ABSTRACT
HUMAN SOCIETIES, anthropologists maintain, despite their many forms and diverse customs, are all alike in being expressions of mankind's common human nature. Anthropology, of course, aims to clarify just what that nature is. The self-examination this search requires is not easy. Our theories are almost inevitably colored by the image we would like to have of ourselves, not only as men in contrast with animals, but as particular men in contrast with other men. The history of anthropology has been a continual struggle to get beyond the ethnocentric assumptions by which we pride ourselves as civilized, Christian, and so on, and to see human phenomena other than through the lenses to which our society's customs have habituated us.1
