Who are we?
Cultures.org is an independant non-profit
association based in Toulouse, France. Its only
activity is the creation of a proof-of-concept
open database tool for the study of cultural
observations. Data collection is under way, and
development of the pilot project is progressing.
We would welcome help from others, and especially
academic participation and/or adoption of this
project.
Who approves this project?
- Lew Goldberg,
Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology,
University of Oregon - "What a wonderful web-site. I
love it."
- Paul Langford, Professor of Modern
History at Oxford - "What you are proposing makes sense to
me... I would only say that separating the
stereotypical out from other evidence is very
much a matter of judgement and difficult to be
completely convincing on. But in my view the
more evidence the better and judgement is after
all what anthropologists, like historians, need
to exercise."
- Dr Robert McCrae (Ed. with J.Allik of The Five-Factor
Model of Personality Across Cultures,
2002) - "It
appears to be an interesting and valuable
project. It would certainly seem that your
traits could be classified in terms of the
Five-Factor Model (FFM) and thus national FFM
profiles could be created. The most obvious
question is whether those profiles would agree
with either assessed national trait levels or
national stereotype ratings."
- Peter Turchin, Professor of Biology and
Anthropology at the University of Connecticut -
"The project you are working on is both
interesting and worthwhile."
Cultural Evolution
Society: We were invited
by the Cultural Evolution Society to provide a
poster presentation at the inaugural meeting of
the society in Jena, Germany in September 2017.
You can see our poster here.
Why do it?
Numerous
reasons.
1. Using data
analysis techniques it may be possible to:
- better
distinguish between stereotypes and real
behavioural phenomena;
- look for
behaviour patterns and cause-and-effect
theories at a cultural level;
- see if and how
observed cultural behaviours change with time;
- better
understand the ways in which the cultural
environment may influence the way individuals
think, and vice versa;
- anticipate
areas of potential misunderstanding between
cultures
- and no doubt
explore many other interesting phenomena (but
this is a data collection and tool creation
project, not a theorising project...)
2.
Anthropologists have traditionally observed people
in distant societies. Unfortunately, people from
those societies didn't often send anthropologists
to study others, so major collections such as the
Human Relations Area Files at Yale
University have no archives on nation-states
despite their milleniums of existence. Travellers
are not anthropologists, but they can be valuable
sources of information when other data sources do
not exist, and they have one major advantage:
there are far more of them. Much old
documentation has been lost, but there are still
enormous quantities to be found in neglected
books, personal letters, articles, radio and TV
archives, etc., and the possibility of instant
access to many of these resources has exploded
since the advent of the internet. It is urgent to
collect these unique sources of information from
the past and to provide an easy way of looking at
the data. That is what this database is intended
to do insofar as behavioral information is
concerned. That said, any branch of human social
investigation, and in particular history, might
appreciate this data collection and data grouping
tool.
3. Cultural phenomena are habitually studied
through observations by professionals
(anthropologists), and this has resulted in the
collection of much valuable material. But the
notes of an English academic are likely to be
different than those of a French, African, or
Japanese observer. The Cultures Observations
Database can help get around this problem by
putting the observers on the same level as the
observed.
4. This quote is from Gary Ferraro,
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the
University of North Carolina:
"... what we
know, or think we know, about our own culture is
not necessarily perceived in the same way by
culturally different people. In other words, we
may see ourselves as holding a particular value
or cultural trait, but then describe that trait
in only the most positive ways. Those looking at
us from the outside, however, are more likely to
see some of the negative implications as well.
Thus, if cultural anthropology is to help us
function more effectively in an increasingly
interconnected world, we will have to focus on
accomplishing three tasks: understanding
culture-specific information about other
cultures; understanding our own culture; and
understanding how culturally different people
view us and our cultural patterns." (Cultural
Anthropology: An Applied Perspective, 6th edition 2006, Thomson Wadsworth)
5. Laland and
Brown in Sense and Nonsense
(2002), remark: "The trouble is, few people are
actually engaged in the business of counting,
recording, and measuring cultural variants or
in tracking how they change in frequency."
6. "Although it would be ideal to have
information on the perception of each culture’s
character by itself and all other cultures, such
data are not yet available." Robert R. McCrae and Antonio
Terracciano, in Personality
Profiles of Cultures: Aggregate Personality
Traits, Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology (2005)
7. "A key question that remains to be
fully answered is whether, and how, the concept
of a universal human nature might be combined
with the large-scale behavioural flexibility and
diversity that is observable between and within
human populations". Gillian
R. Brown, Thomas E. Dickins, Rebecca Sear and
Kevin N. Laland,
in Evolutionary
accounts of human behavioural diversity,
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. (2011)
8. "First, in generating new ideas, we
often begin with our own folk models about human
nature. Being cultural in origin, such folk
models necessarily capture only a portion of the
range of human behavior, and hence we are likely
to overlook important aspects of psychology that
are not prominent in our own culture’s portrait
of the mind. Moreover, if we first fail to study
the record of human diversity, and then later
fail to test our ideas cross-culturally, we run
the risk of tautologically confirming our
culture’s folk model using data obtained from
participants who subscribe to those same
beliefs." Dan Fessler, Associate Professor
of Anthropology, UCLA, in Twelve Lessons for
Evolutionary Psychologists,
www.cognitionandculture.net, 20 January 2012.
9. "Cultural transmission is theory rich
but data poor. Few field studies of cultural
transmission exist." Barry S. Hewlett,
Washington State University, Evolutionary
Approaches to Culture: Lessons from Africa.
10. "This is what’s most galling
– the data that we need to test theories are
there. Some of it is scattered over a multitude
of published and unpublished articles. But most
simply resides in the brains of historians or
archaeologists specializing on particular
regions and epochs. The only way to make these
data useful (for a systematic testing of
theories, that is) is to translate/transcribe
them from human brains onto electronic,
computer-readable media." Prof. Peter
Turchin, Social
Evolution Forum
11. "Many studies of the evolution of human
behavior situate behavior in the context of
ecological, cultural, and social environments.
The task now is to test explicit evolutionary
models against real-world data, preferably on
different scales." Ruth Mace, Department of
Anthropology, University College London, in Human
behavioral ecology and its evil twin,
Behavioral Ecology (2014), 25(3), 443–449
12. "Anthropologists
debate the degree to which the world is
becoming more or less culturally homogeneous,
but to the extent that it is, we will become
less able to use crosscultural comparisons. We
recommend the use of publicly available
database(s) for cataloging psychological
variation across the world’s many diverse
populations."
Coren L Apicella
and H Clark
Barrett, in
Cross-cultural
evolutionary psychology,
Current Opinion in
Psychology 2016, 7:92–97
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