We now know that tool using apes engage in abstract and innovative problem solving and, per the discussion of sign language, can - and perhaps do w/o human contact - use symbolic representations. Now, you may be right to argue that these capacities may not be pivotal to organizing orang, chimp, gorilla or bonobo social relations... but I guess my question is, so what? I categorically reject deep ecological, ecocentric and actor-neworked forms of leveling the differences between social subjects, animal species, floral communities and material objects, but I still I don't understand why it is important to establish hard and fast differentiations between human beings and other species, particularly because doing so has - at least historically - had a strong tendency to support the kinds of normatively-limited and elitist ethnocentric and anthropocentric projects just about all here oppose.
Even if you are right that culture is the abstract universal differentia specifica, what have you now gained, especially as Geertz noted with respect to Herskovitz, if culture has no material content in common across space and time? When teaching Marx, I always stress that his discussion of labor in the abstract is then NOT followed by a claim that labor in the abstract has any substantive meaning in the analysis of anything or any place in particular... that it is the particulars that matter, not the abstract category...
Part of my commitment to this position comes from a whole host of arguments, made by some anthropologists and science studies scholars, that human sociality evolved not only in relation to our biology - thumbs, standing erect, brain/sensory development/underdevelopment, monthly menses, etc. - but also coincident with our relations with mere animals and plant species... that the there has been a dialectic of biological, social, faunal, floral, ecological and cultural development where, unlike Marx's passage on labor - but quite like other passages he wrote on the active contribution "nature" makes to re/production - we, and our symbolic and representational consciousness have not been the only active, outcome-conditioning agents in the making of "culture" or "nature".
-A
********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319