TOK situations about culture
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.
What culture means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- East Asia
Recognised as indigenous, at last
Japan legally recognised the Ainu as indigenous only in 2019, after generations of assimilation policy that had suppressed language and practice while…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
The book that named algebra
Al-Khwarizmi's ninth-century treatise systematised equation-solving for inheritance shares and trade, and its title gave algebra its name while his own gave us…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
The divers evolution equipped
The Bajau of Southeast Asia free-dive to remarkable depths, and genetic studies found enlarged spleens consistent with selection for diving over generations.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
Batik and the question of whose heritage
UNESCO's recognition of Indonesian batik sharpened a recurring dispute with Malaysia, where related techniques also have deep roots, over who may claim the…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- India
A dance banned, then rebuilt
Colonial-era campaigns pushed hereditary temple dancers out of practice, and Bharatanatyam was later revived largely by urban reformers who reshaped its…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- South Asia
Measuring national happiness
Bhutan reports Gross National Happiness through surveys spanning psychological wellbeing, culture and ecology, making a value system into an official…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- East Asia
The hand that knows the stroke
Chinese and Islamic calligraphic traditions both train through years of copying masters, and both hold that a stroke's quality reveals the writer's state of…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
Simplifying the characters
Mainland China's simplified characters raised literacy while severing visual links to older texts that Taiwan and Hong Kong retain, so the same classical…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
What the Chipko villagers knew
In the 1970s, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, embraced trees to stop commercial felling, arguing the forests' real yield was soil, water and air…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- Africa
Two names for one ancestor
The fossil skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974 is Lucy to the world, after a Beatles song playing in the researchers' camp, and Dinkinesh, meaning you are…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Oceania
The painting that hides what it shows
When Central Australian artists began painting for outside markets in the 1970s, senior custodians adapted designs so that restricted ceremonial content was…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
The orchestra with no score
Javanese gamelan is learned by sitting in the ensemble and absorbing it, with written notation used as a reminder rather than a source. A player knows their…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Africa
Historians without paper
West African griots have carried genealogies, epics and political history across centuries through trained recitation, with lineages of transmitters…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Music that lives in a lineage
Indian classical music passes from guru to disciple through years of imitation, correction and presence, with notation treated as a skeleton at best. A raga's…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- East Asia
An alphabet designed for everyone
King Sejong's fifteenth-century promulgation of Hangul gave Korean a script learnable in days, against the years Chinese characters demanded, and literate…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Oceania
Sailing to Tahiti without instruments
Scholars long argued Polynesian settlement was accidental drift, doubting deliberate navigation across such distances was possible. In 1976 the Hokulea sailed…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Justification
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Baghdad's translation century
Abbasid Baghdad funded the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic, and scholars there corrected, extended and argued with what they…
Enduring · History
- Truth
- Culture
- East Asia
Inheriting an actor's name
In kabuki, actors inherit stage names through lineages stretching back centuries, and taking the name signals that the performance knowledge of that line now…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture
- Africa
Cloth you can read
Akan kente patterns carry names, proverbs and histories, so a cloth worn to a funeral says something specific to those who can read it. Sold internationally as…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Freedom inside a system
An Arabic maqam performance improvises within a modal system with defined pathways, and a knowledgeable listener can tell when a player has gone somewhere they…
Enduring · The arts
- Justification
- Culture
- Latin America
Twenty-seven books, one afternoon
Diego de Landa burned Maya codices in 1562 as works of the devil, and only a handful of pre-conquest Maya books survive anywhere today. Much of what…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Global
The first woman to win the Fields Medal
Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian-born and educated through Tehran's olympiad system, became in 2014 the first woman awarded mathematics' highest honour, in a…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Perspective
- Culture
- India
Two forecasts of the same monsoon
Farmers across India read bird behaviour, flowering patterns and wind for the monsoon's arrival, while the meteorological department runs ensemble models, and…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
The library that burned for months
Nalanda drew scholars from across Asia for centuries until its destruction around 1200, its manuscript collections reportedly burning for months. What survives…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Africa
A film industry the textbooks missed
Nollywood grew into one of the world's most prolific film industries through straight-to-video economics, informal distribution and stories tuned to local…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Values
- Culture
- Global
When oral tradition entered the courtroom
In the Delgamuukw case, Canada's Supreme Court held that Indigenous oral histories must be admitted as evidence of land rights on their own terms rather than…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- East Asia
One singer, eight hours, no script
Korean pansori transmits epic narratives through a single singer and drummer over many hours, with each master's version differing in wording, ornament and…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Binary patterns in Sanskrit prosody
Pingala's ancient treatise on Sanskrit poetic metre enumerates syllable patterns in ways that parallel binary representation and combinatorial rules formalised…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Finding the direction of prayer
Determining the qibla from any city is a problem in spherical trigonometry, and medieval Islamic mathematicians developed sophisticated solutions and…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Explanation
- Culture
- Latin America
Records tied in knots
Inca administration ran on quipus, cords whose knots encoded census and tribute data and possibly narrative, and Spanish authorities destroyed many precisely…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Oceania
Maps you must sing
Aboriginal songlines encode routes, water sources, law and cosmology in song cycles tied to travel across country, with fuller layers restricted to those with…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Reconstruction surgery in an ancient compendium
The Sushruta Samhita describes surgical techniques including nasal reconstruction, and European surgeons in the colonial period documented Indian practitioners…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Truth
- Culture
- India
Drumming you can speak
Tabla players learn compositions as spoken syllables, bols, before ever touching the drum, and can recite an entire piece aloud. The syllable is the unit of…
Enduring · The arts
- Explanation
- Culture
- South Asia
Painting by prescribed proportion
Tibetan thangka painters work to iconometric grids specifying proportions for each figure, deviation from which makes the image religiously ineffective rather…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Culture
- Africa
Smuggling a library to safety
When militants occupied Timbuktu in 2012, families and archivists smuggled hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out in trunks and boats, hiding a…
Enduring · History
- Responsibility
- Culture
- East Asia
A malaria cure found in a fourth-century text
Screening traditional remedies, Tu Youyou found a fourth-century Chinese text describing cold extraction of sweet wormwood, adjusted her method accordingly,…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Africa
A person is a person through other persons
Ubuntu, articulated across southern African thought, treats personhood and understanding as constituted through relations with others rather than achieved…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
A language that changed its alphabet
Vietnam's shift to the Latin-based quoc ngu under colonial influence enabled mass literacy campaigns, and within generations most Vietnamese could no longer…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
History taught by shadow puppets
Javanese wayang kulit performances retell epics through the night, with dalangs weaving in contemporary politics and local commentary as they go. Audiences…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Ayurveda meets the randomised trial
India funds research ministries for both biomedicine and traditional systems like Ayurveda, and disputes recur over whether centuries of documented clinical…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- Oceania
Fire knowledge, re-admitted
After Australia's catastrophic 2019 to 2020 bushfires, agencies expanded engagement with Aboriginal cultural burning, low-intensity fire practices refined over…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Mapping rights onto a forest
India's Forest Rights Act asks communities to document customary use of land their ancestors never surveyed, converting remembered practice into GPS points and…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Global
Languages the machines skip
Machine translation is strong between data-rich languages and weak or absent for thousands of others, so speakers of low-resource languages get worse search,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- Global
The encyclopedia's uneven world
Wikipedia's English edition dwarfs most others, and topics rich in one language sit as stubs or absences in another, so the same person consulting the same…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture