Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How unique is man? How much are we bound by a common nature? To what extent is culture an expression of instinct? Such questions have haunted the development of social theory. In this fascinating book, Stephen Horigan argues that our thinking on these matters has been bedevilled by the enlightenment distinction between nature and culture. He criticizes this on the grounds that terms such as 'nature', 'culture', 'human', and 'animal' are ambiguous. He uses the themes of wildness and primitivism and cases of 'feral' children to illustrate his argument.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Horigan examines and discusses the opposition between nature and culture in Western thought from the Classical era to the formulations of contemporary structuralists and sociobiologists. The central issue is the uniqueness of "man" and how different we are from other animals. In this clearly written and logically organized book the author argues convincingly that modern social science inherited both a conception of humankind as unique and a notion of culture as qualitatively different from--and superior to--nature. He believes that such a view underlies many theoretical positions in the current debate about the capacity of apes to learn human languages. Horigan argues that the possibility of symbol-using chimpanzees makes some anthropologists as uncomfortable as 18th-century savants pondering the evidence for feral children, since both situations bring into question the conventional limits to humanity. The book includes useful introductory chapters and well-documented analyses of key concepts and categories. It will be especially valuable for advanced students interested in understanding how the "myth of culture" came to achieve its dominant position in anthropological theory. -O. Pi-Sunyer, University of Massachusetts at Amherst