Although the term ‘human rights’ is traditionally taken to refer to fundamental rights enshrined in formal documents, certain basic ‘normative rights’, such as turn-taking, are central to everyday social life. This paper moves toward a cultural theory of rights, proposing that certain fundamental relations, referred to as ‘primitive social relations’, are inherent in human social life and relative to the local political orientation can appear as rights or duties. Second, normative rights/duties are maintained through evolutionary developed social skills that are integral to local cultures. Modernization has been associated with a nullification or ‘side-stepping’ of evolutionary developed defense mechanisms protecting normative rights. Third, legislated rights/duties are a recent arrival in human cultural evolution, and they arose out of the new social relations inherent to large and complex modern societies.
