Donald Edward Brown (born 1934) is an American professor of

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

(

emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Work

He worked at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

. He is best known for his theoretical work regarding the existence, characteristics and relevance of universals of human nature. In his best-known work, ''

Human Universals A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal) is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all known human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known ...

'' (1991), he says these universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions." He is quoted at length by

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ...

in an appendix to ''

The Blank Slate ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is s ...

'' (2002), where Pinker cites some of the hundreds of universals listed by Brown. In area studies his doctoral research on the structure and history of Brunei was foundational.

Publications

;Books * ''Brunei:'' ''The Structure and History of Bornean Malay Sultanate'' (Brunei Museum, 1970)Books: ''Brunei: The Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate'' (Bibliographic information)
Retrieved 2019-02-04
''Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness''.

University of Arizona Press The University of Arizona Press, a publishing house founded in 1959 as a department of the University of Arizona, is a nonprofit publisher of scholarly and regional books. As a delegate of the University of Arizona to the larger world, the Press ...

, 1988.
''Human Universals''.
New York:

McGraw-Hill McGraw Hill is an American educational publishing company and one of the "big three" educational publishers that publishes educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. The company also publishes refere ...

, 1991. ;Articles
'Human Nature and History'.
''History and Theory'' 38 (1999): 138–157. * 'Human Universals and their Implications'. In N. Roughley (ed.), ''Being humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisplinary Perspectives''. New York:

Walter de Gruyter Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature. History The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...

, 2000.
'Human Universals, Human Nature & Human Culture'.
''Daedalus'' 133 (2004): 4, 47. ;Encyclopedia entries * 'Human Universals'. In Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (eds). ''The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences''. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...

, 1999. * 'Human Universals'. ''Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology''. New York: Henry Holt. Vol. 2, pp. 607–12. * 'Human Universals'. ''Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia''. Eds. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. pp. 410–13.

Reviews

* Christopher Boehm
'Human Universals: Donald E. Brown'.
''American Anthropologist'' 94 (1992): 742–43. * Walter J. Lonner
'Human Universals: Donald E. Brown'.
''American Ethnologist'' 21 (1994): 920–21.

References

External links

Introduction to Human Universals and Methods of research by Donald E. Brown

Curricula vitae
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Donald Living people American anthropologists American anthropology writers American male non-fiction writers Anthropology educators University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Writers from California Cultural anthropologists 1934 births