Reply #17: sure, I'm game [View All]

Culture. I'll start with Kroeger and Kluckholm, who offered this definition:

"The sum total of a way of life of a people; patterns experienced by individuals as normal ways of acting, feeling, and being."

A lot of assumptions in that definition. I would emphasize the concepts of wholism and pattern. Among the students of Boas, Benedict most famously developed and articulated the concept of cultural patterns or "configurations" in her Patterns of Culture, which for all of its shortcomings remains illuminating. "Experienced as normal" refers to a phenomenon that gets torn apart and reassembled in many ways. I'm not enamored of cultural descriptions in statistical terms (normal, deviant...), which I would argue is an aspect of the Boasians' understanding of the culture concept and not an overzealous reading on my part. Nonetheless, I will need something like "experienced as normal" to convey how I am conceptualizing culture here--perhaps already you can see where language might be related--for that I will jump to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, and in particular the concept of habitus.

Bourdieu defines the habitus it seems in more ways than Kuhn defines paradigm, if that's possible. My favorite definition is the briefest and perhaps the most opaque: "the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations" (Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 78). A more complete definition:

"a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems, and thanks to unceasing corrections of the results obtained"

(Outline, p. 82-83, emphasis in original.)

(NB: For a true "outline" of Bourdieu's theory of practice I would recommend his Logic of Practice, esp. Chapter 3.)

Now, this concept seems to cover a lot of human capabilities, well beyond considering the question of how it is that the patterns of thought, feeling and activity that constitute a way of life come to be experienced as ordinary. Yet I think it's addressing the same essential phenomenon, or a very similar set of problems.

Bourdieu brings to the discussion one idea, particularly germaine to our discussion here: that of schemes. I don't think it's entirely unrelated to what Kant or the neoKantian people in cognitive science talk about as perceptual schemata, but of course for Bourdieu it not a purely mental function. I will also note that Bourdieu sees them being used analogically, and we can see that same capability as a key to the transposability of dispositions--a characteristic of the habitus which Bourdieu often emphasizes. This tranposability in fact relates to a primary characteristic of human language: Displacement, or the ability to talk about stuff that happened in other places or times. I haven't actually delved into the ape language studies on this, but it is my sense that the evidence for displacement in ape communications is relatively weak.

So regarding the monkey tool use, the questions I would have concern whether it appears to be schematic, transferable and the like. Can they move their tools easily from the left hand to the right? Can they subsititute one kind of stone for another? Can they apply their digging skills to various problems? Can the skill be taught to other monkeys? Can it be communicated to other monkeys at a time and place where it is not actually being performed? Can they pretend or fake digging?

I'm not quite proposing a Whorfian conception of culture, but depending on one's understanding of language and thought, such a viewpoint may not be far off the mark--at a very primitive level, you know. I'm talking about how reality is defined, and whether tool use is part of the Capuchin reality in the manner of a concept or, more exactly, an apperceptive scheme. I don't expect that would be likely without a language capability. But who knows?

As for humans and the other apes, I tend to see a lot of diversity among the apes, so many differences that have been theorized about seem minor to me. Estrus? Bipedalism? Well, it's a real shock to compare Lucy's hips to the other apes. I'm not denying the difference, or that it marked an important speciation event in hominid evolution. But as for what makes Homo sapiens so very different, bipedalism in itself isn't the most crucial. Basically we're talking about tool culture (Homo) and language (sapiens)--and of course one of those should be in quotes, I'd say the first, but it would take some teasing out:

Tool use--> Tool "culture"--> Material Culture

I am not an archaeologist, but my general impression is that the tool culture of early Homo was not very sophisticated. I could opine that its ability to apply analogical schemes was extremely limited, but that would be rank conjecture. I'll have to pass on providing a definition of "culture light" for the moment.