Why do some people greet each other with a kiss? How does the custom vary from place to place? This article is excerpted from the forthcoming ‘Atlas of Regional Expressions.’
Many Aboriginal survivors of sexual abuse find mainstream counselling inappropriate. But there is a way to help them heal that respects a collective culture, with strong community ties.
National security isn’t just about warding off physical attacks. It’s also about understanding cultural forces that drive a society to think, feel and act in certain ways, a political scientist says.
Privacy starts with the body and extends to digital data. There are few rules governing what companies can do – yet people can’t effectively protect their own privacy.
People’s acceptance of poverty is the biggest challenge to eradicating poverty in Yogyakarta and Banten, both on Indonesia’s most populated Java island.
Linguists have a lot of largely untested theories. Borrowing a tool from ecology, researchers built a model that didn’t look for one worldwide explanation.
Climate change isn’t just a technical challenge – it also involves ethics, social justice and cultural values. Insights from literature, philosophy and other humanities can produce better solutions.
Estimating our ancestry is hard – because our backgrounds are much more mixed up than we thought. So don’t take your DNA ancestry test results literally: they’re just a prediction.
An analysis of billions of words in the Google Books database shows the way society has valued moral principles such as compassion, respect for authority, community values and fairness over time.