Mechanisms Of Cultural Transmission Research Articles

Traditional Mechanisms of Culture Transmission at the Present State of Society

The article is aimed at describing the current state and role in modern culture of the main traditional mechanisms for transmitting culture, preserving cultural memory and passing it on to next generations (customs, rituals, traditions, religion, myth, folklore, art, education, family). The research was carried out on the basis of systemic, activity-based, integration, historical approaches, methods of historical analysis, structural-functional, and axiological approach. It has been revealed that traditional mechanisms of cultural transmission continue to play a vital role in the modern cultural space. At the same time, their transformation, observed at the present time, reflects objective trends in the development of society and civilization as a whole, their accelerated development. Culture exists as a combination of traditional and innovative; it cannot be static and is constantly evolving. The problem is the reaction of a number of representatives of the scientific community to the modification of cultural instruments. The dynamics of social and cultural development in recent decades have become more obvious than before, which has caused a number of researchers to desire to go back and revive the traditional mechanisms of cultural transmission. The unity of traditional and innovative mechanisms for transmitting culture is a ground for its positive development.

Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture.

It has been proposed that climate adaptation research can benefit from an evolutionary approach. But related empirical research is lacking. We advance the evolutionary study of climate adaptation with two case studies from contemporary United States agriculture. First, we define 'cultural adaptation to climate change' as a mechanistic process of population-level cultural change. We argue this definition enables rigorous comparisons, yields testable hypotheses from mathematical theory and distinguishes adaptive change, non-adaptive change and desirable policy outcomes. Next, we develop an operational approach to identify 'cultural adaptation to climate change' based on established empirical criteria. We apply this approach to data on crop choices and the use of cover crops between 2008 and 2021 from the United States. We find evidence that crop choices are adapting to local trends in two separate climate variables in some regions of the USA. But evidence suggests that cover cropping may be adapting more to the economic environment than climatic conditions. Further research is needed to characterize the process of cultural adaptation, particularly the routes and mechanisms of cultural transmission. Furthermore, climate adaptation policy could benefit from research on factors that differentiate regions exhibiting adaptive trends in crop choice from those that do not. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

Generalized brands as a mechanism of cultural transmission in everyday communications practices

The article considers the process and result of the specific transition of phenomena, commercial in origin and functions, into a socio-cultural non-commercial space with their subsequent transforma tion into mechanisms of cultural transmission. In this review, they are conditionally designated as “generalized brands”. The author made an attempt to identify the main positive and negative features of the process of the emergence of such a brand in the company and in the society. The article also provides the concept of habitus of Pierre Bourdieu as a theoretical basis for analyzing the formation and development of generalized brands. The process of brand generalization can, according to the author, become the subject of sociological research, since such brands form new social actions, behavioral models in society. Perhaps “habitus” will hel p to resolve questions about the causes of generalization, its consequences for society in order to understand the impact of processes, the implementation of their intra-economic fields, on processes, implementation in other social fields. Based on the results of the first stage of empirical research, the author puts forward some hypotheses and draws the first conclusions about the specifics of this transition, in particular, about the peculiarities of filling the habitus of a modern individual with non-commercial versions of these phenomena.

Emotional syntax from social construction to virtual function

For a very long time, contemporary western societes and cultures have operated a censorship of emotions (Cambi,1998:37): indeed, they have been studied especially in the psychoanalytic discipline and as main topic in the investigation of human behavior (Ivi,1996:9). More recently, sociology has re-appropriated this “emotional” reflection, focusing the discourse on Homo Sentiens or Homo Patiens, in a passage from the individual identity the to the social one through a circular and self-poietic process: feelings and emotions (both primary and secondary) represent, the foundamental relational connection thanks to which are activated mechanisms of socialization and cultural transmission. The artiche aims to reflect on the emotions as social construction and linked to technologies with a high emotional connotation (Marmion, 2015,252:28-33).

Типологический анализ социокультурной направленности личности представителей разных возрастных групп

The introduction focuses on the role of sociocultural determination, mechanisms of cultural transmission and social inheritance in the development of human psyche and personality. The theoretical part considers psychological types of a personality’s sociocultural orientation that were theoretically deduced through the analysis of a subject’s attitude to traditions and innovations, in-group and out-group culture. The author describes ten types of a personality’s sociocultural orientation: harmoniously balanced, locally oriented, locally-traditional, locally innovative, alternatively oriented, alternatively traditional, alternatively innovative, globally-traditional, globally-innovative, globally-indifferent ones. The empirical part provides the results of the comparative research into the types of a personality’s sociocultural orientation among representatives of three age groups: 1) age range of 46–54 years, 2) age range of 27–36 years, 3) age range of 17–19 years. The author ascertains dominating types of a personality’s sociocultural orientation for each group under study. Harmoniously balanced and globally-innovative types of a personality’s sociocultural orientation prevail among the representatives of the older generation; globally-innovative and alternatively oriented (to the values of out-group culture) types are more common for the age range of 27–36 years. Globally-indifferent type of a personality’s sociocultural orientation is of greatest research interest in the youngest age group. The conclusion looks at the key trends, factors, risks and resources of a personality’s sociocultural development among various age groups.

STRUCTURE AND FEATURES OF THE SOCIAL MEMORY OF THE RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: VALUE AND MEANING AND FUNCTIONAL ASPECT

Relevance. Leading domestic scientists who dealt with the problem of studying the intelligentsia note in their works that intellectuals are not born and it is not encoded in the genes. The values of the intelligentsia are formed and brought up in the course of a purposefully organized pedagogical process and psychological influence. The theoretical and informational basis of this process, as well as the main source, is social memory as a semantic accumulator. Social memory as a dynamic mental formation and as a social phenomenon has its own structure and carriers, as well as cultural and psychological transmission mechanisms.
 Materials and methods. Comprehensive knowledge of the concept and features of the functioning of the social memory of the military intelligentsia, as well as the mechanisms of its translation, was carried out based on systemic, axiological and subjective methodological approaches. The applied scientific methods were analysis and synthesis, analogy and comparison, abstraction and generalization.
 Results of the study. The key scientific results of the study are the accumulation of generalized ideas about the social memory of the domestic military intelligentsia and the psychological mechanisms of its transmission. The results of the study can be used to organize the pedagogical process in a military university to develop the intelligence of future officers.

Examining acculturation in mixed-couples to test cultural transmission mechanisms.

The project sought to understand the factors which underlie cultural transmission, adapting self-reported methods from cross-cultural psychology and sociology to test the external validity of several constructs from existing evolutionary models. The target population were native-foreigner mixed-couples, allowing the analyses to benefit from asymmetrical cultural inputs. Sampling took place in Italy and Portugal, with recruitment relying on social networks, online newspapers, friends, organizations, universities, parishes, and embassies. The questionnaire was personally delivered or filled online. The validated variables were: contact with a population in which the majority endorses the culture being acquired, the relative quantity of friends from that culture, the perceived relationship quality with the companion, affective ties with one’s own family, and the desire and emotional components behind the culture-transmission motive (a concept similar to cultural conservatism). An unexpected strong, positive association between both cultural identities was found. Thus, it was suggested that these participants adopted an integrative orientation, allowing both cultural identities to blend, whereas most research so far focuses on assimilation scenarios. Overall, acculturation was driven by either conformity to the majority or random learning, without discarding the influence of preferred demonstrators, and the emotional bounds embedded in the individual’s cultural identity. Acculturation proved to be flexible and potentially changing according to the cultural trait being examined.

Content bias in the cultural evolution of house finch song

We used three years of house finch, Haemorhous mexicanus , song recordings spanning four decades in the introduced eastern range to assess how individual level cultural transmission mechanisms drive population level changes in birdsong. First, we developed an agent-based model (available as a new R package called ‘TransmissionBias’) that simulates the cultural transmission of house finch song given different parameters related to transmission biases, or biases in social learning that modify the probability of adoption of particular cultural variants. Next, we used approximate Bayesian computation and machine learning to estimate what parameter values likely generated the temporal changes in diversity in our observed data. We found evidence that strong content bias, likely targeted towards syllable complexity, plays a central role in the cultural evolution of house finch song in the New York metropolitan area. Frequency and demonstrator biases appear to be neutral or absent. Additionally, we estimated that house finch song is transmitted with extremely high fidelity. Future studies can use our simulation framework to better understand how cultural transmission and population declines influence song diversity in wild populations. • We analysed house finch songs from three years spanning four decades in New York. • We compared real data against simulations to make inferences about cultural transmission. • Content bias, likely for syllable complexity, drives cultural evolutionary changes. • Frequency and demonstrator biases were absent and transmission fidelity was high.

Migration and Cultural Change

We examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Our theoretical model integrates various compositional and cultural transmission mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on the sign and direction of convergence. We then use the World Value Survey for the period 1981-2014 to build time-varying measures of cultural similarity for a large number of country pairs and exploit within country-pair variation over time. Our evidence is inconsistent with the view that immigrants are a threat to the host country’s culture. While migrants do act as vectors of cultural diffusion and bring about cultural convergence, this is mostly to disseminate cultural values and norms from host to home countries (i.e., cultural remittances).

The Origin and Cultural Evolution of East Asian Cognitive Style: A Case Study of the Book of Changes (Yijing 易經)

Abstract Experimental tests about cross-cultural differentiation of cognitive style conclude that East Asian and Western cognition differ. Tendencies described as East Asian include holism, non-linearity, expectation of change, relationalism, field dependence, causal pluralism, dialecticism, and a tolerance of contradiction. Cross-cultural psychologists generally refrain from discussing the intellectual history or cultural evolution of these differences, preferring to explain results on cognitive scales in terms of results on social scales assessed using present-day participants. The present article attempts to partially close this explanatory gap through detailed discussion of tendencies of East Asian cognitive style as represented in what is probably the most influential book in the history of East Asia, The Book of Changes. This study purports to show (a) that the content of the Yijing 易經 and its commentaries is best described in terms of the cognitive tendencies just mentioned, (b) that reading the Yijing activated those cognitive tendencies, and (c) that the Yijing attained prodigious influence on subsequent Chinese and East Asian cultures through four known mechanisms of cultural transmission. Informed by this case study, researchers of cross-cultural cognition may be positioned to develop a richer appreciation of the cultural representation and evolution of East Asian cognitive style in historical context.

SOCIAL PRACTICES, RUPTURE EVENTS & AESTHETIC CAPITAL IN LOCAL DEVELOPMENT

This work identifies a dual process in intergenerational cultural transmission and reception mechanisms: on the one hand, a break in historical continuity between past and present, and, on the other, the use of its legitimacy to make a mark on history. The approach emphasizes two aspects of cultural and economic transformation, the change induced by sudden, pervasive events, and the plasticity of cultural reception. Therefore, it is intended to argue that without the socio-cultural disposition to accept change, economic transformations cannot work. Drawing on this idea, this article aims to elucidate how cultural transmission crosses time, allowing humanity to recognize and legitimize a new socio-economic order.

Механизмы трансляции культурных смыслов в искусстве

The purpose of the study is to identify the main mechanisms of cultural meanings transmission in art. The authors consider ways of cultural meanings functioning and determine their correlation with specifics of sign systems of various arts. Scientific novelty of the research lies in systematising the conceptual apparatus of the theory of art related to the field of meanings: the article is the first one to clarify and differentiate between concepts of cultural meanings functioning, mechanisms and forms of their transmission. As a result, such mechanisms of meanings transmission as cultural memory, cultural practices, cultural traditions and communication, through which implementation of the main functions of art is ensured, are identified.

Evidence for Teaching in an Australian Songbird.

Song in oscine birds (as in human speech and song) relies upon the rare capacity of vocal learning. Transmission can be vertical, horizontal, or oblique. As a rule, memorization and production by a naïve bird are not simultaneous: the long-term storage of song phrases precedes their first vocal rehearsal by months. While a wealth of detail regarding songbird enculturation has been uncovered by focusing on the apprentice, whether observational learning can fully account for the ontogeny of birdsong, or whether there could also be an element of active teaching involved, has remained an open question. Given the paucity of knowledge on animal cultures, I argue for the utility of an inclusive definition of teaching that encourages data be collected across a wide range of taxa. Borrowing insights from musicology, I introduce the Australian pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) into the debate surrounding mechanisms of cultural transmission. I probe the relevance and utility of mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist approaches to teaching in this species. Sonographic analysis of birdsong recordings and observational data (including photographs) of pied butcherbird behavior at one field site provide evidence that I assess based on criteria laid down by Caro and Hauser, along with later refinements to their functionalist definition. The candidate case of teaching reviewed here adds to a limited but growing body of reports supporting the notion that teaching may be more widespread than is currently realized. Nonetheless, I describe the challenges of confirming that learning has occurred in songbird pupils, given the delay between vocal instruction and production, as well as the low status accorded to anecdote and other observational evidence commonly mustered in instances of purported teaching. As a corrective, I press for an emphasis on biodiversity that will guide the study of teaching beyond human accounts and intractable discipline-specific burdens of proof.

Reconciling and Reassessing the Accumulated Copying Error Model's Population‐Level Predictions for Continuous Cultural Traits

ABSTRACTThe accumulated copying error (ACE) model exploits the fact that limits to human visual perception introduce proportional copying errors during cultural transmission of a continuous trait, such as the length of a tool. Archaeologists have used ACE to infer the mechanisms of cultural transmission employed in the past. But ACE's predictions apply only under “idealized” conditions in which the population contains infinitely many vertical transmission chains and the continuous trait can take any positive value. Here, I relax each assumption to show: (1) the mean and variance of a vertically transmitted continuous trait are functions of population size and number of transmission events, and (2) functional constraints weaken the cumulative effects of proportional copying error. Incorporating the effects of population size and functional constraints in future work will reduce Type I errors (falsely rejecting a true null) when inferring the cultural transmission mechanisms responsible for population‐level variation in continuous traits. [cultural evolution, cultural transmission, finite population size, functional constraints, Paleolithic, simulation, social learning]

Pottery and Non-Sedentary Communities: Origins, Technology and Usage

The introduction of the skill of pottery-making has been recognized as the turning point in the human past from the very inception of the disciplines of archaeology/anthropology. Until recently, pottery has been explained as a part of the Neolithic package and linked to the beginnings of agriculture and sedentarism. However, the pottery registered among the hunters-gatherers of the late Pleistocene in the Far East has demonstrated beyond doubt that it represents an innovation completely independent from plant cultivation and domestication of animals. This has induced a reconsideration of our knowledge. Although various hypotheses explained the appearance of the earliest pottery, it seems today that the invention of pottery technology was most probably induced by utilitarian, practical reasons. On the grounds of the analyses of the organic contents of the vessels, their qualities and the distribution of use alterations, it is certain that pottery is closely linked to preparation and partially with storage of food of animal, often aquatic origin, and sometimes of nuts. On the other hand, the causes and mechanisms of adoption of pottery as a new technology may have been diverse and dependent on various factors. For example, pottery production may be seen as prestige technology among hunters-gatherers, where individuals compete for power, prestige and status by organizing feasts, but in the non-stratified societies as well, where it was used as a medium during the festivities aimed at strengthening the group cohesion, or on the occasion of marriages of members of different groups, where they are reminded of communal obligations and alliances. One of the characteristics of pottery in mobile communities is its close link to twined/woven objects: many pottery assemblages from these groups bear traces on their surfaces that are the consequence of pressing such material (cords, baskets, sacks, mats, fabric, etc.), so sometimes “ceramization” of these older technologies is mentioned. However, the importance of spun material should be stressed in the technology of pottery production. These may have been used in the process of modelling of vessels, as supports or moulds. Finally, the text considers the Starčevo pottery. In spite of the fact that it “reaches” into the Balkans along with other characteristics of the Neolithic package, it performs important similarities to the pottery of mobile communities, from its transportability as a desired feature, to indications that at least some forms were executed in baskets as moulds. The examples of the Starčevo pottery exist bearing the impressions of textile on their interior surfaces, probably due to easier separation of the dried vessel from the mould. All these data raise the issue of interdependence of soft technologies and pottery, as well as wider questions, such as mechanisms of cultural transmission.

Drivers of global variation in land ownership

Land ownership shapes natural resource management and social–ecological resilience, but the factors determining ownership norms in human societies remain unclear. Here we conduct a global empirical test of long‐standing theories from ecology, economics and anthropology regarding potential drivers of land ownership and territoriality. Prior theory suggests that resource defensibility, subsistence strategies, population pressure, political complexity and cultural transmission mechanisms may all influence land ownership. We applied multi‐model inference procedures based on logistic regression to cultural and environmental data from 102 societies, 71 with some form of land ownership and 31 with no land ownership. We found an increased probability of land ownership in mountainous environments, where patchy resources may be more cost effective to defend via ownership. We also uncovered support for the role of population pressure, with a greater probability of land ownership in societies living at higher population densities. Our results also show more land ownership when neighboring societies also practiced ownership. We found less support for variables associated with subsistence strategies and political complexity.

The fundamentals of cultural adaptation: implications for human adaptation

The process of human adaptation to novel environments is a uniquely complex interplay between cultural and genetic changes. However, mechanistically, we understand little about these processes. To begin to untangle these threads of human adaptation we use mathematical models to describe and investigate cultural selective sweeps. We show that cultural sweeps differ in important ways from the genetic equivalents. The models show that the dynamics of cultural selective sweeps and, consequently, their differences from genetic sweeps depend critically on cultural transmission mechanisms. Further, we consider the effect of processes unique to culture such as foresight and innovations in response to an environmental change on adaptation. Finally we show that a ‘cultural evolutionary rescue’, or the survival of an endangered population by means of cultural adaptation, is possible. We suggest that culture might make a true, genetic, evolutionary rescue plausible for human populations.

Population Size Limits the Coefficient of Variation in Continuous Traits Affected by Proportional Copying Error (and Why This Matters for Studying Cultural Transmission)

The accumulated copying error model (ACE) combines findings on the proportional nature of human visual perception error with cultural transmission theory. Previous studies have employed ACE to provide population-level expectations of the coefficient of variation (CV) of a continuous trait, such as the thickness of ceramic vessels. To date, empirical departures from expected CV values have been interpreted as evidence of biased cultural transmission or functional constraints without consideration for how population size might affect population-level cultural variation in the presence of proportional perception error. Here, I employ agent-based simulation experiments to investigate the ways in which population size affects the CV of a continuous cultural trait under different cultural transmission mechanisms. Results show that the CV of a continuous cultural trait is a function of its cultural equivalent N and effective population size (Ne) as well as the relative strength of cultural selection. The results also demonstrate that different combinations of N and cultural transmission yield identical CV values. The study highlights a new set of difficulties with inferring individual-level process—the mechanism(s) by which cultural information is transmitted among individuals—from population-level pattern—the CV of a continuous cultural trait. In light of these results, I identify and discuss one avenue through which we might improve our ability to infer past cultural transmission from archeological data.

Towards a Cognitive Science of the Human: Cross-Cultural Approaches and Their Urgency.

While a major aim of cognitive science is to understand human cognition, our conclusions are based on unrepresentative samples of the world's population. A new wave of cross-cultural cognitive science has sought to remedy this with studies that are increasing in scope, scale, and visibility. Here, I review the state of this new wave of research. The portrait of human cognition that emerges is one of variations on a theme, with species-typical capacities shaped by culture and individual experience. The new wave has expanded our understanding of processes underlying human variation and cumulative cultural change, including mechanisms of social learning and cultural transmission. Less consensus has been reached, however, on the cognitive foundations of human nature. The promise of cross-cultural cognitive science will not be fully realized unless we continue to be more inclusive of the world's populations and strive for a more complete cognitive portrait of our species.

Migration and Cultural Change

We examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Our theoretical model integrates various compositional and cultural transmission mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on the sign and direction of convergence. We then use the World Value Survey for the period 1981-2014 to build time-varying measures of cultural similarity for a large number of country pairs and exploit within country-pair variation over time. Our evidence is inconsistent with the view that immigrants are a threat to the host country’s culture. While migrants do act as vectors of cultural diffusion and bring about cultural convergence, this is mostly to disseminate cultural values and norms from host to home countries (i.e., cultural remittances).