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1.3.21What Are Cultural Universals? They're Human Universals, and Here's a List of Some of Them
Cultural universals are behavioral characteristics found across all cultures. Humans have so many naturally-selected behavioural characteristics in common, regardless of culture, that the anthropologist Donald E. Brown documented hundreds of them in a book, Human Universals. These include musical universals, coming up in a few minutes.
Brown describes the human species as Universal People, a nod to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. Here are a few from Brown’s and others’ compilations of human universals, the things you find in all cultures worldwide (Table 2):
TABLE 2 A Small Sampling of Cultural/Human Universals
- Aesthetics
- Conflict and conflict mediation
- Cooking
- Death rituals
- Distinguishing right and wrong
- Division of labour by age and by sex
- Ethnocentrism
- Facial expressions of emotions, including happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, etc.
- Fairness (equity) concept
- Family (or household)
- Females do most child care
- Food sharing
- Good and bad distinguished
- Gossip
- Groups that are not based on family
- Hospitality
- Jokes
- Kinship statuses
- Language employed to manipulate, misinform, or mislead
- Law (rights and obligations)
- Love and affection felt and expressed
- Magic, belief in
- Males dominate public/political realm, more aggressive, more prone to lethal violence, engage in more coalitional violence, and more prone to theft
- Marriage (husband older than wife on average)
- Mentalese
- Moral sentiments
- Murder and murder proscribed
- Oligarchy
- Preference for own children and close kin (nepotism)
- Rape; rape proscribed
- Reciprocity, positive and negative (revenge, retaliation)
- Religion/supernatural, belief in
- Resistance to dominance and abuse of power
- Risk taking (males)
- Sanctions for crimes against the collectivity
- Self control
- Sex (gender) terminology is fundamentally binary
- Sexual attractiveness, jealousy, modesty, and regulation
- Social structure
- Statuses on other than sex, age, or kinship bases
- Taboos, including food, incest, utterances
- Territoriality
- Weapons
These are only a few that Brown (and others) have documented. Brown’s book lists many more. These traits exist in every culture, however separated geographically and historically. Obviously, such commonality of characteristics could not have emerged independently everywhere in humanity without genetic foundations—an evolved basic human nature.