Culture as Conquest: Nature and Condition in the Definition of Human Identity

Abstract

In the past few years, the old debate about nature and culture, a debate which is —ultimately— one on the definition of the ‘human’, has acquired the form of a controversy (both philosophical and everyday) between “animalists” and “hyper-humanists”; between those who would claim a certain “animalisation of humankind” —humanising animals on issues such as rights— and those who, on the contrary, make attempts at widening the division between humans and animals to justify practices of mistreatment and sacrifice of the latter in the name of tradition and culture. This paper mantains that reductionist abuses of “vulgar sociobiology”, now at times presented as innovative, were adequately questioned by anthropologists in the past; and proposes, both against these views and as opposed to what has been called “mysticist hyperhumanism” by some authors, a reivindication of culture as a conquest of our species leading us to humanity, retrieving in this way the program of that anthropology which, coming from the acknowledgement of cultural diversity, promoted a positive “humanization” of the world.