Book Review: "Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity"

Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity provides a valuable set of chapters that I think could be a model for renewed interaction among cultural anthropologists steeped in critical theory and positivist anthropologists who use evolutionary or other approaches to test hypotheses with structured data. Put in slightly more grandiose terms, this book is the kind of work that offers at least a vision for a more robust anthropology that might fulfill the dream that motivated the discipline's creation: that it might provide a wholistic understanding of human variation.