Anthropologist George Murdock (1945) distinguished between cultural universals and particulars. Cultural universals are those things that all cultures have
in common. Every culture has natural resources such as trees, plants, and rocks
that people put to some use. In addition, every culture has developed responses
to the challenges of being human and living with others. Those challenges include
the need to interact with others, to be mentally stimulated, to satisfy hunger,
and to face mortality. In every culture, people have established specific ways of
meeting these universal challenges.
Cultural particulars include the specific
practices that distinguish cultures from one another. For example all people
become hungry but the potential food sources defined as edible vary across cultures.
That is what is appealing to eat in one society may be considered repulsive or simply
unavailable in another.
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