This is an interesting discussion. In the section below, I think the definition differentiating "culture" and "culture" vs "cumulative cultural evoluton" is problematic, as the longstanding ethnological definition of "culture" makes "accumulation" a necessary part of the definition. In other words, whatever they are calling "culture" that doesn't have accumulation across generations is not culture.
Of course , other species learn and imitate. Learning and imitation are not sufficient to constitute human tradition or culture. The distinctive characteristic of culture, as I've said dozens of times, is symboling and learning from symboling, and _not_ learning by imitating. Humans do learn by imitating, but that is not their cultural learning. The cultural learning is through symbols, and symbols do not "imitate" what they represent. Thus, with symbols and culture, humans can learn from dead generations , from dead people who are not present to imitate. If my parent tells me a story about how my now dead great-great grandfather learned to swim, the words don't imitate the act of swimming. They convey it through words which don't directly imitate the act of swimming. My great great grand father doesn't have to be physically present to demonstrate for me to imitate. Of course, I do learn somethings by their being demonstrated by someone in my physical presence, but humans learn that way _and_ in the symbolic way. Humans learn both ways. Other species only learn through imitation of direct demonstration, not through symbols. By the symbolic learning it is possible to "accumulate" across generations much , much, much....much more cultural knowledge. It is only the accumulated across generations knowledge that is worthy of the name culture, all the efforts to attribute to other species the capacity for culture, notwithstanding. Charles In the long version of this paper, I suggest some strategies for defusing these two serious problems. With regard to the first problem, I turn to the animal culture literature, in search of definitions of 'culture' and 'cultural learning' that do not presuppose a capacity for propositional thought. Following Tomasello, et. al. (1993), I suggest that any population that displays the "ratchet-effect" (495), or what Boyd & Richerson (1996) call "cumulative cultural evolution" (79), should count as displaying culture and cultural learning. Such phenomena do not require propositional thought. They merely require mechanisms of "social canalization" (Boesch 1996, 257), like fairly rudimentary capacities to imitate models. There is ethological evidence that certain chimpanzee populations display such phenomena.(Ibid., 255-265) Furthermore, there is neurobiological evidence that many primates have neural mechanisms capable of implementing imitative learning.(Arbib &Rizzolatti 1996) Given this understanding of 'culture' and 'cultural learning', the neo-Vygotskyan alternative seems threatened by the same sorts of objections as the standard account. If some chimpanzee populations display evidence of culture and cultural learning, and if many primates have neural mechanisms capable of implementing cognitive capacities necessary for culture and cultural learning, then why is there no evidence for the cultural evolution of natural language in non-human, primate species? In response to this worry, I draw on Boyd & Richerson's (1996) formal, evolutionary argument for the claim that, while culture may be common, cumulative cultural evolution is inevitably rare.(82-88) Finally, I conclude the paper by offering some speculative suggestions for defusing the second serious problem with the neo-Vygotskyan alternative: if language is the product of cumulative cultural evolution based on non-propositional forms of cultural cognition, then why does it have the structure that it has? I suggest that the phylogenetically earliest function of language-like systems of communication consisted in supplementing imitation, in the transmission of ecologically crucial, cultural practices from parents to offspring. Proto-language may have consisted in a gestural form with a mimetic function: by miming hierarchically organized sequences of gestures involved in tool use, parents could enhance the transmission of ecologically crucial, tool-using practices to offspring. Such communicative behaviors would inherit the combinatorial structure of the tool use that they mimicked, and would thereby constitute an early form of a combinatorial, communicative system, like natural language. - _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
