We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter considers evidence of European music making in the early colonial towns of Sydney and Hobart. Two concert series in 1826 show the role of music in reimagining colonial towns as organised and aesthetic cities. The musicians that led the concerts shaped these musical worlds, bringing European instruments, forms of opera and vocal music, chamber, orchestral and solo instrumental music that would continue to develop over the next two centuries in Australia’s urban centres. We trace several key musicians who shaped the early phase of these towns’ music-making, looking to the cultural practices of the British Isles and continental Europe. While contextual evidence from this time reminds us of the ongoing presence of Aboriginal people, there is only an occasional glimpse of the musicians’ awareness that their efforts to import a European musical culture took place on Aboriginal land.
We study the effect of an immigration ban on the self-selection of immigrants along cultural traits, and the transmission of these traits to the second generation. We show theoretically that restricting immigration incentivizes to settle abroad individuals with higher attachment to their origin culture, who, under free mobility, would rather choose circular migration. Once abroad, these individuals tend to convey their cultural traits to their children. As a consequence, restrictive immigration policies can foster the diffusion of cultural traits across boundaries and generations. We focus on religiosity, which is one of the most persistent and distinctive cultural traits, and exploit the 1973 immigration ban in West Germany (Anwerbestopp) as a natural experiment. Through a diff-in-diff analysis, we find that second generations born to parents treated by the Anwerbestopp show higher religiosity.
Jicha is a Bronze Age settlement located next to the upper Mekong River in the Hengduan Mountains of Yunnan, south-west China. Recent excavations have revealed details of successive occupation and copper-base industrial activity. The site's position and chronology provide evidence of north–south demographic movement and technological transmission along the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau corridor.
Edited by
Jeremy Koster, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig,Brooke Scelza, University of California, Los Angeles,Mary K. Shenk, Pennsylvania State University
The chapter discusses the field of cultural evolution, which emerged in the wake of sociobiology and alongside evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology in the 1970s. Cultural evolution theory can be divided into three parts: investigating the genetic evolution of psychological capacities underlying culture, studying how populations adapt to their environments, and exploring how genes and culture influence each other’s evolutionary dynamics. The first sections of the chapter examine how human culture differs from nonhuman culture, why and how culture evolved in humans during the Pleistocene, how our cultural capacity predisposed us to be cooperative, and how cultural group selection created the conditions for the genetic evolution of prosocial preferences. Addressing a common criticism that cultural evolution focuses too heavily on mathematical modeling, subsequent sections showcase the recent explosion of empirical research that has been inspired by cultural evolutionary theory. This research is divided into three methods: fieldwork, experiments, and phylogenetics. The chapter concludes by noting that the dividing lines between cultural evolution and human behavioral ecology are blurring, with students of each subfield increasingly borrowing from the other, suggesting that these labels may soon be obsolete.
Even at long time horizons, modern outcomes are in some sense bounded by history. Culture shapes how people interact and as it propagates across generations, groups with more common ancestors face less frictions to cooperation. This, in turn, affects institutional and technological diffusion, implying a society's history plays a crucial role in the causes of sustained long-run economic growth. To test this, we follow other studies by proxying for historical effects with genetic relatedness, which yields a temporal proportionality of shared common ancestry. Measuring cultural traits are more challenging. We develop a new systematic measure through network analysis of Wikipedia. Connectivity statistics over the encyclopaedia's hyperlink-directed network captures unique features of cultural relatedness. Further, as we index pages, we can coarsen the network into specific topics. The results show how history correlates broadly over a range of cultural factors. Differences across the coarsened networks demonstrate not simply that history matters, but where it matters less.
The purpose of this paper is to understand the milk processing system practiced in the Mongolian nomadic Khalkha groups of Su'qbaatar and Dornod Provinces in eastern Mongolia through a field survey, to compare it with surrounding areas of Qentiy and Dundgowi Provinces, and then to analyze the transmission of processing techniques by further comparison with those of Syria, Jordan, Iran and Iraq in West Asia. The milk processing techniques of fermentation, cream separation and additive coagulation are all used in Su'qbaatar and Dornod Provinces. In fermentation processes, the technique of alcohol fermentation with churning is mainly used for cow milk to process alcoholic sour milk, followed by further processing to spirit, butter oil and non-matured dry cheese. In cream separation processes, the technique of heating/cream separation is used, in which cream is first separated from milk and non-matured dry cheese is processed from skim milk. In additive coagulation processes, the technique of fermented milk coagulation which utilizes lactic acid fermented whey as a coagulant is used to process non-matured dry cheese. These techniques are widely shared in the eastern part of Mongolia. It is characteristic of Su'qbaatar Province that the processing of cow milk is dominated by the technique of fermentation processes, mainly alcohol fermentation with churning. It is presumed that the technique of churning sour milk transmitted from West Asia to eastern Mongolia, and then the function of churning originally for butter processing was converted to allow for alcohol fermentation under the cooler environment in North Asia.
This chapter problematises questions of agency, transformation and motives in the context of the exclusion of young people from school. It addresses the question: in what ways might young people be agentic in processes of school exclusion and how might that agency be strengthened? In order to explore this question, the chapter draws on recent developments in cultural-historical theories of transformative agency by double stimulation and Bernsteinian insights on cultural transmission and pedagogy. Empirical data from an exploratory study of permanent school exclusions in a southern English city are used to illustrate the theoretical considerations on transformative agency that are emerging from a four-year multidisciplinary comparative study of exclusion, in all its forms, across the four jurisdictions of the UK. Data are also used to explore the concept of the categorisation of exclusions and in the context of understanding the possibilities for young people’s agency in exclusion.
For at least three million years, knapping stone has been practiced by hominin societies large and small, past and present. Thus, understanding knapping, knappers, and knapping cultures is fundamental to anthropological research around the world. Although there is a general sense that stone knapping is inherently dangerous and can lead to injury, little is formally, specifically, or systematically known about the frequency, location, or severity of knapping injuries. Toward this end, we conducted a 31-question survey of modern knappers to better understand knapping risks. Responses from 173 survey participants suggest that knapping injuries are a real and persistent hazard, even though a majority of modern knappers use personal protective equipment. A variety of injuries (lacerations, punctures, aches, etc.) can occur on nearly any part of the body. The severity of injury sustained by some of our participants is shocking, and nearly one-quarter of respondents reported having sought or received professional medical attention for a flintknapping-related injury. Overall, the results of this survey suggest that there would have likely been serious, even fatal, costs to knappers in past societies. Such costs may have encouraged the deployment of any social learning capacities possessed by hominins or delayed the learning or exposure of young infants or children to knapping.
This chapter traces the translocal dynamics in the exercise of religion on the Greek island of Delos, one of the eminent hot-spots of global connectivity in the Hellenistic world. Stainhauer argues that the local population, among many foreigners and immigrants, shaped their lived environment through various processes of cultural brokerage: by developing genuinely local cults such as that of Apollo, Zeus, and Athena Kynthios; by introducing new cults, sometimes upon the initiative of individuals or associations from away; and third, by locally appropriating global cults, for instance that of Isis and Serapis. Combining these dimensions, the people on Delos crafted a religious pluriverse that was moulded and tied to the local specificities of their island.
This chapter traces the translocal dynamics in the exercise of religion on the Greek island of Delos, one of the eminent hot-spots of global connectivity in the Hellenistic world. Stainhauer argues that the local population, among many foreigners and immigrants, shaped their lived environment through various processes of cultural brokerage: by developing genuinely local cults such as that of Apollo, Zeus, and Athena Kynthios; by introducing new cults, sometimes upon the initiative of individuals or associations from away; and third, by locally appropriating global cults, for instance that of Isis and Serapis. Combining these dimensions, the people on Delos crafted a religious pluriverse that was moulded and tied to the local specificities of their island.
Humans harbour diverse microbial communities, and this interaction has fitness consequences for hosts and symbionts. Understanding the mechanisms that preserve host–symbiont association is an important step in studying co-evolution between humans and their mutualist microbial partners. This association is promoted by vertical transmission, which is known to be imperfect. It is unclear whether host–microbial associations can generally be maintained despite ‘leaky’ vertical transmission. Cultural practices of the host are expected to be important in bacterial transmission as they influence the host's interaction with other individuals and with the environment. There is a need to understand whether and how cultural practices affect host–microbial associations. Here, we develop a mathematical model to identify the conditions under which the mutualist can persist in a population where vertical transmission is imperfect. We show with this model that several factors compensate for imperfect vertical transmission, namely, a selective advantage to the host conferred by the mutualist, horizontal transmission of the mutualist through an environmental reservoir and transmission of a cultural practice that promotes microbial transmission. By making the host–microbe association more likely to persist in the face of leaky vertical transmission, these factors strengthen the association which in turn enables host–mutualist co-evolution.
In the previous chapter we looked at childhood through the lens of dependency. Infants and children can be distinguished from the young of mammals, generally, because, while their brains are large and growing rapidly, representing over half of their metabolism, they remain virtually helpless and in an immature state for a very long time. Others must care for them. In this chapter, we will examine the flip side of that coin and look at how “brainy” but incompetent children set about acquiring their culture and becoming competent members, ultimately supporting their erstwhile caregivers. This process we might characterize as “making sense,” which incorporates two ideas. One is that the child must strive to understand or make sense of all that’s going on around him or her, and this begins in infancy. And two, the child strives to be accepted, to fit in.
Typical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of ‘convergent transformation’, in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-random way. We present a series of stochastic models of cultural evolution investigating its effects. The results show that cultural stability can emerge and be maintained by virtue of convergent transformation alone, in the absence of any form of copying or selection process. We show how high-fidelity copying and convergent transformation need not be opposing forces, and can jointly contribute to cultural stability. We finally analyse how non-random transformation and high-fidelity copying can have different evolutionary signatures at population level, and hence how their distinct effects can be distinguished in empirical records. Collectively, these results supplement existing approaches to cultural evolution based on the Darwinian analogy, while also providing formal support for other frameworks – such as Cultural Attraction Theory – that entail its further loosening.
Social media summary:
Culture can be produced and maintained by convergent transformation, without copying or selection involved.
This article shows empirical and conceptual possibilities of exploring the transcultural roles and economic situations of French migrant women who served as governesses in the noble circles of the Habsburg monarchy. It combines various research methods, employing narrative textual analysis, socioeconomic and material culture approaches, and cultural exchange perspectives. The author uses printed librettos and comparative insights to reveal broader social anxieties connected with governesses who crossed multiple borders in terms of geography, culture, language, class, and the gender order. She also draws attention to inheritance tax–related sources as evidence of these women's economic conditions. Finally, the author outlines the major shifts in attitudes toward the French language and French immigrants and shows how these affected the governesses’ labor market.
Cultural transmission biases such as prestige are thought to have been a primary driver in shaping the dynamics of human cultural evolution. However, few empirical studies have measured the importance of prestige relative to other effects, such as content biases present within the information being transmitted. Here, we report the findings of an experimental transmission study designed to compare the simultaneous effects of a model using a high- or low-prestige regional accent with the presence of narrative content containing social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, or counterintuitive information in the form of a creation story. Results from multimodel inference reveal that prestige is a significant factor in determining the salience and recall of information, but that several content biases, specifically social, survival, negative emotional, and biological counterintuitive information, are significantly more influential. Further, we find evidence that reliance on prestige cues may serve as a conditional learning strategy when no content cues are available. Our results demonstrate that content biases serve a vital and underappreciated role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution.
Social media summary: Storyteller and tale are both key to memorability, but some content is more important than the storyteller's prestige.
Innovation – the process that generates novel learned behaviours – is a defining feature of intelligence, and has long attracted the interest of scientists for its implications in brain evolution, emergence of culture, and adaptation to environmental changes. Although most animals have the capacity to innovate, only a few excel in their innovative capacities. A salient feature of these animals is a highly encephalized brain, which provides the cognitive basis for complex behaviors. Highly innovative animals also tend to be ecological generalists, long-lived and sociable, features that are thought to enhance the payoff of innovation. The evolutionary origin of innovative abilities is unclear, however, because innovating implies coping with problems the animal has not experienced before. A possibility is to consider innovation as an emergent property that results from the combination of cognitive and noncognitive traits that have coevolved as part of a life-history syndrome to cope with environmental changes. The coevolution of innovation and social learning capacities is particularly relevant because it has facilitated the accumulation of the knowledge needed for more complex behaviours. The ability to socially transmit knowledge may thus be behind the exceptional variety and sophistication of human innovations.
People everywhere acquire high levels of conceptual knowledge about their social and natural worlds, which we refer to as ethnoscientific expertise. Evolutionary explanations for expertise are still widely debated. We analysed ethnographic text records (N = 547) describing ethnoscientific expertise among 55 cultures in the Human Relations Area Files to investigate the mutually compatible roles of collaboration, proprietary knowledge, cultural transmission, honest signalling, and mate provisioning. We found relatively high levels of evidence for collaboration, proprietary knowledge, and cultural transmission, and lower levels of evidence for honest signalling and mate provisioning. In our exploratory analyses, we found that whether expertise involved proprietary vs. transmitted knowledge depended on the domain of expertise. Specifically, medicinal knowledge was positively associated with secretive and specialised knowledge for resolving uncommon and serious problems, i.e. proprietary knowledge. Motor skill-related expertise, such as subsistence and technological skills, was positively associated with broadly competent and generous teachers, i.e. cultural transmission. We also found that collaborative expertise was central to both of these models, and was generally important across different knowledge and skill domains.
The paper explains long-term changes in birth, death rates, and in attitude to personal consumption by evolution of preferences by means of cultural transmission. When communities are culturally isolated, they are focused on population growth, which results in large fertility and welfare transfers to children, limited adult consumption, and lack of old-age support. With increasing cultural contact across communities, successful cultural traits induce their hosts to increase their social visibility by limiting fertility and increasing longevity via higher individual consumption. Empirical analysis confirms that social visibility, as measured by the number of language versions of Wikipedia biographical pages, is associated with fewer children and longer lifespan. The presence of notable individuals precedes reduced aggregate birth rates.
This article discusses the role of colonial oppression in creating conflicting perspectives in the reproduction of dance as Indigenous cultural heritage. The debate on kahiko, the ancient Hawaiian dance, of which practice was severely controlled and then revived through the cultural renaissance, demonstrates that the radical deprivation of the practice has created multiple understandings of the dance among different practitioners. Of primary importance in these respects is the intergenerational divide within the dance community, manifest in the critical perspective of the post-renaissance variant of kahiko, which highlights the “continuity” of the practice through the colonial rupture.
Acting on socially learned information involves risk, especially when the consequences imply certain costs with uncertain benefits. Current evolutionary theories argue that decision-makers evaluate and respond to this information based on context cues, such as prestige (the prestige bias model) and/or incentives (the risk and incentives model). We tested the roles of each in explaining trust using a preregistered vignette-based study involving advice about livestock among Maasai pastoralists. In exploratory analyses, we also investigated how the relevance of each might be influenced by recent cultural and economic changes, such as market integration and shifting cultural values. Our confirmatory analysis failed to support the prestige bias model, and partially supported the risk and incentives model. Exploratory analyses suggested that regional acculturation varied strongly between northern vs. southern areas, divided by a small mountain. Consistent with the idea that trust varies with socially transmitted values and regional differences in market integration, people living near densely populated towns in the southern region were more likely to trust socially learned information about livestock. Higher trust among market-integrated participants might reflect a coordination solution in a region where traditional pastoralism is beset with novel conflicts of interest.