Christophe Boesch
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190218966
- eISBN:
- 9780190274474
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190218966.003.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Originally the concept of culture was proposed only for humans, stressing the importance of social influences on its dynamics and development. Although there is no question that all human groups have ...
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Originally the concept of culture was proposed only for humans, stressing the importance of social influences on its dynamics and development. Although there is no question that all human groups have different diverse, complex, and rich cultures, a debate begun in the early 1950s raised the issue of animal culture and what it may mean for the uniqueness of human culture. This chapter argues that data from captive studies are difficult to use in this regard owing to the artificiality of the “social dimension” in captive groups and the absence of a species-specific ecological environment-issues that have obscured progress toward a better understanding of human culture. Two major attributes of human culture-cumulative cultural evolution and symbolic culture-arise in adopting an ethnographic approach to the study of differences between wild chimpanzee populations. Culture is observed among both humans and chimpanzees; therefore further work should be aimed at uncovering the specifics of culture in each of these species.Less
Originally the concept of culture was proposed only for humans, stressing the importance of social influences on its dynamics and development. Although there is no question that all human groups have different diverse, complex, and rich cultures, a debate begun in the early 1950s raised the issue of animal culture and what it may mean for the uniqueness of human culture. This chapter argues that data from captive studies are difficult to use in this regard owing to the artificiality of the “social dimension” in captive groups and the absence of a species-specific ecological environment-issues that have obscured progress toward a better understanding of human culture. Two major attributes of human culture-cumulative cultural evolution and symbolic culture-arise in adopting an ethnographic approach to the study of differences between wild chimpanzee populations. Culture is observed among both humans and chimpanzees; therefore further work should be aimed at uncovering the specifics of culture in each of these species.
Chris Knight
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199665327
- eISBN:
- 9780191779725
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199665327.003.0017
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics, Psycholinguistics / Neurolinguistics / Cognitive Linguistics
Using language is ‘doing things with words’, but the action takes place not within physical reality (the world of brute facts) but exclusively within virtual reality (the world of institutional ...
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Using language is ‘doing things with words’, but the action takes place not within physical reality (the world of brute facts) but exclusively within virtual reality (the world of institutional facts). Therefore, in order to explain how language evolved, we must first explain how virtual reality might have emerged. This chapter surveys currently circulating theories of the origin of language in the light of this requirement.Less
Using language is ‘doing things with words’, but the action takes place not within physical reality (the world of brute facts) but exclusively within virtual reality (the world of institutional facts). Therefore, in order to explain how language evolved, we must first explain how virtual reality might have emerged. This chapter surveys currently circulating theories of the origin of language in the light of this requirement.
