Something I’ve noticed is that when people talk about history there’s often a tendency to try and homogenize the beliefs and ideologies of a given time period. For example when people talk about homosexuality and Rome you often either get some virile purely heterosexual image or sometimes you get people advancing the idea of free-form sexuality being greatly tolerated but like its not really all or nothing. There were Romans that were very openly interested in homosexual sex and at the same time you had Romans who considered those types to be degenerates that undermine civilized morality.
Basically there’s often this tendency to try and turn any social context that isnt the “present” (or rather, is “familiar”, since this same thing happens when people talk about “other” cultures) into something that for any given topic has one single overriding attribute and if there’s “exceptions” well then they should be considered just “exceptions” rather than let the image of a homogenous society be challenged. The “culture of a people” oftentimes oftentimes refers less a series of unifying predicates and more rather the arenas where tension and social conflict emerges.
I wish I could recall her name but I once came across a post
by a novelist who’d started out as a history professor, got tired of trying to
explain that medieval people weren’t all some kind of Church-driven hive-mind,
and decided it was easier to convey the different viewpoints that existed at
the time by writing Dialogues.
Mooncustafer 