A mother culture is a term for an early people' culture, with great and widespread influence on later cultures and people. Though the original culture may fade, the mother culture's influence grows for ages in the future. Later civilizations either learn and build upon their old ways, or can learn them through peaceful or military assimilation. This term can be found in the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
A mother culture is what gives birth to a culture, and although it does not necessarily start up its customs, it is the root that gives rise to a grand fruit tree otherwise known as society that can be traced back to its mother. This tree might undergo a catastrophe that will cause all its societies that sprung up to shrivel away but the mother culture is what we attribute to their origins.
Mother cultures in history include that of Kemet in the Mediterranean, and the Olmec in Mesoamerica.
Read more about Mother Culture: In Ishmael
Other articles related to "mother culture, culture":
... In his 1992 philosophical novel, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn uses Mother Culture as a personification of the not-consciously-recognized yet foundational aspects of any culture, always existing as largely unnoticed ... According to Quinn, Mother Culture feeds us a particular, culturally-biased mythology that greatly influences how we perceive the world ... Mother Culture tells us that everything is as it should be, working to pacify dissent against the culture and its myths ...
... The concept of the Olmecs as a mother culture was first formally raised by Alfonso Caso at a 1942 conference on the "Olmec problem" in Tuxtla Gutiérrez where he argued that the Olmec were the "cultura madre" of ... The proponents of the "mother culture" do not argue that the Olmec were the only contributors, but that the Olmecs first developed many of the features ... that it was in San Lorenzo and the Olmec heartland that the hallmarks of the Olmec culture were first established, hallmarks that include the patio/plaza ...
Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or mother:
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a “loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.”
—Erich Fromm (20th century)