Process Of Cultural Transmission Research Articles

The Travelling Folktales of the Basil Girl’s Wiles

This article sheds light on the translation, evolution, transformation, and circulation of "The Merchant's Daughter," a highly significant piece of Moroccan folklore, tracing its journey within Morocco and globally. Central to our analysis is the tale's origins, which, as theorized by Hasna Lebbady, trace back to Andalus and were carried across the world by Muslims exiled from Spain. This journey encompasses varied landscapes and geographies, across three continents, North Africa, Europe, and South America, illustrating the tale's adaptability and enduring relevance. A focal point of exploration is the tale's nuanced portrayal of women's wit as a tool to navigate and subvert the constraints of patriarchy and authoritarian power structures within their societies. By compiling and comparing variations of the tale from different regions, this study demonstrates the diverse ways in which the narrative has been refashioned to reflect local cultures, societal norms, and resistance strategies. Through the lens of "The Merchant's Daughter," we contend that cultures are not monolithic entities bred in isolation but are instead the result of centuries-long encounters and exchanges. By engaging with this folktale's transnational circulation and thematic richness, our study contributes to a broader understanding of how folktales cross borders, circulate, and adapt as well as the dynamic processes of cultural transmission and adaptation. It underscores the role of storytelling in preserving cultural identity, fostering resilience, and navigating the complexities of global and local intersections.

The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network.

The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers. This study is being conducted in 39 distinct cultural-religious groups (to date), spanning 17 countries and 13 languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities, and present the final, English-language study materials for 6 of the 39 cultural-religious groups who are currently being recruited for this study: Protestant Americans, Catholic Americans, American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

Cultural Transmission of Dazu Vocal Music in Chongqing

Dazu vocal music, a unique and cherished intangible cultural heritage, serves as the focal point of this research conducted in Chongqing, China. The study’s objective is to investigate the contribution of cultural transmission of Dazu vocal music in Chongqing through education and literacy. The research site, Dazu City, is the epicenter of this cultural treasure, encompassing various educational institutions from primary to tertiary levels that engage with this art form. Two key informants, comprising experienced instructors and cultural representatives, offer valuable insights into the educational initiatives and literacy practices supporting Dazu vocal music. Research tools, including observation and interview forms, are employed for data collection, culminating in a detailed analysis of the cultural transmission process. The study’s results underscore education’s pivotal role in preserving Dazu vocal music, fostering hands-on learning, and promoting cultural documentation, with literacy facilitating accessibility beyond oral traditions. These efforts positively impact the local community by enhancing cultural identity and pride. Despite challenges such as an aging practitioner population and shifting cultural dynamics, collaboration among stakeholders emerges as a promising strategy for ensuring the tradition’s continuity. In conclusion, this research highlights the importance of education and literacy in preserving intangible cultural heritage, offering insights applicable to similar endeavors worldwide.

Research on Yulin Historical and Cultural Neighborhoods under the Threshold of Ecological Translation Studies and its Countermeasures for Public Notice Translation

With the continuous development of globalization, the importance of translation, as an important means of cultural exchange, is becoming more and more prominent. Ecological Translation Studies provides a new perspective to understand and practice translation activities. As an important cultural heritage in northern China, the translation of public notices in Yulin Historical and Cultural Neighborhood is not only a task of language conversion, but also a process of cultural transmission and adaptation. The purpose of this paper is to explore how to effectively deal with the translation problems in this specific cultural environment under the framework of ecological translation studies, and to propose practical translation countermeasures.

Abrupt grammatical reorganization of an emergent sign language

Abstract This study traces the development of discrete, combinatorial structure in Zinacantec Family Homesign (‘Z Sign’), a sign language developed since the 1970s by several deaf siblings in Mexico (Haviland 2020b), focusing on the expression of motion. The results reveal that the first signer, who generated a homesign system without access to language models, represents motion events holistically. Later-born signers, who acquired this homesign system from infancy, distribute the components of motion events over sequences of discrete signs. Furthermore, later-born signers exhibit greater regularity of form-meaning mappings and increased articulatory efficiency. Importantly, these changes occur abruptly between the first- and second-born signers, rather than incrementally across signers. This study extends previous findings for Nicaraguan Sign Language (Senghas et al. 2004) to a social group of a much smaller scale, suggesting that the parallel processes of cultural transmission and language acquisition drive language emergence, regardless of community size.

The Ambivalent Translator: Towards a History of Psychoanalytic Translations

An influential strand within modern translation studies has drawn a portrait of the translator as a deeply ambivalent figure, charged with the challenging task of preserving the foreign of the original work within the new version, and thus as inevitably torn between two languages and cultures. The case of the first English translations of Freud's work, undertaken by Abraham Arden Brill, is used here to demonstrate that a detailed historical and philological analysis of textual practices can help us situate the figure of the ambivalent translator in its proper context, namely within a historical model of translation. Retracing this model and its ramifications also has larger implications for an approach that should allow us to understand the relational, affective and institutional bonds connecting authors, translators and readers in global processes of cultural transmission of the human sciences.

The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission.

Empirical work has shown that human cultural transmission can be heavily influenced by population age structure. We aim to explore the role of such age structure in shaping the cultural composition of a population when cultural transmission occurs in an unbiased way. In particular, we are interested in understanding the effect induced by the interplay between age structure and the cultural transmission process by allowing cultural transmission from individuals within a limited age range only. To this end we develop an age-structured cultural transmission model and find that age-structured and non age-structured populations evolving through unbiased transmission possess very similar cultural compositions (at a single point in time) at the population and sample level if the copy pool consists of a sufficiently large fraction of the population. If, however, an age constraint-a structural constraint restricting the pool of potential role models to individuals of a limited age range- exists, the cultural compositions of age-structured and non age-structured population show stark differences. This may have drastic consequences for our ability to correctly analyse cultural data sets. Rejections of tests of neutrality, blind to age structure and, importantly, the interaction between age structure and cultural transmission, are only indicative of biased transmission if it is known a priori that there are no or only weak age constraints acting on the pool of role models. As this knowledge is rarely available for specific empirical case studies we develop a generative inference approach based on our age-structured cultural transmission model and machine learning techniques. We show that in some circumstances it is possible to simultaneously infer the characteristics of the age structure, the nature of the transmission process, and the interplay between them from observed samples of cultural variants. Our results also point to hard limits on inference from population-level data at a single point in time, regardless of the approach used.

Langka Lipu: Cultural Heritage and Identity of the Banggai Indigenous People

This research aims to understand the philosophy of movements and the values embodied in Langka Lipu and to explore how this martial art has managed to survive. This research uses an ethnographic analysis. Ethnographic analysis is an approach that begins with field facts, analyzes them based on cultural theories and relevant arguments to explore the cultural situation of the community, and ultimately yields a conclusion. The results show that Langka Lipu, as a cultural heritage of the Banggai tribe, is more than just a martial arts practice; it is a profound philosophical expression. Religious values are integrated into every aspect of Langka Lipu, making it a means for spiritual and personal development. The educational values transmitted through the teacher-student relationship emphasize character formation and good social values. The cultural transmission process of Langka Lipu, demonstrates a structured strategy to preserve and disseminate this martial art. Thus, Langka Lipu is successfully preserved as a valuable cultural heritage and a crucial pillar of the Banggai indigenous people’s identity. Therefore, it is recommended that practitioners continue to explore and practice the religious and educational values contained in Langka Lipu to enrich and deepen the spiritual and social meanings of this cultural heritage. The Department of Tourism and Culture of Banggai Laut Regency is expected to increase support and recognition for Langka Lipu by integrating it into cultural development and tourism programs aimed at promoting and preserving the original cultural heritage of the Banggai tribe. For the Banggai indigenous people, it is crucial to continue actively participating in the cultural transmission process of Langka Lipu, whether through targeting potential teenagers, socializing values and philosophy, conducting regular training, or in efforts to increase the number of school branches, thus ensuring that the core values and essence of Langka Lipu continue to live and thrive within the community.

Religion and Cultural Mediations: Perspectives from Contemporary Portuguese Society

The article reviews the concept of “cultural religion”, pursuing its different modulations. The limits of the idea oscillate between its interpretation as a form of obsolescence of religion in secularized societies and the possibility that it is a specific modality of religious identification. However, this theoretical construct does not sufficiently incorporate a focus on the processes of cultural transmission in complex societies. From the notion of “cultural mediation (medium)”, an observation framework of contemporary Portuguese society is attempted in order to identify the structuring dimensions that facilitate the mobilization of religious memory in different logics of action.

School of Rocks: a Transmission Time Investment Model for Pleistocene Lithic Technology

We propose a transmission time investment model for integrating the tenets of human behavioral ecology and cultural evolutionary theory to investigate agency and optimality in the social transmission of lithic technologies. While the cultural transmission process is often overlooked in discussions of optimality, we view it as a critical area for the application of adaptive reasoning to further understand the mechanisms responsible for change in lithic technologies. The proposed model modifies a technological intensification model based on the marginal value theorem (Bettinger et al. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33(4), 538–545, 2006; Mohlenhoff and Codding Evolutionary Anthropology, 26(5), 218–227, 2017) to explore how transmissibility may have affected the complexity of socially transmitted lithic production systems during the Pleistocene. This transmission investment model is contrasted with a passive demographic model derived from traditional explanations for changes in lithic technologies. To highlight how optimal considerations of transmissibility may have affected the long-term evolution of lithic technologies, we apply this model to three Pleistocene archaeological case studies investigating increases and decreases in lithic technological complexity. We propose that technological changes in each of these case studies is consistent with the predictions of the model, suggesting that time management strategies may have played a role in the long-term evolution of Pleistocene technologies. It is unlikely that transmission constraints alone were wholly responsible for the observed patterns, and future research should refine the measures of time availability and cost used here, as well as explore the interplay between transmission investment and other optimizing and social constraints.

How Cultural Transmission Through Objects Impacts Inferences About Cultural Evolution

The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of social learning were inferred from the changing frequencies of artefacts. Here, we employ a simulation model to review and examine under-discussed assumptions shared by many of these applications on the nature of what constitutes the ‘population’ under study. We specifically ask (1) whether cultural transmission via ‘objects’ (i.e. public manifestations of cultural traits) generates distinct patterns from those expected from direct transmission between individuals and (2) whether basing inference on the frequency of objects rather than on the frequency of mental representations underlying the production of those objects may lead to biased interpretations. Our results show that the rate at which ideational cultural traits are embedded in objects, and shared as such, has a measurable impact on how we infer cultural transmission processes when analysing frequency-based archaeological data. At the same time, when cultural transmission is entirely mediated by the material representation of ideas, we argue that copying error should be interpreted as a two-step process which may occur in either one or both of embedding information in objects and retrieving it from them.

Translation of Culture-loaded Words from the Perspective of Domestication and Foreignization

Translation is a process of communication and cultural transmission across languages. Huge differences in cultural backgrounds make the phenomenon of national languages show a certain absolute incommensurability, during this process, cultural loaded words also arise. Based on this, people with different cultural backgrounds will inevitably encounter emotional and understanding barriers in communication; the existence of objective differences also brings about the inevitability of the existence of translation. Translators should consider the translation orientation of domestication and foreignization to express the inherent emotion carried by cultural loaded words, which is of guiding significance for the correct choice of words and cultural understanding. This paper mainly discusses the translation of cultural loaded words under the perspective of domestication and foreignization, and gives examples of how Chinese cultural loaded words follow the law of translation when translating into English, striving to find the best balance between domestication and foreignization, thereby promoting effective cultural exchange and transmission.

The cultural evolution of teaching.

Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct - a form of 'natural cognition' centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits characteristics of a cognitive gadget. Children learn to teach by participating in teaching interactions with socialising agents, which shape their own teaching practices. This process hijacks psychological mechanisms involved in prosociality and a range of domain-general cognitive abilities, such as reinforcement learning and executive function, but not a suite of cognitive adaptations specifically for teaching. Four lines of evidence converge on this hypothesis. The first, based on psychological experiments in industrialised societies, indicates that domain-general cognitive processes are important for teaching. The second and third lines, based on naturalistic and experimental research in small-scale societies, indicate marked cross-cultural variation in mature teaching practice and in the ontogeny of teaching among children. The fourth line indicates that teaching has been subject to cumulative cultural evolution, i.e. the gradual accumulation of functional changes across generations.

The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers

Human history has been shaped by global dispersals of technologies, although understanding of what enabled these processes is limited. Here, we explore the behavioural mechanisms that led to the emergence of pottery among hunter-gatherer communities in Europe during the mid-Holocene. Through radiocarbon dating, we propose this dispersal occurred at a far faster rate than previously thought. Chemical characterization of organic residues shows that European hunter-gatherer pottery had a function structured around regional culinary practices rather than environmental factors. Analysis of the forms, decoration and technological choices suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission. We demonstrate a correlation between the physical properties of pots and how they were used, reflecting social traditions inherited by successive generations of hunter-gatherers. Taken together the evidence supports kinship-driven, super-regional communication networks that existed long before other major innovations such as agriculture, writing, urbanism or metallurgy.

Editorial: Reflections on human mobility in pandemic and post-pandemic times

Many of the theories on territorial development have been built in the last fifty years around the concept of human mobility, understood as the mobility at the regional, national, and international level of people, goods, economic factors, financial flows, and cultural transmission processes. However, the outbreak of the pandemic forces to review these assumptions, as well as the very essence of human (im)mobility. During the pandemic, on all the geographical scales, changes in behavioural patterns regarding coexistence, leisure, housing, work, and services were recorded and the resilient responses to the socio-health actions gained ground. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the disruptions caused by the pandemic to human mobility, and on the modifications and continuities that post-pandemic times have brought. The key questions revolve around what has changed and what remains, i.e., what role human mobility will continue to play in post-pandemic times.

Compositionality in Different Modalities: A View from Usage-Based Linguistics

AbstractThe field of linguistics concerns itself with understanding the human capacity for language. Compositionality is a key notion in this research tradition. Compositionality refers to the notion that the meaning of a complex linguistic unit is a function of the meanings of its constituent parts. However, the question as to whether compositionality is a defining feature of human language is a matter of debate: usage-based and constructionist approaches emphasize the pervasive role of idiomaticity in language, and argue that strict compositionality is the exception rather than the rule. We review the major discussion points on compositionality from a usage-based point of view, taking both spoken and signed languages into account. In addition, we discuss theories that aim at accounting for the emergence of compositional language through processes of cultural transmission as well as the debate of whether animal communication systems exhibit compositionality. We argue for a view that emphasizes the analyzability of complex linguistic units, providing a template for accounting for the multimodal nature of human language.

The importance of population heterogeneities in detecting social learning as the foundation of animal cultural transmission.

High levels of within-population behavioural variation can have drastic demographic consequences, thus changing the evolutionary fate of populations. A major source of within-population heterogeneity is personality. Nonetheless, it is still relatively rarely accounted for in social learning studies that constitute the most basic process of cultural transmission. Here, we performed in female mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) a social learning experiment in the context of mate choice, a situation called mate copying (MC), and for which there is strong evidence that it can lead to the emergence of persistent traditions of preferring a given male phenotype. When accounting for the global tendency of females to prefer larger males but ignoring differences in personality, we detected no evidence for MC. However, when accounting for the bold–shy dichotomy, we found that bold females did not show any evidence for MC, while shy females showed significant amounts of MC. This illustrates how the presence of variation in personality can hamper our capacity to detect MC. We conclude that MC may be more widespread than we thought because many studies ignored the presence of within-population heterogeneities.

Between tradition and modernity: the relationship among healers and medicinal plants in an urban center in southern Brazil

Background: Blessing (or benzedura) is a traditional health practice present in both rural and urban areas of Brazil. Several ethnobotanical studies demonstrate that practitioners have a vast knowledge of medicinal plants; however, it is still necessary to expand research to include the importance of the practice and the ways knowledge is transmitted when facing modernity. Thus, this study was conducted in an urban region of Florianopolis (SC) where we sought to investigate the diseases treated by blessings, the plants used in this practice, and the process of cultural transmission. Methods: We conducted interviews with eleven healers from the eastern region of Florianopolis. Information was collected through semi-structured protocols with a free list of plants, and the botanical collection and identification of mentioned plants. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: A total of 34 types of diseases and ailments that are treated through blessings were cited. For the treatment and cure of these ailments, the use of 24 species of medicinal plants was recorded, the most cited were Ruta graveolens (6 citations), Rosmarinus officinalis (3) and Petiveria alliacea (3). In terms of knowledge transmission, most respondents (46%) learned in childhood, 36% learned in adulthood through course, and 18% learned in adolescence. During the interviews, we noticed that new ways of transmitting knowledge are emerging, where courses and mobile applications are gaining importance. Conclusions: The practice of blessing continues to play an important role in the health of communities in the eastern region of Santa Catarina Island, and it is undergoing modernizing adaptations. It is important that future studies investigate the effect of technologies on this practice and the possible implications for the resilience or vulnerability of these health systems. Keywords: Blessings, ethnobotany, health practices, local ecological knowledge, medicinal plants.

‘상자 속 봉인된 영웅’의 상징적 의미 - 헤이룽강 연안 민족 영웅 서사와 한국 서사 무가의 모티프 비교

For Korean mythology and epic poetry had adopted Confucian and Buddhist elements to a great degree during the process of cultural transmission, oftentimes mythical motifs appear in the lore customarily in the absence of their original symbolisms. Such a phenomenon is well exemplified by ‘Musoesŏlk

Environmental influences on human innovation and behavioural diversity in southern Africa 92-80 thousand years ago.

Africa's Middle Stone Age preserves sporadic evidence for novel behaviours among early modern humans, prompting a range of questions about the influence of social and environmental factors on patterns of human behavioural evolution. Here we document a suite of novel adaptations dating approximately 92-80 thousand years before the present at the archaeological site Varsche Rivier 003 (VR003), located in southern Africa's arid Succulent Karoo biome. Distinctive innovations include the production of ostrich eggshell artefacts, long-distance transportation of marine molluscs and systematic use of heat shatter in stone tool production, none of which occur in coeval assemblages at sites in more humid, well-studied regions immediately to the south. The appearance of these novelties at VR003 corresponds with a period of reduced regional wind strength and enhanced summer rainfall, and all of them disappear with increasing winter rainfall dominance after 80 thousand years before the present, following which a pattern of technological similarity emerges at sites throughout the broader region. The results indicate complex and environmentally contingent processes of innovation and cultural transmission in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age.