Author's Note: The following is an expansion on my reply to anthropologist Dan Sperber on the PLoS ONE article "Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees."
Culture is like art or pornography, it's hard for people to define but everyone knows it when they see it. Cultural anthropologists have long struggled to develop a consistent definition of the very thing that they study, a problem that has resulted in bitter arguments between scholars that, to an outsider, may seem as esoteric as church doctrinal disputes over how many angels can sit upon the point of a needle.
In his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture anthropologist Leslie White famously defined culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." His goal was to bring some consistency to a field that had 164 separate definitions of "culture" being used interchangeably in the anthropological literature (which, predictably, made cross-cultural comparisons challenging at best). Today, this view has expanded beyond the human animal and a widely accepted definition is from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's celebrated work Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution:
Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.
By information, we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is
acquired or modified by social learning, and affects behavior.
Earlier I reported on a new study in PLoS ONE by Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, and Frans de Waal that found chimpanzees will adopt novel behaviors after watching them performed by high-ranking members of their group. The authors concluded that these findings demonstrate "prestige-based cultural transmission" for the first time in nonhuman animals. Their results were consistent with Richerson and Boyd's definition of culture as well as their argument that:
[N]atural selection has shaped the psychology of social learning so that we are predisposed to imitate people with prestige and material well-being. . . [M]any phenomena, ranging from maladaptive fads and fashions to group-functional religious beliefs to symbolically marked boundaries between groups, might result from the properties of prestige bias.
However, French anthropologist Dan Sperber (Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, CNRS and 2009 recipient of the Claude Levi-Strauss Prize in Social Science) has recently challenged these findings in chimpanzees and insists that it does not represent cultural transmission at all. In a critique, following from his work in linguistic anthropology, he suggests that humans alone are capable of culture. However, just like in anthropology's past, his conclusions rest on the definition that he prefers to use. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post......
Horner, V., Proctor, D., Bonnie, K., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. (2010) Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees. PLoS ONE, 5(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010625 Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees
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