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Cultural Universals Vs. Non-Material Culture

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The concept, cultural universals (“those beliefs, behavior patterns, and institutions that are found in all known cultures” (Luhman, 61)) are used to study human cultural groups. When studying human cultural groups, we look at material culture and non-material culture, values, norms, cultural adaptation, folkways, mores, law, status, sanctions, and roles. Material culture and non-material culture are two very different ways of living in a society. When comparing two different cultures like the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari Desert (The Gods Must Be Crazy) and American culture, when looking at both these cultures you can tell which one is the material and which one is the non-material culture. The “Bushmen” are very non-material people, they only …show more content…

There are two types of sanctions; formal social sanctions, “mechanisms of social control by which rules or laws prohibit deviant criminal behavior” (Conley, 196) and informal social sanctions, “the usually unexpressed but widely known rules of group membership; the unspoken rules of social life” (Conley, 196). The cultural universal would be that a culture would have some form of sanction whether it is formal or informal or a combination of them. Roles, “the duties and behaviors expected from someone who holds a particular status” (Conley, 132) are also part of cultural universals. In the Milgram study, Obedience to Authority, where an experiment was conducted “ to determine the degree to which people would take orders” (Luhman, 86) in this experiment many roles were filled, Milgram observed, actors would scream as if they were being shocked and another would shock a person through a button on a machine. Roles are a cultural universal because in each culture there are roles that are filled and done so that society runs smoothly. Cultural adaptation “refers to the manner in which people adapt their cultures to necessities of survival” (Luhman, 61) in every culture this happens which makes it a cultural universal. If place were to run out oof drink able water the culture would move, or as the “Bushmen” of the Kalahari Desert (The Gods Must Be Crazy) did it, they would learn to survive off the land

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