Concept
Cultural universal
Overview
A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal) is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all known human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations. Some anthropological and sociological theorists that take a cultural relativist perspective may deny the existence of cultural universals: the extent to which these universals are "cultural" in the narrow sense, or in fact biologically inherited behavior is an issue of "nature versus nurture". Prominent scholars on the topic include Emile Durkheim, George Murdock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Donald Brown.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The rite does not limit itself to expressing this kinship; it makes it or remakes it. For it exists only in so far as it is believed in, and the effect of all these collective demonstrations is to support the beliefs upon which they are founded. Therefore, these leaps, these cries and these movements of every sort, though bizarre and grotesque in appearance, really have a profound and human meaning.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
States what Cultural universal is.
Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Cultural universal is.
We can point out one of these advances here. It is in accordance with the course of our development that external compulsion is gradually internalized, in that a special mental function, man’s super-ego, takes it under its jurisdiction. Every child presents to us the model of this transformation; it is only by that means that it becomes a moral and social being. This strengthening of the super-ego is a highly…
Sigmund Freud, The future of an illusion
Close in meaning to Cultural universal; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Morality.