Orderly is where the activity is

I have been tackling a difficult problem lately, one of cross-cultural differences. The problem is - when you look at individuals within a culture, say china, you will often find outcroppings, deviants. When you seek history to explain behaviors, you can also encounter contradictory events.

The problem is every human is highly malleable, provided you are patient with him. So apart from history, many other things, such as character, affluence, friends, jobs, personal events, shaped a person's behavior. While we can observe that Chinese are more alike to each other than to Americans, there are a lot of individual variability. Accounting for the similarity is difficult, and finding something useful out of this account is even more difficult.

However, if we narrow the scope to local activity, for instance, the behaviors of Chinese inside the chatroom of an online game, we start seeing more similarity between the subjects. Their shared environment and motivation shaped their behaviors to be more similar than outsider.

The point is anthropology is useful in spotting repeated patterns (similarities), but when subjects are very different, it is hard to tell a good story. When the scope expanded, we need support from quantitative analysis to objectify the observation. They are tools that help us ascend to the macro.