Graeber / Wengrow 174: If early cultures "where broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to [...] the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn't"
"Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Thai are people who use spoons, but not chopsticks, and so forth. Its easy enough to see how this could be true of aesthetics--styles of art, music, or table manners--but surprisingly, [Marcel] Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian benefits."
"'Societies,' wrote Mauss, 'live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance'"