Dragaera

Culture (was Architecture question for Steve based upon the Sun, the Moon &

Thu Oct 28 15:27:00 PDT 2004

--- Steve Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote:
...

> Oh, and, by the way, I keep hearing about "human nature" but the only
> precise descriptions of it I've ever heard of involve characteristics
> that are clearly based on and learned from a given society, or culture. 
> Other than the instinct to survive, just what IS "human nature?"

Sorry about the nested quotes, but this appears to be from E. O.
Wilson's book _Consilience_, as quoted at
<http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/t-30034_An_argument_that_moral_relativism_is_%22wrong.%22_).html>

"In a classic 1945 compendium, the American anthropologist George P.
Murdock listed the universals of culture, which he defined as the social
behaviors and institutions recorded in the Human Relations Area file for
every one of the hundreds of societies studied to that time. There are
sixty-seven universals in the list: age-grading, athletic sports, bodily
adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization,
cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art,
divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education,
eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family
feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games,
gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality,
housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups,
kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage,
mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names,
population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights,
propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual,
residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status
differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and
weather control."

I believe you've shown us all of them on Dragaera except that I don't
remember eschatology, food taboos, incest taboos, obstetrics, or
pregnancy usages.  One could argue that Dragaerans, unlike Easterners,
have no propitiation of supernatural beings or religious ritual, if
they accept the gods and Jenoine as natural beings.  There may be a
few others that some Dragaeran houses don't have--I have trouble
imagining a Yendi family feast or Dragon weaving.

Note to would-be sf writers (including me): that list may be useful
in imagining societies.

Jerry Friedman


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