Qu’est-ce donc que la musique des aliens ou pour les aliens? Des cinq notes de la mélodie de Rencontres du troisième type aux explorations sonores de Sun Ra ou des intelligents dansants de l’électro, elle n’est peut-être que l’expression la plus accomplie d’une tendance très humaine à projeter sur l’extraterrestre certains reflets plus ou moins déformés de soi, surjouant quelque insaisissable mystère, révélation ou écart incompressible venu de l’ailleurs pour retrouver finalement, tout là-bas, une bribe d’ici.

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. -/- Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes (...) place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. -/- Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology. (from the HUP website). (shrink)

This study aims to discuss the historiography of standing up Maḥallu al-Qiyām in the cultural expression in Indonesia. This research is classified as qualitative research with a historical approach method reinforced with documentation, interview and observation. To deepen the meaning of Maḥallu al-Qiyām using analysis using the symbolic interpretive theory of Clifford Geertz. Interestingly, the tradition of Maḥallu al-Qiyām becomes a symbolic meaning of the expression of homage to the Prophet Muhammad and has the content of Maḥabbah teachings to (...) the Prophet. This research concluded that standing up Maḥallu al-Qiyām began when Sheikh Tajuddin as-Subkhi started his stand while reading the Prophet’s Mawlīd as a symbol of respect for the Prophet Muhammad. The Maḥallu al-Qiyām has various forms of celebration as a cultural expression in Indonesia, manifested in various forms of celebration in Javanese cultures, such as muludan, srakalan, kekahan, temu manten, manakiban, sema’an al-Qur’an, and respect for newly arrived ulama.Contribution: This article has contributed to discovering the traditions that developed in Indonesia, which intersected with Maḥallu al-Qiyām, thus identifying some expressions of Javanese culture in whose dialectic with standing Maḥallu al-Qiyām. (shrink)

This article examines the cultural practices through which a group of professionals infuse their work and community with charisma. Although previous research has theorized the “charisma of office” (Weber 1978), we know little about how the occupants of such offices sustain it. I focus on a group of psychoanalytically-inclined psychotherapists, whose field, despite its early charismatic beginnings, has been especially embattled in recent decades. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I reveal how they share stories emphasizing their “idealization” by (...) others, draw boundaries between their professional and private lives to manage their work identities, and perform interpersonal affective work that shores up their claims to extraordinary abilities. Together, these cultural practices constitute charisma within the professional group. This article thus makes a case that, as expertise becomes increasingly contested, we must look beyond social organization and the evidentiary bases of knowledge to understand professional authority. (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the (...) institutional environments of cultural studies; and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

Desde la mirada de los estudios de la cultura y la hegemonía del poder esta investigación explora desde la perspectiva de sus habitantes, el sentir popular y la apropiación de la celebración religiosa de San Pedro y San Pablo en la parroquia Picoazá (Portoviejo – Ecuador). Para el fin se acude a la metodología cualitativa, utilizando la entrevista como herramienta de corte etnográfico. Los resultados plantean un colectivo apegado a la religión con connotaciones significativas en la organización social y (...) class='Hi'>cultural del entorno, dando paso a la reproducción de tradiciones heredadas de generación en generación. Las mismas que a la par, fetichizan y esencializan la actividad, e invisibilizan otros aspectos inherentes a las prácticas culturales. (shrink)

Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the (...) world; why shamanism professionalizes early, often in the absence of other specialization; and how shifting social conditions affect the form or existence of shamanism. According to this theory, shamanism is a set of traditions developed through cultural evolution that adapts to people's intuitions to convince observers that a practitioner can influence otherwise unpredictable, significant events. The shaman does this by ostensibly transforming during initiation and trance, violating folk intuitions of humanness to assure group members that he or she can interact with the invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes. Entry requirements for becoming a shaman persist because the practitioner's credibility depends on his or her “transforming.” This contrasts with dealing with problems that have identifiable solutions, in which credibility hinges on showing results and outsiders can invade the jurisdiction by producing the outcome. Shamanism is an ancient human institution that recurs because of the capacity of cultural evolution to produce practices adapted to innate psychological tendencies. (shrink)

Objetiva compreender elementos constituintes das fotografias como documentos arquivísticos de valor secundário, isso a partir da análise de práticas documentárias e culturais que incidem sobre produção do arquivo no âmbito do programa extensionista ´Entre Comunidades´. Os procedimentos metodológicos adotados correspondem à pesquisa bibliográfica, documental e arquivística para atender ao objetivo. Evidencia-se que os valores arquivísticos são elementos constituintes das fotografias como documentos arquivísticos de valor secundário, associando-os às práticas documentárias, de ativação da memória e de mediação cultural. Concluiu-se que (...) a fotografia possui valores culturais, notadamente valor estético ou formal, sendo objeto de mediação cultural. (shrink)

The article proposes to defend the basic income as a pillar of a socio-cultural revolution. This is done exclusively from a literature review and articulation of different works. The introduction section presents the characteristics of a basic income. Section 2 brings how it would mitigate current capitalism problems, which are: increasing inequality, lack of equality of opportunity, means tested social security and its bureaucracy, narrow definition of paid work and future of labor. On Section 3, the author does a (...) literature review to address two common objections against basic income: the cost, and potential labor decrease. Section 4 presents the author argument on three pillars of the socio-cultural revolution: austerity, active citizenship, and solidarity. The article ends with a general conclusion. (shrink)

Fitness is a central concept in evolutionary theory. Just as it is central to biological evolution, so, it seems, it should be central to cultural evolutionary theory. But importing the biological fitness concept to CET is no straightforward task—there are many features unique to cultural evolution that make this difficult. This has led some theorists to argue that there are fundamental problems with cultural fitness that render it hopelessly confused. In this essay, we defend the coherency of (...) cultural fitness against those who call it into doubt. (shrink)

"El libro tiene dos grandes temas: la identidad cultural, sobre la que se expresan opiniones balanceadas entre los extremos posibles, y la 'liberacion social', entendida en general como liberacion con respecto a estructuras opresivas. El itinerario de e.

In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called “protolanguage” to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also defends (...) and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulative cultural evolution—and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual. (shrink)

This paper examines the influence of cultural and socioeconomic factors on the growth of enterpreneurship in Vietnam. Traditional cultural values continue to have a strong impact on the Vietnamese society, and to a large extent adversely affect the entrepreneurial spirit of the community. Typical constraints private entrepreneurs face may have roots in the cultural facet as legacy of the Confucian society like relationship-based bank credit. Low quality business education is both a victim and culprit of the long-standing (...) tradition that looks down on the role of private entrepreneurship in the country. (shrink)

The progress and development of the new era has given commercial illustration a new vitality, expanding and enhancing its commercial value and cultural connotation.However, under the influence of traditional mechanistic philosophical thought, there is a tendency of utilitarianization, mechanization, absolutization and fragmentation in China's commercial illustration in general, resulting in various reform measures facing difficulties and resistance, especially not conducive to the healthy and comprehensive development of packaging design.Ecological philosophy, as a systematic, holistic, processual and connected idea, is now (...) being widely used to deal with the relationship between human beings and society.By analyzing the close relationship between commercial illustration, which is an important design graphic language for cultural and creative packaging design, and cultural and creative product packaging, this paper tries to propose how commercial illustration is applied in cultural and creative packaging design under the ecological philosophy perspective.It summarizes the role of commercial illustration in cultural creative packaging design, elaborates the research on the innovation strategy of commercial illustration in cultural creative packaging design under the ecological philosophy perspective, and demonstrates the charm of commercial illustration in cultural creative packaging design. (shrink)

Natural and supernatural explanations are used to interpret the same events in a number of predictable and universal ways. Yet little is known about how variation in diverse cultural ecologies influences how people integrate natural and supernatural explanations. Here, we examine explanatory coexistence in three existentially arousing domains of human thought: illness, death, and human origins using qualitative data from interviews conducted in Tanna, Vanuatu. Vanuatu, a Melanesian archipelago, provides a cultural context ideal for examining variation in explanatory (...) coexistence due to the lack of industrialization and the relatively recent introduction of Christianity and Western education. We argue for the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies from cognitive science and anthropology to inform research on explanatory coexistence. (shrink)

The eminent Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu confronts the paradox that while Western cultures recoil from claims of universality, previously colonized peoples, seeking to redefine their identities, insist on cultural particularities.

In a recently published paper, we argued that theories of cultural evolution can gain explanatory power by being more pluralistic. In his reply to it, Dennett agreed that more pluralism is needed. Our paper’s main point was to urge cultural evolutionists to get their hands dirty by describing the fine details of cultural products and by striving to offer detailed and, when explanatory, varied algorithms or mechanisms to account for them. While Dennett’s latest work on cultural (...) evolution does marvelously well on the first point, it has only whet our appetite on the second. Accordingly, the present paper aims to show what an evolutionary explanation of culture that takes the variety of cultural evolution mechanisms seriously would look like. We will focus on the cultural evolution of social epistemic mechanisms and we will propose that Darwinian algorithms should be complemented with a cultural analogue of the error reduction mechanism proposed to account for human cognition, with a particular emphasis on the necessity to build independencies between different sub-systems in charge of tracking states of the world. To illustrate our point, we will present how the evolution of the legal system as epistemic systems can be understood as a process of building increasingly better independencies and how various criticisms of the actual legal system calls for building even more of them. (shrink)

Cultural differences pose a serious challenge to the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence from a global perspective. Cultural differences may enable malignant actors to disregard the demand of important ethical values or even to justify the violation of them through deference to the local culture, either by affirming the local culture lacks specific ethical values, e.g., privacy, or by asserting the local culture upholds conflicting values, e.g., state intervention is good. One response to this challenge is the (...) human rights approach to AI governance, which is intended to be a universal and globally enforceable framework. The proponents of the approach, however, have so far neglected the challenge from cultural differences or left out the implications of cultural diversity in their works. This is surprising because human rights theorists have long recognized the significance of cultural pluralism for human rights. Accordingly, the approach may not be straightforwardly applicable in “non-Western” contexts because of cultural differences, and it may also be critiqued as philosophically incomplete insofar as the approach does not account for the role of culture. This commentary examines the human rights approach to AI governance with an emphasis on cultural values and the role of culture. Particularly, I show that the consideration of cultural values is essential to the human rights approach for both philosophical and instrumental reasons. (shrink)

This classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism harbors the seeds of its downfall, particularly by effecting a certain cultural tendency among its most successful subjects that is bound to corrode its very foundations. As such, it is a conservative critique employing cultural concerns precisely where Marx prioritized economic ones.

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the (...) notion of “cultural attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

The use of the category of race in science remains controversial. During the last few years there has been a lively debate on this topic in the field of a relatively young neuroscience discipline called cultural neuroscience. The main focus of cultural neuroscience is on biocultural conditions of the development of different dimensions of human perceptive activity, both cognitive or emotional. These dimensions are analysed through the comparison of representatives of different social and ethnic groups. In my article, (...) I present arguments supporting these two hypotheses: the other-race effect understood as an individual, distinct effect does not exist. It is rather an exemplification of a much broader phenomenon which I call theunfamiliarity homogeneity effect. It includes not only problems with differentiation and recognition of faces of representatives of other ethnic groups, but also covers similar recognitional difficulties ; The race-based terminology and categories are used in cultural neuroscience research in a vague and inconsistent manner. Such an approach distorts the science both in empirically and conceptually significant respects. The unfamiliarity homogeneity effect is an example of such a situation: narrowing it to the other-race effect makes it difficult to analyse in a wider context crucial for its understanding. (shrink)

Many have assumed that widespread cultural ignorance exculpates those who are involved in otherwise morally problematic practices, such as the ancient slaveholders, 1950s sexists or contemporary meat eaters. In this paper we argue that ignorance can be culpable even in situations of widespread cultural ignorance. However, it is not usually culpable due to a previous self-conscious act of wrongdoing. Nor can we always use the standard attributionist account of such cases on which the acts done in ignorance can (...) nonetheless display bad motivations. Instead, we argue that moral ignorance often results from the exercise of vice, and that this renders subsequent acts blameworthy, regardless of whether the ignorance happens to be widespread. We develop an account of moral-epistemic vice, and argue that two families of moral-epistemic vice may be common. Vices of arrogance involve the motivation to self-aggrandizement, while vices of laziness involve the motivation for comfort. If cases of cultural ignorance involve the operation of these moral-epistemic vices then that ignorance ought to be viewed as culpable. (shrink)

Mood profiling has a long history in the field of sport and exercise. Several novel mood profile clusters were identified and described in the literature recently (Parsons-Smith, Terry, & Machin, 2017). In the present study, we investigated whether the same clusters were evident in an Italian language, sport and exercise context. The Italian Mood Scale (ITAMS; Quartiroli, Terry, & Fogarty, 2017) was administered to 950 Italian-speaking sport participants (659 females, 284 males, 7 unspecified; age range = 16–63 yr., M = (...) 25.03, SD = 7.62) and seeded k-means clustering methodology applied to the responses. Six distinct mood profiles were identified, termed the iceberg, inverse iceberg, inverse Everest, shark fin, surface, and submerged profiles, which closely resembled those reported among English-speaking participants (Parsons-Smith et al., 2017). Significant differences were found in the distribution of specific mood profiles across gender and age groups. Findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of the six mood profiles and offer new research avenues into their antecedents, correlates and behavioral consequences in Italian-language contexts. (shrink)

Discussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ in popular culture suffer from an inherited politics of authenticity and ownership originating in a liberal legal–ethical framework. Here, I use Raymond Williams’s and Stuart Hall’s cultural theory to pinpoint the place at which cultural-appropriation discourse goes wrong – an essentialist and anti- historical notion of colonial encounters. We can overcome these limits through Marxist cultural and historical analysis. Outrage about colonial violence which most often roots appropriation discourse is better understood within (...) the context of an account of the transition to capitalism beginning with the Low Countries and their eastern colonies. Furthermore, the Marxist idea of the cosmopolitan cultures of both capital and labour offers a productive path for the history of culture rooted in the same colonial encounter. (shrink)

Despite the intention for precision and accuracy, legal discourse is oftentimes complex, archaic and ambiguous - which gives rise to contentious interpretation. Moreover, little or no attention is paid to the cultural dimension of legal discourse, which plays a critical role in the translation and interpretation of legal texts, as well as in the application of law. This paper endeavours to illustrate the impact the culture, or, more precisely, legal culture has on the way legal texts are construed or (...) translated and to present problems which arise in the interpretation, translation and application of law as a result of cultural diversities. (shrink)

Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cultural attractor concept has been used and identify three kinds of factors of attraction typically appealed to. Clarifying these explanatory concepts identifies problems and ambiguities in the work of cultural epidemiologists and commentators alike.

Confucian humility (qian xun 謙遜) is a deeply rooted virtue in East Asian traditions and widely practiced among modern East Asians. Despite its significance, our modern understanding of it remains imperfect, partly due to a prevailing misunderstanding of its true nature under the label of “modesty­bias.” This bias is often cited as a representative trait of East Asian collectivism in social or cultural psychology, leading to a narrow focus on attitudes and behaviors associated with it, with little attention to (...) whether it accurately reflects the historical roots of Confucian humility. This paper aims to highlight the notable differences between attitudes or behaviors related to modesty­bias and traditional Confucian humility, arguing that failing to make this distinction poses a significant obstacle to understanding Confucian humility as a virtue and its contemporary expression. Methodological suggestions are provided on how to conduct interdisciplinary research on Confucian humility, emphasizing the need to recognize and address the prejudice associated with modesty­bias. Such an interdisciplinary approach can also help discern modern attitudes or behaviors rooted in Confucian humility and shed new light on the continuing relevance of this traditional virtue in contemporary East Asian society. (shrink)

For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI (XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and (...) that many popular XAI designs implicitly and problematically assume that Western explanatory needs are shared cross-culturally. Additionally, we systematically reviewed over 200 XAI user studies and found that most studies did not consider relevant cultural variations, sampled only Western populations, but drew conclusions about human-XAI interactions more generally. We also analyzed over 30 literature reviews of XAI studies. Most reviews did not mention cultural differences in explanatory needs or flag overly broad cross-cultural extrapolations of XAI user study results. Combined, our analyses provide evidence of a cultural bias toward Western populations in XAI research, highlighting an important knowledge gap regarding how culturally diverse users may respond to widely used XAI systems that future work can and should address. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the growing promise of cultural evolutionary theory as a new approach to bringing human behaviour fully within the broader evolutionary synthesis. This review of two recent seminal works on this topic argues that cultural evolution now holds the potential to bring together fields as disparate as neuroscience and social anthropology within a unified explanatory and ontological framework.

In the debate around ecological democracy, a pivotal point of contention has long been the question why democracy should actually be expected, as some claim, to deliver (more) ecological outcomes. This point is empirical as well as conceptual: it is difficult to conceive why voters would support any policies that - as is often (perceived to be) the case with environmental legislation - would leave them worse off; whilst democracy conceptually must remain open to all outcomes rather than being tied (...) to any particular agenda ex ante. Yet both empirically and conceptually, the nature and extent of this key puzzle has always hinged on the particular definitions used. This paper reconsiders the link between democracy and ecological sustainability from a cultural angle: I argue that conceiving of both sustainability and democratisation as essentially cultural transformations resolves the puzzle and thus makes a renewed case for ecological democracy. Only as cultural processes - the creation of new meanings of sustainable prosperity in people's everyday lives, and a culturally rather than institutionally based form of democratisation - can these transformations be deep-seated rather than superficial, and thus self-perpetuating rather than merely enforced. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate? _The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism_ identifies a conceptual tendency that can (...) be drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Noël Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture—particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life—all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art. (shrink)

Cognitive innovation has shaped and transformed our cognitive capacities throughout history. Until recently, cognitive innovation has not received much attention by empirical and conceptual research in the cognitive sciences. This paper is a first attempt to help close this gap. It will be argued that cognitive innovation is best understood in connection with cumulative cultural evolution and enculturation. Cumulative cultural evolution plays a vital role for the inter-generational transmission of the products of cognitive innovation. Furthermore, there are at (...) least two important functions of enculturation for cognitive innovation. First, enculturation is responsible for the ontogenetic acquisition of cognitive practices governing the interaction with innovative products. Second, successful processes of enculturation provide opportunities for subsequent innovative processes. The trans-generational trajectory of calculation from mathematical symbol systems to the first digital computers will serve as a paradigm example of the delicate interplay of cognitive innovation, cumulative cultural evolution, and enculturation. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary theory has been alternatively compared to a theory of forces, such as Newtonian mechanics, or the kinetic theory of gases. In this article, I clarify the scope and significance of these metatheoretical characterisations. First, I discuss the kinetic analogy, which has been recently put forward by Tim Lewens. According to it, cultural evolutionary theory is grounded on a bottom-up methodology, which highlights the additive effects of social learning biases on the emergence of large-scale cultural phenomena. (...) Lewens supports this claim by arguing that it is a consequence of cultural evolutionists’ widespread commitment to population thinking. While I concur with Lewens that cultural evolutionists often actually conceive cultural change in aggregative terms, I think that the kinetic framework does not properly account for the explanatory import of population-level descriptions in cultural evolutionary theory. Starting from a criticism of Lewens’ interpretation of population thinking, I argue that the explanatory role of such descriptions is best understood within a dynamical framework—that is, a framework according to which cultural evolutionary theory is a theory of forces. After having spelled out the main features of this alternative interpretation, I elucidate in which respects it helps to outline a more accurate characterisation of the overarching structure of cultural evolutionary theory. (shrink)

El arte no es solamente una fuente inagotable de goce estético, es además una huella, una evidencia de nuestro pasado histórico. A partir del arte es posible remitirnos a nuestra raíz cultural, y es por eso que la obra artística constituye una parte importante del patrimonio de un pueblo. Es evidente el estrecho vínculo entre el patrimonio artístico y la identidad cultural; por eso es importante dar un justo valor a ese patrimonio que, a su vez, se reflejará (...) en la consolidación de una identidad propia. De esas expresiones tomamos únicamente las de la arquitectura de algunas iglesias barrocas. En ellas podemos notar una serie de variables del mestizaje cultural. La arquitectura del barroco novohispano, como uno de los lenguajes del arte, generó una reflexión sobre la identidad del individuo iberoamericano. (shrink)

In a series of incisive readings of signature historical works, Mark Poster charts the move from social history to new practices of cultural history that are drawing strength from poststructuralist interpretive strategies and raising issues found in feminist and postcolonialist discourse. In the process, he sets forth an outline for a postmodern historiography that can negotiate the contested terrain between the ambiguities of discourse and the pull of the "real." As Poster provides close readings of leading historians and theorists (...) such as Lawrence Stone, Francois Furet, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, key themes animate his work: the often irreducible difference between past and present; the relationship of writing and representation to power and domination; the dissolving distinctions between high and low culture, production and consumption, and reality and fiction; and, most important, a new perspective on human agency and the construction of political subjects. (shrink)

This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich et al.. First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons that respond to microfeatures. This enables associations to be made, and cultural change to be generated. Second, ‘replicator dynamics’ do not ensure natural selection. The replicator notion does not capture the distinction between actively interpreted self-assembly code and passively copied self-description, which leads to a fundamental principle of natural selection: (...) inherited information is transmitted, whereas acquired information is not. Third, this principle is violated in culture by the ubiquity of acquired change. Moreover, biased transmission is less important to culture than the creative processes by which novelty is generated. Fourth, there is no objective basis for determining cultural fitness. Fifth, the necessity of randomness is discussed. It is concluded that natural selection inappropriate is an explanatory framework for culture. (shrink)

Contrary to Vaesen, we argue that a small number of key traits are sufficient to explain modern human tool use. Here we outline and defend the cultural intelligence (CI) hypothesis. In doing so, we critically re-examine the role of social transmission in explaining human tool use.

El trabajo cuestiona críticamente cierta visión extrema y unilateral apreciable en Adorno y Horkheimer al juzgar la relación de la industria cultural con la música. Es cierto que hoy prácticamente toda actividad humana se encuentra condiciona¬da por el mercado y que la música no es una excepción. Ella también es portadora de valor de cambio que tiende a ser dominante en los marcos de la industrial cultural. Pero es plausible que dentro de las industrias culturales mismas se empezara (...) a hacer una distinción entre los bienes culturales producidos por razones meramente comerciales y aquellos producidos por razones más artísticas. Un público demandante de obras de valor artístico, aun cuando pueda ser minoritario y estar inmerso también él en el mercado, condiciona de cierta manera la propia producción cultural, o, al menos, un segmento de ella. Esta posibilidad real no era muy reconocida por los autores de la “La industria cultural”. Según su lógica, como nada puede sustraerse a la industria cultural y como ésta compulsa a la prevalencia del valor de cambio o comercial y a la casi supresión de cualquier otro valor, entonces el arte, el verdadero arte, terminaría por desaparecer, sucumbiendo ante una lógica no interesada en su conservación o crecimiento, sino sólo en la maximización de ganancias a toda costa. Los hechos han contradicho esta conclusión. La relación de la música con la industria cultural, igual que las monedas, tiene dos caras. No basta con reconocer sólo la parte negativa, la que busca alienar las obras con tal de convertirlas en sólo mercancías. Es imprescindible tomar en cuenta también la posibilidad más que comprobable de que piezas con excelente factura estética surjan también en los marcos de esta industria. El asunto radicaría en develar las condiciones que lo posibilitan. El mercado, si bien puede favorecer la generación de productos pseudoculturales de escaso o nulo valor artístico, también se constituye en la única vía, dentro de la sociedad de consumo, por medio de la cual lo genuinamente valioso se convierte en patrimonio común. (shrink)

Central and East Europeans have a great deal in common, both historically and culturally, with West Europeans and North Americans, but tend to be more interdependent. Interdependence has been shown to be linked to holistic cognition. East Asians are more interdependent than Americans and are more holistic. If interdependence causes holism, we would expect Central and East Europeans to be more holistic than West Europeans and North Americans. In two studies we found evidence that Central and East Europeans are indeed (...) more holistic than Westerners on three tasks, one of which examined categorization and two of which measured patterns of visual attention. These studies support the argument that cross-cultural differences in cognition are due to society level differences in independence/interdependence. (shrink)