6.2. The Universality and Locality of
Some Social Pathologies
It may be right to state that some social problems are
universal in their nature; this means that they occur
everywhere across all societies. They may derive from
the fundamental similarity of the nature, origin and
destiny of all human societies. As anthropologists argue,
all human beings share common bio-psychological
problems and as such they have more or less similar
basic interests, questions, fears, etc. Although they may
vary in terms of scale, all societies face such kinds of
social problems as for example, juvenile delinquencies,
marriage breakdown and divorce, parent-children
conflicts, tensions over limited resources between
groups, wars and inter-group skirmishes, alcoholism,
environmental pollution, prostitution, homelessness,
begging, etc.
However, some of the social problems seem to emanate
from the local conditions; they are the manifestations of
the specific cultural and ecological settings of a society,
as well as the reflections of the socio-historical and