anthropologists

That the right hand is favoured for practical use by most members of the human race seems, from the evidence, to be undisputable. That much pan-cultural knowledge seems to legitimise this with specific forms and methods of suggesting superiority to the right hand also seems to be the case. It is this symbolic expression of the dexterity differential which holds the fascination of the discipline of Anthropology. The right hand being pre-eminent is not a …

…classification and binary opposition. We must be very careful. As we can see in the case of the Chinese, put forward by M. Granet, these underlying princples do not transfer so readily across all cultural boundaries (altthough it must be said that the number of cultures which do share something similar is striking) and the risk is being run of universalising psychological, cultural symbolic expression, which are very presonal to both individuals and particular cultures.