The Sphere of Cultures-1

Signifying orders manifest themselves temporally and spatially in institutional structures that we will call spheres in this text. Cultural spheres are, in a certain sense, "domesticating" systems. Living no longer principally in the wilderness, where their hominid ancestors had to rely primarily on instinct for survival, tribal humans came to depend primarily upon communal spheres for the bare necessities of life...
Anthropologists divide the mam spheres into primary—kinship and religious—and secondary—political, legal, economic, and educational. Primary spheres are characterized by face-to-face modes of communication and interaction and by a feeling of solidarity. Secondary spheres, on the other hand, are based on more conventionalized and impersonal forms of communication and interaction. The latter took on greater importance in the first super-tribal collectivities, where consensual patterns of interaction would have been impossible on the basis of the primary spheres alone.
The word consensus requires further elaboration here. It means, literally, "sense-making together." In a collectivity of any kind, consensus implies adherence to the norms of behavior and communication that are deemed appropriate by the collectivity as a whole. These are established and enforced primarily by those who are centrally located within the most dominant sphere in a collectivity at a specific point in time. If that sphere is the religious one, for instance, then the leader or leaders of that sphere will dictate what the norms are; if it is the political sphere, then those located in a central position within that sphere will determine them. Those who do not comply with such norms risk censure, punishment, and/or marginalization. Indeed, those who reject them outright must show the validity of why they are doing so publicly. Otherwise, in all kinds of societies they risk facing some form of rebuke, chastisement, or castigation.

The Kinship Sphere
In his monumental study of social organization, Charles H. Cooley (1909) defined kinship as the primary sphere of culture par excellence, giving stability and perpetuity to the activities of the tribe. However defined, membership in a kinship unit provides every human being with a primary identity and a vital sense of belonging. This is why people tend to feel a "kinship bond" when they meet a stranger of the same lineal descent, and why, at some point or other in their lives, many (if not most) individuals tend to become interested in where the "roots" of their "family tree" lead. As the great sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) remarked, leadership in early tribal cultures tended to emerge typically from within kinship units, because their communal activities revolved around the family with the most power and ability to withstand opposition from within the tribe.
The central feature of the kinship sphere is the primary mother-child bond, to which diverse cultures have added different familial relations by the principle of descent, which connects one generation to the other in a systematic way and which determines certain rights and obligations across generations. Descent groups are traced typically through both sexes, i.e. bilaterally, or through only the male or the female link, i.e. unilaterally. In unilateral systems the descent is known as patrilineal if the derivation is through the male line, or tnatrilineal if it is through the female line. Anthropological surveys of kinship systems have shown in recent years that half of the world's cultures are patrilineal, one-third bilateral, and the remainder matrilineal. Bilateral kinship systems are characteristic of modern-day hunting-gathering tribes, such as the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa and the Inuit in northern Canada; and they are becoming increasingly characteristic of modern Western societies as well. Less frequent ways for tracing descent are the parallel system, in which males and females each trace their ancestry through their own sex, and die cognatic method, in which the relatives of both sexes are considered, with little formal distinction between them.
Kin members are everywhere categorized in ways that assign specific roles and expected behaviors to each individual. The categories are represented by the names given to individuals. These may also indicate how a kinship sphere assigns the inheritance of goods and property. The latmul of New Guinea, for instance, assign five different names to the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth child in such a way that in any quarrels over inheritance, the first and third children are expected to join forces against the second and the fourth.

The Religious Sphere

The idea that there is life beyond death is an ancient one, as borne out by the discovery that the ritualized burial of the dead is at least 350,000 years old. This is a truly extraordinary idea that has dictated the course of cultural evolution since ancient times; but why it became an intrinsic feature of human consciousness constitutes a mystifying enigma. Suffice it to say for the present purposes that the notion of a spiritual after-life is the motivation behind the emergence of religion in human cultures.
The religious sphere can be defined as a communal system of interaction and complex rituals designed to reflect the will of the gods or of the powers and forces that are believed to reside in the world of the afterlife. As such, this system ties people together, allowing them to express a common sense of purpose beyond immediate life. The term religion stems from the Latin word religio "to bind, fasten," an etymology that reflects how in early cultures an individual was perceived to be bound by certain mystical or metaphysical (literally "beyond the physical") rites and symbols to the tribe in which s/he was reared. To live "unreligiously" would have implied rejecting the tribe's signifying order that bound the tribal members together. The salient feature of early religious belief systems was the absence of any sharp boundary line between the spiritual and the natural worlds, a characteristic that is still found in some modern-day religious practices such as Shinto, a religion practiced in Japan. The Japanese term Shinto (from shin "spirit") means both "the way of the gods" and "the way of the spirit." The term is also used in common Japanese discourse as an exclamation similar to "Wonderful!" In Shinto, every human being, rock, tree, animal, stream is perceived as having its own wonder. There is no doctrine, creed, or formulated canonical system; Shinto is fundamentally concerned with expressing wonder, respect, and awe for everything that exists. This concern involves treating everything as if it were a person, not in the sense of being inhabited by some human-like ghost or spirit, but in the sense of having a mysterious and independent life of its own that should not be taken for granted.

Tribal metaphysical beliefs led to the establishment of astrology as one of the first sciences. Its widespread popularity in today's secular cultures bears concrete witness to the persistence of the tribal concept that human character and destiny are intertwined with natural processes. The Chaldeans, who lived in Babylon, developed one of the original forms of astrology as early as 3000 BC. The Chinese started practicing astrology around 2000 BC. Other varieties emerged in ancient India and among the Maya of Central America. Astrology grew out of observations that certain astronomical bodies, particularly the sun, affected the change of seasons and the success of crops. From such observations, ancient tribal peoples developed a system of metaphysics by which the movements of other bodies such as the planets affected or represented all aspects of life. By around 500 BC, astrology had spread to Greece, where such philosophers as Pythagoras and Plato incorporated it into their study of religion and the cosmos. Astrology was widely practiced in Europe through the Middle Ages, despite its condemnation by the Church. Many scholars of the era viewed astrology and astronomy as complementary sciences until about the 1500s. Only then did the discoveries made by astronomers undermine astrology as a science.
The importance of the religious sphere to the constitution of culture can be seen in the fact that wizards, priests, and shamans have always tended to he the lenders of a tribe as a whole (or to share the leadership with a powerful clan). These were thought to have direct contact with supernatural beings and forces, and thus to be endowed with magical powers that allowed them to cure diseases and to influence the course of events in the world. Early ritualistic practices were invariably organized and supervised by such leaders. In the super-tribal arrangements of the ancient world, however, religious leaders retained only a part of their authority, having to share power increasingly with leaders coming out of the emerging political sphere. With the rise of complex social systems and civilizations these two spheres developed increasingly autonomous, but complementary, functions.

Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.