Cultural Similarity
Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 4:14 pm
Cultures are, of course, very complicated things with many facets. Culture includes the collective experience of the people wrapped up in language, legend, fable, geography, government, literature, art and individual roles that the people employ. If it were possible to quantify all of the sub-elements of a culture, there would be literally millions upon millions of data points and propositions, both substantive and incidental.
Because of the large number of these cultural elements, it is highly probably that many of them will line up if you pick any two cultures at random and compare them. Statistically speaking, the huge number insures that there will be 100s of cultural elements that appear shared—but the appearance is deceiving since the two cultures arrived at the similar ideas from two completely different positions. Looking at these shared elements would give the distorted view that the cultures are specially related or derived one from another when that case is not justified.
For example, in linguistics there is a finite set of distinctive sounds the human being is capable of producing. Phonemes are produced by combining these sounds into distinctive elements of meaning that can be audibly differentiated. Because of the limited set, if you compare any two random languages, there will be 1000s and 1000s of phonemes that appear in both languages—the vast majority having no meaning in common. However, in any two languages there will be a handful of words where both the sound and the meaning correspond—at random. Because of the limited set of sounds and definitions, this is bound to happen and has been noted many times by linguists in many different languages.
Additionally, human experience is limited and all cultures face many of the same problems of living in this world. So an even higher degree of correlation would be expected than purely random, since our anatomy, biology, and even the weather will lead humans to make similar decisions. Likewise, a diffusion effect can occur among cultures that have no direct contact. The Spice Route comes to mind which extended from Rome into the Alaskan territory, although no one person was aware of the extent.
So if one wishes to show that a particular culture was spawned from or influenced by anther particular culture, more than the baseline expected amount, one must first show that the lineup of cultural and linguistic elements falls outside the normal distribution of randomly expected elements. In other words, if you took two complex cultural artifacts, and compared them, you might be able to find some surprising similarities. But unless you can demonstrate that the volume of those similarities is sufficient to overcome the null hypothesis of random or incidental cross over, you have not established causality.
Because of the large number of these cultural elements, it is highly probably that many of them will line up if you pick any two cultures at random and compare them. Statistically speaking, the huge number insures that there will be 100s of cultural elements that appear shared—but the appearance is deceiving since the two cultures arrived at the similar ideas from two completely different positions. Looking at these shared elements would give the distorted view that the cultures are specially related or derived one from another when that case is not justified.
For example, in linguistics there is a finite set of distinctive sounds the human being is capable of producing. Phonemes are produced by combining these sounds into distinctive elements of meaning that can be audibly differentiated. Because of the limited set, if you compare any two random languages, there will be 1000s and 1000s of phonemes that appear in both languages—the vast majority having no meaning in common. However, in any two languages there will be a handful of words where both the sound and the meaning correspond—at random. Because of the limited set of sounds and definitions, this is bound to happen and has been noted many times by linguists in many different languages.
Additionally, human experience is limited and all cultures face many of the same problems of living in this world. So an even higher degree of correlation would be expected than purely random, since our anatomy, biology, and even the weather will lead humans to make similar decisions. Likewise, a diffusion effect can occur among cultures that have no direct contact. The Spice Route comes to mind which extended from Rome into the Alaskan territory, although no one person was aware of the extent.
So if one wishes to show that a particular culture was spawned from or influenced by anther particular culture, more than the baseline expected amount, one must first show that the lineup of cultural and linguistic elements falls outside the normal distribution of randomly expected elements. In other words, if you took two complex cultural artifacts, and compared them, you might be able to find some surprising similarities. But unless you can demonstrate that the volume of those similarities is sufficient to overcome the null hypothesis of random or incidental cross over, you have not established causality.