie White captured this doctrine in a memorable myth.
The imagery of this just-so story dividing humans from animals is fanciful, but the message is sincerely intended: human *cognition and action are mediated by learned and therefore cultural, rather than by instinctive or inborn, responses. Since this is so, culture is a separate object of study, cultural variation is different in kind from biological variation, and cultural anthropology is an autonomous discipline, separate from the biological sciences.
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