Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (2000)

Abstract

A renewed interest in culture among social scientists at the end of the 20th Century points to an interesting paradox in the evolution of cultural theories. During the mid-1900s, the views of ‘social anthropologists' like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu progressives who considered human nature to be infinitely elastic challenged hereditarian theories about human behavior. The notion that culture rather than genes cause human behavioral differences created a paradigmatic shift among social scientists; ethnic and racial dissimilarities were viewed as cultural artifacts. The logical extension of this rationale found 'society' culpable for persistent economic and social disparities between human populations.

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