For example, the serial killer, as a myth, represented, in the United States, the difficulty of finding a balance between legal system and individual freedom: both having the potential of turning into monstrosity.
Another example: the fear of "mad cow" disease (due to industrial feeding of cattle) seemed to represent a more fundamental issue: artificiality of our lifestyles and our interventions on life forms and their natural intermingling.
In the background of these phenomena, which can rightly be named "pathologies", Denis Duclos (who worked with the British anthropologist Mary Douglas) built a theory of cultural fields, of their conversational structure (counterpoint to the tendency to domination observed by Pierre Bourdieu).
He considers in particular the emergence of "positional" clusters which tend to directly organize themselves into a global conversation, gradually moving away from their traditional shells: religious, national, international and civilizational fields.
On the assumption that, in a sense (related to the fact that homo sapiens is speaking) there has potentially only ever been one human cultural field, Denis Duclos questions History as a confluence of separating and unifying trends.