Damián Blasi

It is a model organism, and it's one that's chosen because we think it allows you to get a relatively pure look at, quote, cultural processes or, like, endogenous cultural processes with less impact from other cultural processes like politics and power and economy and so forth.

Part of what I was thinking here is that in these aesthetic domains, you have this dynamic that I think is called schismogenesis, which actually came up in an earlier episode with Damian Blasi talking about drivers of linguistic diversity.

Some anthropologists, linguists have speculated that schismogenesis leads to further differentiation between languages.

So in other words, this kind of drive to differentiate oneself, to use this cultural form or linguistic form as an identity marker, leads to more differentiation than you otherwise would see in some sense.