Cultural Patterns

Are you good at pattern recognition? Look around: there are cultural patterns everywhere! Two people strolling down the street, hand in hand. An old man walking his dog. An old lady feeding the pigeons. In the distance, shouting at a sporting match. The cultural patterns that surround us are like a kaleidoscope of the human experience. Let's take a look.

Cultural Patterns Definition

Patterns are, in a way, the architecture of culture.

Different Cultural Patterns

Human cultures come in many shapes and forms. There are thousands of ethnic cultures alone and a nearly uncountable number of sub-cultures. Culture is always changing. New cultures emerge; old ones die out or change form.

Among this diversity and flux, certain patterns stand out. They range from the family, if we are talking about ethnic cultures, to a holy text, when we invoke religion, and even to shoe types in sports subcultures.

Generally, the broader the category of cultural trait (dress, cuisine, belief, language), the more likely it is to be found as a pattern across most cultures. More specific traits, such as types of shoes or what you eat on December 31, may be a quite limited pattern.

In this explanation, we are concerned with a representative sample of the broad patterns of culture.

The Family

Every ethnic culture and subculture ever has had a distinct definition of "family." This is because the family unit has been the basic means whereby humanity reproduces itself, both biologically and culturally.

In the West, the "nuclear family" refers to the household comprised of Mom, Dad, and the kids. Because of the dominance of Western culture through globalisation, this image is widespread worldwide. However, Western culture, not to mention other cultures, have numerous other ways of defining what a family is and what it isn't.

Extended Family

In many cultures, "family" means grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and others in addition to the nuclear family unit. Households may be comprised of some of these relatives (from the paternal or maternal side, or both). "Family" may mean something much bigger and more extensive than whoever resides in your home.

In traditional societies, for example among Australian Aboriginal people, relationships with people who are your kin are incredibly complex and also centrally important to cultural preservation. From an early age, one must learn the correct things to say and how to act around each and every type of relative, including in-laws and extending out to second-degree cousins and beyond.

In some Western societies, "family" means more than the nuclear family, though they may not be carefully defined kinship networks.

Post-Nuclear Family

There are many other ways of defining who your family is and what it is for. In the West, it may consist of one rather than two parents, guardians, or caregivers; no children; pets; it may include a heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple; etc.

Part of this is affirmative: traditional or "conservative" definitions of what a family is, or should be, have given way in many sectors of society to broader definitions.

However, another element involves the so-called "breakdown" of the nuclear family. Single-parent homes exist where one partner has abandoned the other and their children.

Age-based Rituals

Ethnic cultures (and other types of cultures as well) typically have different roles for people depending on their ages. As will become a familiar theme, religion often has a lot to say in how these are defined and how you transition from one stage to the next.

Pregnancy, Birth, and Childhood

Many patterns exist in the way mothers, infants and children (and fathers) are expected to behave from conception and pregnancy through birth and all the way to adulthood. Each culture has expected norms as well as punishments for transgressing those norms.

Coming of Age

Most societies that are not Western or "modern" in a broad sense have a clearly defined boundary between childhood and adulthood. This frequently involves coming-of-age ceremonies that include physical and mental challenges. These can be extraordinarily painful and even dangerous because they are meant to separate the "men from the boys" and the "women from the girls." They may include scarring, genital mutilation, combat events, tests of endurance, or other types of trials.

Fig. 1 - Bullet ants, which have stings that can make adults faint, sewn into gloves worn by 13-year-old boys as a painful coming-of-age ritual among the Satere-Mawe of the Brazilian Amazon

Successfully becoming an adult, in traditional societies, typically involves induction into a secret or secretive society with various grades, levels, or positions. These secretive inner groups usually help to preserve cultural traditions well-hidden from outsiders, and otherwise work to maintain internal order within the culture as well as protect it from external influences where necessary.

If one is unable or unwilling to successfully come of age, banishment or marginalization can occur. Sometimes, people who are neither female nor male (i.e., third gender) are relegated to defined cultural roles; in other cases, "failures" become perpetual "children" but are still tolerated.

In modern societies, coming-of-age rituals sometimes also exist.

Even in societies where formal rituals don't exist, graduating from school, getting a full-time job, driving a car, drinking alcohol, or joining a certain club may signify that one has become an adult.

Marriage

Marriages that include weddings are common to most ethnic cultures, though no longer strict norms in some. In some societies, weddings are events costing a year's salary; in others, they are simple affairs before a judge. Religion, as you might guess, has a lot to say about what marriage is, who can do it, and when they can do it.

Senescence and Death

In Western society, old age may mean elderly retirees spending their pensions in Florida, or people living on fixed wages, shut into their homes and abandoned by their kin, and everything in between.

In traditional societies, "elders" are seen as people who are wise and to be respected. They often retain considerable cultural and political power.

Death as a cultural pattern involves not just the event of dying but also the entire process of "laying the person to rest," as it is often called. Beyond that, it may or may not involve veneration of ancestors, which, while not universal, has a centrally important cultural role in cultures as distinct as Mexican and Han Chinese. At the very least, most cultures bury their dead in certain places such as cemeteries.

Cultural Patterns and Processes

Every cultural pattern includes numerous constituent processes. These are sequences of events defined by cultural mores. Let's see how this works for marriage.

The cultural pattern of marriage takes many forms in many cultures. Each culture has a different set of processes leading up to the unification ("wedding"). You could (and many do!) write extensive rulebooks for this.

None of these processes are universal. Courtship? You have probably heard it called "dating." You might think that getting to know your partner comes prior to the mutual decision to get married.

Fig. 2 - Hindu wedding in Kerala, India. Traditional marriages in South Asia are arranged by families

But in many cultures across time, the survival of the culture itself was not left up to the decisions of love-struck youngsters! Indeed, the entire concept of romantic love might not have been recognized or seen as important. Marriage was (and still is, in many cultures) seen as primarily a means to strengthen the bonds between extended family networks. It might even have involved the unification of two royal families! Not uncommonly, the partners did not even meet for the first time until their wedding night.

Types of Cultural Patterns

Above, we looked at cultural patterns that involve the human life cycle. There are many other types of patterns. Here are just a few:

• Time. Each culture defines and subdivides time differently, from the things one should do during the day, to the calendars that may stretch over eons; time may be seen as linear, cyclical, both, or something else.

• Meals. What, when, where, and how people eat is of fundamental importance.

• Work. What constitutes "work"? Some cultures do not even have the concept. Others carefully define what type of people can do what jobs.

• Play. Children, and adults as well, engage in play. This ranges from board games in the home, to telling jokes, to the Summer Olympics. Recreation, sports, fitness, gaming: whatever you want to call it, every culture has and does it.

• Gender roles. Most cultures align biological sex to gender identification and have male and female genders. Some cultures include these and many others as well.

Universal Cultural Patterns

The anthropologist Ruth Benedict, in Patterns of Culture,¹ became famous for championing cultural relativism almost a century ago. Seeing the incredible varieties of patterns across the world, she made famous the notion that Western cultural values weren't the ONLY worthwhile values and that non-Western cultural mores needed to be understood on their own terms and respected.

Today, the "culture wars" rage on, pitting (broadly speaking) cultural relativists against cultural absolutists. In other words, at the extremes, some relativists, it is said, believe that "anything goes," while conservative absolutists claim there are certain fixed cultural patterns that are the norm. They typically argue that these norms are biological imperatives or else mandated by a deity (or sometimes both). The nuclear family comprised of a biological woman and a biological man, with children, is a common example.

So where is the truth about all this? Probably somewhere in between, and it depends which pattern you are talking about.

Incest Taboo

An oft-cited truly universal cultural pattern is the incest taboo. This means all ethnic cultures prohibit and penalize reproductive relationships between close-blood kin. This is an example of a biological imperative: the in-breeding of close kin produces genetic defects, which has many disadvantages.

fig. 3 - Atahualpa, the last Inca Emperor. He was polygamous. Coya Asarpay was his sister and first wife

However, the universality of this trait does not mean it isn't tolerated or even encouraged in some societies (the same goes for other "extreme" practices, such as cannibalism: you can always find some culture somewhere that engages in it). Indeed, the first thing popping into many people's minds is historical inbreeding among members of royal families. Widely reputed to have occurred in Europe, it was also practised among the ruling class of the Inca Empire (the leader married his sister).