How do you think they might be interpreted by members of the opposite gender and by people in other cultures? Do you think that the age of the observer might play a part in their interpretation? The range of permissible ways of dressing and acting as a man or woman are often very limited in strictly fundamental Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Hindu societies.
In Afghanistan under the Taliban rule during the late 's, men were expected to wear traditional male clothing and were beaten or jailed by morality police for not having a full beard, playing or listening to music, or allowing female family members to go out in public unchaperoned.
Women were similarly punished for being in public without wearing a plain loose outer gown that covered their face and entire body including their feet. They also were not allowed to go to school or to work outside of the home. To the surprise of Europeans and North Americans, many of these conservative cultural patterns did not disappear with the end of Taliban control.
They are deeply ingrained in the Islamic tradition of Afghanistan and in the more conservative nations of the Middle East. Note: women in some predominantly Muslim countries lead lives that are much less constrained by tradition. Cultures No Longer Exist in Isolation. It is highly unlikely that there are any societies still existing in total isolation from the outside world.
Even small, out of the way tribal societies are now being integrated to some extent into the global economy. That was not the case a few short generations ago. Some of the societies in the Highlands of New Guinea were unaware of anyone beyond their homeland until the arrival of European Australian miners in the 's. A few of the Indian tribes in the Upper Amazon Basin of South America remained unaware of the outside world until explorers entered their territories in the 's and 's.
Members of these same New Guinean and Amazonian societies today buy clothes and household items produced by multinational corporations. They are developing a growing knowledge of other cultures through schools, radios, and even televisions and the Internet. As a result of this inevitable process, their languages and indigenous cultural patterns are being rapidly replaced.
Virtually all societies are now acquiring cultural traits from the economically dominant societies of the world. The most influential of these dominant societies today are predominantly in North America and Western Europe. However, even these societies are rapidly adopting words, foods, and other cultural traits from all over the world. The emergence of what is essentially a shared global culture is not likely to result in the current major cultures disappearing in the immediate future the same way many of the small indigenous ones have.
Language differences and ethnocentrism will very likely prevent that from happening. There are powerful conflicting trends in the world today.
At the same time that many people are actively embracing globalism , others are reviving tribalism. The break-up of the former empire of the Soviet Union into largely ethnic based nations is an example of the latter. Likewise, some of the nations in Africa whose boundaries were arbitrarily created by Europeans during the colonial era are now experiencing periodic tribal wars that may result in the creation of more ethnically based countries.
All rights reserved. Illustration credits. Expanding human geographic range into new environmental zones made possible by the evolution of culture The ranges during later time periods include those of earlier periods.
Our ethnocentrism causes us to be shocked and even disgusted at attitudes about other animals in different cultures. This North American woman considers her dog to be a close friend and essentially a member of her own family. In the Muslim world, dogs are generally considered to be dirty animals that are likely to be kicked if they get in the way.
In some areas of Southeast Asia, dogs have multiple functions, including being a source of food for people. Masai women. Do you think that this woman is wearing makeup? If so, what kinds of makeup is she using? Look closely and take your time. Who is most likely to use this tool?
What is its function? Conservative Muslim women in the Middle East. They are fully covered for modesty in public and are being escorted by a male relative Note: women in some predominantly Muslim countries lead lives that are much less constrained by tradition.
Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures --National Geographic anthropologist describes some of the indigenous cultures being lost in our time. This link takes you to an external website. To return here, you must click the "back" button on your browser program.
Successful cultural technology for adapting to very cold winter environments. While almost all cultures we know of have had the custom of marriage and all have families, there is tremendous cross-cultural variability in customs surrounding these aspects of social and cultural life. Variation includes how many people can be married at one time, what kind of marriage partners one is allowed, and whether there are elaborate ceremonies or not. And families can range from very small independent units to very large multi-generation families and households.
Sexual reproduction is part of the biological nature of humans, so it may be surprising how much sexuality varies cross-culturally. Indeed, societies vary considerably in the degree to which they encourage, discourage or even appear to fear heterosexual sex at different life stages and in varying circumstances.
And societies vary widely in their tolerance and practice of homosexuality. This module explores cross-cultural patterns in sexuality and explanations of why sexual attitudes and practice may vary. Categorizing children at birth into the binary categories of female or male is common cross-culturally. But there is also substantial variation across cultures, both in the number of gender categories and in the tolerance of switching categories.
This module first explores variation in gender concepts, then turns to what we know from cross-cultural research about gender differences in division of labor, political and warrior roles, and the relative status of women and men in society. Nearly all societies are known to engage in practices that lead to altered states of consciousness. However the methods, functions, and cultural context vary widely between societies.
One major variation is whether societies believe in possession by spirits or in one's soul fleeing or going on a journey. We summarize what we know of this variation from cross-cultural research. The hunter-gatherer way of life is of major interest to anthropologists because dependence on wild food resources was the way humans acquired food for the vast stretch of human history. Cross-cultural researchers focus on studying patterns across societies and try to answer questions such as: What are recent hunter-gatherers generally like?
How do they differ from food producers? How do hunter-gatherer societies vary and what may explain their variability? In this revised summary, we focus on what cross-cultural researchers have found about hunter-gatherer lifestyles. As a result, cultural evolution is a stronger type of adaptation than old genetics. Waring, an associate professor of social-ecological systems modeling, and Wood, a postdoctoral research associate with the School of Biology and Ecology, have just published their findings in a literature review in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B , the flagship biological research journal of The Royal Society in London.
We evolve both genetically and culturally over time, but we are slowly becoming ever more cultural and ever less genetic," Waring says. Culture has influenced how humans survive and evolve for millenia. According to Waring and Wood, the combination of both culture and genes has fueled several key adaptations in humans such as reduced aggression, cooperative inclinations, collaborative abilities and the capacity for social learning.
Increasingly, the researchers suggest, human adaptations are steered by culture, and require genes to accommodate. Waring and Wood say culture is also special in one important way: it is strongly group-oriented. Factors like conformity, social identity and shared norms and institutions -- factors that have no genetic equivalent -- make cultural evolution very group-oriented, according to researchers.
Therefore, competition between culturally organized groups propels adaptations such as new cooperative norms and social systems that help groups survive better together. According to researchers, "culturally organized groups appear to solve adaptive problems more readily than individuals, through the compounding value of social learning and cultural transmission in groups. With groups primarily driving culture and culture now fueling human evolution more than genetics, Waring and Wood found that evolution itself has become more group-oriented.
We tell stories, we dream, we imagine things about ourselves and others and we spend a great deal of time thinking about the future and analysing the past.
There's more to it, Thomas Suddendorf , an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Queensland in Australia is keen to point out. We have a fundamental urge to link our minds together.
We connect up our brains, and it's one of our defining traits Credit: SPL. That our rapidly expanding technology has allowed us all to become instant publishers means we can share such information at the touch of a button.
And this transmission of ideas and technology helps us in our quest to uncover even more about ourselves. That is, we use language to continue ideas that others put forward. Of course, we pass on the good and the bad.
The technology that defines us can also destroy worlds. Take murder. Humans aren't the only species that kill each other. We're not even the only species that fight wars.
But our intelligence and social prowess mean we can do so on an unprecedented scale. We can fight and kill on an unparalleled scale Credit: istock.
Charles Darwin, in his book The Descent of Man, wrote that humans and animals only differ in degree, not kind. This still stands true but Suddendorf says that it is precisely these gradual changes that make us extraordinary and has led to "radically different possibilities of thinking". And it is these thoughts that allow us to pinpoint to our differences with chimpanzees. That we do so is because they are the closest living relative we have. If any of the now extinct early humans were still alive, we would be comparing our behaviour to them instead.
Still, as far as we know, we are the only creatures trying to understand where we came from. We also peer further back in time, and further into the future, than any other animal.
What other species would think to ponder the age of the universe, or how it will end? We have an immense capacity for good. At the same time we risk driving our closest relatives to extinction and destroying the only planet we have ever called home.
This is part of a two-part feature series looking at whether humans are really unique. Part one looks at the similarities between us and our closest relatives. The traits that make human beings unique. Share using Email.
By Melissa Hogenboom. Not so fast, says Melissa Hogenboom, a few things make us different from any other species. We see the roots of many behaviours once considered uniquely human in our closest relatives. There is little evidence that any other hominins made any kind of art.
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