Cultural Universals - Stuff shared by ALL cultures

[Lucasxp64]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal

Those are the most interesting:

Quote

# Beliefs

    Magical thinking
    Use of magic to increase life and win love
    Beliefs about death
    Beliefs about disease
    Beliefs about fortune and misfortune
    Divination
    Attempts to control weather
    Dream interpretation
    Beliefs and narratives
    Proverbs, sayings
    Poetry/rhetorics
    Healing practices, medicine
    Childbirth customs
    Rites of passage
    Music, rhythm, dance, and to some degree associations between music and emotion
    Play
    Toys, playthings
    Death rituals, mourning
    Feasting
    Body adornment
    Hairstyles
    Art

# Society

Personal names
Family or household
Kin groups
Peer groups not based on family
Actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control
Affection expressed and felt
Age grades, statuses, and terms
Law: rights and obligations, rules of membership
Moral sentiments
Distinguishing right and wrong, good and bad
Promise/oath
Prestige inequalities
Statuses and roles
Leaders
Inclination towards patriarchy (dominance of men in society)
De facto oligarchy
Property
Coalitions
Collective identities
Conflict
Cooperative labor
Gender roles
Males on average travel greater distances over lifetime
Marriage
Husband older than wife on average
Copulation normally conducted in privacy
Incest prevention or avoidance, incest between mother and son unthinkable
Collective decision making
Etiquette
Inheritance rules
Generosity admired, gift giving
Mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances
Redress of wrongs, sanctions
Sexual jealousy
Sexual violence
Shame
Territoriality
Triangular awareness (assessing relationships among the self and two other people)
Some forms of proscribed violence
Visiting
Trade

 

Edited Monday at 09:51 PM by Lucasxp64

[Leo Gura]

Cuisine.

Every culture is built around food in some way. Every culture has its staple traditional foods and its glorification of certain foods.

God. Every culture corporates God in some way.

Edited Monday at 10:02 PM by Leo Gura

[mmKay]

What are the main pillars of a culture? 🤔

[Reciprocality]

All those universals seem to come in two categories

1. What all humans attend to

2. What only some humans attend to, which non the less are functionally identical to what all humans attend to via how any true statement about these subsets of human behaviours binds us to more general statements that converge with more and ultimately all behaviour. 

 

One universal can be observed, the other must be inferred. 

Edited 23 hours ago by Reciprocality

[UnbornTao]

Manipulation.

Oh, we may also think that culture exists out there.

So perhaps a better question is: What do humans do in this context? What kinds of thinking and behavior do we, as a collective, reliably engage in?

[Lucasxp64]

9 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

Manipulation.

That one I realized the strongest after learning a lot of history. Humans through all cultures find sneaky ways of using their current "sacred things" for their personal benefit:

- Race/Ethnicity/Group: The every changing definitions of groups based on what you want and who you want to manipulate. Like the every-changing definition of who is "white" and who is "American" in the USA, like giving poor "white" American southerns some KKK larping over almost as equally poor freed slaves just to pit the poor against the even poorer.

Or seeing French, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese as not white enough, or even Germans as not white enough at some point. Or the countless genocidal wars across the world of people (to an untrained eye) that are exactly the same (same religion, same race, same class) but different tribes, or patriotism.

- Spirituality/Religion (Pharaohs "appointed by god", modern political conservatives, etc)

- Law (King's power is law, bureaucracies that kills and steals people in a "legal" way, or making something illegal to fuck with some people)

- Social Justice or order (how we ought to behave) or correction of bad deeds done to a certain people group (i.e. Israel genocides)

- "progressiveness" (A better way than the status quo... Tech oligarchs and corporations love this, framing it as "the future" of infinite progress)

- "conservationism" (The good old way), or "others do it this way", etc.

 

---

 

 

Edited 8 hours ago by Lucasxp64

[UnbornTao]

12 minutes ago, Lucasxp64 said:

That one I realized the strongest after learning a lot of history. Humans through all cultures find sneaky ways of using their current "sacred things" for their personal benefit:

- Spirituality/Religion (Pharaohs, modern political conservatives, etc)

- Law (King's power is law, bureaucracies that kills and steals people in a "legal" way, or making something illegal to fuck with some people)

- Social Justice or order (how we ought to behave) or correction of bad deeds done to a certain people group

- "progressiveness" (A better way than the status quo... Tech oligarchs and corporations love this, framing it as "the future" of infinite progress)

- "conservationism" (The good old way), or "others do it this way", etc.

It's even more prevalent considering that any action taken is a form of manipulation, though your examples provide food for thought too.

[Reciprocality]

Consider the intersection of marriage, etiquette, property and leaders

The most general intersection would be intent or identity.

But what are their least general intersection? 

 

Any set in the list of cultural universals has intersections, but some subsections of those universals intersect at far more unique properties than "intent/identity", and you likely form groups of these subsections intuitively while reading that list, this implies an automated cognitive process whereby  relevance are attributed thresholds of uniqueness.

Is it possible for two "cultural universals" to only intersect at the most general property, such that all they have in common is only what they have in common with all the other "cultural universals"? In such a case, is it still possible to map those two to something more unique that those two universals share to the exclusion of any of the others? Functionalism would be the first contender here, since it allows things that have no unique intersection to be defined by a common unique function both serves, we can consider this an intensional intersection or a second order intersection. Would the appeal to functionalism fail too if we could show that "serving a function" is already inherent to the most general properties  "intent/identity" that were naturally the intersection of all the "cultural universals"? 

 

[kavaris]

I like the food one, cause food is somethin women, like to do like they knock on ur door and bring upside chicken w/ rice and stuff like this from Palestine — like people can unite over food. The god or gods one i just avoid, personally, as when it gets brought up in a cross-culture scenario, im thinkin to myself "Oh jeez, they bringin up religios god stuff.. this is so fu@€#..." but so far it hasnt gone too bad yet.. Historically it probably wouldve gone bad.

Edited 4 hours ago by kavaris