Abstract
Recent field studies have broadened our view on cultural performances in animals. This has consequences for the concept of cumulative culture. Here, we deconstruct the common individualist and differential approaches to culture. Individualistic approaches to the study of cultural evolution are shown to be problematic, because culture cannot be reduced to factors on the micro level of individual behavior (methodological individualism, “atomism”) but possesses a dynamic that only occurs on the group level and profoundly affects the individuals (“holism”). Naive individuals, as a prerequisite of an atomistic perspective, do not exist. We address the construction of a social approach to (cumulative) culture by introducing an inevitable social embedding of the individual development of social beings. The sociological notion of “habitus” as embodied cultural capital permits us to understand social transmission of behavioral components on a very basic level, resulting in a cumulative effect. Bits of information, movement, handling of material, attitudes, and preferences below distinct functional units are acquired through transfer mechanisms simpler than emulation and imitation such as peering, participation, co-performance, or engagement with a material environment altered by group members. The search for a zero point of cumulative culture becomes as useless as the search for a zero point of culture. Culture is cumulative.
Highlights
A broad consensus exists today that behavioral patterns of humans and many other animal species cannot be explained only in terms of genes and the environment, but that there is a share of culture involved
Documenting peering behavior by immature orangutans as a process of social learning, Schuppli and van Schaik identified a broad spectrum of performances not previously recognized as culturally transmitted
We introduce the notion of “habitus,” stemming from Bourdieusian sociology, as a basic cultural and cumulative layer
Summary
A broad consensus exists today that behavioral patterns of humans and many other animal species cannot be explained only in terms of genes and the environment, but that there is a share of culture involved. Technical skills that are due to latent solutions are determined by the individual’s cognitive and motor abilities; they are not culturally transmitted and do not allow for cumulative development According to this scenario, repeated individual reinvention, rather than social transmission of information, should provide an explanation—and even a much simpler one—of groupwide expressions of many behavioral performances (Tennie et al 2009). A first point worthy of elaboration is that the two approaches to culture, individualist and holist, do not necessarily represent an unconditioned choice Rather, they are tied up with two different paths of investigation: (A) experimentally testing individuals for their capability to solve introduced problems, and (B) the observation in situ of individual and group differences in tool use, controlling the samples for differences in the environments. A strict separation between the drummer and the drums becomes meaningless, and so does the idea of a pre-cultural individual
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