I appreciate your respect but I don't see your answer answering the question. I'll try to be even more blunt, without cussing or double-daring you to do something else. My position - like Sayer's Marxist one and Geertz' non-Marxist one - is that what it is to be human is to be social and what it is to be social - in its human variety - is to be enabled, constrained and defined by the qualitatively and quantitatively different modes and forms of sociality that have existed across time and space.
^^^^^ CB: Wouldn't Geertz , especially Geertz with thick description of meaning, say that culture, symbols, language are essentially human ?