I had a realisation recently that we’re pretty comfortable with regional dialect borders being an entrenched and normal thing that reach back in history a thousand years or more and that something as specific as how we move our mouths and tongues is strongly correlated geographically.

But we don’t often pay attention to other types of physical and behavioural culture being as geographically entrenched as they sometimes seem to be.

Accents hold some special place in being so recognisable but I think there’s no obvious reason we wouldn’t have many other layers of physical culture like this.

The signal is a bit harder to pick up but I’m sure it’s there.

I’m not trying to make any particular point for or against damaging stereotypes here.

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degamad 18 hours ago | parent [-]

There are some behaviours which are classically regionally identified, but they tend to be the exception to the rule...

Italians talking with their hands, the Indian head-wobble, the East-Asian squat, etc.

	▲	markburns an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So these are the really loud behaviours, and not necessarily what I was thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_inattention So there's a thing which I can't find the name of but it's something like a civil inattention sniff. It's a brief sniff at the moment someone walks past you. I'm not saying this one is cultural or geographical. It's possibly universal, I'm making a reference to the signal vs noise ratio. If you've never noticed the civil inattention sniff, you may start noticing it now, or noticing yourself do it. I was decades on this earth before I picked up on it. It's a similar amount of signal to feeling the weather change in your knees. A tiny signal in background noise of input of many physical senses. I believe and suggest that it's true that there are many of these micro behaviours in many different regional cultures, but I'm not stating as fact or backing that up with science here. This is just an exploratory idea for me that I enjoy speculating on.
	▲	teddyh 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		“A couple of the other Meltdowns are standing around smoking cigarettes, holding them between two fingers in the Slavic style, like darts.” — Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson, 1992