BH 2013 - IUAES Tracks on being human

There would be a general consensus amongst anthropologists and ethnologists that this is the fundamental question that our subject as a whole seeks to answer. Because that is the ultimate question, anthropology as a human science cannot be simply a broader kind of sociology or history, but must also embrace biology and the relations between humans and other animals and the environment. Yet the consensus can mask paradigm clashes. Socio-cultural anthropologists, for example, abandoned the nineteenth century evolutionist approaches to society and culture as ethnocentric, and most remain sceptical in principle to applying Darwinian ideas to explaining different forms of society and human behaviour, although few are familiar with modern work on evolutionary processes. And a great many absolutely fundamental questions remain subject to debate. The sessions in this track therefore have a dual purpose. One is to highlight what contemporary anthropology has to say about the most fundamental of issues from the variety of approaches that it embraces. The other is to promote exchange between anthropologists practising these different approaches that will enhance mutual appreciation of their significance and constructive debate in areas where ideas and explanatory frameworks differ.
Discussion could focus on topics such as:
? Human origins: myth or reality?
? Rethinking biological and cultural evolution
? Humans and the non-human
? Beyond the universal and the particular?
? Persons and relations
? Language and human development
Whether it makes sense to speak of ‘human origins’ is a contentious issue. What assumptions lie behind the notion of origins? What is originating? What does all this imply for the way we do (or do not) distinguish between evolution and history, biology and culture? Rethinking the distinction between biological and cultural evolution follows, and is equally challenging for both biological and socio-cultural anthropologists. Then there is the whole issue of ‘non-humans’, which covers everything from human-animal relations to issues of material agency, as posed, for example by actor-network theory. ‘Beyond the universal and the particular’ picks up the old (and ever unresolved) chestnut of universalism versus relativism, but a series of debates around these issues might take us beyond it (as suggested, for example, by anthropological work on rethinking the simple dichotomy between the local and global). Finally, there is the separate but related question on what it means to be a person, and of what is the difference, if any, between being human and being a person. The point at which living organisms become "persons" or cease to be "persons" is already a subject of strong controversy. Traditional anthropological topics such as "kinship" have already provoked fruitful new lines of enquiry in the age of new reproductive technologies, but issues such as the use of stem cells and advances in techniques for prolonging life continue to raise new moral, legal, political and economic issues. Anthropologists tend to focus on issues of relations and relatedness.But are human relations always social relations? Finally, panels addressing the role of language in human development will be relevant to this track, although issues of language, cognition and communciation are also relevant to the World of the Mind and the Mind in the World track.