[FRIAM] cultural universals, continued

[Prof David West]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:24:18 -0700, "glen e. p. ropella"
<gepr at tempusdictum.com> said:


> Would you mind citing an example of a culture that engaged in
> necro-cannabalism that acknowledges lineage?
   I was thinking of the Yanomami when I wrote this paragraph.  I would
   have to return to grad school notes to find others.


> 
> That would mean that given any _two_ cultures, there are some
> identifiable universals (over the set of two).
> 
> But as we increase the size of the set from two to three to N, the
> number of those invariants shrinks, perhaps quite rapidly.

You can also have commonalities across a subset of "all cultures" - for
example, there seem to be a limited number of kinship patterns with a
given pattern shared by a number of cultures rather than a different
kinship scheme for each culture.
> 
>
> 
> Is there such a strong argument out there?  Do we have some idea of how
> rapidly invariants fade as the number of cultures is increased?

I might depend on the specific practice (invariant) at issue.  For
instance: the practice of polygamy - specifically polygyny - sixty
percent of the world's cultures practice/sanction polygyny to the
invariant covers a large majority of cultures.  At the same time,
polyandry is practiced by less than ten cultures, so you almost
immediately find variants.  Within the ten - cultures that practice
polandry, most of them (I don't remember the exact number) practice
fraternal polyandry, so within the subset the invariant is high.

 
>
> 
> But doesn't rationale like this lead one to think that "culture" is,
> itself, just a convenient packaging of biology?  I.e. all culture
> probably reduces to biology, we're just too ignorant to know _how_?

No, I think it is merely the fringe of unknowns where this there is
uncertainty.  I think that most anthropologists believe that most of
their field of study is not reducible to biology.  The exception being
socio-biologists that do want to reduce all of culture to biology -
humans and human culture are merely the means for genes to replicate
themselves.

I just remembered - the mind is a strange thing - the closest answer to
your original question about differentiation of anthro from bio - social
transmission.  Culture is transmitted from one person to another, and
more importantly from one generation to another via social mechanisms,
not biological.

davew
> 
> - --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
> The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put
> together the right information at the right time, think critically about
> it, and make important choices. - E.O. Wilson
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