#anthropological documents from the 2400s

[daisukitoo]

In the American civic religion, the traditional role of the church came to be played by, appropriately enough, a corporation. As formal religion waned, the Disney corporation took the reins of hegemonic cultural development, preservation, and transmission.

Pilgrimages to Disneyland and Disneyworld replaced similar holy trips to Rome, Jerusalem, or Mecca in other faiths. The poor would save for years in hopes that they could afford a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage. The middle class would go as they could afford. The wealthy would either make a spectacle of an annual pilgrimage or of announcing themselves above such proletarian religious observances.

Like other religious institutions, Disney came to subsume competing mythologies, most often through purchase, as might be expected of a corporation. "Super heroes," a popular American form of demigod mythology, came to be owned by Disney, not just renamed as saints or called aspects of an existing deity.

Like all religions, there were schisms. Take the Pixar sect, officially a part of Disney but usually operating semi-independently, depending on whether the current leadership was promoting conformity or diversity. Pixar is perhaps best known for its paean to the American institution of Cars, a trilogy of stories in which the cars themselves have outlived humanity and formed their own nation on the highways that so long divided Americans from each other.

Pixar's iconography was one of rebellion from the church-corporation that had purchased it. Whenever it could get away with it, Pixar films started with a panopticon image of a self-powered spotlight, crushing the self ("I") from Pixar itself before looking directly at the viewer. The rebellion at Pixar showed this tragic destruction of "I" before showing that "you" are next, before performing their prescribed role of celebrating the culture and the corporation, a mix of the prescribed and the proscribed.

[ironkoalastrawberry]

1. Do all forms of homophobia have religious roots?

No. Homophobia has multiple roots:

Pre-religious origins: Anthropological studies show some premodern societies (e.g., the Dinka tribe in Sudan) had sexual taboos unrelated to organized religion, often tied to reproduction and social structures.

Socioeconomic factors: Needs like child labor, inheritance preservation, and fear of violating gender norms often operated independently of religion.

Political utility: In empires like Rome, anti-homosexuality laws (e.g., Lex Scantinia) aimed to maintain social hierarchy.

Religious reinforcement: Abrahamic religions (especially conservative interpretations) later strengthened and legitimized homophobia, but non-religious societies also practiced it (e.g., Stalinist USSR).

2. Historical precedence: Homophobia or religion?

Homosexuality predates both: Evidence from ancient civilizations (Sumer, Egypt, Greece) documents same-sex relationships before organized religions existed (e.g., Egyptian tomb art ≈ 2400 BCE).

Older sexual taboos: Reproduction-linked restrictions likely existed in early hunter-gatherer societies.

Early homophobia as social control: The oldest anti-homosexuality laws (e.g., Assyrian Law Codes ≈ 1075 BCE) focused on family structure/property, not religious doctrine.

Religious systematization: Abrahamic faiths (Judaism ≈ 2000 BCE, Christianity/Islam later) codified and theologized these taboos.

3. Does homophobia exist in animals?

No. Human-like homophobia (ideological hatred or systemic persecution) does not exist in animals, but:

Homosexual behavior is natural: Documented in 1,500+ species (e.g., mammals, birds, reptiles).

Limited social reactions: Some species show temporary responses to non-reproductive behavior (e.g., male bison interrupting same-sex mounting), but this:

Is brief and non-systematic.

Stems from reproductive competition or social hierarchy.

Lacks ideological motivation.

Frequent acceptance: Species like bonobos or bottlenose dolphins integrate same-sex behavior socially.

Scientific Consensus

Homophobia stems from intertwined biological (reproductive needs), economic, political, and later religious factors. Religions amplified preexisting taboos in later history. Animals exhibit homosexuality but not homophobia.

Sources for further study:

Greenberg, D. (1988). The Construction of Homosexuality.

Roughgarden, J. (2004). Evolution’s Rainbow.

Bagemihl, B. (1999). Biological Exuberance.

Zoological Society of London (ZSL) reports on animal sexual behavior.

Do you think all homophobia stems from religion?

I don't know. Maybe, maybe not? It's hard to say when we have no written records of a civilisation without religion or homophobia. Homophobia doesn't exist in the animal kingdom, only in humans, and so does religion. Now correlation doesn't equal causation but it doesn't bode well for religion. Especially the ones where "thou shall not fornicate with the same sex" is explicitely written in the sacred text and the sacred text is also supposed to be forever the truth applicable everywhere all the time for eternity, amen.

[myfeeds]

Grambank shows the diversity of the worlds languages

Grambank was constructed in an international collaboration between the Max Planck institutes in Leipzig and Nijmegen, the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Turku, Kiel University, Uppsala University, SOAS, the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, and over a hundred scholars from around the world. Grambank’s coverage spans 215 different language families and 101 isolates from all inhabited continents. “The design of the feature questionnaire initially required numerous revisions in order to encompass many of the diverse solutions that languages have evolved to code grammatical properties,” says Hedvig Skirgård, who coordinated much of the coding and is the lead author of the study. Limits on variation The team settled on 195 grammatical properties, ranging from word order to whether or not a language has gendered pronouns. For instance, many languages have separate pronouns for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but some also have male and female versions of ‘I’ or ‘you’. The possible ‘design space’ would be enormous if grammatical properties were to vary freely. Limits on variation could be related to cognitive principles rooted in memory or learning, rendering some grammatical structures more likely than others. Limits could also be related to historical ‘accidents’, such as descent from a common language or contact with other languages. The researchers discovered much greater flexibility in the combination of grammatical features than many theorists have assumed. “Languages are free to vary considerably in quantifiable ways, but not without limits,” explains Stephen Levinson, Director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and one of the founders of the Grambank project. “A sign of the extraordinary diversity of the 2400 languages in our sample is that only five of them occupy the same location in design space (share the same grammatical properties).” Languages show much greater similarity to those with a common ancestor than those they are in contact with. “Genealogy generally trumps geography,” says Russell Gray, Director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution and senior author of the study. “Nevertheless, if processes of linguistic evolution and diversification were run again from the beginning, there would still be some resemblance to what we now have. The constraints of human cognition mean that, while there is a great deal of historical contingency in the organisation of grammatical structures, there are regular patterns as well.” Diversity under threat “The extraordinary diversity of languages is one of humanity’s greatest cultural endowments,” concludes Levinson. “This endowment is under threat, especially in some areas such as Northern Australia, and parts of South and Northern America. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalise endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition and culture will be seriously fragmented.” The Grambank database is an open-access comprehensive resource maintained by the Max Planck Society. “It puts linguistics on an even footing with genetics, archaeology and anthropology in terms of quantitative, large scale, accessible data,” says Gray. “I hope it will facilitate the exploration of links between linguistic diversity and a broad array of other cultural and biological traits, ranging from religious beliefs to economic behavior, musical traditions and genetic lineages. These links with other facets of human behavior will make Grambank a key resource not only in linguistics, but in the multidisciplinary endeavour of understanding human diversity.”