Is Culture Learned? The Neglected Role of Evoking Events.

Abstract

Although no one disputes that the transmission of culture depends on social learning, a capacity that has enabled humans, unlike other animals, to modify cultural practices across generations, this review argues that cultural change can also be evoked by environmental events leading to an alteration in the configuration of an habitual behavioural repertoire. An evoked mechanism allows latent or normally suppressed behaviour to emerge. Cannibalism and warfare are put forward as examples. Evoked mechanisms have largely been ignored by one of the few attempts to reconcile biology and culture, namely cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). This review endorses CCE's aim of developing a biocultural conceptual framework but criticises this model for failing to produce a credible analysis of culture into 'units' or 'variants'. The critique of CCE is situated within a discussion of the long-standing separation within academia of science and arts disciplines, each focusing at different levels of analysis and with different aims. It is suggested that the main obstacle to developing a biocultural framework can be attributed to an incompatibility between nomothetic and idiographic research methods, the former being typical of the biological sciences, the latter of the arts. A successful biocultural conceptual framework would therefore have to accommodate the particular and the general. It is suggested that progress in this direction would be made if agreement could be reached on ways of observing or inferring behaviours rather than pursuing an analysis in terms of hypothetical constructs such as mental representations or units of 'cultural information'.