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.
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