Study Of Cultural Transmission Research Articles

Toys as Teachers: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Object Use and Enskillment in Hunter–Gatherer Societies

Studies of cultural transmission—whether approached by archaeological or ethnographic means—have made great strides in identifying formal teaching and learning arrangements, which in turn can be closely aligned with models of social learning. While novices and apprentices are often in focus in such studies, younger children and their engagement with material culture have received less attention. Against the backdrop of a cross-cultural database of ethnographically documented object use and play in 54 globally distributed foraging communities, we here discuss the ways in which children make and use tools and toys. We provide a cross-cultural inventory of objects made for and by hunter–gatherer children and adolescents. We find that child and adolescent objects are linked to adult material culture, albeit not exclusively so. Toys and tools were primarily handled outside of explicit pedagogical contexts, and there is little evidence for formalised apprenticeships. Our data suggests that children’s self-directed interactions with objects, especially during play, has a critical role in early-age enskillment. Placed within a niche construction framework, we combine ethnographic perspectives on object play with archaeological evidence for play objects to offer an improved cross-cultural frame of reference for how social learning varies across early human life history and what role material culture may play in this process. While our analysis improves the systematic understanding of the role and relevance of play objects among hunter–gatherer societies, we also make the case for more detailed studies of play objects in the context of ethnographic, archival and archaeological cultural transmission research.

The role of schools as an opportunity for transmission of local knowledge about useful Restinga plants: experiences in southeastern Brazil

BackgroundThe study of cultural transmission can help identify processes that influence knowledge systems dynamics and evolution, especially during childhood and youth, which are fundamental phases in acquiring survival skills. In this sense, we use the knowledge about useful restinga plants (Brazilian coastal vegetation) as an analytical model to describe, compare, and analyze cultural transmission during youth, while factoring in origin, in the Cabo Frio region, southeastern Brazil. We tested (1) whether transmission of knowledge is conservative, (2) whether immigration events define the transmission modes, (3) whether teaching is the most important social transmission cognitive process, and (4) which type of stimulus/context is most important for the knowledge transmission process.MethodsQuestionnaires and free listings were applied to 150 high school students aged between 15 and 20 to obtain information about socioeconomic characteristics, useful plant knowledge, and cultural transmission. We analyzed the distribution of knowledge according to the informant’s origin and evaluated the models, processes, and context with which this information was transmitted. The chi-square test was used to determine the association between origin, plant knowledge, and transmission as well as to reveal the most important models, modes, and processes during youth.ResultsInformants provided 299 plant citations ( overline{x} = 1.75; s = 1.73) related to 37 species. The categories of the most cited uses were edible (93) and medicinal (32). Statistical results showed that origin did not influence knowledge distribution and transmission. In addition, although the most relevant mode was the conservative (vertical) one, the one-to-many diffuse mode (teacher) was highlighted. The new environmental context for immigrants did not influence transmission, the main transmission process was teaching, and the learning contexts were predominantly school-related.ConclusionPlant knowledge in youth was related to local edible and medicinal plants, indicating adaptive knowledge linked to material demands for survival. While the initial models for cultural transmission are family (vertical), during the development phase of juveniles, other actors become models (one-to-many). In addition, the nature of the information (survival demand) and age are more relevant to cultural transmission than the socio-environmental context.

МЕЖДУ ПАМЯТЬЮ И УЛИЦЕЙ: БУКВАРЬ В РУССКОЙ ЭМИГРАЦИИ КАК ЛИТЕРАТУРА (НЕ)ВОЗВРАТА

In the article the Russian textbooks for primary education, compiled and published by Russian refugees and minorities outside Russia in Germany, Estonia and Poland in the 1920s – 1930s were analyzed. The proposed solutions to define emigre teachers their places in the educational context of the host countries have been considered. We reconstruct the wide spectrum of such educational projects from the textbook as a protected place for emigre heritage culture, taken from the homeland, to the textbook, in varying degrees trying to establish a dialogue with the majority population surrounding Russian-speaking minority. The results could be used in the historical reconstructions of the culture of Russian emigration of the first wave and at the same time can be taken into account in the study of cultural transmission within various other emigrant and minority communities.

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.

Contingency and Faithfulness: Francis Alÿs and the (Re)Presentation of St. Fabiola

‭As a European emigrant to (and now longtime resident of) Mexico City, contemporary artist Francis Alÿs is deeply sensitive to the ways that cultural systems shape and organize human lives. Over two decades, his work has become deftly efficient at instigating subtle social interferences that highlight and reconsider these organizing systems. Although much has been written about the social and political force of these interferences, the literature on Alÿs’s work has generally ignored the significant religious content and allusions recurring throughout his artistic practice. This essay is a critical meditation on the religious implications of his Fabiola project, a collection of more than 370 handmade copies of a lost nineteenth-century painting of a fourth-century Christian saint named Fabiola. By paying special attention to the ways that these “handmade readymades” ennoble the voices of others and revise the possible meanings of visual repetition (particularly in the context of mechanical mass-reproduction), this essay argues that Alÿs’s Fabiola is not only a profound study of cultural transmission but one that is particularly resonant with the Christianity that formed St. Fabiola’s own life and the forms by which she has been remembered.‬

Folk concepts of mental disorders among Chinese‐Australian patients and their caregivers

This paper reports a study of (a) popular conceptions of mental illness throughout history, (b) how current social and cultural knowledge about mental illness influences Chinese-Australian patients' and caregivers' understanding of mental illness and the consequences of this for explaining and labelling patients' problems. According to traditional Chinese cultural knowledge about health and illness, Chinese people believe that psychotic illness is the only type of mental illness, and that non-psychotic illness is a physical illness. Regarding patients' problems as not being due to mental illness may result in delaying use of Western mental health services. Data collection took place in 2001. Twenty-eight Chinese-Australian patients with mental illness and their caregivers were interviewed at home, drawing on Kleinman's explanatory model and studies of cultural transmission. Interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed, and analysed for plots and themes. Chinese-Australians combined traditional knowledge with Western medical knowledge to develop their own labels for various kinds of mental disorders, including 'mental illness', 'physical illness', 'normal problems of living' and 'psychological problems'. As they learnt more about Western conceptions of psychology and psychiatry, their understanding of some disorders changed. What was previously ascribed to non-mental disorders was often re-labelled as 'mental illness' or 'psychological problems'. Educational programmes aimed at introducing Chinese immigrants to counselling and other psychiatric services could be made more effective if designers gave greater consideration to Chinese understanding of mental illness.

Evolutionism and North America's archaeological record

The archaeological record of North America has long been a laboratory for evolutionary studies. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, culture historians would regularly turn to evolutionism as a source of archaeological explanations. Sometimes the explanations were broadly Darwinian in nature, with reference to processes such as selection and genetic transmission, and other times they were based more on the evolutionism of the classic nineteenth-century culture theorists. The archaeological literature of the closing decades of the twentieth century and beyond suggests a heightened interest in employing Darwinian theory. No one, however, has suggested that Darwinism can solve all of archaeology's problems. Rather, advocates have pointed out that it might solve some of archaeology's historical – read evolutionary – problems. Despite the interest shown thus far, evolutionary archaeology needs to move beyond a narrow reading of Darwinism and become a more inclusive approach. Examples from North America underscore the point that studies of cultural transmission and human behavior are important components of an evolutionary archaeology.

Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation

I N the middle decades of the seventeenth century, roughly i645 to I 67 5, a distinguishable group of immigrant leaders arrived in Virginia, where they founded families whose names would become identified with the pre-Revolutionary gentry. The careers of these men provide a unique perspective into the process of cultural transmission and innovation in the Anglo-American world, for their stories involve them in cultural interaction on three fronts: with their English backgrounds, with conditions they encountered in the colony, and with their legacy to subsequent generations of gentry families. Through them we can follow cultural evolution over space-from England to Virginia-and over time-from charter settlers to mid-century immigrant leaders and from the latter to their Virginia-born sons.1

A study of cultural transmission in Taiwan

Our study of cultural transmission in Taiwan is based on a survey of 1000 students, their families, and friends, for characters ranging from religion to various customs and beliefs, as well as entertainment and hygienic habits. The effects of father, mother, and an older sib on a propositus are tested by an additive model of transmission, using a novel statistical procedure, and compared with correlations with friends. For many traits there exist significant influences; older sibs are almost as important as father and mother, with effects differing somewhat with their sex. Formulas for recurrences and equilibrium frequency of a cultural character for which father, mother, and sib are active in transmission are given in the appendices along with formulas for estimation of their effects from real data.

Theory in the Study of Cultural Transmission

The amount of research work being conducted on the process of cultural transmission has led to an active interest in theories of the process by which individuals learn to be members of their culture. Most research work conducted today is generated by some theoretical concern, and should ultimately be useful for clarifying those concerns. My task was to take stock of the theories of cultural transmission, but that stock taking indicates that there are no theories of the process of cultural transmission, and that there are only two theories con­ cerned with that portion of the total process that occurs in social interaction. My feeling is that we need theories, true theories, in order to understand that which draws our curiosity, in order to be in a position to take action in the process of cultural transmission, and, until we do understand, we need theories to communicate our thoughts, our research findings, and our conclusions. Since we need theory but do not have one, I will present a review of where we are. In this review I shall define a theory and distinguish it from theory work. I shall present theory work which conceptualizes the process of cultural trans­ mission as involving two component processes, and present theory work on those two component processes. The theory work will be used as the best advice available for conceptualizing the process of cultural transmission. I shall then compare two theories of the interactive aspect of cultural transmission to a synthetic conceptual framework. In this review I confine myself to work which is addressed to the process of cultural transmission. I will not consider reports of empirical research which may contain theoretical propositions, either explicitly or implicitly. I will not consider theories of schooling, nor shall I attempt to make explicit propositions which are implied in many review articles.