Posted by
glen ep ropella on
Mar 11, 2008; 11:22pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/questions-tp525926p525932.html
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Prof David West wrote:
> No, there is no definitive method, set of criteria, precision
> [...]
> 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.
> [...]
> 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.
Right. But that would fall into "within epsilon of universal" I think,
given that the focus is on the ritual sacrifice and eating of the
_sacrificed_, not really eating of one's own children. I.e. the "child"
transforms from being one's offspring into being some other thing, even
if only metaphorically. If we asked a parent of the sacrificed, "What
are you eating?", they would answer, "The sacrifice" not "My child."
That's what I _suspect_ anyway.
> 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.
I didn't know that. Thanks!
OK. Everything up to this point seems to argue that there ARE (in some
usage of the word "universal") cultural universals.
> 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.
But this text seems to equivocate on the word "universal". What you're
saying is that any _formulation_ of an alleged cultural universal can be
dissected to show that the formulation is only universal in its overly
abstract form. And when the formulation is applied to concrete
circumstances, we can see blatant distinctions that make it non-universal.
The problem is that this can be said of _any_ formulation of _any_
thing. Completely concrete descriptions (were they logically possible)
cannot ever be non-local and completely abstract descriptions are always
non-local. Abstraction is required (necessary but insufficient) for
generalization.
So, is that all you mean by "there are no cultural universals"? All you
mean is that cultural universals are always too abstract and can be
picked apart and shown to be (somewhat) local as they are applied and
made concrete?
> 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).
Given that we have no predicate for biological vs. cultural, this seems
a bit sloppy on the part of the anthropologists. Not because of the
ambiguity in "cause", but because of the circular rhetoric of holding
all 3 premises simultaneously: 1) there are no cultural universals, 2)
if a cultural universal is apparent, it's likely biological, and 3)
there is no predicate to distinguish cultural vs. biological.
It would be _less_ circular to toss one of them out. My choice would be
to toss out (1). That way any apparent universal could be a little bit
biological and a little bit cultural (e.g. as with intertwined
feedback), which is what we see everywhere else in biology and medicine.
- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846,
http://tempusdictum.comI don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in
order to enjoy ourselves. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
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