The Cultural Relativity Vortex

20 Jun, 2026

I believe, if this trip has for me (as a thinking person) a valuable experience, it lies in the strengthening of the viewpoint of the relativity of all cultivation.

- Franz Boas, Baffin Island Letter-Diary, 23 December 1883

The riotous novel Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy described a device called the Total Perspective Vortex. The Vortex grants instant awareness of exactly how insignificant you are in comparison to the universe. It's the ultimate punishment. Subjected to it, you aren't harmed physically, and you aren't just driven out of your mind - your mind is simply wiped out. Now, everyone who took Carl Sagan to heart should know how to resist the device - concentrate steadily on the fact that you, a mere lump of stardust, were born to understand all that. Piece of cake.

There is a Vortex like that right here on Earth. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre glimpsed it when he argued we were condemned to be free. At any moment, he noted, horrified, there's an infinity of choices I could pursue. If I will it, I can drop all I've been doing my whole life and begin an entirely new existence. And indeed, if you really try to wrap your mind around this, you can work yourself up into vertiginous nausea or a panic attack. Sartre was onto something.

That said, the take can legit be criticized as too individualistic. Most of us are sheltered from Sartre's existential abyss by our intimate attachments, obligations, status positions, our lives' routines. The social fabric we both wear and weave constrains us to narrower, more manageable repertoires in choosing who we are.

Not so fast. These constraints are all learned - we acquire them, are often shoved into them, by our cultural surroundings. Those of us who lived in two or more cultures, or who practiced the discipline of seeing the world from the eyes of others, can notice Sartre's panic-inducing freedom in our social realities writ large. At any moment, I along with everyone else around me could be conducting our common affairs in a nearly infinite range of alternative ways.

That's ... disorienting.

What's also disorienting is that a world revolution is under way, and that we must be ready to challenge and change a lot - possibly, all major social, economic, and political arrangements of the last few centuries - to get through it. In this case, the Cultural Relativity Vortex, the awareness that the default habits driving us to ruin are optional and that the repertoire of alternatives is truly vast, could help remedy the vertigo rather than induce it.

Let's peek inside it, shall we?

We can, indeed, organize our societies to take heed of the ecologies we inhabit - in effect, to embed the information about the environment within our cultures. Such knowledge can be explicit, encoded in myth and ritual, or emergent from patterns of social interaction. Here are a few examples, intentionally drawn from disparate research approaches but otherwise quite haphazard (none uncontroversial).

A good place to start are the (in-famous) arguments by Marvin Harris for an ecological basis to food taboos of major world religions. Harris argued that the Muslim and Jewish ban on pork sensibly prevents people from raising the pig, a temperate forest omnivore that competes with us for food and water, in arid environments. As for the Hindu refusal to slaughter their cows even in times of famine, Harris pointed out that the cattle are more useful as sources of dairy, fertilizer, and traction; and that it is more efficient for Indian peasants to obtain these benefits from roaming herds of zebus than to adopt "modern" farming techniques.

Research in human behavioral ecology (HBE) built on and formalized this approach. HBE was met with criticism for minimizing the role of culture in how we act, but it is more fruitfully seen as affirming that cultural practices tend to converge on patterns appropriate in local environments, while revealing the limits of ecological optimization in explaining them.

Harris's observation that traditional agriculture is, in fact, quite efficient finds ample support in Robert Netting's comprehensive examination of smallholder farming worldwide. Netting found that traditional techniques, while labor intensive, are quite up to the task both of feeding the people and sustaining local ecologies, and often do so better than industrial agriculture. One crucial nugget of information: in non-industrial farming, every calorie invested yields 5-50 calories of output; industrial agriculture in the United States requires 10 calories of input for every calorie of food.¹

Ethnoecology studies how communities conceive of their environments and practice ecological stewardship as part of their traditions. Studies collected in Conserving Nature in Culture, for instance, examine how professional environmental conservation efforts systematically fail in their objectives, by failing to support local communities already engaged in conservation work in ways opaque to the experts. Cultural Memory and Biodiversity by Virginia Nazarea criticizes gene banking, demonstrating that preserving just the germplasm of traditional seed varieties is inadequate absent the cultural memory of their cultivation.

The research on governance of common-pool resources at the Ostrom Workshop is the achiever kid here, as its co-founder Elinor Ostrom netted the non-Nobel prize in economics in 2009. Ostroms' research team meticulously compiled evidence that disproved the influential pseudoscientific argument known as tragedy of the commons, which claims that communities can't be trusted to manage shared resources without squandering them. Close examination of how dozens of irrigation systems, forests, and fisheries are administered found otherwise. Communities do - often, not always - succeed in governing their commons sustainably, and specific conditions can make this easier or harder to achieve.² These results were later generalized and developed into the polycentric governance framework, which I will revisit.

Lastly, the studies of Balinese water temples by J. Stephen Lansing and colleagues add the complex systems perspective to the mix. Lansing and Kremer developed an agent-based model simulating the timing of rice planting across two nearby watersheds on Bali. They concluded that, when neighboring irrigation coops (subaks) coordinate planting times, an overall schedule emerges that produces high yields, is resistant to ecological disruption, and suffers low pest damage - performing much better on these accounts than industrial techniques. You can play with this and related models at the website Islands of Order.

Now I know what you'll say ... is that it? A few wonky examples do not a Vortex make.

All of this just scratches the surface. I'm familiar with this research, more with HBE and the commons studies than the rest, but I'm not current. A leading researcher in any of these areas would come up with dozens, perhaps a hundred relevant titles. Add the subfields I omitted as I never properly engaged with them, such as human ecology. With some effort, voilà, a thousand well-documented cases of how we can be just fine in our environments, thank you.

That's the Vortex. We got options.

Now, there's also no shortage of cautionary tales, cases from both industrial and non-industrial societies that reveal how badly we can botch it. And none of the above are ready-made blueprints we can replicate, but they do teach us valuable lessons. They're best seen as puzzle pieces, pebbles in a mosaic we can reach for if we need to take our worlds apart and reassemble them.

The world is falling apart no matter what, so we better start learning.

Next time, I'll return to the uncertainty about our major social assumptions, and argue just that: if we're stumped but must act, we learn on the go.