Posted by
Prof David West on
Mar 11, 2008; 9:24pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/questions-tp525926p525931.html
On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:41:31 -0700, "glen e. p. ropella"
<gepr at tempusdictum.com> said:
>
> Sorry to break off a tangent; but, given that you're willing to discuss
> the existence of cultural universals, I assume you have a relatively
> solid method of distinguishing culture from biology. Is that right? If
> so, what is that method?
No, there is no definitive method, set of criteria, precision
instrument that allows unambiguous differentiation and classification of
an observed phenomenon into "biological" or "cultural" - unless you
happen to be a socio-biologist and everything is biological. A recent
example: religion has long been held to be "purely cultural" but recent
advances in neuro-theology suggest that some of the base phenomenon -
seeing a white light at then end of a tunnel in a near death situation,
losing the distinction between self and the world, believing in an other
- can be induced by changing the state of the biological (neurological)
organism.
The boundary between biology and culture is always subject to change and
an observable categorized in one area might be re-categorized into the
other or recognized as a consequence of interaction between the two.
> My current strawman would be the supposed cultural/biological universal
> that "People don't eat their children." It's not a biological universal
> because I've heard that some dogs eat their pups and I assume other
> animals will eat their offspring.
that is why the zoo saving some shark babies was in the news recently -
it is rare because sharks eat their young
>Yet I've never heard of any society
> where humans eat their offspring.
Depends on how ritualized and total you want to get. In cultures that
practiced human sacrifice accompanied by ritual cannibalism - the mom
and dad of the sacrificed individual partake in the ritual along with
everyone else.
>Or perhaps there's clear
> biological evidence of an immediate health consequence of eating one's
> children?
Not that I am aware of - other than the general consequences of
cannibalism in general - ease of transmission of disease, especially the
equivalent of mad-cow type diseases.
However, people have tried to make a case for the "universal" taboo
against incest on biological grounds. Problem is - as any livestock
breeder knows - incest leads to improvements far more often than
defects.
If not, that makes it seem like a cultural universal rather
> than a biological one.
>
> I'd also like to avoid equivocation on the word "universal". One
> _might_ say there are no cultural universals because there simply are no
> universals, at all,
Universal is not being used in any special way except a sense of
wholeness in the behavior pattern you are calling a cultural universal.
For instance, all cultures, of which we are aware, believe in the
supernatural but the form of that belief, the ways it is expressed vary
from culture to culture. Or, all cultures have an incest taboo - but
the definition of incest is not constant across cultures: parent-child
is OK in some not others, brother-sister, child-to-moiety, child to
mythical but not biological clan, all are OK/not OK somewhere.
If you were to find a pattern of behavior that was expressed in all
cultures, most anthropologists would expect a biological "cause" (quotes
because of another long running FRIAM debate about causality).
> - --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846,
http://tempusdictum.com> We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact
> that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery. -- H. G. Wells
>
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