Maurice Bloch on the conflict between the universalists and the culturalists

“In this article I want to argue that the cause for the endless repetition of controversy, in the social sciences at least, comes from our failure to consider people as natural organisms rather than as the abstractions of unclear ontological status that characterise social science theory. If we focus on the evolved human animal – a very special being that is not, however, ontologically different from other living species – we can begin to understand the complex way in which we are created simultaneously by our biology, which includes our psychology, and by history and culture. And we can do so without getting lost in the smoke of battle of the phantasy wars of social science theory”.

– Maurice Bloch, The Blob in Antropology of this century