Linking cultural attributes from historical to present day societies
In linguistics, scholars use various techniques to attribute language elements to their ancient sources. Has anyone attempted to do this with cultural elements?
For example, the ancient Romans were known for being stubborn, rules fanatics, relatively culturally inclusive, to name a few. There are stereotypes of modern day Italians that both match and diverge from Roman culture from what I can tell.
Ancient Mongolian culture was unique although I am not going to attempt to summarize it due to lack of knowledge. It seems like present day Mongolia has retained a lot of elements of Mongol culture, possibly more so than Italy despite both civilizations conquering the known world of their time.
Has there been any attempt to quantify this type of observation?
Some thoughts:
- When and why did Germans become known for 'engineering'?
- Do western European cultures have similar volatility to other cultures? e.g. do they change faster or slower?
obviously these questions involve huge generalizations, but it's probably because I am asking the question wrong.
8 replies
I can only talk about the region I'm most familiar with, in the south-west of Germany.
I've read that here a big factor was inheritance law. Unlike in many other places where the eldest son inherited everything, all children (or all sons, depending on region) inherited an equal fraction. This lead to smaller and smaller plots of land and people not being able to live solely on that. Many took up a craft or manufactoring on a small scale, while still maintaining their small farms.¹
Thus, during the industialisation there were many potential workers who were already skilled and willing to come work in the factories. This kickstarted the industrialisation and gave this region an advantage we were able to ride for a long time.
Then, after WW2 (West-)Germany profited from large-scale economic help which lead to quick access to global markets.
This is of course very simplified. There are many other factors, like religion and cultural values and Germany being a centre of science, especially physics and maths, before the world wars, with many papers being published in German instead of English like today.
¹Bonus fact: This is probably also a factor why worker's movements never gained much traction here. People didn't see themselves as workers because they owned land.
Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks
e: I was assuming without giving it much thought that the majority of this type of change would be due to conquest or economic contact between cultures. This type of niche created as an unintended byproduct of one decision made long in the past is fascinating.
Keep in mind that this is not true for other parts of Germany. It's only a tiny fraction of a huge picture.
Yeah, there have been attempts. There has also been a lot of hot garbage written about this as a lot of racist literature has been written about it.
dammit. good point.
That's cultural / historical anthropology, in essence. Perhaps ethnohistory would be more fitting if you're looking at cultural continuity across centuries.
Thanks, ethnohistory seems to be what I was thinking of. There's a lot of Wikipedia articles to process but I am interested in any differences between linguistic transmission and cultural transmission over time.
I was initially thinking about whether you could positively identity any cultural trait of an ancient civilization or people, and trace that to a characteristic of a present day group of people. The obvious issue is stereotypes are not always accurate.
It might be interesting to aggregate social commentary from a period and try to understand what fed that set of stereotypes.