Baby fish mouth

September 23, 2009 6:06 AM

What are the traits documented to be universal across all cultures? Trying to google it, but with no luck.

I was talking about baby talk with someone recently and he said that baby talk was one of the 13 things found in every culture. [Not sure about the number.] Meaning, we all do it. I thought was really interesting and would like to know more. He said he couldn't remember the other ones but thinks he read it somewhere. Does this ring a bell with anyone? I'd like to know the others. Thanks.

posted by bunny hugger to society & culture (23 comments total)

Google Ron Paul Joseph Campbell.

It has been a while since I studied JC, and I'm sure someone will correct me, but I believe I recall the only truly universal more was prohibition of mother/son incest.
posted by Pollomacho at 6:13 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]

Men claiming that size doesn't matter?

Seriously, when you say traits, do you mean things like facial expressions or customs?
posted by MuffinMan at 6:15 AM on September 23

I'm not sure what list you're thinking of, but Wikipedia has a list of cultural universals (which is possibly the phrase you were missing in your Google searches).

Do note that these lists are all either going to be unhelpfully broad (for example, according to Wikipedia, "beliefs" are universal! Go figure) or tremendously difficult to substantiate with evidence. I already see a few on the Wikipedia list that are questionable; Christine Helliwell (2000), for example, describes a culture in which rape doesn't exist (and I've heard the same claim about other cultures as well). And research on the Piraha (which is itself the subject of contentious debate among linguists) calls into question many of the assumed "universals" of human language and cognition.

On preview: Yes, Pollomacho is right that incest prohibition is one of the few uncontested cultural universals.
posted by pluckemin at 6:16 AM on September 23

There is a strong case for the practice of divination being universal across all cultures.
posted by hermitosis at 6:18 AM on September 23

I vaguely remember flipping through one of Desmond Morris's books when I was a teenager and being struck by the factoid that everyone, in every culture, raises their eyebrows a little bit when they spot someone they recognize and are saying hello.

Another thing: it's not 100% universal, but there is a law of reciprocity in just about every religion or belief system (i.e., "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"). The only two exceptions are Satanism (which instead of "treat others the way you WANT them to treat you" teaches "treat others the way they DO treat you") and the Creativity Movement (which is basically the White Power movement as a religion).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:25 AM on September 23

http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/human%20nature.htm
posted by Postroad at 6:27 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]

Prohibitions agains Incest.
posted by dfriedman at 6:36 AM on September 23

Prohibitions agains Incest.

(Egypt had brother sister incest at the royal level at least)
posted by IndigoJones at 6:39 AM on September 23

Yes. Pollomacho rightly specified mother/son incest.
posted by Phanx at 6:46 AM on September 23

Here's Donald E Brown's long and debatable list.
posted by Phanx at 6:55 AM on September 23

Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn has some interesting thoughts on the universals of human culture.
posted by musofire at 7:01 AM on September 23

As an example of where Brown is off-base, he specifies "de facto oligarchy" as a cultural universal. As Wade explains, hunter-gatherer cultures such as the San ("bushmen") are often highly egalitarian. If someone doesn't like what's going on, he just walks away from the group.
posted by musofire at 7:05 AM on September 23

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk#Questions_regarding_universality
posted by egg drop at 7:10 AM on September 23

Facial expressions are supposed to be pretty universal. I think it's actually been researched, in the context of microexpressions (look for Paul Ekman's work if you're interested).
posted by captainawesome at 7:24 AM on September 23

This is probably not what you specifically asked for, but there are the Big Five personality traits which are supposed to be measurable across cultures.
posted by amtho at 7:33 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]

James Rachels argues that certain moral values must be universal, or a cultural group would disintegrate...
1. A culture must value truth telling, or communication would be impossible, and group coordination would never occur.
2. A culture must care for its young, or the helpless infants would die off, and the culture's population would not be renewed.
2. A culture must have prohibitions or restrictions on killing other members of that culture, or else no one would congregate for fear of being senselessly killed.

Also, many anthropologists point out that all cultures place heavy emphasis on birth, sex, and death, but this is pretty vague, considering how that emphasis manifests is radically different.
posted by reverend cuttle at 7:44 AM on September 23

"Traits" can mean so many things. Depending on what you mean by the term, you are on some of the most controversial ground in science.

There's no question that there is a universal common biological basis for human behavior, including the cognitive capacities for communication and thus culture. All humans have cultures, not just languages, so there's a universal trait for you. All of those cultures have some apparently common properties or structural logics (when put it in rationalized terms, an act that filters description through values deeply naturalized in language and culture themselves -- see Greg Urban's fascinating book, *Metaculture.*) All human cultures apparently have concepts and elaborated institutions and behavioral norms in domains anthropologists would describe as kinship, religion/ritual, gender, and subsistence. An emphasis on the universal (or putative universal) aspects of culture, behavior, and cognition has alternated regularly with an emphasis on the differences that can be resolved at finer-grained levels of detail or from different descriptive perspectives, throughout the modern history of the anthropological sciences especially. Even in linguistics and cognitive science, the enormous impact of Chomsky's universalist case for Language, now well extended into other faculties of the human Mind/Brain, has not prevented the resurgence of hold-on-a-minute particularism, of which I am personally very fond because the newly resolved (or emergent) details always complicate the meta-theory and if they didn't, science wouldn't advance.

Even within particular cultural domains, such as music, there is very little consensus about the behavioral universals (not that there aren't, as with language, neurobiological universals, although what we know of them comes from a cognitive science still overwhelmingly in the grip of the now antiquated view that Western music can stand for "music" in any given experimental context). And of course, "music" has physical universals, some of which appear to be the basis of culturally mediated universals (one could argue that all musical cultures recognize the identity of the octave, the 2:1 frequency ration; that all human cultures have song, etc.).

The mental habit of serious social scientists should be to assume that nature and nurture are not separate explanations for any human behavior, and to concede that the naturalistic basis for culture and cognition means that humans are generically "the same" as individual bearers of evolved capacities, faculties, specializations, and basic drives. We're a species, biologically speaking. End of one story. But the remarkable thing about the human evolutionary adaptation of culture allows us a huge scope for differentiation, invention, and even direct intervention in natural processes (beginning with agriculture and animal husbandry, proceeding up to contemporary genomics). That is, what we have in common is the basis for our evident differences. You can focus on one or the other, but they only make sense as a dialectic.
posted by fourcheesemac at 7:58 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]

Baby talk is hardly universal, see here.

Paul Ekmans six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) are thought to be recognized across most cultures.
posted by zentrification at 10:43 AM on September 23

Ah yes, but the content of those emotions (cognitive, psychic, behavioral) has been shown (one might quibble with the verb) to be variable across cultures. See Catherine Lutz' *Unnatural Emotions,* or Michelle Rosaldo's *Illongot Headhunting* for two classic arguments on the subject.

The leading anthropological experts on children's linguistic socialization are Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs. Schieffelin's classic ethnographic study of Kaluli child socialization (Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) has some brilliant thinking on the supposed "universality" of baby talk.
posted by fourcheesemac at 12:37 PM on September 23 [1 favorite]

(One more thing: "baby talk" -- presuming you mean the register of simplified syntax and lexicon, heightened sentence intonation, and breathy timbre used in many cultures to speak to infants and toddlers, and not the ways babies acquire the ability to talk through a set of stages that have been shown to be significantly universal -- is usually referred to as "Motherese" or "Caregiver Language" in linguistic theory. If you want to research the topic, these terms will be helpful for you. )
posted by fourcheesemac at 12:39 PM on September 23

The concept that there is a transcultural "universal prohibition" toward any form of incest, including mother/son and father/daughter incest, has come under a lot of critique in the past decade or so. There's a lot of weaseling on this even by cultural universalists: you'll see folks like Marvin Harris writing "Nearly every culture" because cultures with no particular animus about incestuous parent/child dyads have been more fully documented since Westermarck's original hypothesis.
posted by Sidhedevil at 1:56 PM on September 23

"Human Universals list compiled by Donald E. Brown as published in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker."
posted by ollyollyoxenfree at 8:13 AM on September 24

Whoops, I missed Phanx's post.
posted by ollyollyoxenfree at 8:14 AM on September 24