THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE

In his thought‐provoking book, Alex Mesoudi argues for an evolutionary, unifying framework for the social sciences, which is based on the principles of Darwinian theory. Mesoudi maintains that cultural change can be illuminated by using the genotype‐phenotype distinction, and that it is sufficiently similar to biological change to warrant a theory of culture‐change based on evolutionary models. He describes examples of cultural microevolution, within‐population changes, and the biologically inspired population genetics models used to study them. He also shows that some aspects of large‐scale (macro‐evolutionary) cultural transformation can be studied by using ecological models and phylogenetic comparative techniques. We argue that although Mesoudi's evolution‐based perspective offers many useful insights, his ambition—the unification of the social sciences within a Darwinian framework through the use of the methods and models he describes—suffers from a major theoretical limitation. His reductive approach leads to overlooking culture as a system with emergent processes and features. Mesoudi therefore does not engage with any of the central past and present theories in sociology and anthropology for which the systems view of culture is central, and he does not analyze the emergent, high‐level properties of human cultural‐social systems. We suggest that a systems perspective, using some analogies and metaphors from developmental biology, can complement the evolutionary approach and is more in tune with a systems view of society. Such an approach, which stresses feedback and self‐sustaining interactions within social networks, and engages with the insights of sociological and anthropological theories, can contribute to the understanding of cultural systems by highlighting the evolution of processes of social cohesion, and by making use of the mathematical approaches of complexity theory.     

Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.     

Assessing Disciplinary Integration in New Anthropological Studies of Music

Four recent books offer an opportunity to review new and continuing approaches to the study of music, not as an artistic product, but as an essential practice in human society and as a capacity that defines humankind. Two books examine musical capacity and music making from the framework of biological anthropology, drawing on new research in neurophysiology to connect biological and archaeological anthropology. The other two locate the study largely within cultural anthropology, drawing on ethnomusicology. Taken as a set the volumes invite disciplinary integration in anthropological studies of music.     

Chaos,Complexity, and a Revitalization of Four-Field Anthropology?

Four-field anthropology has always struggled with the problem of how to holistically study human cultural systems that are the products of environment, process, and history. Complexity science offers a set of tools calibrated to the analysis of complex systems like those of human societies, and has the potential to allow us to scientifically understand how history and process affect the physical, cultural, and linguistic components that are entangled in the whole of human societies. Application of complexity science to anthropological problems thus far has favored engagement on a conceptual level rather than one that harnesses the full power of the approach.     

2. ONCE AGAIN,WITH MORE FEELING

This book summarizes in a compact volume Runciman's arguments to comparative sociologists that their discipline belongs under the theoretical umbrella of neo‐Darwinian selectionism. In his view, heritable variation and competitive selection govern cultural and social as well as biological evolution. Runciman makes a strong case for the usefulness of selectionism, but two of the theory's central features are problematic: his choice of units of selection; and the notion that culture can be distinguished from society historically as well as analytically. No one friendly to the basic project would argue against the need for hypotheses about units that undergo selection, but arguments can be made, also on pragmatic grounds, that he has chosen the wrong kinds of units. Runciman's learning and wisdom show to good effect in the book's fundamental approach: in the overall human story, the biological, cultural, and social coevolve. The quickly accumulating evidence of evolutionary psychology, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience strongly supports the hypothesis that there is a biological basis for a great deal of human behavior, and also that sociocultural evolution modifies genes. History, in this way of thinking, is like a “braided stream” of unpredictably mutating, blending, and coevolving biological, cultural, and social processes. The old Darwinian image of branching fails to capture the complexity of evolutionary processes in biology, culture, and society. Runciman outlines a unified bio‐social science relying upon information theory. If his program were carried out consistently it would relegate to a non‐scientific level the traditional historical narratives about “carriers” or “vehicles”. The scientific‐explanatory level would instead feature replicators. Gametheory strategies play a prominent role in the selectionist picture. The emphasis on units of information stored in human brains or in exosomatic brain prostheses pushes neuroscience and information theory to the fore. An argument for the analytic‐heuristic value of “memes” and “practices” should be weighed against the value of other hypothetical units undergoing selection in a sociocultural evolutionary approach.     

Uncommon Ground: Holism and the Future of Anthropology

Anthropology has long been a contested field with roots in both scientific and humanistic discourse. The “four-field” approach in American anthropology has been used by some as a means of suppressing conflict and enforcing a false sense of unity. While critiques of the four-field approach are warranted, in fact holism represents anthropology's greatest strength. Anthropology gains a competitive advantage over other disciplines in its ability to combine biological and cultural approaches. Moreover, the four-field model, while historically contingent, is well suited to the institutional and political realities of the American academy, especially the public research university.     

Anthropology,Festival, and Spectacle

This article weaves together analyses of three recent books which, despite their being compiled primarily by scholars outside of the discipline of anthropology, make theoretical and methodological contributions useful to the anthropology of festivals and ritual, both religious and secular. These works demonstrate that spectacle has been ritualized into festive practices of modernity and identity in multiple places, times, and cultural contexts. Greater attention to how this works from a general anthropological perspective is needed.     

CHRONOLOGICAL INSIGHTS, CULTURAL CHANGE, AND RESOURCE EXPLOITATION ON THE WEST COAST OF SWEDEN DURING THE LATE PALAEOLITHIC/EARLY MESOLITHIC TRANSITION

In this paper, we attempt to shed light on a probable cause of cultural change via a new avenue of approach. In brief, the paper represents a micro-study that addresses the Ahrensburgian culture group during the close of the Late Palaeolithic in north central Europe, and its relationship to the Hensbacka group found in central Bohuslän on the coast of western Sweden. Although we do not disagree that environmental conditions are a 'prime mover' of cultural change, we hold that it is not the only 'mover'. In addition, we also discuss the distinct possibility that the term 'microlithization' cannot be used as a synonym for the Mesolithic. The foundation of our micro-study is based on interdisciplinary concepts from the fields of archaeology, economic anthropology, geosciences, and marine zoology.     

1. CONSTRUCTING A SELECTIONIST PARADIGM

In his latest contribution to the application of Darwinian evolutionary thinking to the social sciences, W. G. Runciman conceives of human behavior as resulting from three levels of selection—biological, cultural, and social. These give rise, respectively, to evoked, acquired, and imposed patterns of behavior. The biological level is hardly controversial, but to draw a distinction between separate cultural and social selective processes is more problematic. Runciman takes memes to be the variants competitively selected at the cultural level and the practices constituting rule‐governed roles to be the variants competitively selected at the social level—thus preserving separate spheres of research for anthropology and sociology. It is not clear, however, what drives cultural and social evolution. Nor are the three levels theoretically well integrated. The book's strength lies in the numerous examples provided of how the application of selectionist theory illuminates and enriches sociological and historical explanations and contributes to the construction of historical narrative.     

Searching for the Intercultural,Searching for the Culture

This paper questions a dominant view of culture as being relatively bounded and hermetic by questioning the concept of an intercultural domain that is brought into existence as a necessary consequence of this view. The paper suggests that recognition of cultural processes does not lead to the need to posit ‘a culture’ which is constituted by them. The view that ‘a culture’ is a relatively autonomous, relatively hermetic and relatively homeostatic entity arises, this paper argues, in the birth of nationalism and the founding years of anthropology, which are intimately linked. This approach, characterised here as modernist, is criticised for failing to deal well with complex cultural relationships. It results in the need to theorise an intercultural space, or a realm of cultural change, between cultures theorised as entities. Here the later work of Malinowski is used as an exemplar. The paper argues for alternative conceptualisations, such as Gluckman's suggestion that intercultural relations occur within social fields which are the proper subject of anthropology, and Strathern's contention that ‘society’ is a redundant concept, yet not denying ‘sociality‘. The case of the Aboriginal people of Broome in their struggle with the state over the terms in which their prior rights to land will be recognised is used to illustrate this.     

Does Culture Evolve?

The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources. One from within social theory is part of the impetus to convert social studies into "social sciences" providing them with the status accorded to the natural sciences. The other comes from within biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms. The social--scientific theory of cultura evolution is pre-Darwinian, employing a developmental model of unfolding characterized by intrinsic directionality, by definable stages that succeed each other, and by some criterion of progress. It is arbitrary in its definitions of progress, and has had the political problem that a diachronic claim of cultural progress implies a synchronic differential valuation of present-day cultures. The biological scheme creates an isomorphism between the Darwinian mechanism of evolution and cultural history, postulating rules of cultural "mutation," cultural inheritance and some mechanism of natural selection among cultural alternatives. It uses simplistic ad hoc notions of individual acculturation and of the differential survival and reproduction of cultural elements. It is unclear what useful work is done by substituting the metaphor of evolution for history.     

Where are the witches of prehistory?

Why are certain common classes of ritually destroyed objects (persons, artifacts, or architecture), such as persecuted witches, so difficult to identify in the archaeological record? Although a common topic in cultural anthropology, witches seldom receive the attention of archaeologists. The difficulties archaeologists face in the study of religion derive, in part, from the lack of correlates linking ritual activities to the formation of archaeological deposits. This paper defines ritual as a technology and employs an object life history approach that draws upon ethnographic, archaeological, and experimental research to begin building such linkages—including those describing the presecution and deposition of witches, sorcerers, and other victims of ritual violence. These new directions are illustrated through a case study of anomalous deposits of human skeletal remains from the North American Southwest     

日本名古屋华侨社区的演变与重建——基于现代社区理论视角的研究

论文采用文化人类学的方法,根据对名古屋华侨社会活动家的访谈和对＂名古屋中国春节祭＂的参与观察及与老港口城市横滨、神户的比较,分析阐述了初期名古屋华侨社区的社会文化变迁、新华侨的活跃和＂文化象征社区＂的构建,旨在以名古屋为例,反映以新移民为主体的日本华侨社会的最新动向和发展趋势,并借＂名古屋唐人街＂的构想,对华侨社区的未来发展进行了展望。     

Intellectual Property and Cultural Appropriation

Many recent works on intellectual property have been published that come from outside anthropology but offer context for a set of ethical and legal questions central to the discipline, subsumed by the term cultural appropriation. These questions include concern for the circulation of ethnographic knowledge beyond source communities. Four recent works address the relationship between intellectual property and cultural appropriation. These books do not deal with iconic anthropological source communities. Rather, they offer anthropologists points of entry into debates on cultural appropriation that are of urgent interest both within and beyond anthropology.     

The making of a mushroom people: Toward a moral anthropology of psychedelics beyond hype and anti-hype

As regulatory agencies have put psychedelics on an expedited path to market approval, North Americans and Europeans might turn away from their repression and join the subset of cultures that have institutionalized the use of hallucinogenic drugs. What is the place of anthropology in this psychedelic renaissance? More specifically, how should anthropology relate to the cycles of hype and anti-hype, which have been identified as a recurrent pattern in the careers of new drugs as psychedelics have entered a second round of cultural enthusiasm and critique? This article suggests extending ethnographic studies of the psychedelic renaissance from medical to moral anthropology. The case of psychedelics is especially interesting for moral anthropology because these drugs frequently induce mystical-type experiences, which can play an ethically irritating role as mysticism challenges a strict moral order enforced through disciplinary practices. What cultural consequences would the spread of mystical experiences have for contemporary European and North American societies?     

Evolutionary approaches in archaeology

Two evolutionary approaches in contemporary archaeology, selectionism and processualism, are compared in terms of their theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and empirical contributions. Selectionism is a tightly focused approach that aims to apply a strict Darwinian framework to the study of cultural evolution. The selectionists view cultural evolution as a shift in the relative frequencies of cultural traits; the evolutionary mechanism that brings this about entails undirected variation followed by selection in a manner analogous to biological evolution. Processualism is a more flexible approach that acknowledges the importance of variation and selection but employs these concepts in a broader framework that recognizes fundamental differences between cultural and biological evolution. Among them are the central roles played by directed variation and the hierarchical operation of selection in cultural evolution. As we enter the late 1990s, the selectionists appear comfortably ascendant while the processualists often seem in disarray—they appear less confident, more embattled, more internally diverse. This diversity and dynamism, however, may harbor great potential for further growth and development. It is suggested that processualism's ongoing ferment will spawn the evolutionary archaeology of the future.     

Demographic growth and the “cultural factor” in ireland: rethinking the relationship between structure and event

The structure/event dichotomy has been a bone of contention in anthropology for many decades. The so‐called “synchronic paradigms” such as functionalism and structuralism saw “structure” (defined in various ways) as the object of anthropological analysis, whereas “events” were left to historians. Recent trends in anthropological thought are eager to dismiss the ahistoricity of traditional approaches as they attempt to include the diachronic perspective within anthropological research. Very often, this re‐historization of anthropology has entailed the criticism of the structure/event dichotomy. By using data from Irish demographic history, in this article I postulate the need to recover this dichotomy as a fundamental component of the anthropological approach to human affairs.     

In Search of Religion

Anthropology began with a concern for exploring religion. Over time it abandoned its interest in origins, including the origins of religion. The influence of Boas's cultural history approach and Malinowski's functionalism directed anthropologists into particularistic studies of religion as part of given cultural systems. There was a movement away from the search for universal themes and the psychic unity of humans. Most anthropologists contented themselves with heuristic definitions of religion, which aided them with fieldwork. This article examines the tension between theoretical and empirical, and humanistic and scientific impulses in anthropology and some of the major trends in the field.     

湖北松滋西斋汪家嘴遗址发掘报告

汪家嘴遗址是江汉平原与澧水流域过渡地带的一处重要的商代遗址,时代从二里岗上层偏早延续到殷墟二、三期。其文化特征与湖南澧水流域青铜文化皂市类型之土著因素保持强烈的一致性,中原商文化的因素极少或不见,是一个典型的地域类型。本报告运用了考古界面理论和存在背景关系理论,不仅为该遗址的研究提供了更多有价值的信息,而且为今后考古报告的科学编写提供了借鉴。     

Three Boasian Women: Margaret Mead,Ruth Benedict,and Ruth Landes

Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ruth Landes each made significant contributions to American anthropology that have been obscured by enemies and by time. Recent reappraisals of their work suggest that these women and their ideas are of much more than antiquarian interest. They either prefigured or provided sophisticated visions on a variety of issues including processes of embodiment, cultural selection, and improvisation in the face of power. A reexamination of these women's work and times may yet provide anthropology with a cautionary yet useful past as well as revivify the greater Boasian project.