| You want cross-cultural universals, Tom. I don't think anyone's collected a definitive list, because discussion is still ongoing about how scientific the idea of cross-cultural universals really is, and how you define what's universal. For instance, I've been told that every culture thinks murder is bad (by someone emphatically absolutist). But how any society defines murder varies, naturally enough, so much that the most inclusive definition would most likely be "bad causing a death," which is pretty circular. The use of language is a cross-cultural universal, but that doesn't actually tell us much about language or about how various societies are likely to use it. Eating is a CCU, but not cooking, or eating together— they're ALMOST CCUs, but almost doesn't cut it; that's what universal means. The most reliable CCUs are bare exensions from biological needs and the results of (biological) evolution— all people sleep, and all people dream, so all people have some way of describing their experience of dreaming— from journeying in spirit worlds to expressing unconscious wishes to neurons firing randomly. |
