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The idea of human rights invokes a realm of justice and morality beyond and superior to particular countries, cultures, and religions.  Human rights, usually seen as vested in individuals, include the right to speak freely, to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and not to be murdered, injured, enslaved, or imprisoned without charge. These rights are not ordinary laws that particular governments make and enforce.  Human rights are seen as inalienable (nations cannot abridge or terminate them) and international (larger than and superior to individual nations and cultures).  Four United Nations documents describe nearly all the human rights that have been internationally recognized. Those documents are the UN Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Independent invention is the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems a mechanism of cultural change.  Faced with comparable problems and challenges, people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar ways, which is one reason cultural generalities exist.  One example is the independent invention of agriculture in the Middle East and Mexico. In both Mexico and the Middle East, agriculture led to many social, political, and legal changes, including notions of property and distinctions in wealth, class, and power.

The notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) has come up in an attempt to conserve each society’s cultural base— its core beliefs and principles. IPR are claimed as a cultural right, allowing indigenous groups to control who may know and use their collective knowledge and its applications.  According to the IPR concept, a particular group may determine how its indigenous knowledge and the products of that knowledge are used and distributed, and the level of compensation required.

Cultural rights are vested not in individuals but in groups, including indigenous peoples and religious and ethnic minorities.  Cultural rights include a group’s ability to raise its children in the ways of its forebears, to continue its language, and not to be deprived of its economic base by the nation in which it is located.  Many countries have signed pacts endorsing, for cultural minorities within nations, such rights as self- determination; some degree of home rule; and the right to practice the group’s religion, culture, and language. 

Anthropologists distinguish between law and custom but have shown that in operation there is little difference between the two concepts. Custom reinforces normative rules-forms of action and behaviour that ought to be observed.But there are legal institutions for mediating in disputes and considering breaches of normative rules and customary sanctions  or punishment for wrong doings. Paul Bohannan in Law and Welfare ( 1967) distinguished law from custom and rules of condust as being doubly institutionalized meaning that law reinstitutionalizes customs or rules derived from other institutions. Law is a custom that has been restated in order to make it amenable to the activities of the legal institutions. American anthropologist E Adamson Hoebel suggested in The Law of Primitive Man (1954) that law has three principles The legitimate use of force to ensure correct behaviour and punish wrongdoing. The allocation of power to individuals to use coercion. Respect for tradition as against...

Anthropologists are consulted by many different disciplines. Psychiatrists, for example, have consulted  anthropologists specialising in ‘moral panic’   when researching the question of whether internet sex addiction is in fact an addiction at all, or a media storm simply seeking to medicalizing a personal preference in order to boost circulation figures. The use of anthropological data is extremely useful in investigations of this kind. But has work been done into the rise and rise of cosmetic surgery in society? Medicalizing Aesthetics The increasing application of medical techniques to the arena of human aesthetics should give the inquisitive anthropologist pause for reflection. What of the history of self-adornment, and are there parallels to be drawn. What is the difference between inserting a gigantic cup into your lower lip, and extending your neck with metal rings, and the surgical enhancements on offer from cosmetic surgeons today? Discuss. There is no doubt that huma...

Physical anthropologists derive knowledge through the scientific method. Physical anthropologists carefully and systematically observe the natural world around them. These observations form the basis for identifying problems, developing questions, and gathering evidence  data that   will help answer the questions and solve the problems, fill gaps in scientific knowledge about how the natural world operates. These data are used to test  hypotheses,   possible explanations for the processes under study. Scientists observe and then reject or accept these hypotheses. This process of determining whether ideas are right or wrong is called the  scientific method.  It is the foundation of science. Science  is more than just knowledge of the facts about the natural world. Science is a way of acquiring knowledge—a way of knowing—through observation of natural phenomena. This repeated acquisition results in an ever-expanding knowledge base. In ...

According to a new study, modern man emerged 44,000 years ago .A team of scientists from Britain,South Africa,France,Italy,Norway and the US carried out a research in Border Cave area in South Africa and gathered evidence which shows tools and ornaments that humans used 44,000 years ago. Tools like wooden digging stick with perforated stones,poison applicator and ornaments made from ostrich eggshell and marine shell dated back to approx 44,000 years ago. Many archaeologists believed that the oldest traces of hunter gatherer people earliest known Modern human inhabitants of South Africa dated back to atleast 20,000 years ago. Many elements of material culture that characterise the lifestyle of San hunter-gatherers were part of the culture and technology of the inhabitants of this site 44,000 years ago. The Border Cave in South Africa is located in the foothills of the Lebombo Mountains in KwaZulu -Natal and has yielded exceptionally well-preserved organic material. Poison dating from 25...