On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:24:18 -0700, "glen e. p. ropella" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org > > iD8DBQFH4AjSpVJZMHoGoM8RAq+2AJ9tq50KcXv5ZwClA0EXV0/yjEduCwCgnkyx > yQqZvPLaxygKf944RfpmA3Y= > =ftbJ > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
