Artefacts in cultural transmission: Evolutionary perspective
Keywords:
cultural transmission,
artefact,
material culture,
cultural information,
cultural evolution
Abstract
In this study, the existing body of knowledge related to the mechanisms of cultural evolution is analyzed in view of the role of artefacts in cultural transmission. It is focused primarily on the vertical transmission without inter-personal contact. Particular attention is given to the comparison between unit of culture and artefacts as its material expression, as well as to the studies of analogy between replication in genetic transmission and cultural transmission. It is found that retrieving cultural information from an artefact in absence of original transmitter still shows the principal characteristics of cultural transmission. This type of cultural transmission is of lower fidelity than synchronic transmission with inter-personal contact, since it relies on an artefact as a transmission medium, but can provide for cultural persistence and lay ground for adaptive modifications over time.
References
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Chua, Liana and Amiria Salmond. 2012. “Artefacts in Anthropology”. In the SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, 101-114. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
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Dewey, John. 1929. Experience and nature. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
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Holtorf, Cornelius. 2002. Notes on the life history of a pot sherd. Journal of material culture 7 (1): 49-71. DOI: 10.1177/1359183502007001305
Hull, David L. 1988. “Interactors versus vehicles.” In The role of behavior in evolution, ed. Henry C. Plotkin, 19-50. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jones, Andrew. 2007. Memory and material culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Keene, Suzanne. 2006. Fragments of the world: Uses of museum collections. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.
Kendal, Jeremy, Jamshid J. Tehrani, and John Odling-Smee. 2011. Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 (1566): 785-92. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0306
Kranzberg, Melvin. 1959. At the start. Technology and Culture 1(1): 1-10.
Laland, Kevin N. Extending the extended phenotype. 2004. Biology and Philosophy 19 (3): 313-325. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:BIPH.0000036113.38737.d8
Latour, Bruno. 1996. On Actor-network Theory: A Few Clarifications. Soziale Welt 47 (4): 369-81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40878163 (Accessed 6/02/2015).
Latour, Bruno. 1999. On Recalling Ant. The Sociological Review 47 (1) )_suppl : 15–25. DOI:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03480.x.
Law, John. 1999. After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology. The Sociological Review 47 (1) _suppl: 1-14. DOI:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03479.x.
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1999. Tužni tropi. Translated by Slavica Miletić. Belgrade: Zepter book world.
Lewis, Hannah M., and Kevin N. Laland. 2012. Transmission fidelity is the key to the build-up of cumulative culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367 (1599): 2171-2180. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0119
Lumsden Charles J. and Edward. O. Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 2017. Continuities in cultural evolution. Abingdon: Routledge.
Mesoudi, Alex, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland. 2004. Perspective: Is human cultural evolution Darwinian? Evidence reviewed from the perspective of The Origin of Species. Evolution 58 (1): 1-11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3449291 (Accessed 11/05/2017)
Mesoudi, Alex, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland. 2006. Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 329-347. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X06009083
Mori, Naohisa. 2011. Where are we going beyond the archive metaphor? Culture & Psychology 17 (1): 11-19. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X10388855
Nikolić, Aleksandra, Kaja Damjanović, Dragana Cvetković. 2017. „Evolutionary perspective on tangible cultural heritage: artefacts as social learning modality“. Paper presented at the Inaugural Conference of the Cultural Evolution Society, Jena, September 13-15.
Pocklington, Richard, and Michael L. Best. 1997. Cultural evolution and units of selection in replicating text. Journal of Theoretical Biology 188 (1): 79-87. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.1997.0460
Renfrew, Colin. 1998. “Mind and matter: cognitive archaeology and external symbolic storage.” In Cognition and material culture: the archaeology of symbolic storage, eds. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, 1-6. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Richerson, Peter and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rowlands, Michael. 1993. The role of memory in the transmission of culture. World archaeology 25 (2): 141-151. https://www.jstor.org/stable/124810
Schiffer, Michael B. 1995. “Social theory and history in behavioral archaeology.” Expanding archaeology, eds. James M. Skibo, William H. Walker and Axel E. Nielsen, 22-35. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Segestrale, Ullica. 2000. Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Y. Tilley. 1987. Social theory and archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Shanks, Michael. 1998. The life of an artifact in an interpretive archaeology. Fennoscandia Archaeologica XV: 15–30.
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Sperber, Dan, and Nicolas Claidière. 2008. Defining and explaining culture (comments on Richerson and Boyd, Not by genes alone). Biology & Philosophy 23 (2): 283-292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-005-9012-8
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Tilley, Christopher (ed.) 1990. Reading Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
---. 1991. Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity. Abingdon: Routledge.
Tomasello, Michael, Ann Cale Kruger, and Hilary Horn Ratner. 1993. Cultural learning. Behavioral and brain sciences 16 (3): 495-511. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0003123X
Tuđman, Miroslav. 1983. Struktura kulturne informacije. Zagreb: Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske.
Whiten, Andrew, and David Erdal. 2012. The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599: 2119-2129. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0114
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1992. Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press on Demand.
Alexander, Richard D. 1974. The evolution of social behavior. Annual review of ecology and systematics 5 (1): 325-383.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 2005. “Culture, Adaptation, and Innateness”. In the Innate Mind: Volume 2: Culture and Cognition, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, Stephen Stich, 23–38. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the archive: Memory, narrative, and the autobiographical process. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Caldwell, Christine A., and Ailsa E. Millen. 2008a. Experimental models for testing hypotheses about cumulative cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior 29 (3): 165-171. DOI: 10.1177/0963721416641049
---. 2008b. Studying cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1509: 3529-3539. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20208768 (Accessed: 25/07/2014)
Campbell, Donald T. 1960. Blind variation and selective retentions in creative thought as in other knowledge processes. Psychological review 67 (6): 380-400.
Carruthers, Mary J. 1990. The book of memory: A study of memory in medieval culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, and Marcus W. Feldman. 1981. Cultural transmission and evolution: a quantitative approach. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Chua, Liana and Amiria Salmond. 2012. “Artefacts in Anthropology”. In the SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, 101-114. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
D’Andrade, Roy. 2001. A cognitivist’s view of the units debate in cultural anthropology. Cross-cultural research 35 (2): 242-257. DOI: 10.1177/106939710103500208
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
---. 1982. The Extended Phenotype. Oxford, UK: Freeman.
Debray, Régis. 2004. Transmitting culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Degler, Carl N. 1992. In search of human nature: The decline and revival of Darwinism in American social thought. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press on Demand.
Dewey, John. 1929. Experience and nature. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Dobzhansky, Theodosius, F. J. Ayala, G. Ledyard Stebbins, J. W. Valentine. 1977. Evolution. San Francisco: Freeman. DOI: 10.4135/9781446201077.n42.
Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Duhs, Rosalind. 2010. Learning from university museums and collections in higher education: University College London (UCL). University Museums and Collections Journal 3: 183–186. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/56ff/25ab546bb362b1f262ad1eee86fa793969e4.pdf
Dunnell, Robert C. 1989. Aspects of the application of evolutionary theory in archaeology. Archaeological thought in America: 35-49.
Ellen, Roy. 2009. A modular approach to understanding the transmission of technical knowledge: Nuaulu basket-making from Seram, eastern Indonesia. Journal of Material Culture 14 (2): 243-277. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183509103065
Enquist, Magnus, P. Strimling, K. Eriksson, K. Laland, and J. Sjostrand. 2010. One cultural parent makes no culture. Animal Behaviour 79 (6): 1353-1362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.03.009
Fragaszy, Dorothy M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende, and E. Visalberghi. 2013. The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 368 (1630): 1-10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42569293.
Gabora, Liane. 2004. Ideas Are Not Replicators but Minds Are. Biology & Philosophy 19 (1): 127–43. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:BIPH.0000013234.87103.76.
Gerard, Ralph W., Clyde Kluckhohn and Anatol Rapoport. 1956. Biological and cultural evolution some analogies and explorations. Behavioral Science 1 (1): 6-34.
Hannan, Leonie, Helen Chatterjee, and Rosalind Duhs. 2013. “Object based learning: a powerful pedagogy for higher education.” In Museums and higher education working together: challenges and opportunities, eds. Speight Catherine, Jos Boys, and Anne Boddington, 159-168. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Heyes, Cecilia M. 1994. Social learning in animals: categories and mechanisms. Biological Reviews 69 (2): 207-231. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-185X.1994.tb01506.x
Hodder, Ian. 1986. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
---. 1991. Interpretive archaeology and its role. American antiquity 56 (1): 7-18. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/280968 (Accessed: 22-11-2018)
Holtorf, Cornelius. 2002. Notes on the life history of a pot sherd. Journal of material culture 7 (1): 49-71. DOI: 10.1177/1359183502007001305
Hull, David L. 1988. “Interactors versus vehicles.” In The role of behavior in evolution, ed. Henry C. Plotkin, 19-50. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jones, Andrew. 2007. Memory and material culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Keene, Suzanne. 2006. Fragments of the world: Uses of museum collections. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.
Kendal, Jeremy, Jamshid J. Tehrani, and John Odling-Smee. 2011. Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 (1566): 785-92. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0306
Kranzberg, Melvin. 1959. At the start. Technology and Culture 1(1): 1-10.
Laland, Kevin N. Extending the extended phenotype. 2004. Biology and Philosophy 19 (3): 313-325. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:BIPH.0000036113.38737.d8
Latour, Bruno. 1996. On Actor-network Theory: A Few Clarifications. Soziale Welt 47 (4): 369-81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40878163 (Accessed 6/02/2015).
Latour, Bruno. 1999. On Recalling Ant. The Sociological Review 47 (1) )_suppl : 15–25. DOI:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03480.x.
Law, John. 1999. After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology. The Sociological Review 47 (1) _suppl: 1-14. DOI:10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03479.x.
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1999. Tužni tropi. Translated by Slavica Miletić. Belgrade: Zepter book world.
Lewis, Hannah M., and Kevin N. Laland. 2012. Transmission fidelity is the key to the build-up of cumulative culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367 (1599): 2171-2180. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0119
Lumsden Charles J. and Edward. O. Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 2017. Continuities in cultural evolution. Abingdon: Routledge.
Mesoudi, Alex, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland. 2004. Perspective: Is human cultural evolution Darwinian? Evidence reviewed from the perspective of The Origin of Species. Evolution 58 (1): 1-11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3449291 (Accessed 11/05/2017)
Mesoudi, Alex, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland. 2006. Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 329-347. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X06009083
Mori, Naohisa. 2011. Where are we going beyond the archive metaphor? Culture & Psychology 17 (1): 11-19. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X10388855
Nikolić, Aleksandra, Kaja Damjanović, Dragana Cvetković. 2017. „Evolutionary perspective on tangible cultural heritage: artefacts as social learning modality“. Paper presented at the Inaugural Conference of the Cultural Evolution Society, Jena, September 13-15.
Pocklington, Richard, and Michael L. Best. 1997. Cultural evolution and units of selection in replicating text. Journal of Theoretical Biology 188 (1): 79-87. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.1997.0460
Renfrew, Colin. 1998. “Mind and matter: cognitive archaeology and external symbolic storage.” In Cognition and material culture: the archaeology of symbolic storage, eds. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre, 1-6. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Richerson, Peter and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rowlands, Michael. 1993. The role of memory in the transmission of culture. World archaeology 25 (2): 141-151. https://www.jstor.org/stable/124810
Schiffer, Michael B. 1995. “Social theory and history in behavioral archaeology.” Expanding archaeology, eds. James M. Skibo, William H. Walker and Axel E. Nielsen, 22-35. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Segestrale, Ullica. 2000. Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Y. Tilley. 1987. Social theory and archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Shanks, Michael. 1998. The life of an artifact in an interpretive archaeology. Fennoscandia Archaeologica XV: 15–30.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sarks.fi/fa/PDF/FA15_15.pdf
Sperber, Dan, and Nicolas Claidière. 2008. Defining and explaining culture (comments on Richerson and Boyd, Not by genes alone). Biology & Philosophy 23 (2): 283-292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-005-9012-8
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Tilley, Christopher (ed.) 1990. Reading Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
---. 1991. Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity. Abingdon: Routledge.
Tomasello, Michael, Ann Cale Kruger, and Hilary Horn Ratner. 1993. Cultural learning. Behavioral and brain sciences 16 (3): 495-511. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0003123X
Tuđman, Miroslav. 1983. Struktura kulturne informacije. Zagreb: Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske.
Whiten, Andrew, and David Erdal. 2012. The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599: 2119-2129. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0114
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1992. Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press on Demand.
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2018-12-30
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