Cultural Universals and Particulars

Everything in this topic so far has emphasised variation. Cultures differ; the familiar is arbitrary; your disgust is local. That emphasis is correct and it is only half of an honest account.

Because if you look across all known human societies, something else appears: a short list of things that show up everywhere, in radically different forms. Making sense of that combination — universal problems, particular solutions — is the subject of this lesson, and it is one of the most useful analytic frames in the discipline.

Four funerals.

In one, the body is washed, wrapped in white cloth, and cremated within hours on an open pyre by the eldest son, who then shaves his head. Ashes are carried to a river. The family observes a specified period of ritual impurity during which they do not cook for others.

In the second, the body is embalmed, dressed in its best clothes, displayed in a padded box for viewing, and buried in a plot the family has purchased, marked with a stone bearing dates. People wear black and say the person "passed away." Afterwards there are sandwiches.

In the third, in Tana Toraja in Indonesia, the death may not be socially recognised for months or even years while the family accumulates the resources for an enormous ceremony; during that period the deceased may be spoken of as ill rather than dead, and kept in the house. Buffalo are sacrificed; the number is a public statement about the family.

In the fourth, among Zoroastrian Parsis, the body is neither burned nor buried — earth and fire are too sacred to be polluted — but exposed in a tower to be consumed by vultures.

Now look at what all four share. In every case: the body is not simply left. There is a prescribed sequence performed by specified people. There are rules about who must attend and who must abstain. There is a marked period of altered status for the mourners. There is an idea about what has happened to the person. There is a public statement about the family. And in every case, doing it wrong is a serious matter.

Every known human society disposes of its dead ceremonially. No two do it the same way.

So which is the finding — the sameness or the difference?

Both, and they are not in tension once you see the structure. What is universal is not the practice but the problem: human beings die, the living must do something about the body, the survivors' relationships have been disrupted, and the group must reconstitute itself. Every society faces this. Each answers it with material at hand — its beliefs about the person, its available resources, its ecology, its history.

This gives us the most useful formula in this lesson: universal problems, particular solutions.

The reason it matters is that it protects you from two opposite errors. If you only see variation, you cannot explain why funerals exist at all, or why every society has kinship terms, or incest rules, or music. If you only see universals, you will mistake your own solution for the human condition — and 2.1.8 told you what that costs.

The idea, in plain words

What is actually on the list

The classic inventory is George Peter Murdock's (1945), drawn from cross-cultural survey work. His list runs to several dozen items and includes: age grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, division of labour, education, ethics, etiquette, family, feasting, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, mourning, music, mythology, numerals, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weaning, weather control.

Read that list slowly, because two things about it are striking.

First, how thin each item is. "Marriage" is on the list; who may marry whom, how many, arranged by whom, with what property implications, and whether it can be ended, varies without limit. The universal is the category, not the content.

Second, how much it tells you anyway. Every society has music, games, jokes, names, decoration of the body, and a story about where things came from. That is not a trivial finding about a species.

Some robust candidates worth singling out:

Language. Every known society has a full grammatical language. There are no "primitive" languages; complexity is universal, though it is distributed differently across subsystems.

Incest prohibition. Every society prohibits sex and marriage within some close category of kin. Which relatives count varies enormously — cross-cousin marriage is preferred in much of south India and prohibited in much of the north (Karve, 6.2.8) — but the existence of a prohibited category is universal. Lévi-Strauss (5.9) built his structuralism on this, arguing the prohibition is what forces groups to exchange partners and thereby creates society through alliance.

Kinship classification. Every society sorts relatives into named categories with attached obligations, and the categories never simply mirror biology (2.1.5).

Some status differentiation. Even the most egalitarian recorded societies distinguish by age, sex, and skill. Note carefully what this does not license: the observation that all societies have some differentiation says nothing about the enormous variation in how much and on what basis, which is precisely 1.2.2's warning against sliding from "inequality exists" to "this inequality is inevitable."

Reciprocity. Every society has norms of giving and returning — Mauss's gift (1.4.2) — though what must be given, to whom, and how promptly differs completely.

Ritual marking of transitions. Birth, adulthood, marriage, death. Arnold van Gennep (1909) identified a recurring three-phase structure in rites of passage — separation from the old status, a liminal phase betwixt and between, and reincorporation with the new status — later developed by Victor Turner, who added the concept of communitas: the intense equality and fellow-feeling among those undergoing the liminal phase together. It is one of the most transferable ideas in this course: you will recognise it in initiation rites, military training, medical residency, and the strange intense bonding of anyone going through a shared ordeal.

Look again at his inventory and notice something about the categories themselves: "obstetrics," "surgery," "weather control," "magic," "medicine," "law," "religion."

Those are Western analytical categories, projected onto other societies. A practice that a community understands as a single unified activity may be split by the observer into "medicine" and "magic" — a distinction that exists in the observer's culture and not in the observed one. Conversely, activities the community distinguishes sharply may be lumped together.

So the list is doing two things at once: reporting a real regularity, and imposing a grid. Clifford Geertz made the sharper version of this criticism: universals arrived at by abstracting until everything fits tend to be so empty that they explain nothing. "All societies have religion" is true and tells you nothing about any society.

This is not a reason to abandon the search for universals. It is a reason to state them at the level of problem rather than institution, and to be honest that your categories came from somewhere. Which is also the general lesson of 1.4.3 and Part 6 — the grid is never neutral.

Go deeper

Why universals exist: three sources

Shared biology. Humans are born helpless and need years of care; we eat, sleep, reproduce, age and die; we have limited memory and a particular sensory apparatus. Any workable arrangement must accommodate these. Hence: child-rearing arrangements everywhere, food rules everywhere, death rites everywhere.

Shared functional problems. Every society that persists must solve a recurring set of tasks: produce subsistence, allocate it, raise and socialise the next generation, coordinate action, handle conflict, and give an account of the world. This is the intuition behind functionalism (5.1) and behind Parsons' AGIL — and note that the functionalist error was never noticing the problems, it was assuming the existing solution was the necessary one (1.3.4).

Diffusion and common descent. Some apparent universals are not independent inventions but shared inheritances or borrowings. All human languages may descend from a common ancestry; agriculture, writing, and religions have spread. Anthropologists call the resulting problem Galton's problem: societies are not independent cases, so a trait shared by many may be one event, not fifty. This matters enormously for any comparative claim, and 7.6 returns to it as a methodological issue.

Universals and the politics of human nature

This lesson has a political edge, and you should see it clearly, because claims about universals are used in arguments.

Claims that something is universal are regularly deployed to argue it is natural and therefore right: hierarchy, male authority, the family in a particular form, war, private property. The logical error is old and has a name — deriving an ought from an is — and there is a second, empirical error stacked on top of it: the claimed universal usually turns out on inspection to be far less universal than asserted, or universal only at a level of abstraction that permits the opposite arrangement.

Take "the family is universal." True at the level of some arrangement for raising children. Not true at the level of the co-resident nuclear household with a breadwinning father, which is a specific and historically recent form. The move from the first to the second is where the smuggling happens (9.1).

Conversely — and 1.5.3 requires this balance — the denial of all universals can be a political move too, and it is not more honest for being progressive. If nothing is shared, cross-cultural understanding, translation, solidarity and human rights all become unintelligible (2.1.8). Some of the strongest arguments against oppressive practices rest precisely on shared human vulnerabilities: people everywhere can be hurt, coerced, humiliated and deprived, and recognise these in each other.

Where the frontier is

Two contemporary conversations worth knowing exist, both of which you will meet later.

Cross-cultural psychology and the WEIRD problem. A now-famous critique observed that a very large share of published behavioural research uses subjects from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic societies, and that on a number of measures — perception, reasoning about fairness, sense of self — those populations are outliers rather than representative. The implication is precisely this lesson's: results generalised from one narrow sample were mistaken for human universals. It is the psychological version of the critique Part 6 makes of sociology.

Multiple modernities. The macro version (6.7, 11.6): societies face similar problems under industrial conditions — urbanisation, bureaucracy, mass schooling, wage labour — and solve them in durably different ways shaped by their own histories. Universal problems, particular solutions, at the scale of civilisations.

"Universal means identical." Almost never. The universal is the domain or the problem; the practice varies without limit.

"Universal means natural, and natural means right." Two errors in one sentence. A regularity is not a justification, and most claimed universals dissolve or thin out on inspection.

"If we find universals, relativism is refuted." No. Methodological relativism (2.1.8) is about how to understand a practice, not about whether any regularities exist.

"All societies have status differentiation, so inequality is inevitable." They have some; the amount and basis vary hugely. This is the exact fallacy 1.2.2 warned about — sliding from a general fact to a particular arrangement.

"Murdock's list is objective." It reports real regularities using categories drawn from one tradition. Both halves of that sentence are true, and Geertz's criticism stands.

"Similar traits in many societies mean independent invention." Galton's problem: they may be one diffusion event counted many times.

Why it matters

It gives you the single most useful comparative frame in the discipline. Universal problem, particular solution. Apply it to anything — funerals, marriage, childcare, punishment, greeting, hospitality, retirement — and you immediately have two questions instead of a shrug: what problem is this solving, and why this solution here?

It stops both cheap moves. "Everyone does it, so it's natural" and "everything is different, so nothing can be compared" are both lazy, and this lesson disarms them together.

It licenses a global sociology. Part 6 is only possible if comparison is possible; comparison is only possible if there are shared problems to compare solutions to. This lesson is the warrant for the whole comparative enterprise — and, in its critique of Murdock's grid, also the warning about how to conduct it.

And van Gennep's rites of passage will follow you everywhere. Separation, liminality, reincorporation, communitas: once you have this, you will see it in a wedding, an initiation, a hospital stay, a training programme, a prison sentence and a first term at university.

A cultural universal is found in all known societies; a cultural particular is its local form. The best formulation is universal problems, particular solutions.

Robust candidates include language, incest prohibition (Lévi-Strauss on alliance), kinship classification, reciprocity, some status differentiation, and ritual marking of life transitions.

Murdock's inventory reports real regularities and imposes Western analytical categories; Geertz objected that universals abstract enough to be true are usually empty. State universals as problems, and be honest about your grid.

Van Gennep's rites of passage — separation, liminality, reincorporation — plus Turner's communitas, is among the most transferable frames in this course.

Universals arise from shared biology, shared functional problems, and diffusion or common descent (Galton's problem: shared traits may be one event, not many).

Politically: universality does not imply rightness, and claimed universals usually thin out on inspection — but denying all commonality makes translation, solidarity and cross-cultural argument unintelligible.

The WEIRD critique in psychology and multiple modernities in sociology are the same lesson at two scales: a narrow sample was mistaken for humanity.

Cultural universal — a practice or domain found in all known human societies.

Cultural particular — the specific local form a universal domain takes.

Murdock's list — the classic 1945 inventory of proposed cultural universals.

Incest taboo — the universal prohibition of sex or marriage within some category of close kin; the specific category varies.

Alliance theory — Lévi-Strauss's argument that the incest prohibition forces exchange between groups and thereby creates social ties.

Rite of passage — van Gennep's ritual sequence marking a change of social status.

Liminality — the ambiguous middle phase of a rite of passage, betwixt and between statuses.

Communitas — Turner's term for the intense equality and solidarity among those in a liminal phase together.

Galton's problem — the difficulty that societies are not independent cases, so shared traits may reflect diffusion rather than independent invention.

Naturalistic fallacy — inferring that what is, ought to be.

WEIRD samples — Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic research populations, unrepresentative on several measures.

Multiple modernities — the view that common structural problems are solved in durably different ways across societies (6.7).

One — four funerals. Find out how death is handled in three traditions other than your own. For each, identify the shared problem being solved and the particular solution. Then write down what your own tradition's solution assumes about the person.

Two — thin the universal. Take three items from Murdock's list and, for each, state the universal at the level of a problem rather than an institution. Notice how much more useful the reformulation is.

Three — find the liminal phase. Identify one transition you have been through (a school-leaving, a wedding, a first job, a training course, an illness). Locate the separation, the liminal middle, and the reincorporation. Then ask who else was in the liminal phase with you, and how you felt about them.

Four — catch the smuggle. Find one public argument that moves from "all societies do X" to "therefore X is right." Identify the exact sentence where the move happens.