Ever heard of a cultural universal? In other words they are things that people all do; no matter the location, the complexity of the culture, its material culture, etc. In other words, dancing, singing, eating; may all be called cultural universals. Its an interesting cultural and anthropological framework that no matter how diverse or different, we all seem to tred the same places, living the same lives, eating and drinking and dancing and singing. With all of the other complexity foisted on us by the ‘net, the technology, the world; we still hearken back to simpler things. One that is interesting in the link above is religion. Give it some thought and here is an anthropological perspective for you. As cultures grew in complexity, new institutions were needed. These institutions had to manage the access to things like food, water, crafts, etc. Perhaps they were educational and military and cooperative institutions. But they definitely were religious. People that were hunter-gatherers found enough mystery in weather, ground, ecology without adding pestilence, insects that ate crops, etc. Religion as an institution, a cultural universal, had to evolve to meet the needs of the burgeoning society. So in essence cultural universals are not static. They must be able to adapt and adopt. They are evolutionary perspectives and I suspect when one no longer “fit the bill” they were tossed aside much like some of our outmoded social mores.
When I was doing cultural anthropology in New Mexico, I found another one. Humor. We had a new ethnologist on board. He was asking this one senior puebloan questions about a place of power. The elder documented all this stuff and the ethnologist was busy writing. An hour went by and the ethnologist was all excited and wanted one of us ruffians to take him out there.
At the end, the elder looked at the guy with some humorous glint in his eye. He basically said,
You know all that great stuff I just told ya? It was all bullshit
I just stopped and started laughing. It was the essence of this particular cultural universal. Humor.
Sometimes we just move too fast to catch all of the things in our culture and our universals just cannot keep up. We lose sight of the forest and know not of the trees either. We are simply aimless beings spinning around too tightly in our orbits. Then we believe that our orbits are all of reality. Edward Abbey never saw any underlying reality and I doubt it really exists besides in our own superficial orbits. But our worlds are not the sum-total of the cultural universals. Other live other ways.
We all can learn every new universals, adopt old ones. Its a wondrous thing. I seriously doubt that technology by itself could ever be a universal. It has to have a human touch to apply it. Don’t they all need human interaction to make them work though? Especially humor. A good joke is nothing if you have no one to tell it to.
