The anthropocentric myth of "universals" and common cultural traits

Anthropological studies and their results, both theoretical and applied, have a high degree of worldwide visibility in the field of printed and digitized publications, as well as on the web. Various fields of social and natural knowledge - understood as the relationship of human beings with their environment - also called the science of culture (Herskovits, 1992: 255-67), give rise to diverse interpretations, depending on the worldview of the authors and in accordance with political interests, in actions to unite, divide or dominate human groups, social sectors or entire peoples living together in common spaces or limited by geographical or political-administrative "borders". The fragmented globalization of the world-system calls into debate the potential of cultural diversity and identities as a human resource of accumulated wisdom, the necessary mutual respect for non-shared cultural expressions, the historical sense of cultural continuity, as well as its economic and patrimonial value. However, the safeguarding of cultural diversity and the recognition of cultural identities are related to issues repeatedly addressed by anthropological studies, such as the successive approaches to "cultural universals", and the relations of coexistence between diverse human groups; also identified as interculturality and multiculturalism, with a rich and contradictory interpretative range, which could be synthesized in the proposal of culture as "a way of living together" (Pérez de Cuéllar et al., 1996), or in the galloping hegemonic attitude of "divide and rule", to guarantee the distances between some dominant cultural expressions and other disadvantaged ones.Published in Spanish by Temas. Cultura, ideología, sociedad, no. 99, La Habana, julio-septiembre de 2019: 4-11 (ISSN: 0864-134X)