Quotes About Culture

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture.

When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.

What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society?

throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Until around A.D. 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe, even more so than medieval Islam. The long list of Chinese inventions includes canal lock gates, cast iron, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses, movable type, paper, porcelain, printing (except for the Phaistos disk), sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows. China then ceased to be innovative for reasons about which we shall speculate in the Epilogue.

Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.

Dat wil zeggen dat de problemen van Montana voor het grootste deel niet eenvoudigweg kunnen worden toegeschreven aan zelfzuchtige booswichten die willens en wetens profiteren van hun buren. In plaats daarvan zijn het conflicten tusseen mensen die vanuit hun achtergrond en normen kiezen voor een manier van doen die verschilt van die waar mensen met een andere achtergrond en andere waarden voor kiezen.

La historia siguió trayectorias distintas para diferentes pueblos debido a las diferencias existentes en los entornos de los pueblos, no debido a diferencias biológicas entre los propios pueblos».

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

A Maori conqueror explained, "We took possession…in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people.

literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history.

Children in the New Guinea highlands have the swollen bellies characteristic of a high-bulk but protein-deficient diet. New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

It turns out that, in addition to China's eight 'big' languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as 'Chinese'), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 'little' languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn't arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else.

Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.

WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies.

suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia.

We insist that "diversity" is a great strength, but for most Americans this is mere lip service. They rarely seek diversity in their personal lives, living instead in homogeneous islands that look nothing like the racial and cultural mix this country has become.

We have a bubbling successful melting pot in this country so long as the ingredients are essentially European.

En minä halua kulttuurikriittisiä ja -poliittisia kannanottoja. Minä kaipaan kylmää ryyppyä ja terävää ajattelua.