Process Of Cultural Transmission Research Articles

Inferring processes of cultural transmission: the critical role of rare variants in distinguishing neutrality from novelty biases.

Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of different episodes of cultural change. One approach has been to test whether neutral predictions are consistent with observed progeny distributions, recording the number of variants that have produced a given number of new instances within a specified time interval: a classic example is the distribution of baby names. Using an overlapping generations model, we show that these distributions consist of two phases: a power-law phase with a constant exponent of [Formula: see text], followed by an exponential cut-off for variants with very large numbers of progeny. Maximum-likelihood estimations of the model parameters provide a direct way to establish whether observed empirical patterns are consistent with neutral evolution. We apply our approach to a complete dataset of baby names from Australia. Crucially, we show that analyses based on only the most popular variants, as is often the case in studies of cultural evolution, can provide misleading evidence for underlying transmission hypotheses. While neutrality provides a plausible description of progeny distributions of abundant variants, rare variants deviate from neutrality. Further, we develop a simulation framework that allows the detection of alternative cultural transmission processes. We show that anti-novelty bias is able to replicate the complete progeny distribution of the Australian dataset.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.

Cattlemen's Choice of Status in the Northern Pantanal of Brazil as a Social Process of Cultural Transmission

This study aims to present the changes identified within the structure of the status of Pantanal cattlemen in Pocone - MT which help us understand why the young generation of Pantanal cattlemen see cattle breeding in the Pantanal as a complementary economic activity and why most of their offspring are not interested in it. The work defends the general hypothesis that the Pantanal cattleman's choice of status used to be influenced by his family along paths suggested by the cultural transmission theory in agreement with the mechanism of direct vertical socialization, although this has been changing because: (h1) changes in the social structure drawn from the status of Pantanal cattlemen (status set) do not favor investing in the occupational status of Pantanal cattlemen; (2) those who choose the social role of a Pantanal cattleman do so considering it a secondary, complementary economic activity and which minimizes conflicts with the role of their main occupational status. Data collected from cattlemen in 2015 (n=29) sustain the two hypotheses.

The Cultural Origin of CEOss Attitudes Towards Uncertainty: Evidence from Corporate Acquisitions

We examine the role of cultural heritage in shaping U.S. CEOs’ attitudes toward uncertainty, in the context of their corporate acquisition decisions. We find that CEOs with a more uncertainty-avoiding cultural heritage are less likely to engage in acquisitions. Conditional on making an acquisition, uncertainty-averse CEOs prefer targets in familiar industries and targets that can be more easily integrated. The emphasis on cultural identity by CEOs’ parents and the ethnic composition of CEOs’ early life environment significantly influence the cultural transmission process. Cultural differences about uncertainty attitudes persist over multiple generations, but become less pronounced over time.

Slavery's Intertextual Harvest

Slavery's Intertextual Harvest Paul Giles (bio) In its consideration of the various ways in which African American and British Victorian literatures were mutually entangled, Daniel Hack's Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) does indeed reap something new through its enlargement of our critical perspectives on both literary traditions. Whereas Henry Louis Gates's Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (1987) focused on ways in which African American authors troped on literary narratives within a tradition of black writing, Hack expands this intertextual method to encompass Atlantic literary production more widely. He shows, for example, that Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) was reprinted in 1855 in Frederick Douglass's Paper, and that it was subsequently deployed by Paul Dunbar in his 1895 poem "The Colored Soldiers" to celebrate the role of African American troops in the American Civil War. The title of Hack's book is taken from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" (1869), with the author being willing to countenance a mode of what he calls "deracializing decontextualization" in his analysis of how Victorian poems and novels were re-read in widely (and wildly) varying circumstances (79). Hack's implicit conjunction of a canonical Tennyson poem with his analysis of "African American Transformations of Victorian Literature" highlights his interest in how questions of race travel and circulate among different textual [End Page 74] locations, with centers and margins being brought here into productive juxtaposition. He is thus concerned not so much with intertextuality in the narrower theoretical sense, as it was developed by Julia Kristeva and others; instead, he looks to a broader process of cultural borrowing and transmission, the manner in which familiar texts were framed and reframed both by contemporaries and by succeeding generations through "such literary devices as allusion, parody, or diegetic transposition" (21). Accordingly, the first half of the book tracks "African Americanizing engagements with the work of a single Victorian author"—Charles Dickens, Tennyson, and George Eliot successively—while the last three chapters "explore a single African American author's engagement with fiction and poetry by multiple Victorians," focusing in turn on the work of Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois (101). The great virtue of this approach is that it enables us to understand more clearly how African American literature and culture were enmeshed within the rubrics of Victoriana, just as mainstream Victorian literature itself was negotiating, albeit sometimes obliquely, with the shadow of slavery. Reconfiguring Franco moretti's notion of distant reading, Hack proposes a critical method that he calls "close reading at a distance," one that "combines detailed, granular textual analysis with consideration of a work's geographical dispersal and uptake, especially by readerships not envisioned or addressed by the work itself" (3). This enables him to discuss, for example, how Anna Julia Cooper's collection of essays, A Voice from the South (1892)—a "book now recognized as a milestone in African American literary and intellectual history" (4)—relies heavily on Tennyson. Cooper quotes Tennyson's words, "but quotes them slant," so that In Memoriam (1850) is given an additional valence within the apparently incongruous milieu of the U. S. South (11). Given these tortuous paths of reception, Hack's largely convincing display of the ways in which British literature was woven deeply into the fabric of nineteenth-century African American culture enables him to trace the tentacles of slavery in unexpected places. As he observes, actual "depictions of African Americans" in these canonical British works "are virtually non-existent," but this does not mean that slavery was not crucial to the ways such works were received and re-articulated (3). Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), for example, was reprinted in its entirety in Frederick Douglass's Paper between April 1852 and December 1853, and was appropriated enthusiastically by white abolitionists. Hack is indeed particularly good in his analysis of Dickens, demonstrating identifiable affinities between him and Douglass. Douglass referred to Dickens's American Notes (1842) in several of his speeches, while Dickens himself in 1848 sent a copy of Douglass's Narrative (1845) to one of his friends, having first torn...

Succession of generations as the process of cultural transmission

Succession of generations as the process of cultural transmission

Fundamentalism and Democracy: A Dynamic Perspective

<p>We analyse the dynamics of the distribution of democratic values in a population where<br />agents have heterogeneous preferences about democracy, distinguishing between<br />fundamentalist-antidemocratic agents and pro-democracy agents. Cultural traits and norms<br />are acquired through a process of intergenerational cultural transmission and socialization.<br />The driving force in the equilibrium selection process is the education effort exerted by<br />parents; this depends on the distribution of democratic values in the population and on<br />expectations about future policies affecting formal and informal institutions.<br />The main result is that when fundamentalism is sufficiently diffused in all institutional<br />dimensions of social life, the imposition of formal democratic rules do not significantly affect<br />social preferences. On the other hand the model shows how a cruel fundamentalist<br />dictatorship cannot wholly destroy democratic preferences in the population; the sole result is<br />a fictitious homologation of manifested attitudes, with no preferences dynamics and the<br />previous real attitudes immediately emerging as soon as dictatorship falls.</p>

How Do Children Become Workers? Making Sense of Conflicting Accounts of Cultural Transmission in Anthropology and Psychology

AbstractThis article uses children's work as a lens to examine methodological concerns in the study of cultural transmission. At present, scholars remain divided between two positions with regards to the processes of cultural transmission. The first perspective places the burden of skill acquisition on the child who “picks up” skills and ideas through exploration, observation, imitation, play, interaction with peers, participation with others in carrying out routine tasks, and other voluntary, self‐initiated activities. A second position assigns great importance to parents as teachers who transmit essential skills and knowledge to their children. We illustrate that this debate may not be strictly empirical. Instead, these perspectives emerge from the contrasting methodologies that are largely associated with different disciplines: interviews in psychology and ethnography in anthropology. Drawing upon a review of the literature as well as a case study concerning the Asabano of Papua New Guinea, this article problematizes the sole reliance upon decontextualized self report data. Instead, we call for interviews to be situated within an ethnographic framework which not only involves observation, but also considers local models of cultural transmission, local communicative practices, and sociocultural change.

A virtual itinerary for a real experience. The Frescoes of the Chapel of the Magi in Palazzo Medici riccardi, Florence

A Virtual itinerary for a real experience is an idea based on the virtual reproduction of the fresco of the Procession of the Magi painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in Palazzo Medici in Florence, in its original dimensions and spatial configuration, which was presented at the Digital Heritage International Congress in Granada in 2015. The installation stems from an approach to Cultural Heritage communication, that sets the visitor at the centre of the design process, as both recipient and agent of cultural transmission. In this vision, cognitive science and the concept of affordance play a crucial role in defining a multimedia set that promotes a primary mechanism of cognition embedded in the human beings, the perceptive-motory method to help visitors approach and understand art through a natural form of integrated aesthetic experience.

Atypical birdsong and artificial languages provide insights into how communication systems are shaped by learning, use, and transmission

In this article, I argue that a comparative approach focusing on the cognitive capacities and behavioral mechanisms that underlie vocal learning in songbirds and humans can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary origins of language. The experimental approaches I discuss use abnormal song and atypical linguistic input to study the processes of individual learning, social interaction, and cultural transmission. Atypical input places increased learning and communicative pressure on learners, so exploring how they respond to this type of input provides a particularly clear picture of the biases and constraints at work during learning and use. Furthermore, simulating the cultural transmission of these unnatural communication systems in the laboratory informs us about how learning and social biases influence the structure of communication systems in the long run. Findings based on these methods suggest fundamental similarities in the basic social–cognitive mechanisms underlying vocal learning in birds and humans, and continuing research promises insights into the uniquely human mechanisms and into how human cognition and social behavior interact, and ultimately impact on the evolution of language.

Confucian Ritual and Sacred Kingship: Why the Emperors Did not Rule Japan

AbstractThis article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured “as if” realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in early Japan, and by contrast in Tang China. I reexamine a number of well-known primary sources of early Japanese history in comparison with parallel Chinese sources of the Tang dynasty. Placing that comparison within the context of new developments in the historiography of China, Korea, and Japan, I argue that Confucianism's comparatively weak ritual positioning in Japan disabled its capacity to legitimate imperial rule there. The early Japanese state thus lacked one of the primary ritual tools employed in other parts of premodern East Asia to legitimate the power of new emperors and kings. I thus unpack one component in a wider process of East Asian cultural reproduction, which in the case of Japan contributed to the emergence of a state ultimately not ruled through imperial institutions or the emperor for most of its premodern history. The bifurcation of ritual and political power in sacred kingship, a seemingly geographically and temporally widespread phenomenon currently studied in various global histories, is explained in this article in terms of complex processes of cultural reproduction and transmission.

Identity-Based Organizations

A single club model describes the collective production of both personal and social identity. Personal identity, how one perceives oneself, is formed through a process of cultural transmission. Social identity, how one is perceived by others, takes the form of collective reputation. Our model of identity-based organizations incorporates into the economics of identity insights from the economics of religion and cultural transmission. The identities that develop tend to be oppositional. Organizations devoted to more extreme identities are able to support higher levels of participation and collective action.

The Cultural Transmission of Environmental Values: A Comparative Approach

This paper investigates the hypothesis that individual environmental attitudes are partly determined by a cultural component. Our analysis tackles this issue both theoretically and empirically. In the theoretical section of the paper, we describe a model of intergenerational transmission of cultural traits. In the empirical section, we use survey data from the European Values Study, to empirically identify this cultural component in environmental attitudes. We use a comparative approach that exploits variations associated with European migration flows. Our findings suggest that culture has a persistent and statistically significant impact on the environmental values of migrants: differences in environmental attitudes among migrants can be traced back to social values that persist in their countries of origin. We also show that environmental attitudes are resilient to incentives derived from the external environment: environmental conditions migrants have been exposed to in their countries of origin do not have a significant impact on their preferences when living in the host country. Our empirical findings are robust to a number of alternative assumptions and present interesting dimensions of heterogeneity concerning the cultural transmission process. These results imply that in the presence of multiple environmental problems that require collective action, comprehending the driving forces behind the formation of an environmental culture is critical to effective policy formation.

Reconsidering Technological Transmission: The Introduction of the Potter’s Wheel at Ayia Irini, Kea, Greece

This article examines processes of cultural and technological transmission by focusing on the effects of the introduction of the potter’s wheel. Since distinct production choices are tied to both micro- and macroscale processes that drive change in material culture, a study of such choices provides insight into processes of acculturation, technological transmission, and local social dynamics. The authors therefore examined macroscopically a large corpus of complete vessels from Ayia Irini, Kea, for evidence of the manufacturing technique(s) used in the production process. These locally produced pots, dating to the period spanning the Middle and Late Bronze Age in the Aegean (ca. 1900–1400 B.C.E.), when Ayia Irini acted as a hub of interregional exchange, attest to the adoption of the wheel by the local potters, presumably through contact with Cretan communities of practice who were already using this technique. Evidence for connections between local, Cretan, and Cycladic communities of practice is presented, and the reasons driving the process of innovation are considered. The results of this study confirm some established narratives about the introduction of the wheel but at the same time reveal significant differences between Aegean communities in their adoption of this new technology. A free, downloadable appendix can be found under this article’s abstract on AJA Online.

Evolving views on the Pleistocene colonization of North America

Abstract Current understanding of the processes involved in the Late Pleistocene human settlement of North America has benefited from the application of theoretical perspectives derived from evolutionary ecology, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary paradigms. These perspectives have increased and expanded our grasp of critical issues including demography and migration strategies; foraging, settlement mobility, and technological strategies; processes of social learning and cultural transmission; mobility and interaction networks; and the involvement of symbolism and prestige in social cohesion. The rapid spread of the Clovis cultural phenomenon across the entire continent has long fascinated archaeologists because of its speed, geographic extent, association with big-game hunting, and impressive degree of technological knowledge and skill. Renewed investigation of this phenomenon points toward the critical role of certain social factors behind its success. In particular, prestige-seeking and symbolic representation of inter-group relationships are increasingly viewed as driving forces in explaining this unique colonization event.

Challenges of preserving indigenous ecological knowledge through intergenerational transfer to youth

Indigenous communities have acquired significant ecological knowledge which is now gaining global recognition. This makes its preservation for the benefit of society essential. Preservation of indigenous knowledge has been pursued through cultural transmission processes which resulted in intergenerational knowledge transfer to youth. Using data from research conducted in two indigenous communities in Ghana, this paper examines key cultural transmission processes including socio-cultural functions that enabled young persons to interact with and thereby acquire ecological knowledge from elders and other knowledgeable persons. It identifies constraining variables such as limited youth focus on, and inadequate hands-on involvement in, traditional aspects of these functions as critical factors that might negatively affect long-term, sustainable use of acquired knowledge. The paper then examines possibilities of using prominent community members as role models for young persons and other measures for strengthening community interactive processes through which intergenerational knowledge transfer could be sustained.

A generative inference framework for analysing patterns of cultural change in sparse population data with evidence for fashion trends in LBK culture.

Cultural change can be quantified by temporal changes in frequency of different cultural artefacts and it is a central question to identify what underlying cultural transmission processes could have caused the observed frequency changes. Observed changes, however, often describe the dynamics in samples of the population of artefacts, whereas transmission processes act on the whole population. Here we develop a modelling framework aimed at addressing this inference problem. To do so, we firstly generate population structures from which the observed sample could have been drawn randomly and then determine theoretical samples at a later time t2 produced under the assumption that changes in frequencies are caused by a specific transmission process. Thereby we also account for the potential effect of time-averaging processes in the generation of the observed sample. Subsequent statistical comparisons (e.g. using Bayesian inference) of the theoretical and observed samples at t2 can establish which processes could have produced the observed frequency data. In this way, we infer underlying transmission processes directly from available data without any equilibrium assumption. We apply this framework to a dataset describing pottery from settlements of some of the first farmers in Europe (the LBK culture) and conclude that the observed frequency dynamic of different types of decorated pottery is consistent with age-dependent selection, a preference for 'young' pottery types which is potentially indicative of fashion trends.

Primate archaeology reveals cultural transmission in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus).

Recovering evidence of past human activities enables us to recreate behaviour where direct observations are missing. Here, we apply archaeological methods to further investigate cultural transmission processes in percussive tool use among neighbouring chimpanzee communities in the Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Differences in the selection of nut-cracking tools between neighbouring groups are maintained over time, despite frequent female transfer, which leads to persistent cultural diversity between chimpanzee groups. Through the recovery of used tools in the suggested natal territory of immigrants, we have been able to reconstruct the tool material selection of females prior to migration. In combination with direct observations of tool selection of local residents and immigrants after migration, we uncovered temporal changes in tool selection for immigrating females. After controlling for ecological differences between territories of immigrants and residents our data suggest that immigrants abandoned their previous tool preference and adopted the pattern of their new community, despite previous personal proficiency of the same foraging task. Our study adds to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of conformist tendencies in animals.

Production bias in cultural evolution: An examination of cubic dice variation in experimental and archaeological contexts

Similar artifact function and conformism to social norms are two models commonly proposed to explain why ancient people shared a particular form of material culture. We propose an additional model for explaining such similarity, production bias, which focuses on interactions between raw materials and the production of material culture. By way of modern replication experiments and a survey of ancient examples, we use dice to exemplify production bias and discuss how it can be recognized in the archaeological record. Although there are 15 possible configurations for cubic dice, all of equal function, only three are common in the archaeological record. Replication experiments show that one is the result of production bias, and is differentially produced by novice dice-makers. The other two are the byproduct of conformist cultural transmission processes. A similar result holds for dot patterns, or how dots are placed with respect to one another to represent a particular number.

A cultural model of private provision and the environment

This paper analyses an overlapping generations model of environmental externalities and capital accumulation where private contributions to environmental quality are motivated by a desire to socialize others into environmental attitudes. In this framework, the formation of environmental preferences is the result of a cultural transmission process depending on the extent of private contributions. In the short run, we show that three equilibria may arise: a first one where all green agents contribute to the environment, a second one where nobody contributes to the environment and a third interior one. We show that the capital-accumulation process and the change in preferences that occur in this economy lead the interior equilibrium to be selected, in which some, but not all, green agents contribute to the environment. The model thus provides an economic rationale for the gap between the number of people who care about the environment and the number who adopt pro-environmental behaviours. We also show that the fraction of contributors rises with capital, so that we explain the negative relationship between this gap and country income. Last, we show that this gap is particularly detrimental for welfare, and analyse the impact of a number of public policies.

Multilingual Knowledge Transmission of International Chinese Language Learners in China

The concept of knowledge transfer and transmission has been researched primarily in the context of the management of multinational organisations for the past few decades. However, only in recent years has this interest stretched beyond the business world into higher education management and innovation, as well as learning and teaching in universities. Little of this research has been directed to language learners, who constantly engage in the process of transmitting the multilingual and multicultural knowledge that is deeply embedded in their native and newly acquired languages and cultures. This study investigates knowledge creation, dissemination, and sharing in language education by a group of international learners studying the Chinese language at a university in China. By drawing on the scholarly literature around business knowledge management and that of language and cultural studies, this paper explores the impact of cultural differences in language learning and the factors that affect the process of linguistic and cultural knowledge transmission and sharing in a targeted learning context. The findings contribute to the learning, teaching, and research of the Chinese language as well as other languages in the context of international education. The implications for educational policy-making for language educators and institution management personnel are highlighted within the landscape of a knowledge economy.