World Cultures Analyzing Pre-Industrial Societies In Africa, Asia, Europe, And the Americas

By James T. Shea

"World Cultures" is an examination of pre-industrial human societies across the world. Designed to give readers a broad catalogue of social behavior, "World Cultures" covers:
- Social norms and values
- Authority and government
- Gender and sexuality
- Knowledge and technology
- Fashion and art
- Religion and spirituality

• Language: English
• Publisher: James T. Shea
• Release date: Jan 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386864714

Book preview

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I. INTRODUCTION

It’s not easy to condense over ten thousand years of human civilization into a readable overview. I knew that going into this, and I hope this serves as your fair warning as you begin reading this book. I’ve done my best to both provide a basic understanding of how cultures are built as well as picking interesting, atypical branches of societal development.

My goal is to give you, my reader, both a core understanding of societal development, and a broad toolbox of ideas for developing more specific cultures in your own writing. Think of this book less as a definitive guide to cultures and more as a tasting menu, exposing you to as many distinct ideas as possible. My goal is to expose you to the breadth of human societies as well as to give you a toolbox of core ideas to understand how cultures work.

Before we dive into the actual content, it’s important to establish: what is culture, and where does it come from? Culture refers to the traits that define groups of people. The concept has its roots in animal behavior; humans sometimes think of themselves as above animals, but in many ways human behavior is merely a more complex and organized version of what animals do.

Every animal has a distinct social structure, whether it’s a family-based carnivore pack or a larger grazer herd. However, some animals display more intricate patterns worthy of note. Chimpanzees, for example, show many proto-human traits such as a tiered society with individual chimpanzees showing deference to those above and contempt for those below. They have even been observed waging at least one war, an organized long-term effort to destroy an enemy group marked by apparently needless cruelty and aggression.

Humans can build and farm - but so can animals, in their own way. In addition to the construction of complex tunnels and burrows, ants are capable of farming aphids. The ants protect the aphids and lead them to plants that the aphids eat. In exchange, the ants eat honeydew that the aphids release; the ants even milk the aphids with their antennae in order to force them to release it.

Some animals are capable of distinct language. While all animals communicate, it was long thought that the nuances and complexities of true language were the realm of humans alone. However, it has been noted that prairie dogs are capable of communicating in a way that implies precise detail; not only simple messages like danger, but a more complex series of chitters that distinguish details like the nature of the threat, their size, and even their color. Furthermore, the prairie dog language also has regional dialects, deepening its comparison to human language.

Even artistic sense is not limited to humans. Male Bowerbirds, found in New Guinea, attracts mates by making a complex nest of brightly-colored bits and baubles. These nests can be so complex that they even include elements of forced perspective - an element that makes them far more desirable to female Bowerbirds.

Humanity’s only apparent unique traits involve self-awareness, which leads to concepts like religion and philosophy to try to explain why we’re here, what the point is, and so on. Yet even these things are only known because humans are capable of communicating with each other; without access to an animal’s inner thoughts, it is impossible to know if they feel the same way. We do know that some animals mourn the dead, including elephants, dolphins, apes and whales. So perhaps even spiritual or philosophical thought could be possible.

Most cultural traditions have their root in a prehistoric, proto-human period. The majority of human history existed in a pre-recording state, which meant that humans transmitted knowledge and information solely through direct contact and memory. Information of any kind was passed down through families and communities, but was not recorded for any form of larger consumption. As a result, we do not know who made the first words, or why they made them that way; our understanding of languages usually begins in media res when writing is established, long after the actual origins of the language itself. Knowledge was passed from generation to generation like links in a chain; the process was not always perfect, but in general people maintained the views and traditions of their ancestor. Hence, by the time prehistory became history, humans had been carrying their traditional values for thousands of years.

For this reason it is difficult to talk about the origins of cultural values except in terms of observing instinctual patterns, i.e. protecting one’s young, social structures, and so on. Specifics like, for example, why a certain sound is associated with a certain concept linguistically are harder to determine. Specifics like why the deification of thunder has a certain root name that is carried on to many descendant cultures. At some level, a line must be drawn where people say we don’t know. Still, though, those misty origins do eventually coalesce into more observable patterns, and those are what we will be talking about.

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II. CULTURAL VALUES

A culture is defined by the ideas it represents and the values it seeks to propagate. Cultures are, in essence, sets of ideas carried from generation to generation. Therefore, in order to discuss cultures, we have to start with what they believe. This is what creates the cultural core that all other things - society, art, language, economics, and so on - are built around.

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2.1 Idealized Values

Values refer to the things that a culture considers important, which informs things like morality, purity, and right-vs-wrong. Values establish the criteria by which all other aspects of a culture are shaped and judged. In that way, they can be considered the most important aspect of cultural discussion.

A concept that is important to understand first and foremost is the window of discourse, also known as the Overton window. In short, there is a core moral set, often described as centrist, in a given culture. Divergence from that core morality exists, but only to a limited extent. Ideas that exist near the core are seen as normal, and the further you get from the core, the more unworkable or radical they seem. People will still hold those ideas on some level, but will be shunned by society if they voice them. Any society will have ideas that seem unthinkable to them as a whole. However, there will still be an array of what is acceptable to them, and people will be relatively free to voice those sentiments without global opposition. All the things we discuss about cultural values and norms exist on a scale. There will be divergences that are acceptable and divergences that are widely rejected. No culture is truly absolute.

The ways that individuals engage with each other is a reflection of society as a whole - whether they feel able to express themselves openly or if they must guard their feelings behind a constant veneer. In order to reconcile the difference between private feelings and public acceptability, the concept of a social facade is common in most societies. In psychological terms, such behavior is called masking. In Japan, the word tatemae is used to describe the mask itself. As a form of self-censorship, masking is useful at propagating or controlling societal values. Because only accepted values can be safely expressed in public, members of the public are led to believe that everyone in their society holds those core values. Those who deviate from the standard are criticized, socially outcast, or otherwise condemned. In this way, the window of discourse is maintained.

Now that the idea of cultural control is laid out, how do we define what a culture’s values are? There are some models we can use to narrow it down. The Inglehart-Welzel cultural map is a graph that displays countries around the world as points on two axes. The first axis is traditional vs secular-rational values. The second axis is survival vs self-expression values. The former has to do with deference to customs and authority, importance of religions, and so on. The second has to do with whether the country is rigidly utilitarian or more open to personal freedom. The map has regional correlation for different parts of the world. For example, the Confucian countries (China, Japan and South Korea) are secular-rational combined with survival (although Japan leans more towards self-expression). The Latin countries, such as Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil, are solidly traditional, but in the middle ground of survival-vs-self-expression. The Protestant countries, such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway, score high in both secular-rational and self-expression.

A limitation of the Inglehart-Welzel format is that it only maps two major issues. However, it does give us a relative starting point for discussion. Cultures are most broadly defined by the values they stand for, as a whole, and the way their societies are shaped exist in conjunction with the pursuit of that core value.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt conducted tests that led to the development of the moral foundation theory. Haidt’s research showed that when people of different ideological sets talked about moral behavior, they were applying similar reactions to different stimuli. The six stimuli Haidt identified were liberty, fairness, care, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Self-identified conservatives thought all six were equally important. Liberals and leftists thought that care was more important than all the others, while libertarians polled highest on liberty. All respondents registered strong feelings to their chosen moral values, and all of them identified their feelings as morality. It is important to understand that when people, or cultures, talk about moral behavior, they are often talking about very different things that provoke similarly strong emotions.

Empathy is the emotional response of concern and sympathy for other human beings. Discussions of the sanctity of human life and acts of charity are founded in empathy. Almost all ideologies value protecting one’s in-group: family, friends and people who share ties with you. Low-empathy ideologies limit their goodwill to these types of people alone, expressing contempt for out-group individuals or perceived moral degenerates. In modern politics, progressivism is associated with stronger welfare, weaker militaries, and humane treatment of society’s undesirables. By contrast, conservative politics are generally more distrustful and aggressive. Conservatives depict progressives as naive and weak; progressives see conservatives as inhumane and hateful.

In India, the ancient ruler Ashoka the Great built his empire originally on bloody conquest. However, after the particularly cruel conquest of Kalinga, Ashoka repented and became a Buddhist and a pacifist. His empire mandated not only humanitarian care, but even the welfare of animals. His was an example of a high empathy government (in the standards of the day). In contrast, the Middle Empire of Assyria was dominated by cruel punishments and brutal acts of repression even for good citizens - who were only considered good as long as they fulfilled their purpose in their aggressive, militaristic society. This is an example of a low empathy government.

Liberty reflects the importance of self-expression and self-determination in a given society. Societies with a low level of liberty value will think that one’s own agency is less important than values such as cooperation or obedience. A society based on communal values will curtail the individual’s ability to act economically as a way to ensure equality between individuals. Societies with a high level of liberty value will believe that individual expression and action is more important than collective empathy or deference to government.

Note that a love of liberty does not automatically indicate a hatred for slavery; the Greeks and Americans both built their culture on stated values of freedom, and both allowed slavery because it was the right of individuals to own them. This is a problem with the definition of liberty - more freedom for one person can mean less freedom for another. The Greek historian Herodotus described the Greco-Persian Wars as wars of freedom (Greece) vs slavery (Iran). This was despite the fact that Greece openly practiced slavery, whereas Iran at the time had banned it for all but prisoners of war. Herodotus was talking more about the common person’s influence on their government as well as their economic freedom; he described the Iranian citizens as subservient slaves to their imperial overlord. In short, he was only considering the two groups of people that he considered human, which is to say landed citizens; actual slaves fell below his own considerations in a discussion of freedom.

Tradition is a measure of respect for existing institutions and ideas. It is connected to the concept of things being sanctified or sacred, as well. Respect for a government-in-power often also falls under tradition, since those governments often derive authority from ideological sources. Different cultures will have different ideas of what falls under the veil of tradition, because in most cases tradition is defined by values as well as religion. The concepts here are also noted by automatic, unreasoned disgust for violations or breaches. Obviously every society has things that provoke disgust, but some countries are more strict than others.

In ancient China, two of the most prominent philosophies were the traditionalist Ruism (commonly called Confucianism) and the pragmatic Legalism. Ruism is defined by obedience to ancestors and moral norms, and has a great number of proper rites and behaviors that show the proper levels of respect for one’s ancestors and society at large. In contrast, Legalism was a guide for rulership that encouraged a cynical and adaptable approach to leadership. It focused heavily on organization and management, as well as how to get the best results out of one’s subordinates. Legalism says that a king should detach himself from his subjects and his own emotions in order to guarantee the best results for his country. Both of these philosophies had egalitarian or meritocratic aspects, but Ruism did so because men of value should be recognized regardless of birth, and Legalism did so because it was the most efficient method. Legalism was the leading philosophy of the short-lived Qin dynasty, while Ruism became a major influence around East Asia when it was adopted by the later Han dynasty.

The nexus of these three concepts is the societal goal. In essence, a society designs itself around a specific set of objectives, and judges the actions of its inhabitants as being beneficial to, or detracting from, that goal. In short, a society arranges itself to support its goal.

For example, feudal societies are built around a desire to maintain a certain type of order - the nobles rule and fight, the commoners farm and craft, and the priests maintain the necessary rituals to keep the divine appeased. The goal of a society like this is to preserve itself in that state. Tradition, therefore, takes precedence, while liberty is not valued and is therefore low. Empathy is somewhere in the middle based on the values of the ruling class. Religious societies similarly maintain a high tradition, but liberty and empathy depend on the tenets of the religion in question.

A democratic society values individual liberty and freedom as good ends in and of themselves. Tradition can range in importance; it is entirely possible for a liberty-focused society to have conservative moral values. Empathy has similar variability; a democratic society can be built on respect for humanity, or it can justify abuse of the weak by the strong as a natural result of the freedom of strong individuals. A libertarian society skews high-liberty, low-tradition, and low-empathy for just such a reason.

A communal society is based on the idea of restricting personal freedoms and economic mobility in order to ensure that all members of the community are taken care of. As a result, they tend to be medium-to-high empathy (depending on how they view outsiders) alongside low liberty. Tradition is variable depending on the type of commune; some are religious in nature, while Marxist-derived communes are atheist.

A fascist society is high-tradition, low-empathy and low-freedom. This is because its goal is to create a self-justifying military machine by appealing to culture clashes. Fascism is centered around a society banding together to stand against out-groups, and by definition, its members must subvert their own independence and well-being in order to support the group. As a result, fascism is the enemy of libertarianism and liberalism (because it takes away freedoms), but also the enemy of empathic ideologies (because it is inhumane and permanently hostile).

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2.2 Customs & Traditions

Beyond the core values that define a culture, there are many issues that affect subtler matters. These are traits that affect the ways in which people go about their lives, determining proper behavior and correct thinking.

Honor is a concept encompassing both personal reputation and morality. Honor exists at some level in almost every society, although the more formal and tradition-based a culture is, the more focus there is on it. In China, honor is tied in with the concept of mian, often translated as face, which is a measure of social standing, prestige, and due respect. The Romans made references to dignitas (from which English gets the word dignity) and gravitas to reference similar concepts - not only one’s moral standing, but also how seriously one is taken as a respectable individual.

Honor reflected many parts of a society’s values, and was generally used as a measure of compliance with those values. An individual who lived by society’s traditions and morality would gain a positive reputation, while a person who eschewed them would gain a negative one. This was both practical and ideological; the practical aspect was the desirability of living and working with someone who held these desired traits, and the ideological aspect was increasing conformity and preferring like individuals.

Honor was not only about individuals, though. The honor of the individual affected the family, past and present. Therefore, maintaining honor was often a communal task; punishing dishonorable individuals before they tainted the family as a whole was perceived as a necessary task. In some societies, a dishonored individual would commit suicide in order to clean the stain from their name. This was especially common in Japan, where it was called seppuku. Even in modern times, suicide rates are very high in Japan, and it is culturally tolerated as a response to dishonor. Suicide amongst students is a noted problem in both Japan and Korea (specifically South Korea) due to the high expectations and grueling demands placed upon individuals.

An extreme incarnation of familial honor policing is honor killing, found in Rome, the Arab world, India, China, the Mesoamerican cultures, Albania and the Balkans. Honor killing was the killing of a family member by other members of the family, incited by dishonorable or shameful actions by the victim. In many cases these kinds of killing were patriarchal in nature, targeting a woman for refusing to participate in an arranged marriage, being the victim of rape, or otherwise deviating from social norms. Men could also be victims for reasons such as homosexuality or even refusing to participate in honor killings themselves. The purpose of honor killings was to maintain the family’s status in the community; knowingly abetting dishonor would bring penalties, and redressing the dishonor with violence was often the only way to staunch it.

Politeness is a universal concept across cultures, but as many travelers have experienced, different cultures have different ideas