Systemic Culture Patterns as Basic Units of Cultural Transmission and Evolution

Abstract

The authors suggest that with slight modifications, the concept of systemic culture pattern as originally defined by Kroeber provides one ideal basic unit of study for culture. Prototypic examples of systemic culture patterns include phonemic structure and kinship terminological structure, both of which are paradigms. The significant elements in each may be partitioned in terms of a limited number of universal features. Kroeber’s original list provided an important guide for kinship studies; Jakobson, Fant, and Halle provided such a universal list for phonemic studies. Some coherent substructures characterized by a subset of features may themselves be treated as basic units, such as vocalic or consonantal phonemes, or subunits of kinship terminology, such as sibling terminology. Paradigms may be mapped perfectly into Euclidean spatial models. Elements of cultural patterns with large or uncountable numbers of features may be mapped directly into Euclidean spatial models on the basis of judged similarity data.