Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective
- PDF / 722,175 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 1 Downloads / 154 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective Miriam Noël Haidle1,2 · Oliver Schlaudt1,3 Received: 25 November 2019 / Accepted: 4 April 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Recent field studies have broadened our view on cultural performances in animals. This has consequences for the concept of cumulative culture. Here, we deconstruct the common individualist and differential approaches to culture. Individualistic approaches to the study of cultural evolution are shown to be problematic, because culture cannot be reduced to factors on the micro level of individual behavior (methodological individualism, “atomism”) but possesses a dynamic that only occurs on the group level and profoundly affects the individuals (“holism”). Naive individuals, as a prerequisite of an atomistic perspective, do not exist. We address the construction of a social approach to (cumulative) culture by introducing an inevitable social embedding of the individual development of social beings. The sociological notion of “habitus” as embodied cultural capital permits us to understand social transmission of behavioral components on a very basic level, resulting in a cumulative effect. Bits of information, movement, handling of material, attitudes, and preferences below distinct functional units are acquired through transfer mechanisms simpler than emulation and imitation such as peering, participation, co-performance, or engagement with a material environment altered by group members. The search for a zero point of cumulative culture becomes as useless as the search for a zero point of culture. Culture is cumulative. Keywords Cultural evolution · Cultural niche · Cumulative culture · Habitus · Ratchet effect · Social learning
Introduction A broad consensus exists today that behavioral patterns of humans and many other animal species cannot be explained only in terms of genes and the environment, but that there is also a share of culture involved. “Culture” is understood to mean “all behaviors and knowledge that are acquired and passed on within and between generations through social learning” (Schuppli and van Schaik 2019, pp. 1–2; after Boyd and Richerson 1985). In the last two decades, basic cultural capacities (Whiten et al. 2017) have been identified in a number of nonhuman animal species (Whiten 2019) including chimpanzees (Whiten et al. 1999), orangutans (van * Miriam Noël Haidle miriam.haidle@uni‑tuebingen.de 1
Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities at Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen and Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
2
Institut für Ur‑ und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany
3
Ruprecht Karls University, Heidelberg, Germany
Schaik et al. 2003; Krützen et al. 2011), gorillas (Robbins et al. 2016), cetaceans (Whitehead and Rendell 2014), and New Caledonian crows (Hunt and Gray 2003; Bluff et al. 2010; St. Clair et al. 2016), to name only the most prominent examples. These
Data Loading...
