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doi: 10.1163/15685373-12342161pmid: N/A
The ‘information cycle’ is an evolutionary model of the processes of gene/culture maintenance and change. This paper reports the first naturalistic experimental study designed to collect information data that can illuminate the mechanisms of ‘culture’ production and sharing in information cycles. It is an analysis of conversation among university students in Taiwan. A junior class of 32 students utilized pencil and paper (P&P) diaries to record conversation topics over a three week period. It was expected that some topics of special interest would be shared widely as they were passed among speakers through repeated information cycles. This type of linear transmission did appear. However, of great interest, the majority of widely shared topics were initiated by larger scales of information cycles, it is argued, specifically popular media, education, social media, ritual, and legal scales, which triggered cascades of conversation sharing. This result indicates that the sharing of cultural information relies on statistical, not linear, transmission, in which topics are shared imprecisely but repeatedly, permitting the construction of shared knowledge. Further, it indicates that culture is shared in a hierarchy of transmission cycles, which differ in space, cycle time, input, and copy fidelity. Further, it indicates that culture must be maintained against depreciation by repeated cycling in information cycles. Cultural transmission is indeed a complex, statistical, multi-scaled process that requires a nested model of information cycles as I have proposed.
doi: 10.1163/15685373-12342162pmid: N/A
Rituals are part of all religious systems and their transmission and stability have exercised many scholars for decades. Within cognitive anthropology competing views of cultural transmission have emerged in recent years in terms of the mechanisms by means of which cultural forms, including rituals, are transmitted and persist (or not) within societies. Two schools of thought focusing on (1) the “epidemiology of representations” and (2) memetic cultural evolution have informed this study’s goal for gaining insight on the plausibility of cultural learning models as opposed to Sperber et al.’s emphasis on meta-representational processes of representation generation. This study examined 11 life-stages Zulu rituals in terms of participants’ (a) knowledge of them; (b) performance of them; and (c) direct observation of them in order to make some initial judgments about the importance of various forms of direct observational learning for ritual transmission. It was found that while knowledge of rituals was high, observance rate was significantly lower, and performance rate was substantially lower. These results tentatively suggest that an emphasis on understanding those cognitive systems (Hazard Precaution, Action Representation) that might constrain ritual representations (and fit within the Sperberian framework) would be the best way to advance justifiable explanations of ritual transmission.
doi: 10.1163/15685373-12342163pmid: N/A
Humans coordinate with other people and technological resources in order to become integrated into distributed cognitive systems and engage the world in ways beyond their naked capacities. This paper extends the distributed cognitive framework towards human and dog partnerships at a sheepdog trial, arguing that by scaffolding the sheepdog’s cognitive limitations and inability to tackle the trial independently, the human handler forms with the canine partner an interspecies cognitive system. The handler serves as a higher-order cognitive resource integrated through the use of commands and complementing the sheepdog’s own species-specific skills. The process and structure of support reflects parent – child interaction as framed in the developmental literature. However, scaffolding in this instance is a permanent support structure that is situation dependent; the handler must equally be aware of when the dog’s initiative and skills can be advantageously exploited. This paper draws on ethnographic illustrations of the training methods and detailed descriptions of on-field interactions to support these claims. Data at this level of analysis also provides evidence of the reciprocally affecting and co-determining role of each partner as they engage the sheep, and coordinate in ways that blur the boundaries between their two species, supporting broader perspectives in the human-animal literature.
Hornbeck, Ryan G.; Bentley, Brianna; Barrett, Justin L.
doi: 10.1163/15685373-12342164pmid: N/A
Is reasoning about religious ritual tethered to ordinary, nonreligious human reasoning about actions? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley’s ritual form hypothesis ( rfh ) constitutes a cognitive approach to religious ritual – an explanatory theory that suggests people use ordinary human cognition to make specific predictions about ritual properties, relatively independent of cultural or religious particulars. Few studies assess the credibility of rfh and further evidence is needed to generalize its predictions across cultures. Towards this end, we assessed culturally Chinese “special patient” rituals in Singapore. Our findings strongly support rfh predictions for special patient ritual repeatability, reversibility, sensory pageantry and emotionality.
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