then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer, Mauss felt, is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbours. Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Thai are people who use spoons, but not chopsticks, and so forth. It’s easy enough to see how this could be true of aesthetics – styles of art, music or table manners – but surprisingly, Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian
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