cracking the code of culture

An excerpt:

I escaped there [to the discipline of anthropology], and was confronted immediately by one problem - there were lots of rules of marriage all over the world which looked absolutely meaningless, and it was all the more irriatating because, if they were meaningless, then there should be different rules for each people, though nevertheless the number of rules could be more or less finite.  So, if the same absurdity was found to reappear over and over again, and another kind of absurdity also to reappear, then this was something which was not absolutely absurd; otherwise it would not reappear.

Such was my first orientation, to try to find an order behind this apparent disorder.  And when after working on the kinship systems and marriage rules, I turned my attention, also by chance and not at all on purpose, toward mythology, the problem was exactly the same.  Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world.  A 'fanciful' creation of the mind in one place would be unique - you would not find the same creation in a completely different place.  My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind this apparent disorder - that's all.  And I do not claim that there are conclusions to be drawn.