World Cultures, 21 Universals?

Question

I am in a World Cultures Couse and at the beginning of the book. IN class we are studying the 21 universals, or universal cultural patterns. I have (and correct me if im wrong) Race, Behavior, Religon, Food, Marrage, Education, Communications, Status, Taboo, Valus, Rituals, Positive and negative sanction, norms, traits, Geography, government, and Econmics.

Please correct me if any are incorrect, and include as many as you know to be correct that I have not listed.

THANK YOU!!!

Answer 1

It sounds pretty good to me. Your question is not one that has a proven and indisputable "correct answer".... rather, you have been given an answer that some professor has created. I would add to your list "gender roles" (because, unlike present-day America, most cultures give/gave different roles in society to the two genders). And perhaps "justice", because I'm not seeing at a glance that a culture's interpretation of "what is justice?" is covered by 'government', 'values', and 'norms'....though of course it overlaps.

It has been said that the hardest thing for historians to achieve is to understand how people in a past society THOUGHT. For example, what were their assumptions? What was not written about (in a literate society) simply because it was taken for granted? One beautiful example of this is that we in the 20th and 21st centuries love factuality. We look at a mediaeval text and ask "is it true?" Was King Arthur really, factually, born at Tintagel? Was Uther his father? The 6th or 12th century mind, though, had a quite differrent agenda (I've learned). To them the vital question is "what does it mean?" "What (e.g. moral or political) point is it making?"

Does your course encourage you to think for yourself? How about this question: "how does pigeon-holing what I know about [culture of choice] into these boxes help me to understand it?" I could give you a paragraph under each of these 18 hats (if you explained what 'norms' and 'traits' are) for sixth century Ceredigion and Gwynedd (two kingdoms of one culture). But what would it do for you? You could get yourself a parallel set of boxed answers on, let's say the Carolinas between Independence and the Civil War. Then what? What do you understand and appreciate after reading these (at this moment, imagined) parallel boxed answers that you don't now? What do you feel differently about yourself and others?

Or I could take you inside a very densely-composed poem by a man who grew up in 6th century Ceredigion. I could work you outwards from there to an understanding of conflict in his culture, of the spiritual and the numinous and how his personal understanding was in context of his people, of the economy of that place-time, of the governance, many of the things you mention. Such an understanding wouldn't have a tidy pseudoscientific relationship with what you learned from someone else about the Carolinas in +/- 1800, but would you come away with less or more?

Yes, you by all means go to your class and pass your exam with your 21 boxes checked off smoothly, but somewhere, somewhen, would you like to ask yourself what you are doing it for and what you really want from your studies?