> Alan Rudy ---
>
> 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 ?
>
That's the guy... they are essentially human and saying so is essentially substance-less. To say that human beings have culture, symbols and language is to say absolutely nothing in particular and effectively nothing in general because cultures, symbols and languages are fundamentally open, qualitatively different and wildly diverse.