Understanding Cultural Traits

FabrizioPanebianco EmanueleSerrelli
Editors
Understanding
Cultural Traits
A Multidisciplinary Perspective on
Cultural Diversity
Understanding Cultural Traits
Fabrizio Panebianco Emanuele Serrelli

Editors
Understanding Cultural
Traits
A Multidisciplinary Perspective
on Cultural Diversity
Editors
Fabrizio Panebianco
Paris School of Economics
Paris, France
Emanuele Serrelli
CISEPS Center for Interdisciplinary
Studies in Economics, Psychology
and Social Sciences
University of Milano - Bicocca
Milan, Italy
Riccardo Massa Department
of Educational Human Sciences
University of Milano - Bicocca
Milan, Italy
In collaboration with:
CISEPS Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology and Social
Sciences, University of Milano - Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Riccardo Massa Department of Educational Human Sciences, University of Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-24347-4
ISBN 978-3-319-24349-8
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8
(eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933026

Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made.
Printed on acid-free paper
Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media
(www.springer.com)
To the memory of our colleague

Pier Luigi Porta
Contents
Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue...................................

Fabrizio Panebianco and Emanuele Serrelli
Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture, Cultural Traits

and Cultural Changes Between Global and Local Scales ...................
Vincenzo Matera
Cultural Traits and Identity ...................................................................

Ugo E.M. Fabietti
The Diffusion of a Museum Exhibit:

The Case of the Transparent Man .........................................................
Elena Canadelli
The Incompetent Subject in the Kingdom of Technical

Terms. A Possible Role of Pedagogy in the Study
of Cultural Traits.....................................................................................
Rossana Brambilla
21
43
61
81
The Unary Trait of Psychoanalysis. Identification,

Transmission, Generation ...................................................................... 101
Matteo Bonazzi
Cultural Diversities Across and Within Cultures:

The Bicultural Mind ............................................................................... 117
Olivia Realdon and Valentino Zurloni
Birth and Evolution of Jazz as Effects of Cultural Transfers ............. 135

Stefano Zenni
Geographical Boundaries as Places of Meeting

and Diffusion of Cultural Traits ............................................................ 145
Stefano Malatesta, Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg,
and Enrico Squarcina
vii
viii
Contents
10
Maps, Diagrams and Charts: Making the Cultural

Trait Visible ............................................................................................. 161
Fulvio Carmagnola
11
Evolutionary Genetics and Cultural Traits

in a Body of Theory Perspective .......................................................... 179
Emanuele Serrelli
12
Cultural Traits in Economic Theory ..................................................... 201

Fabrizio Panebianco
13
International Cooperation and Cultural Transmission ....................... 221

Isa Gama
14
Rethinking Organizational Culture: The Role

of Generational Subcultures .................................................................. 249
Alessandra Lazazzara
15
From Material Remains to Culture: The Possibilities

and Limits of Archaeology in Reconstructing Ancient People ............ 273
Viviana Ardesia
16
Homology and Phylogenetic Inference in Biological

and Material Cultural Evolution ........................................................... 287
Ilya Tmkin
17
On the Origin of Technologies: The Invention

and Evolution of the Bow-and-Arrow ................................................... 315
Giuseppe Carignani
18
Trees, Languages and Genes: A Historical Path .................................. 341

Federica Da Milano and Nicoletta Puddu
19
Signaling in Style: On Cooperation, Identity

and the Origins of Visual Art ................................................................. 357
Larissa Mendoza Straffon
20
Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach.............................. 375

Mariagrazia Portera and Lorenzo Bartalesi
21
Nothing But Survival: On the Origin and Function

of Literature............................................................................................. 389
Mario Barenghi
22
Concluding Remarks .............................................................................. 403

Emanuele Serrelli
Chapter 1
Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

Fabrizio Panebianco and Emanuele Serrelli
UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2 November 2001) defines

culture with an emphasis on cultural features: culture should be regarded as the set
of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a
social group, encompassing, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of
living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs. Academic literature does not
uniformly share this emphasis on cultural features. Each discipline poses its research
questions in specific ways and thus uses concepts that are suited to find answers in
its well defined disciplinary frameworks. Accordingly, the acceptability and usability of a notion of cultural traits varies very much across the many books, articles and
research projects that deal with culture and cultural diversity. Historically, whole
schools in cultural anthropology, linguistics and other fields1 emphasized the
existence of units in culture that would constitute the basis for comparison and
1
Even in fields where cultural traits are not systematically cited, we may recognize the use of
some analog notion. Comparative approaches in anthropology, history, and cultural studies, for
example, make extensive use of the idea of a cultural trait. A famous example is Diamond (1999,
2005, 2012) and Diamond and Robinson (2010). Other, less historical, methodologically relevant
texts are found in the ecology of culture, with authors such as Ingold (2000, 2011), or Sperber
(1996, 2000) with his epidemiology of culture approach. Cross-cultural studies have specific
methodology texts such as Hofstede (2001) and Minkov (2012). Beyond methodological and theoretical literature, we find many studies on the importance of cultural diversity and cross-culturalization for facing the challenges of our time, often promoted by United Nations and other political
organisms. An example among many others can be Johnston et al. (2012).
F. Panebianco
Paris School of Economics, Paris, France
E. Serrelli (*)
Riccardo Massa Department of Educational Human Sciences,
University of Milano - Bicocca, Milan, Italy
e-mail: emanuele.serrelli@epistemologia.eu
F. Panebianco, E. Serrelli (eds.), Understanding Cultural Traits,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_1
F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli
explanation (Matera, this volume; Fabietti, this volume; Da Milano and Puddu, this
volume). Then, in recent decades, scholars in different disciplines started dealing
with cultural traits by adopting an evolutionary point of view on culture (see, in
this volume, chapters by Realdon and Zurloni; Serrelli; Panebianco; Gama).
However, the theoretical debate over cultural traits and cultural evolution is all but
exhausted (Blute 2010; Distin 2010; Mesoudi 2011). Even among those fields that
do use cultural traits, we find notions that are different, sometimes complementary,
sometimes incoherent with each other. Sometimes a minority in a discipline criticizes the widespread use of a trait-like notion of culture (compare, for example,
Ardesia, Carignani, and Tmkin, this volume). Conversely, approaches that heavily
emphasize cultural traits often remain isolated from the bulk of their own discipline.
We may even see the rise of a multidisciplinary community of cultural traits specialists who grossly agree upon what a cultural trait is, while thousands of archeologists, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, literary scholars, economists etc.
work on culture with no specific contact or agreement about cultural traits. Taking
inspiration from this complex and fascinating situation, the present book results
from a dense and extremely multidisciplinary network of scholars, mostly Italians,
determined to interact on the topic of cultural traits in order to find common research
questions and common languages. We invited authors who had been working for
many years in their respective fields, most of them without ever thinking in terms of
cultural traits. We interacted and asked them to seek, in their fields, the concepts,
methods and cases that best resemble the idea of cultural traits. We then tried to
compare and discuss these different views and intuitions in order to provide an
overview of how the concept of cultural trait has been approached in all these different fields. With this book we are trying to overcome not only the gap between cultural traits specialists and other scientists, but also the barriers among the researchers
who are not specialists on cultural traits but that nevertheless directly or indirectly
use cultural traits in their different disciplines. The debate on cultural traits may thus
be the occasion to build new cross-fertilization bridges between disciplines, methods, languages.
In order to start a fruitful interdisciplinary confrontation (Brambilla and Serrelli
2016), we adopted a sufficiently loose definition of a cultural trait as any trait whose
production in individuals depends, to some extent, on social learning; and we
strongly advocated a deflationary interpretive horizon where cultural traits are not
expected to provide an exhaustive theory of culture and cultural change. We were
able and lucky enough to engage colleagues in the most diverse disciplines: cultural
anthropology, psychology, geography, philosophy, musicology, sociology, pedagogy, history of science, archaeology, evolutionary theory, palaeoanthropology, aesthetics, literary studies, psychodynamics, ethics, epistemology, economics,
linguistics, history of technology and engineering. A long preparation and a real
research process was necessary to arrive here. At the University of Milano - Bicocca,
we found the ideal container for this process: CISEPS, the Interdepartmental Center
for Interdisciplinary Research in Economics, Psychology, and Social Sciences. We
sent several calls for ideas to colleagues in any relevant field, then we snowballed
a mailing list of researchers and students, we did discussion meetings, and we

shared every step and the final goals of the whole work. Initial caution and skepticism were soon replaced by enthusiasm in sharing ideas among disciplines who
rarely find grounds of encounter. Concretely, a long and dense series of seminars
took place, in which each member of the growing Cultural Traits group in turn
made an effort to present their own researches, their ideas on culture, and their opinion not always positive on the notion of a cultural trait. The present book is the
outcome of that challenging itinerary.
We have walked on a fine line: the notion of a cultural trait is interesting because
it has something to say to many sciences, but, paradoxically, also because it generates harsh conflicts on top scientific journals more and more frequently. While our
book is getting published, cultural traits are at the center of several intellectual
battles within the global scientific community, battles that give rise to periodical
discussions, and even fights, on and between major scientific journals. In the next
section we hint to just a couple of exemplifying discussions related to the growing
transfer of formal tools from evolutionary biology to the social sciences, to make
evident the intensity of these battles. It is interesting to track the struggles for
shared definitions of word or phoneme in historical linguistics in face of new
computation-intensive methodologies, or to follow heated conflicts about the legitimacy of formulating cultural studies in terms of traits. Historical linguistics and
cultural evolution are two of these many fields where these clashes happen, and we
want to hint to those conflicts before delving into the contribution we have to offer.
1.1
Scientific Controversies Over Cultural Traits
Evolutionary genetics was the source of an original discourse on culture, named

memetics, describing cultural traits as viruses of the mind that undergo differential
survival according to their effectiveness in colonizing peoples minds (Dawkins 1976).2
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) initiated a much more circumstantial and
rigorous application of mathematical models of evolutionary genetics to culture,
giving rise to an enduring concept of a cultural trait which was then translated in
several fields. Richerson and Boyd are acknowledged as decisive expanders of an
evolutionary approach to culture (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd
2005, see Serrelli, this volume), but the evolutionary perspective on cultural traits
still grows today with new theories such as, for example, niche construction, that
studies the traits-environment coevolution (Odling-Smee et al. 2003).
While these evolution-inspired general theoretical frameworks based on cultural
traits were being elaborated, lots of disciplines started to apply evolutionary meth-
Memetics is elaborated in books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Richard
Brodie, Robert Aunger, Tim Tyler. For a critical approach, see Distin (2004).
ods in fields such as archaeology, linguistics, and engineering, giving rise to productive specialized disciplinary branches.3 Additional stimuli came from the increased
computing capacity and big data that are enabling statistical studies of cultural data
on a large scale (Mace et al. 2005; Atkinson, see below).
For the purpose of this introduction, let us focus on a few examples from a number of studies that are taking compute-intensive phylogenetic methods developed
for genetic sequences and applying them, after some adaptations, to massive linguistic databases. On Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of U.S.A.,
Mark Pagel with a consolidated research group featuring statistical bioinformatics,
psychology, and linguistics, performed an analysis on LWED, the Languages of the
World Etymological Database. Their results provided quantitative evidence of the
presence, across seven language families in Eurasia, of ultraconserved words that
change or get replaced particularly slowly, so that their descendant words (cognates) could be used to reconstruct splits among languages older than 9000 years
(Pagel et al. 2013). They further argued that frequency of use is predictive of ultraconservation, and that their data support a classical but ill-fated hypothesis in historical linguistics: the existence of an Eurasiatic superfamily.
Obviously, the research groups performing these studies are non-traditional in
their composition, including people with various types of training. They propose
their results to the field of historical linguistics, and it is interesting to follow the
consequent debates on specialist and generalist scientific journals. Several discussions are just focused on the legitimacy of working with particular linguistic traits
such as ultraconserved words or inventories of phonemes. In a response letter on the
same journal, linguist Paul Heggarty (2013) heavily criticized Pagels group: their
data are not actually data, and their findings are artifacts of their assumptions, so
they cannot constitute proof; in particular, there would be no such things as ultraconserved words and the Eurasiatic language family. The database used by Pagel
and coauthors to perform mass quantitative analysis would be made of subjective
interpretations and should be rejected as vacuous by specialists in language
reconstruction. It interesting to notice how Pagel and coauthors work wedges into
running controversies or old debates among experts of linguistics hypotheses and
repositories. But the aspect most relevant to our book is that ultraconserved words
are data for one group of scientists and faces in the fire for another group, and
become the focus of interdisciplinary fights rather than keys to interdisciplinary
collaborations. The discussion between Pagel et al. and Heggarty is not at all unique.
Many episodes in recent years follow the same script. Let us see another example.
Atkinson (2011) performed various statistical studies of data contained in WALS,
the World Atlas of Language Structures. The units of analysis this time were not
On evolutionary archaeology see Tmkin (this volume), Carignani (this volume). Theoretical
frameworks and findings are published in books such as OBrien and Lyman (2000, 2003), OBrien
et al. (2005), and Shennan (2003, 2009). The relevance of phylogenetic thinking to linguistics is
addressed in Da Milano and Puddu (this volume), and extensively exemplified below in Sect. 1.1.
Carignani (this volume) provides examples of evolutionary thinking in engineering and technology
studies.
words, but phonemes, namely perceptually distinct units of sound that differentiate
words. Connecting WALS data with demographic information about speakers,
Atkinson verified the presence of a pattern proposed by some linguists: a negative
correlation between speakers population size and phonemic diversity. Small populations have lower phonemic diversity. The negative correlation, Atkinson observed,
is similar to a pattern found in genetics, and can be explained by the fact that phonemes are gained and lost by languages through stochastic processes, and stochastic
models teach that features are more likely to be lost in small populations. Finding
the predicted statistical correlations at different scales, and taking them into account,
Atkinson mapped geographically the origin of languages and their phonemic diversity, showing a declining diversity gradient from Africa to South America and
Oceania.4 The paper, published on Science, instigated several other papers, including some replies by Atkinson.5
Van Tuyl and Pereltsvaig (2012) pointed out that There are significant variations in phoneme counts reported from different sources, especially with respect to
tones. What are phonemes? How do they vary? Phonemes would be more complex
than those captured by WALS: the database would reduce the actual diversity, by
simplifying information about vowels, consonants, and tones, and their relationships. For Cysouw et al. (2012) WALS-based data give unjustified weight to the
number of vowels and tones at the expense of the number of consonants, and phonemes emerge only in richer databases such as the UCLA Phonological Segment
Inventory Database (of which WALS is a coarse-grained summary). Van Tuyl and
Pereltsvaig (2012) added that WALS further simplifies the data by assigning a synthetic measure of language phonemic complexity. Wang et al. (2012) pointed out
the same problem: WALS greatly underestimates the number of vowels, obliterating
large differences in vowel diversity levels (e.g., between the African and Eurasian
languages) and, moreover, ignore[s] all other phonetic features of the vowels, such
as nasalization, diphthong, and length, which vary tremendously among the worlds
languages. For Van Tuyl and Pereltsvaig languages typically acquire or lose not
single phonemes but whole (natural) classes of phonemes, such as clicks or ejectives, long or nasal vowels, or tonal distinctions; taking this hierarchical complex-
Performing several tests and considering some potential objections and overlapping clines,
Atkinson maintained distance from Africa as a significant predictor of phonemic diversity. Just like
the much more marked pattern observed in neutral genetic markers, the gradient of phonemic
diversity would be a serial founder effect, i.e., the signature of a series of population size reductions (bottlenecks) during the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa, dating 5070,000 years
ago according to the model used by Atkinson.
5
A whole special issue of Linguistic Topology (Bybee 2011) was published to discuss Atkinsons
method and results, and their implications. Cysouw et al. (2012), Van Tuyl and Pereltsvaig (2012),
and Wang et al. (2012) responded on Science, then Atkinson (2012a) addressed their criticisms.
Then there was one more exchange between Jaeger et al. (2012) and Atkinson (2012b). Afterwards,
Hunley et al. (2012) published a rejection on the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Statistical
methodologies, in particular arbitrary choices and errors, were discussed as the same data got reanalyzed making the trend disappear and yielding different and multiple origin points, but here we
are more interested in discussions on phonemic data themselves.
ity into account not done by WALS would imply that Small changes in phoneme
counts can have a substantial effect on analytical outcome.
This discussion about the way in which a database should correctly record phonemic diversity sounds, to our ears, as a discussion of what phonemes are, and how
they are conserved, created, and lost over time. A more extreme criticism by an
Italian linguist, Federico Albano Leoni, deserves to be cited here: Albano Leoni
argues that the phoneme represents an epiphenomenon of the letter, i.e., an artificial subdivision that looks natural only in alphabetized cultures.6 So, the phoneme
would not exist in oral languages. Letting aside this extreme position, the studies
cited above are all confident that appropriate data could be gathered, and statistical
methods could reveal patterns in phonemic diversity. But Cysouw et al. (2012)
notice that the patterns of phonemic diversity do not generalize to other inventorylike aspects of language, and that more stable features show non-African origins . In fact, most studies question the stability of phonemes along with the
possibility that they could really store information about ancient history. This concern is often based on theoretical language transmission mechanisms, affected by
horizontal transmission that is thought to make neighbors similar to each other and
erase historical traces (Cysouw et al., cit.; Van Tuyl and Pereltsvaig, cit.; Atkinson
2012a; see in particular Hunley et al. 2012), and also on which kind of phonemic
variation is expected to be influenced by bottlenecks (Cysouw et al., cit.; Hunley
et al., cit.).
Besides linguistic phylogenetics, there are many other forms of contact between
the biological and the socio-cultural sciences. All of them have cultural traits as an
important category, while some of them generate heated discussions. As an example
of that, we will take the clash started with a paper published on Behavioral and
Brain Sciences by Mesoudi et al. (2006), expressing a very enthusiastic, strong position about what they call a unified science of cultural evolution. A remarkably
large literature with this kind of approach has been accumulating in the last few
years. Serrelli (this volume) provides a grid for interpreting it, while Panebianco
(this volume) explains how mathematical models of evolutionary genetics were
incorporated by economics, and Gama (this volume) illustrates how cultural evolution ideas can help to interpret concrete experiences of international cooperation.
Mesoudi et al. (2006) write: We suggest that human culture exhibits key
Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science
of biological evolution. Before we discuss the importance of cultural traits in this
context, let us line up a few quotations to give an idea of the debate temperature.
Here goes Mesoudi et al.s judgement on existing social sciences such as cultural
anthropology:
the discipline that professes to be most directly engaged in the study of culture cultural or
social anthropology has been much less demonstratively productive [than evolutionary
biology] over the course of the same time period, particularly in terms of establishing a
6
This idea was expressed in the 1960s by Chistovich and Kozhevnikov in the Leningrad school
of linguistics (Greenberg 2006). See also Faber (1990).
secure body of data and theory that earns and deserves the attention of researchers working
in sister disciplines. (Mesoudi et al., cit.: 329330)
A response to Mesoudi et al.s attack came from anthropologist Tim Ingold on

Anthropology Today in 2007. For Ingold, anthropologists have good reasons to be
hostile to the cultural evolution project, because Mesoudi et al. appear to have
little understanding of what contemporary anthropology is about (p. 14):
the hegemony of the neo-Darwinian paradigm in evolutionary biology has effectively
closed it off, locking it up within a hermetically sealed, intellectual universe of its own. The
inmates of this shuttered universe can talk to no one but themselves, or to occasional converts from other disciplines who have elected to join them in their self-imposed exile and
who are routinely paraded as evidence of the paradigm's multidisciplinary ambition. (Ingold
2007, cit.: 15)
On the same issue of Anthropology Today, Mesoudi et al. responded:

productive engagement is hardly likely to be facilitated by the inflammatory tone of
Ingolds article, which egregiously distorts our arguments. We feel he does anthropology a
disservice by propagating false oppositions between our approach and some of the best
work in the discipline he purports to represent []. Ingolds exaggeration only further
perpetuates divisions between anthropology and other disciplines. (Mesoudi et al. 2007)
Unfortunately, we must refrain from delving into the interesting conceptual and
epistemological details of the arguments of both sides. Luckily, we can refer the
reader to Matera (this volume) who deals with these issues of cultural anthropology.
In short, Ingold defends the critical and self-critical attitude of cultural anthropology as a good epistemological attitude to study culture. At the same time, he decries
two tendencies of cultural anthropology: the excess of particularism and rumination, and the retirement from public debate (including lack of responses to Mesoudi
et al.). As for Mesoudi et al. in their response (2007) they add several examples of
quantitative culture studies to the already long list presented in their paper (2006),
presenting them as real improvements of understanding and solutions to specific
problems.
Mesoudi et al. (2006) had imagined a unified multidisciplinary science of culture
modeled upon biology, with disciplines (including cultural anthropology) hierarchically arranged according to their scales of observation. Cultural traits are the real
protagonists of their whole framework.7 At the macroscopic scale, cultural traits are
7
Just as cultural traits are the real building block of Mesoudi et al.s proposal, they are also a major
point of contention in the clash with Tim Ingold. See for example the following passage:
Mesoudi et al.s [] characterization is not merely anachronistic. It is also an affront to the millions of intelligent human beings for whom traditions are real and important but who are not, on
that account, trait-bearing cultural clones whose only role in life is to express in their behaviour,
artefacts and organizations information that has been transmitted to them from previous generations, only to have their performances observed and recorded in their natural habitat, along with
other forms of wildlife, by intruding scientists. The genealogy of cultural traits that Mesoudi et al.
propose, under the rubric of comparative anthropology, is a parody of history in which agency,
power and social relations are but the ephemeral effects of proximate causes whose ultimate source
is supposed to lie in capacities and dispositions bequeathed to individuals as an ancestral legacy,
independently and in advance of their life in the world (Ingold 2007: 14, emphasis added).
used to find relationships and relatedness among cultures, just like biological traits
in biological systematics and phylogenetics. A geography of cultural traits, analog
to biogeography, studies the worldwide distribution of cultural traits, considering
that they travel not only with their bearers, but also by contact and exchange.
Moving downwards in this hierarchical framework, we find the idea of laboratorybased experiments where, just like in experimental biology, cultural traits are measured with respect to their inter-individual transmission. At the lowest level we find
scientific researches on the neural, cellular, molecular bases of learning and memory, which make cultural traits possible.
Being our book an attempt to build new perspectives on how different disciplines
approach cultural traits, we do not assume as a starting point this biology-inspired
framework for the unification of the social sciences. Rather, essays from our book
may serve as critical commentaries on every tier of that hierarchical framework: for
example, Matera (this volume) discusses the possibility of performing large-scale
studies in anthropology and finding reliable patterns in cultural dynamics; Fabietti
(this volume) shows how traits are functions of social identity construction processes; Tmkin (this volume) and Ardesia (this volume) examine what can be done
with artifacts to reconstruct cultures and their relationships; Malatesta et al. (this
volume) talk about culture and geographical boundaries, and Carmagnola (this volume) dissects the possibility of mapping cultural traits and their origin(s); then
Serrelli (this volume) comments on the theory of small-scale changes, on its predictive power, and on its epistemological meaning.
At stake behind the polemics between scholars of different backgrounds, for
which we provided just two examples above, there is the reality of cultural traits,
along with the possible consequences on a theory of culture and of the human being.
Or, better, the disputers are engulfed in a dynamics that reinforces both sides in the
conviction that these are the stakes, adding more and more fuel to the fire.
1.2
Attitude of This Book
These harsh debates, rarely constructive, convinced us that what is really needed is
a serene confrontation among a large set of disciplines on culture and cultural traits,
in order to understand whether or not a real dialogue is possible and, most importantly, whether real interdisciplinary research has a sense. We thus had no ex ante
answer to these doubts, especially because one of the most difficult challenges we
had was to find a common language in order to talk fruitfully. The keywords of this
book are thus tolerance, curiosity and encounter between different discourses.
Tolerance is at work at different levels. Disciplines need tolerance to accept that
they ask their questions differently, and provide different answers to the same questions. Any discipline needs tolerance to consider criticisms against its own main
elements, to try to understand which are the main points of criticism, and to try to
find unifying solutions whenever possible. And disciplines need tolerance to accept
that a monistic solution sometimes is not readily available. Curiosity, too often
proclaimed, needs to go beyond mere parallels and instrumental uses of other disciplines, to reach the ways of thinking that are internal to different disciplines, and to
understand when interdisciplinary work is possible or desirable. Different discourses rarely cross each other, because each branch of knowledge has its own traditions that are necessary to develop specific knowledge. Each has sets of instruments
to study specific domains. But knowledge and instruments sometimes work as barriers to interdisciplinarity. At such very basic level, the common ground to evaluate
the different perspectives is just the scientific method used by all. On the other hand,
in this book we tried to focus on those issues that are more susceptible of mutual
gain from interdisciplinary research.
For all the represented disciplines, the book constitutes a first step towards an
ever-deferred interdisciplinary dialogue, and towards the construction of common
working platforms. For the reader, Understanding Cultural Traits is a way to enter
a representative sample of the intellectual diversity that surrounds such an important
topic, culture, and a means to stimulate innovative avenues of research. Each of the
involved disciplines enters the debate with a self-presenting attitude, emphasizing
its own methodological practices, and explaining whether and how cultural traits
have a role in its own research programs and epistemic goals. Along these lines
some chapters are more methodological, while others address case studies, where
methodological aspects are inferred more indirectly. What aspects of culture are
studied by different disciplines? What definitions of cultural traits are on the table?
How do we delimit a trait? How is the problem declined at different observational
scales, and which scales are most in focus? Do traits travel in geographical space,
and how? Are there other relevant spaces? How are traits modified in their diffusion? Is it possible and useful to build models of this diffusion? Only a strong multidisciplinary perspective can help to clarify these problems about cultural traits, by
means of which we understand our precious heritage, cultural diversity.
1.3
Contents and Interdisciplinary Links
The contributions proposed in this book can be read by different perspectives. For
sure, each chapter, as a fruit of intellectual research on a specific area, may stand on
its own. However, every chapter happens to explicitly link to issues analyzed by
other scholars in completely different fields. This is due to the intrinsic crossdisciplinary nature of our topic cultural traits. To make this interdisciplinary dialogue more evident, we propose three different ways to browse the entire book,
discovering new possible intellectual contaminations.
The first proposal is the network in Fig. 1.1, resulting from the unsolicited crossdisciplinary links, citations and suggestions appearing in the chapters. Each node is
a discipline. The reader, while reading a chapter, can easily point out its location in
the network and see what different disciplines can possibly be correlated. The network is not a comprehensive representation of all the possible links among the
selected disciplines, but gives a clear intuition of how interdisciplinarity can work,
10
Medicine
Mathematics
Linguistics
Literature
Musicology
Geography
Biology
History
Economics
Political Science
Anthropology
Philosophy
Psychology
Archaeology
Techological Studies
Educational Science
Sociology
Visual Art
Ecology
Fig. 1.1 Network of the unsolicited cross-disciplinary links, citations and suggestions appearing
in the chapters of this book. Red nodes are disciplines actually represented in this book, while grey
nodes are other disciplines. The correspondence between chapters and disciplines is as follows:
Anthropology (Chaps. 2 and 3), HIstory (Chap. 4), Educational Science (Chap. 5), Psychology
(Chaps. 6 and 7), Musicology (Chap. 8), Geography (Chap. 9), Philosophy (Chaps. 10 and 20),
Biology (Chaps. 11 and 16), Economics (Chaps. 12 and 14), Sociology (Chap. 13), Archaeology
(Chaps. 15 and 19), Technological Studies (Chap. 17), Linguistic (Chap. 18), Literature (Chap. 21)
even in the single topic of cultural traits. This is promising and challenging. The
reader can thus use this map to surf the book.
A second way to browse the book is to pay attention to special footnotes called
Connection. The aim of these notes made by the Editors is to identify common
concepts that are treated by different contributions in the book. Connections also
guide the reader in deepening the knowledge of some ideas cited by some authors
and developed in other Chapters. Finally, exploiting the Editors overall sight on the
book, these connections propose some new interdisciplinary links that can be further studied in future research.
Finally, Chapters can be read sequentially as they appear in the book, as rings in
a chain. The reader can identify blocks of chapters that analyze similar problems,
pose the same questions or provide different answers to the same questions. In some
cases, a Chapter provides tools for the subsequent contributions, in other cases some
Chapters analyze case studies that, though belonging to different disciplines, trace a
common sight over the issue of cultural traits and their diffusion.
11
The two opening contributions are from cultural anthropologists who, discussing
how anthropology historically dealt with the cultural trait notion, critically illustrate
two different approaches. The first contribution provides arguments in favor of a
study of Culture and generic cultural traits, while the second argues that a reasonable study can only be done by looking at the specific traits to be studied. The
reader can find instances of both kinds in the subsequent chapters.
More specifically, in the first essay, Cultural Anthropologist, Vincenzo Matera
argues for a new attention to cultural traits and cultural diffusion notions by side of
anthropologists. Such concepts are crucial to understand how Culture works and
changes in the wider world beyond the local. Matera argues that in the last decades
the crisis of representation in the social sciences has been overcome, in part, by new
theoretical categories. Along this line, anthropologists are required to focus less on
particularistic views and analyses of local cultures, and to study cultural traits more
as elements that can be identified as units of analysis that are almost invariant in
time and space.
Cultural Anthropologist, Ugo Fabietti then focuses on how cultural traits of one
tradition are re-used in other traditions in order to shape new identities. In this perspective, there are no such things as generic traits. An analysis of cultural traits
cannot be performed without a focus on the specific time and place in which traits
are observed and created. Fabietti presents a theory based on interactions among
three main forces: block thinking, geocultural imagination, and the roles of
mediascapes and ideoscapes. He then proposes an analysis of how these forces have
worked in the construction of the new national Baluchistan identity and then the
case of how a genethnic identity arose in Namibia in a context of resource
competition.
The next two contributions are focused on large-scale broadcast of cultural
traits: societies and institutions promote specific ideas that shape peoples way of
living and their relationship with societal and national context. In this acculturation,
cultural traits are both dense message and multifarious medium.
Historian of Science, Elena Canadelli, tells the story of a museum exhibit: the
Transparent Man. To the historians eye, the exhibit is a traceable catalyst and
detector of the cultural traits that are typical of periods and nations. The Transparent
Man expresses an emerging visual style and conveys a specific idea of the body and
health care related to eugenics, hygienism, as well as National Socialism in 1930s
Germany. After touring Europe, the Transparent Man and his female version were
taken up and developed by American exhibitions about the human body in different
ways and, of course, with changing political and ideological connotations. The
exhibit met the needs of the new cultural context, justified, for example, by universalism of health education. Links with the original context persisted and, at the same
time, were flexible enough to allow for adaptation. After WWII, the Transparent
Man also made its way back to Germany, undergoing a further phase of restructuring
and reuse that could be called camouflage, and its legacy can be partly recognized
until today.
Pedagogist, Rossana Brambilla surveys education as it takes place in everyday
life and in all kinds of institutions that constitute cultural traits of a particular soci-
12
ety in a particular time. Education in turn produces individual traits, i.e. thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors that reside in individuals and that are manifest expressions
of the culture in which the individual is raised and educated. Various theoretical
perspectives on education entertain different relationships with the notion of a cultural trait, and, for Brambilla, are themselves spreaders of particular cultural traits.
A Foucaultian perspective on education emphasizes the mechanism of exercise
thereby the individual interiorizes cultural traits inside institutions. Adopting this
perspective, Brambilla argues for some typical traits of contemporary society:
avoidance of a truthful relationship with the self, subjects incompetency, and explosion of counselors and consultants endowed with many technical languages.
The latter contributions lead to reflect upon how cultural traits fit into psychological processes in life contexts. The next two contributions shed some light on
these processes: the first one by focusing on a psychoanalitic notion of trait as precultural and related to identification, the second one with a view of traits as contextual cues to different cultural syndromes that coexist in societies and are
interactively learned by their members.
Philosopher, Matteo Bonazzi explores the importance of a trait notion in
Freuds and Lacans psychoanalytical thinking, connected with illustrious Western
philosophical traditions. The trait in psychoanalysis is pre-cultural, in that it produces the primordial separation between nature and culture in individual psychogenesis. The unary trait is something usually marginal, a minimal detail, almost
insignificant recognized in the Other that stabilizes the identification of the subject.
For Freud, the trait also explains identification in the constitution of masses in totalitarisms. The tragedy of both a subject and a civilization is that The subject does not
have an essence, it is a pure lack of being that searches for a trait in the Other to
which he can attach himself: but this trait, in the last instance, does not exist.
Something as unrecognizable as a trait cannot be transmitted, but, on the other hand,
produces powerful effects beyond itself. This idea of transmission also has implications for the elusive nature of teaching and learning, and for the interpretation of
remains from the past: for Bonazzi, cultural traits are always ruins.
Hong Kong bicultural people, who have been raised both into Chinese traditions
and Western social beliefs and mindsets, switch between the two cultural syndromes according to salient context cues. Cultural syndromes dont seem to blend.
Psychologists, Olivia Realdon and Valentino Zurloni, lay down empirical evidence and the theoretical framework to understand bicultural minds. Here, cultural traits are cues to cultural syndromes, the latter being systems of meaning and
practices that are available to the individual. An experimental methodology called
cultural priming, instead of comparing societies, cultures, or traits, studies the
activation of cultural syndromes. Societies seem to differ in how likely to be cued
the many available syndromes are. The transmission of cultural information is not
an automatic transfer from experts to novices: individuals are both experts and
novices; in their interaction, there is participatory appropriation that depends on
what the novice is able to acquire and adapt to his needs and expectations.
Individuals seem to have typical neural architectures correlated with their life histories of cultural learning, e.g., they can have cross-cultural dissociations between
brain areas and functions.
13
The next three contributions represent an interdisciplinary dialogue made up by

two case studies and a theoretical interpretation. The first case study is an analysis
of how jazz, as a set of traits, had emerged as a consequence of migration and slavery trades; the second is a study of the importance of borders for cultural transmission. The third contribution reflects on the epistemology of cultural traits, on the
different kinds and styles of maps that are used to capture cultural processes, and on
the human drive to look for origins.
Musicologist, Stefano Zenni presents jazz as a geographical music, based on
communities and cultures that moved across neighborhoods and continents. Jazz is
a music genre that was born and evolved under the close effects of migrations: of
people (whether slaves or not), but also of instruments, styles, ideas, books and
technological tools. In Zennis kind of study, instruments, rhythms, voices and so on
are cultural traits that get transmitted, merged together, assimilated. These simple
units of analysis can be followed in their migration process, adoption, and change.
The geographical study of diasporas is a necessary complement to understand in
depth the multiple origins of jazz. With the use of maps and several examples, and
focusing on the powerful example of New Orleans, the author considers the dynamics that fostered jazz global diffusion, up to our contemporary time.
Geographers, Stefano Malatesta and coauthors focus on a real place, an
Osteria (a kind of inn), protagonist of Osteria di confine, a famous novel by Mario
Rigoni Stern and still located on a lasting boundary between the once AustroUngarian empire and Italy. Through this example, the authors think about geographical boundaries: they discuss how boundaries get reified (i.e., made real things) in
particular places that are identified as boundary, while at the same time cultural traits
get diffused and new hybrid cultures arise. In their essay, Malatesta et al. do not focus
on the cultural transmission process itself, but rather on the importance and shape of
border places where cultural transmission happens. They describe boundaries as both
political and cultural elements, related with private geographies and memory processes. Finally, the authors propose that boundaries can themselves be identified as
cultural traits, and studied with respect to their evolution and modifications.
For Philosopher, Fulvio Carmagnola a trait is any perceptible or intangible
characteristic aspect. To be cultural, a trait must not be intentional or part of a plan,
and its diffusion and repetition must elude control even when initially intentional.
Traits are inseparable from the cultural space and power relations that are the source
of their value, and that govern their spread. Consequently, cultural traits like the
style of a period can only be recognized a posteriori and at distance. Traits can be
mapped in different ways, but a map is no simple object. For Carmagnola, maps can
vary along two dimensions: dynamic-static and conceptual-perceptual. Some maps
are schemas or diagrams. Classifying the maps used by Zenni to illustrate the history
of jazz, and comparing them with analog maps from the 1970s, Carmagnola shows
how maps depend from the (cultural) ideas of the observer. Some maps evidently
express a search for hierarchy and origins. But, in contemporary philosophy, the
question of the origins constitutes a problem. For Michel Foucault, history is not a
search for the origin, on the contrary, it must dispel the chimera of the origin,
because the passion of the origin is functional to reassurance or self-reassurance,
and there are no real single origins.
14
The next two contributions provide a historical and theoretical block on cultural
transmission theories. In particular, the first contribution reconstructs the historical
and epistemological process that brought to the integration of cultural transmission
into evolutionary genetics. The second contribution provides an example of a discipline, economics, that tries to build a comprehensive theory of cultural transmission
by taking elements from other disciplines and translating them into a formal language compatible with its objectives.
Philosopher of Science, Emanuele Serrelli explains why evolutionary genetics a mathematical body of theory eventually got to deal with culture in the
1970s: its developers had understood that the frequency dynamics of genes like the
lactase gene in populations cannot be correctly modeled without including social
transmission. Hence, they modified the idea of a Mendelian population to include
traits that are transmitted with different mechanisms, more similar to social learning. While the use of the new models required specific justifications (for example,
meticulous legitimations of describing culture in terms of traits), the body of theory
played as an immensely valuable scientific instrument, not only for its modeling
power but also for the amount of work that had been necessary for its building,
maintenance, and expansion. Justification and mathematical tinkering are two
halves of the mutual adjustment between the body of theory and the new domain of
culture. Some works in current literature, while advertising cultural evolution,
overstate justification, misrepresenting the relationship between body of theory and
domain, and hindering interdisciplinary dialogue.
Economist, Fabrizio Panebianco presents how economic theory, during the last
decades, needed to confront with cultural dynamics and with the notion of cultural
traits. The essay shows how the main elements of any microeconomic theory are, or
at least can be interpreted as, cultural traits, and how economics deals with these
issues in evolutionary game theory, in the models of cultural transmission and in
network theory, making it evident how economists borrow from other disciplines in
order to build tractable models.
A key feature of the diffusion of cultural traits is the fact that this process is
sometimes accompanied or contrasted by misunderstandings and socio-cultural
conflicts. The next two chapters provide two analyses of what happens when cultural transmission doesnt work as expected by the actors, or when battles take
place between different groups to preserve their own traits.
Sociologist, Isa Gama reflects on a field study conducted in Mozambique and
Italy, and on the usefulness of the cultural evolution framework to set up the socioanthropological study of the actual process. International cooperation is a suitable
environment for the study of cultural transmission. The core of a development
project is the transmission of knowledge, but recipients can respond differently to
new knowledge. Their local rationale totally differs from the projects logical framework. Cultural factors, such as the human tendency to imitate the dominant trend,
often cause resistance. Issues regarding communication are the norm. Sometimes
NGOs lack knowledge about local dynamics hinders the achievement of their
goals. When Gama talks about cultural evolution, she means ideas, values, and
meanings, that come from outside of the community and become part of that com-
15
munity, even suffering interpretations and changes by the new hosts. Ideas of
development are particularly important. Ideas of development determine expectations towards a cooperation project, and they can differ across practitioners and
recipients of international cooperation interventions. In fact, development the way
human societies use and change the environment over time is part of the culture:
most its aspects are related to the ways people socialize among their own group and
exchange with other groups.
Alessandra Lazazzara, scholar in organization studies, discusses how the
entrance into the labor market of a new generation of workers, together with
extended working life and postponed retirement, is leading to three generations
working together longer that in the past with a strong impact on the core set of organizational values and beliefs, as exemplified by the case of new leading firms as
Google. Different generations (baby boomers, generation X and generation Y) are
characterized by different sets of corporate cultural traits, namely some unobservable assumptions or beliefs, some values and the derived observable artifacts. A
novel challenge to managers and human resources professionals is posed by the
changing values of employees and their consequences on corporate culture.
Lazazzara discusses how the generational shift, interacting with different national
identities, may ultimately affect organizational culture.
The next block consists of four chapters. The first three look at material culture
and the fourth at languages. From archaeological remains, archaeology reconstructs
the culture of ancient populations, structural-functional analysis reconstructs the
modes of technological change (including, to a large extent, horizontal transfer),
and phylogenetics determines relatedness and common descent among different
versions of an artifact. Phylogenetics is also used in historical linguistics where
the method was in place even before Darwin.
Archaeologist, Viviana Ardesia points out that the definition of culture in
archaeology coincides with that of material culture, which is a small part of an
organized system with its social, religious, and economic subsystems, in turn
inserted in an ecological-temporal context. Reconstructing all these aspects from
simple and deteriorated artifacts is the challenge of archaeology. Artifacts are solid
behavior, a particular kind of cultural traits. Ardesia presents the rigorous passages
of archaeological investigation, from typological classification discerning the
order introduced by man into the physical world to the mechanisms through which
types originate, get accepted, and terminate; from the reconstruction of cultural
areas corrected for possible biases in the geographical distribution of associated
artifacts, to the understanding of modifications of cultures under autochthonous
and allogeneic impulses that constantly determine the invention and the loss of cultural traits.
Evolutionary biologist, Ilya Tmkin compares characters in biological phylogenetics with characters used in phylogenies of material culture. In both domains,
characters are a product of empirical comparative analysis: they are variable,
quasi-independent (semi-autonomous) intrinsic attributes of form, structure, or
composition that are the basis for comparison among entities that possess them. In
biology, they are selected and used to reconstruct nested compositional hierar-
16
chies, i.e., more and more inclusive groupings of entities. A traditional distinction
of biology, retained in cultural phylogenetics, is that between characters (that are
comparable among entities) and character states (that are the mutually exclusive
forms of a character). The distinction, although somehow artificial, becomes critical
to encode observations and perform phylogenetic analysis. To be informative of
groupings, a character must have a minimum of two states (binary variables), but
many characters have more than two (multistate variables). Homologies, as opposed
to homoplasies, are characters and character states that, coherently with the nested
compositional hierarchy, are shared due to common descent. In material culture,
Tmkin points out the lack of formal criteria for demarcating character categories,
recognizing scalar differences between them, selecting the correct kind of hierarchical system among many competing possibilities, and defining homology. While
phylogenetic reconstruction based on artifact design can be a crucial contribution to
historical inference in the cultural domain, artifacts do not really evolve: evolution of artifacts is a record of the history of conceptual innovations. For these reasons, Tmkin looks forward to new cultural phylogenetic methodologies built upon
explicit models of cultural transmission that are not constrained by implicit biological assumptions.
Engineer, Giuseppe Carignani applies an evolutionary analogy of technological change to the bow-and-arrow case, taking into account the modularity of technological artifacts and two processes whose importance is gaining recognition in
biological evolution too, namely horizontal transfer and exaptation. His main thesis
is that, in order to observe path breaking innovation, vertical transmission is not
sufficient: a key factor is some form horizontal transfer and exaptation (i.e., functionalization or re-functionalization) of the basic modules or elements of a technology. These modules represents the traits to focus the analysis upon. Once
innovation has come up, processes of amelioration, vertical transmission and selection are at work. The same evolutionary mechanisms that drove the evolution of the
bow-and-arrow can apply to some internet-driven socio-technical innovation processes, suggesting new approaches to Innovation Management and New Product
Development.
Linguists, Federica Da Milano and Nicoletta Puddu discuss the parallels and
differences between biological evolution and language history. Linguists pioneered
several methods that would enter evolutionary biology, such as tree-thinking,
homology-thinking, and even the concept of drift and clock methods that infer
population splits on the basis of small changes occurring at regular intervals. As
molecular biology matured in the second half of the twentieth century,
language-species analogies gave way to analogies between linguistic elements and
genes. Da Milano and Puddu examine all the relevant aspects of this analogy
transmission, boundaries, drift, and clocks getting to recent quantitative methods
to build language trees. Linguistic phylogeny uses characters such as cognates,
typological characters, and words. Da Milano and Puddu show how some computational tools return an unrooted network of languages, whereas others, provided
with additional assumptions, can return a tree. The adequate estimation of phylogenies needs not only rigorous methods, but also accurate data selection of which
17
languages are compared and which observable and measurable features (traits) of
language are chosen.
The last three contributions deal with three domains visual art, aesthetic preferences, and literature where thinking in terms of cultural traits seems straightforward. But the three essays talk about the deep origin of these domains, asking when
and how our species (perhaps along with others) started to do visual art, to have
aesthetic experiences, and to make poetic use of language. In this way, the Chapters
explore the issue of how cultural, as opposed to natural, these traits really are.
Archeologist, Larissa Mendoza-Straffon studies the emergence of visual art in
an evolutionary perspective. Mendoza-Straffon hypothesizes that style originated as
a social signal, more specifically as intra-group and inter-group social marker. As
societies became more complex in the Pleistocene, and the need for cooperation and
coordination increased, it became more and more difficult to remember whether
particular individuals were behaving cooperatively or not. Archaeological evidence
seems consistent with the hypothesis that visual art and diversification of styles
worked as a signal to ease cooperation.
Philosophers, Lorenzo Bartalesi and Mariagrazia Portera analyze the evolutionary emergence of aesthetic preferences. They find evidence of aesthetic preferences in non-human species, where these are routinely explained by a pure
functionalist approach. But such an approach would seem too restrictive for humans,
since it would rule out social influence. Taking inspiration from Darwins hypothesis about the rise of the aesthetic instinct they propose what they call a chiasmatic
relationship between culture and nature. Supported by emerging evidence in neuroscience, they argue that it could be possible for socially determined actions to modify brains creating instinctual actions that can be inherited.
Literary scholar, Mario Barenghi chooses not to deal directly with the transmission of cultural traits because he observes all studies on the history of literature do
nothing but illustrate the modalities of the dissemination, reproduction and adaptation
of traits. The chapter, instead, argues for literary studies need to deal with another
question, which will bring them in contact with other fields (psychology, biology,
evolution): why is literature? Literature is here understood in the broadest sense of the
word, as a set of poetic uses of language. Barenghi reflects on the possibility that literature gave our species an evolutionary advantage at the origin of language and symbolic thought, 6080 Kya. Literature was made possible by material and biological
pre-conditions. At the same time, it was not cheap. As a costly activity, it probably
served one or more functions for our survival. In Barenghis evocative words, Poems,
fairy tales, legends, epic tales, anecdotes and short stories evoke figures and imaginary
environments, which differ from the time and place of the reader or listener. They
fantasize about events that have never occurred, whether plausible or far from the
likelihood of being rendered plausible by the imagination. They re-elaborate past
events, distilling and composing them in the worthiest forms in order to be remembered. They give life to invented characters and give new and different features to real
people, turning them into role models, emblems or heroes. For Barenghi, literature is
first of all a powerful means of experience and learning: it takes its beneficiaries to
different places and times, and gives them access to feelings and intentions of others.
18
Acknowledgements Our first thank goes to Luca Stanca, Director, CISEPS Center for
Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology, and Social Sciences at the University of
Milano - Bicocca, Italy, whose support was so precious during these years. Thanks to his true
engagement in interdisciplinarity, we had the necessary support to go along with this project. We
also want to thank CISEPS for financial support, along with Riccardo Massa Department of
Human Sciences at the same university.
Then, we would like to thank Luigino Bruni and Telmo Pievani, who had, more that 5 years ago,
the first intuition of letting people from different disciplines meet in the University of Milano Bicocca, sharing the interest in evolutionary studies. We took up their heritage by promoting a new
wave of seminars, more focused on the concept of cultural traits, from which this book was born.
It was possible to realize this book thanks to all participants to the seminars we held. We thus
want to thank all presenters and, especially, those who then agreed to become authors of this book.
We want to highlight the fact that this is really a collective work, in which authors did not simply
agree to write chapters assigned by the editors; on the contrary, almost all authors participated in
the book creation process, constituting a research group, reviewing each others work, and stimulating interdisciplinary debate.
We also took advantage of cooperation with AppEEL Applied Evolutionary Epistemology
Lab, University of Lisbon, in particular with its greatly interdisciplinary research and dissemination project Implementing the Extended Synthesis in Evolutionary Biology into the Sociocultural
Domain funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Fabrizio Panebianco kindly aknowledges the
financial support of the ERC project TECTACOM 324004. Emanuele Serrelli kindly acknowledges support from the John Templeton Foundation in the framework of the 2012/2013 project
Implementing the Extended Synthesis in Evolutionary Biology into the Sociocultural Domain
carried out at the Lisbon Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab (grant ID 36288).
At last, if this book appears as it is, this is greatly due to Springers referees and staff, and to the
precious external referees from the many disciplines involved, who donated their time to ensure the
scientific correctness of this book. On top of the overall referee process, they acted as an additional
stimulus during the book construction process.
References
Atkinson, Q. D. (2011). Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language
expansion from Africa. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332(6027), 346349.
Atkinson, Q. D. (2012a). Response to comments on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder
effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science, 335(6069), 657.
Atkinson, Q. D. (2012b). Response to comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder
Blute, M. (2010). Darwinian sociocultural evolution: Solutions to dilemmas in cultural and social
theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Brambilla, R., & Serrelli, E. (2016). The goals and conditions of successful interdisciplinarity.
Some critical guidelines in planning, managing and evaluating interdisciplinary projects.
Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica, forthcoming.
Bybee, J. (Ed.). (2011). The vanishing phonemes debate, apropos of Atkinson 2011. Linguistic
Typology, 15(2), Special Issue, 147534.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cysouw, M., Dediu, D., & Moran, S. (2012). Comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial
founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science, 335(6069), 657.
19
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Diamond, J. (1999). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: W. W. Norton
& Company.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Penguin Books.
Diamond, J. (2012). The world until yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies?
New York: Viking Press.
Diamond, J., & Robinson, J. A. (Eds.). (2010). Natural experiments of history. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Distin, K. (2004). The selfish meme: A critical reassessment. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Distin, K. (2010). Cultural evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Faber, A. (1990). Phonemic segmentation as epiphenomenon evidence from the history of alphabetic writing. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research 1990, SR-101/102,
pp. 2840.
Greenberg, S. (2006). Production dynamics of speech. In P. Divenyi, S. Greenberg, G. Meyer
(Eds.), Dynamics of speech production and perception (pp. 36). Amsterdam, The Netherlands:
IOS Press, NATO Science Series, I: Life and Behavioural Sciences.
Heggarty, P. (2013). Ultraconserved words and Eurasiatic? The faces in the fire of language
prehistory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
110(35), E3254.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Cultures consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Hunley, K., Bowern, C., & Healy, M. (2012). Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic
and linguistic coevolution. Proceedings Biological Sciences/the Royal Society, 279(1736),
22812288.
Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling, and skill.
London/New York: Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2007). The trouble with evolutionary biology. Anthropology Today, 23(2), 1317.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive. Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Jaeger, T. F., Pontillo, D., & Graff, P. (2012). Comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial
founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science, 335(6072), 1042.
Johnston, B. R., et al. (2012). Water, cultural diversity, and global environmental change: Emerging
trends, sustainable futures? Dordrecht/New York: Springer.
Mace, R., Holden, C. J., & Shennan, S. (Eds.). (2005). The evolution of cultural diversity: A phylogenetic approach. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture and
synthesize the social sciences. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a unified science of cultural evolution.
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(4), 329347. discussion 34783.
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2007). Science, evolution and cultural anthropology. A
response to Ingold (this issue). Anthropology Today, 23(2), 18.
Minkov, M. (2012). Cross-cultural analysis: The science and art of comparing the worlds modern
societies and their cultures. Beverly Hills: Sage.
OBrien, M. J., & Lyman, R. L. (2000). Applying evolutionary archaeology: A systematic approach.
New York: Springer.
OBrien, M. J., & Lyman, R. L. (2003). Cladistics and archaeology. Salt Lake City: University of
Utah Press.
OBrien, M. J., Lyman, R. L., & Schiffer, M. B. (2005). Archaeology as a process: Processualism
and its progeny. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche construction: The neglected
process in evolution (Monographs in population biology, Vol. 37). Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
20
Pagel, M., et al. (2013). Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(21),
84718476.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shennan, S. (2003). Genes, memes and human history: Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution. London: Thames & Hudson.
Shennan, S. (Ed.). (2009). Pattern and process in cultural evolution. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. (Ed.). (2000). Metarepresentations: A multidisciplinary perspective. Oxford: Oxfor
University Press.
Van Tuyl, R., & Pereltsvaig, A. (2012). Comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder
Wang, C.-C., et al. (2012). Comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect
model of language expansion from Africa. Science, 335(6069), 657.
Chapter 2
Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture,

Cultural Traits and Cultural Changes Between
Global and Local Scales
Vincenzo Matera
2.1
Conceptualizing Culture: From the Simple

to the Complex
A special epistemological tension characterizes anthropological knowledge. It has

the same roots as the discipline and has been discussed many times by many scholars throughout its history. It gives cultural anthropology its peculiarity within a
western academic context. Cultural anthropological understanding, indeed, as a
unique case, implies an endless enlargement of concepts, methods, theories and
achievements since they have been defined in one particular cultural context but
have to fit and work in another. It is an epistemological strength that gives this discipline endless problematic and critical drives. There are no other fields of knowledge that, like cultural anthropology, see their concepts, their theories, their research
methods so deconstructed, so criticized, and so continuously revised.
Regarding this tension, there are opposing views: some, such as Antony Giddens,
think that it is a small and clear sign of theoretical blurring. Others, such as Clifford
Geertz, think that it is a sign of great capability to anticipate social and cultural
transformations and to fit in with them. Still others, like Roger Keesing, think that,
from an ideological point of view, the intellectual project of anthropology, since its
origin, has consisted of the invention and claim of radical cultural alterity, so that
anthropological discourse has to continuously remake itself depending on political positions and identities to be able to attend to its basic function of framing
diversity. In this scope, the West needs the classical concept of culture as a delimited
universe of shared uses and values.1
1
Connection: Section 14.3 and Chap. 12 discuss values as cultural traits in the context of
organizations.
V. Matera (*)
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano - Bicocca, Milan, Italy
e-mail: vincenzo.matera@unimib.it

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_2
21
22
V. Matera
Nevertheless, the doubt remains that despite the progress of reflection and the
extent of empirical research, cultural anthropology is weaker today than it was in
the last century (Hannerz 2010).2
Of course, as is its nature, an intellectual project that draws its basic raison detre
from the need to understand the other without looking into the question of whether
this alterity exists or if it is something invented by the same anthropologists (Said
1973; Wagner 1981; Keesing 1994; Kilani 1994) cannot but accept its deeply
historical and cultural being, or the fugacity of its theoretical models, the evanescence of its knowledge, or the total lack of solidity. Cultural anthropology, in this
sense, is made of the same cultural material that it studies, even though many
scholars have proposed some very convincingly (e.g. Claude Lvi-Strauss), others
less so (e.g. Dan Sperber) concepts made of another kind of material, very strong
and unchangeable, to find a secure point, no longer a cultural one but a logical or
natural one, from which to study cultural variations.3 We know well that scientific
knowledge continues in revolutions, by sudden changes of paradigms (Khun
1969), but it is probably a peculiarity of anthropologists to make experiences from
a theoretical rarefaction. The longer the study proceeds, with new achievements
and with new perspectives, the narrower the path along which it goes becomes. As
Clifford Geertz put it:
Nevertheless, pulled in opposed directions by technical advances in allied disciplines,
divided within itself along accidental ill-drawn lines, besieged from one side by resurgent
For example, the public image of the discipline is today very far from clear and understandable.
Given that it was, from a certain point on, a no more politically and intellectually sustainable specific discipline for that part of humanity said primitive, or simple or, in general, non western,
as anthropology was intended at its origin. The discipline moved (or tried to move) itself towards
a study concerned with all of humanity. Anyway, this move still appears to be incomplete today,
and the image of anthropology, both internal and public, is rather blurred. As Ulf Hannerz puts it,
there are some questions to be answered or at least debated, which are crucial for the future of the
discipline: What, in these times, is anthropology for? What is its place in the world? How do we
go about our work? Who should work where? How do we want to be understood, and how do we
not want to be seen? For whom do we write, and whom should we read? (Hannerz 2010: 2).
3
It is of course impossible to face exhaustively here such a complex question concerning the history of anthropological ideas. I have just hinted at the position of Claude Lvi-Strauss, a strongly
rationalist one, which considers the structures of human thought to be the same everywhere, and
the matrix that generates human cultural systems the principle of binary opposition as a deep,
innate and though universal structure underlying superficial (and observed) facts, eventually different in cultural contents (Lvi-Strauss 1963, 1966). A similar rationalist position is the one of several scholars in cognitive anthropology, that claim a culture as knowledge definition, and study
both the organization of cognitive classifications (see Berlin (1992)) and/or the mental representations of cultural practices and their widespread, in certain cases as a sort of epidemiology of ideas
(Sperber 1985, 1996; Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004; see also Shore (1998)). Universal perceptual
and cognitive disposals, or a sort of universal hidden nature are usually at the basis of their ways
to explain Culture, as intrinsically linked to the human mind, and in ultimate analysis without any
kind of mediation by cultural practices. The essential point here is the emphasis on the rules, or on
the logic principles underlying any cultural system that enables comparison and a general theory
of Culture (Miller 2003). For a recent return to more relativistic issues, indeed within the cognitive
frame, see Levinson (2003).
Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture, Cultural Traits and Cultural Changes
23
scientism and from the other by an advanced form of hand-wringing, and progressively
deprived of its original subject matter, its research isolation, and its master-of-all-I-Survey
authority, the field seems not only to stay reasonably intact but, what is more important, to
extend the sway of the cast of mind that defines it over wider and wider areas of contemporary thought. We have turned out to be rather good at waddling in. In our confusion is our
strength. (Geertz 2000: 97)
It is something like this waddling in that marks the analysis of Culture.

The analysis of Culture, indeed, has been going on in cultural anthropology the
discipline that has most studied it following a proceeding consisting in progressive substitutions of simple images with complex ones. While it is usually common
opinion that scientific knowledge consists of the transformation from the complex
into the simple, from chaos to order, from the unintelligible to the understandable,
sometimes the opposite as in anthropology with regards to culture happens:
The rise of a scientific concept of culture amounted to, or at least was connected with, the
overthrow of the view of human nature dominant in the Enlightenment a view that, whatever else may be said for or against it, was both clear and simple and its replacement by a
view not only more complicated but enormously less clear. The attempt to clarify it, to
reconstruct an intelligible account of what man is, has underlain scientific thinking about
culture ever since. Having sought complexity and, on a scale grander than they ever imagined, found it, anthropologists became entangled in a tortuous effort to order it. And the end
is not yet in sight. (Geertz 1973: 34)
Forty years have passed since 1973, and still the end is not yet in sight.
However, there are some paths in sight that we can follow by trying to understand
the complex, elusive, only sometimes analyzed, but always discussed concept of
culture.
From an epistemological point of view, these paths are not all on the same
level. Some of them, as we will see, are more or less clearly linked to our main
characteristics as human beings. Others, however, are direct consequences of our
anthropological gaze on human beings. Following these paths we will also find
that our objective, the concept of culture, is a changing one, depending on how we
observe it.
2.1.1
An Unfinished Animal
The first of these lines of reasoning, the one from which I would like to start, is
directly linked to the first part of the title of this paper, Understanding cultural
diversity. It derives, perhaps, from the main peculiarity of human beings as a biological species: its incompleteness. Man is an incomplete, unfinished animal, as
most of philosophical anthropology has argued (Gehlen 1940), and as Clifford
Geertz (1973) has underlined when presenting his view of culture as the software
man needs in order to live in a meaningful way, and as the condition for gaining full
mankind:
24
V. Matera
[] there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture
[] would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognizable
sentiments, and no intellect; mental basket cases. (Geertz 1973: 49)
Because of his incompleteness, man cannot do anything but produce culture,

which is, according to Geertzs computer science metaphor, a control mechanism
we need to operate. In different contexts, under different conditions and circumstances, human beings interact differently and produce different cultures, thus, we
can face the extraordinary diversity man is imbued with thinking of in terms of
cultural diversity.4
2.1.2
Empirical Evidence
An extraordinary differentiation is the second trait of the human species which is

useful for our excursus along culture concept anthropological conceptualizations. It
brings us to our second line of reasoning; human diversity is an empirical trait, an
evident one even at a very superficial glance, which we continuously experience
both in a direct way, during our daily life, and in an indirect way, through any kind
of image or representation. A large amount of literature exists about human diversity.
Different languages, different physical traits, different beliefs and values, different
4
The problem of the relationship between nature and culture is a huge one, not only in anthropology. Of course, within the vast landscape of environmental studies, biology and cognitive psychology, nature can no longer be seen as a simple and inert background for the great unfolding of
human culture. In particular, the ethnographic knowledge of sites and peoples starting from
ethnobotanic research until the more recent ecological approaches of Tim Ingold, who is the key
contemporary theorist of a biologically-minded based anthropology (see, for example, Kull et al.
2003) enables these theorists to do away with the nature/culture dualism that has been so central
to anthropology. Within this framework, Philipe Descola argues for a new anthropological epistemology beyond nature and culture, in which the nature/culture dualism is definitively replaced
with a fully monistic framework. At the heart of his book Beyond Nature and Culture (Descola
2013) Descola not only attempts to describe some more deep-lying schemas which, he claims
can account for the appearance of naturalism but also some different ways of identifying things
in the world, and of forming relations with them. The position of Clifford Geertz and of his control mechanism conception of culture still appears as not fully beyond this dualism, even though
he refuses to make a sharp division between human nature and human culture. In any case, it is not
evident which anthropologists are (or were) so committed to the division of nature and culture.
Perhaps they are the classic scholars such as Levi-Strauss, of course, Radcliffe-Brown, EvansPritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Marshal Sahlins? The point is maybe more complex than it appears,
given that it is impossible to state where exactly anthropology, both currently and in its history, sits
in regard to this division. The post-structuralist concept of culture insists on what people hold in
their minds (like the Geertzian semiotic notion). In classical symbolic anthropology, the universe
of relations out of which cultures are condensed was conceptualised as a web of meanings
(Geertz 1973) and were seen to be established only between groups of real social actors. In the
beyond nature/culture conception, the web that establishes culture is not just a web of meanings, it
is also real and very material. The communities that form out of these condensed relations, at once
mental and material, contain semantic, social connections between people as well as things,
objects, technologies and non-humans (Latour 1993; Ingold 1998, 2004).
25
ways of acting and thinking present a real Babel, which makes our world essentially
an opaque place. Human beings, members of the human species, express and perceive this incredible amount of diversity in multiple ways, so that the world we live
in, the world of man, is opaque, of course, but not uniform. Under certain conditions
opacity is more dense, becoming dark, and this makes us afraid. Other times it
seems to dissipate, and this makes us feel safer. Understanding another person,
grasping their point of view, or their thinking and acting is exalting. This positive
effect is stronger whenever our capacity to understand and to predict works not just
for a single individual, but also for a community; whenever, in other words, we are
able to enlarge our understanding, and to make the world transparent, as cultural
anthropology analysis, ultimately, should do (Hannerz 2010). How is this collective
understanding possible? How can we make the world transparent? By making an
effort to realize that what makes the world an opaque place is nothing but cultural
phenomena that we are able to read, to interpret, to explain, and to make clear.
2.1.3
The Repetition: The Heart of Cultural Production
Indeed, at the basis of our acting and thinking, there is a very simple mechanism:
repetition (plus improvisation, in the sense that the word takes in artistic performances, see Halam and Ingold 2007). This is the third line of reasoning to follow in
search of some understanding of culture. The mechanism of repetition plus improvisation a certain degree of controlled variation around the same theme, like in
jazz music is at the real core of our daily life, and of our everyday activity as part
of a meaningful existence. It is also at the very heart of linguistic and communicative production, and for this reason could be theoretically conceptualized by the
notion of performance, as underlined by Alessandro Duranti.
To be a fluent speaker of a language means being able to enter any conversation
in ways that are seen as appropriate and not disruptive. Such conversational skills,
which we usually take for granted (until we find someone who does not have them
or ignores their social implications) are not too different from the ways in which a
skilled jazz musician can enter someone elses composition, by embellishing it,
playing around with its main motive, emphasizing some elements of the melody
over others, quoting other renditions of the same piece by other musicians, and
trying out different harmonic connections, without losing track of what everyone
else in the band is doing (Duranti 1997: 1617).
Where we cannot find repetition, we cannot find sense, at least not at first glance.5
Because of this, we find difficulties in understanding the way in which other people
5
Differently from a computer processor, the human brain is able to grasp the sense of what is going
on (linguistic acts, speech acts, actions and so on), although it always occurs with a certain amount
of variation. This is the principle of vague boundaries (Andersen 1975; Labov 1973; Cardona
1985) by which human beings are able to recognize as the same occurrence the same word
different acts of speech (performed by different speakers, for example, or by the same speaker in
26
V. Matera
act and think. Their acting and thinking are different from our own in the sense that
they diverge from our usual patterns, those patterns we are used to repeating every
day. The mechanism of repetition is the first step of culture making and of cultural
trait patterning. In one of the most important books of the last century, Reality as
Social Construction (Berger and Luckman 1967), Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckman explained how the mechanism of repetition is placed at the heart of cultural production. Starting from their perspective, it emerges that a culture is a set of
points of reference or points of invariance that remain relatively fixed or that do
not change, whereas all the rest is changing. Ways of acting, ways of doing things,
ways of thinking, and even values have gained a sort of invariance (relative
invariance, of course) throughout the course of time. We, as human beings, are
immersed in temporality, as Martin Heidegger claimed. Our existence bears the
marks of time, as we are biological organisms that are born, grow up, become old,
and die. So, we are organisms that change with and by time and we live embedded
in a world that changes incessantly (as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus
said in his famous fragment Panta Rei). Because of the character of flow of our
primary experience, we need to establish, and we are able to do it only in a totally
arbitrary way, that some elements cannot change (or do not have to change). If not,
we would be unable to recognize, to understand, or to make sense of our lives. Our
life, to be a meaningful life, needs order, direction, and stability, which can be
obtained only by repetition. Of course, social and cultural order, direction, and stability, are all hard to achieve and are not all granted and established by a timeless
structure. In other words, making things go together is something we at least
have to work on (Hannerz 1996: 8).
From this perspective, a philosophical one if we like, culture is a flexible, historical structure of repetition, completely arbitrary, immersed in the flux of temporality,
or of transformation.6 This means that in making up our arbitrary culture by
different occasions) as mere repetitions. We can extend, I argue, this principle, which has been
attested to in the realm of language and communication, to the realm of Culture as well. Of course,
beyond a certain degree, variation becomes unrecognizable, so the world becomes an
opaque place.
6
This is probably the reason why the first generation of fieldwork anthropologists after Franz Boas
and Bronislaw Malinowski were to a certain extent entangled with the idea that a culture is a highly
integrated totality. Only during the second half of the Nineteenth century did some scholars (e.g.
Max Gluckman, Fredrich Barth, Sigfried Nadel, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and Marshal
Sahlins) begin to express their doubts about it, underlining for example that a culture has of course
something to be integrated, but it is probably for the most part a question of degree. As Ulf Hannerz
recalls, the concrete lives of human beings indeed imply a relevant part of [] contradictions,
ambiguities, misunderstandings and conflicts; making things go together is something we at least
have to work on (Hannerz 1996: 8). Here, there is a significant connection with the crucial idea in
conversational analysis and in anthropology of language that in social practices of communication
social actors have to constantly gain their reciprocal understandings, agreements, making things go
in the right directions and so on. This is why linguistic acts are performances, in a dramatic sense
(Duranti 1997). There is nothing certain, in social (communicative) interactions. We have the
chance to do the right thing, and so doing we achieve acknowledgement and approval from our
interlocutors, but we can also do the wrong thing, and so be blamed and damaged in our face
(Goffman 1959, 1967).
27
repetition, we also make up our diversity, or, from an inverted perspective, that we
can explain our diversity in terms of our cultural, arbitrary diversity. How are we
able to establish that structure (a soft one) of invariance (contingent invariance) that
is our culture?
2.1.4
The Creature Who Makes Sense
The fourth line of reasoning we are going to follow in our partial attempt to depict
the concept of culture is connected to another crucial trait of human beings, and in
a special way of Homo sapiens, which is the capacity to make sense. We are producers of meanings, as Ulf Hannerz has claimed with regard to his idea of culture.
Homo sapiens is the creature who makes sense. She literally produces sense
through her experience, interpretation, contemplation, and imagination, and she cannot live in the world without it. The importance of this sense-making in human life is
reflected in a crowded conceptual field: ideas, meaning, information, wisdom, understanding, intelligence, sensibility, learning, fantasy, opinion, knowledge, belief,
myth, and tradition. Amongst these words, another also belongs, dear to anthropologists: culture. There have been times when they have used it to stand for much more,
but in the recent period, culture has been taken to be above all a matter of meaning.
To study culture is to study ideas, experiences, and feelings, as well as the external
forms that such internalities take as they are made public, available to the senses and
thus, truly social. For culture, in the anthropological view, it is the meanings which
people create, and which create people, as members of societies (Hannerz 1992: 3).
To make sense is the only resource we as human beings, as biological, but incomplete organisms (without any concrete set of natural disposals once we could have
said instincts to grant survival), who at the mercy of time, both biological
and cultural, have to gain a partial anchorage for our existence, otherwise we are
condemned to chaos. So, we produce sense, in a public dimension, during and
through the complex game of social interactions. This sense is always, in a more or
less rigid way, distributed inside a formal frame, as webs of meanings. As Clifford
Geertz put it in his exemplary essay Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture:
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not
an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.
(Geertz 1973: 5)
2.1.5
Memory
There is one more line of reasoning, the fifth. Indeed, both the sense-making process and the need for repetition require another capability, which is the capability to
retain traces of our experiences and to recall them, the faculty of memory. In
28
V. Matera
another very important book, the egyptologist Jan Assmann (1992) explained the
crucial role memory as a cultural and social construction plays in our life.
Thanks to our memory we are able to recall and to repeat (and to forget, of course);
to recall our meaningful experiences and to repeat them in appropriate ways and
under appropriate circumstances. In other words, thanks to our memory, we are able
to make up our culture the sense we produce during experiences and the webs of
meaning that envelope our world which is still alive every day.
So, to sum up, when speaking about culture we are able to state that it is a complex concept, that it is directly linked to our basic mechanisms as human beings:
incompleteness, differentiation, production of sense, repetition, and faculty of
memory which are all essential ingredients to make our existential horizon a
meaningful one. Furthermore, we know that culture is made of meanings, of webs
of meanings, and that it is the primary source of human diversity. At this point, I
present a hypothesis: if, as we have seen, culture is made of meanings, and if, as we
are going to see, the smallest units of culture are cultural traits, then we could possibly conceptualize cultural traits in terms of meanings that are socially produced
and diffused, socially transmitted and acquired (and interpreted) by individuals.
Within this hypothesis, there is also room for culture mixing, hybridization, or creolization as a quality or an added value of migrations (in general, of mobility) and
the media in contemporary global cultural diffusion (Appadurai 1996; Herzfeld
2001; Lewellen 2002; Inda and Rosaldo 2002). I will return to this hypothesis later.
2.2
Culture and Cultures
I would like to point out, at this stage of our short review of a scholarly culture
concept, that we can almost face the concept of culture on two different levels. One
is the level of Culture (with a capital C), as a direct response to some basic characteristics and processes of human beings, the incompleteness, the differentiation, the
making of sense, the mechanism of repetition, and the faculty of memory, as we has
seen. It is evident that these basic conditions have to be the same wherever we
observe them. I do not think that this claim entails any engagement with any sort of
positivism, universalism, or anti-relativist scientific epistemology.
On another level we face the concept of culture by studying the materials single
cultures are made of, those particular and localized webs of meanings that, starting
from the claim of Geertz (1973: 52) that what men are, above all other things,
is various, become the main target of any real anthropologist, or, better,
ethnographer.7
7
According to Clifford Geertz there are no differences between anthropology and ethnography or,
in other terms, beyond ethnography there is nothing for anthropologists left to do (Ingold 2007).
There are several quotes from Geertz where it is possible to find this vision of the discipline. The
Geertzian manifest, for example, Toward an Interpretive theory of culture (Geertz 1973), beyond
its most common suggestions on the semiotic vision of culture, and on the textual metaphor of
29
If we look at the history of the discipline and at the main anthropological ways
to conceptualize culture, it becomes easy enough to underline that anthropological scholarship on culture has faced the concept on one or the other of these two
levels, depending on the intellectual, but also the political and social circumstances
of its historical collocation (see Hannerz (1996) and Fisher (2007)).
We can understand the passage from Culture, in the singular, to cultures, in the
plural, thanks to the dimension of the social distribution and organization of cultural
meanings, in the following (theoretical) terms. As we have seen, human beings
produce sense in the social dimension of their lives. They shape and acquire Culture
as meanings they make up webs or habits of meanings and finally, they arrange
(or try hard to arrange) cultural meanings into coherent cultural patterns. As they
go about their lives, Culture, in some ways, becomes socially organized and distributed into and along the more or less coherent packages anthropologists have
called (and still call) cultures. These cultures are the mirror images of societies.
Indeed, it is in the plural.
This insight about cultures presupposes that human beings live, or should live,
to maintain a pure culture and a strong identity, within closed and separate social
units. It presupposes, furthermore, that human communities should be semantic
monads, closed universes. Apart from the doubt, if any, that anthropologists have
never really accepted such a rigid idea of their research object,8 there is another
point to underline here.
cultural analysis as trying to read [] a manuscript-foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations [] presents in its final paragraphs an articulate reasoning just on
this issue. We do not yet have a really deep and textual analysis of the complete implications of
Geertzs writings, for both the actual ethnographic practices and the theory of culture. I would just
like to underline three critical points of the Geertzian anthropology is ethnography program. First,
the anthropological model: it is probably true that The locus of study is not the object of study.
Anthropologists dont study villages (tribes, towns, neighbourhoods ); they study in villages
(ivi 1973: 22). But it is probably also true that most anthropologists have been trapped in the villages they have been studying (see, for example, Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Amit 2000). Second,
the methodological problem: It is to be resolved says Geertz or, anyway, decently kept at
bay by realizing that social actions are comments on more than themselves; that where an interpretation comes from does not determine where it can be impelled to go. Small facts speak to large
issues, winks to epistemology, or sheep raids to revolution, [] (ivi 1973: 23). As a matter of
evidence, however, anthropologists failed to adequately and definitively solve the problems which
the microscopic nature of ethnography presents, given that to really hear small facts speaking to
large issues anthropologists should need a resonance disposal, that in an anthropology is ethnography frame is not compelled (see, for example, Hastrup 2004; Wikan 2013). Third, the conditions
of cultural theory, that: the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities
but to make thick description possible [] (ivi 1973: 26), and that [] it is not predictive
(ivi 1973: 27). These conditions are against both one basic principle of human meaningful acting
regularity indeed and the major promise of anthropological knowledge, its ability to depict credible or at least possible scenarios (see Hannerz 2003a, 2010; Fisher 2007).
8
But see for example Ulf Hannerz when he affirms: The idea of an organic relationship between
a population, a territory, a form as well as a unit of political organization, and one of those organized packages of meanings and meaningful forms which we refers to as cultures has for a long
time been an enormously successful one, spreading throughout the world even to fairly unlikely
places, at least as a guiding principles. Perhaps anthropologists, studying human life even in places
30
V. Matera
Since human beings involve themselves more and more with global interconnectedness, as is happening in the contemporary world, an important question
emerges: under which circumstances does Culture take on, eventually, other kinds
of organization than the neatly arranged packages (or webs) of meanings we have
been (and still are) used to defining as cultures and to study ethnographically?
2.3
Tylors Definition of Culture
Indeed, since its origin, the anthropological study of Culture has been understood in
many different ways, both before and after its first definition. The term, nowadays,
shows a plurality of connotations that in one way or another are indexes of the dense
stratification of meanings that have covered it. Within the general idea of Culture
many divergent and alternative insights coexist indeed, which attack the same
conception of man. The first anthropological concept of culture, defined by Edward
Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (Tylor 1871), despite its strongly evolutionist
(and of course ethnocentric) matrix has been a useful intellectual instrument
almost in the illuminated vision of its author to free savage people from the
natural condition where they were firmly collocated by western imagery, and to
recognize their full manhood. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and during
the first decades of the twentieth century anthropologists studied Culture as the
product (not casual but systematic) of a universal faculty of human beings as members of a society to produce material and intellectual objects and ideas.9 There are
no human beings living in a natural condition, because all humans produce Culture
and in so doing mark a distance, both a symbolic and a material one, from Nature.
Anyway, within the ideological frame of evolutionism, Nature takes its revenge on
Culture in so far as it is just Nature that determines the evolution of Culture with its
where states have not existed, should have been a bit more wary of the construct. But with the
personal experience of citizenship surrounding them in their own lives, facing the classical conditions of local fieldwork, and under the influence of a natural history tradition in which cultures are
seen more or less as taxonomically analogous with biological species, they have hardly been
inclined than anyone else to scrutinize the assumptions linking at least people, place, culture
(Hannerz 1996: 20). Indeed, several scholars during the history of anthropology have been a bit
more wary of the construct, a handful of them in the first half of the last century, (see, for example,
Bateson (1936), Leach (1959), and, also, on the USA side, Speck (1935); Hallowell (1960)), when
mainstream anthropology was positivist and essentialist, some more in the course of the second
half, such as Fredrick Barth, Max Gluckman, James C. Mitchell and the Manchester School,
G. Balandier, C. Meillassoux and the French Marxist Anthropologists, Marshal Sahlins, until cultures and societies were definitively unbounded (Barth 1969, 1989; Clifford and Marcus 1986;
Clifford 1988; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Appadurai 1996).
9
Of course to define the concept of culture was the favourite anthropological task until the last part
of the twentieth century, and it is not possible here to face the huge amount of work created on the
culture concept in its entirety. It could be enough at least to mention that Kroeber and Kluckhohn
(1952) collected well over 150 definitions of culture. For a more recent analysis of the concept see
Borofsky (1994), Hannerz (1992, 1996), and Fisher (2007).
31
evolutionary (and universal) rule. Each people has a specific culture that is nothing
but the expression of one precise step along the path of Cultural Evolution, from
primitive culture to civilization. Tylors theory of culture had one essential premise: Culture, the new object of a new academic discipline, cultural anthropology, is
universal. Anthropologists are thus able to rank all human societies by their different levels of cultural achievements. In other words: local facts are relevant not in
themselves, but because they are indexes of something else.
From this perspective, a very interesting notion for our purposes is the one of
survival, within Tylors theory of culture a local cultural phenomena (both material
and symbolic) that outlives the set of conditions under which it developed. In Tylors
terms, survivals are evidence of a basic principal of Tylor anthropology, the psychic
unity of mankind: all human beings are ruled by the same mental processes and,
faced with similar circumstances, will respond similarly. The principal of psychic
unity explained the appearance of similar cultural traits in widely disparate societies.
Thanks to the notion of survivals, local cultural traits became powerful indexes
(epistemologically speaking) to connect all human societies in a chain of temporal
sequences, within a theory of cultural change. Survivals were useful in establishing
sequences of development from the simple to the complex, from homogeneity to
heterogeneity and from uncertainty to certainty. Survivals are cultural phenomena
that can be characterized as follows:
Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to
introduce the term survivals. These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which
have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in
which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an
older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved. (Tylor 1871:1617)
So, if we look at survivals, according to Tylors insights and definitions, we

cannot help but notice the similarity with another notion of the same period in the
history of anthropology, that of cultural trait, as it emerged explicitly within
Diffusionism. The cultural theory of diffusionism was intended in quite different
ways. We count an extreme and a moderate diffusionism, depending on how many
centres of origins and spreads of culture were indentified. Some thought that there
was just one centre, from where the totality of human culture spread. Others thought
that the plurality of centres was evident for spreading cultural facts. Anyway, cultural traits are, in diffusionist terms, the smallest units of a culture, single elements
or, in more methodological terms, units of analysis for observing a specific culture. If we agree that each culture is a more or less integrated system of learned
behavior patterns typical of (most of) the members of a society the strongest and
most accepted conception of culture that was stated in mainstream cultural anthropology in the last century (see, for example, Benedict (1934), Kroeber (1952),
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), and Hannerz (1998, 2001)) then a cultural trait is
an irreducible unit of learned behavior (a cluster of meanings, maybe). Each culture
is made up of thousands of cultural traits, possibly grouped in cultural complexes of
32
V. Matera
larger clusters of traits organized about some nuclear point of reference (Wissler
1929; Hoebel 1958), finally converging to form cultural patterns, a number of cultural complexes interrelated by their social function or value.
The components of culture are cultural traits, culture complexes, and institutions. [] the
elements and complexes of a culture are functional in that each part tends to be related to
the others in ways that contribute to the operation of the whole culture. The differing ways
in which variant culture traits are related to each other lend to each culture its unique overall quality, or configuration. It is through culture that each society develops a way of life that
enables it to cope with the wresting of sustenance and shelter from the physical world and
of managing the relations of human beings one to another. (Hoebels 1958: 172173)
The point at stake here is the systematic view of culture as something characterized as having a very high level of integration. This point derives from Tylors
culture concept as a complex whole and has persisted within cultural theory until
very recent times. For Tylor, the systematic nature of culture does not exclude that
one or more cultural traits could be survivals, mere evidence of precedent evolutionary stages, without any meaning under the present conditions.
Other scholars held that a cultural element could change in its function but
remain integrated with the rest of culture. Bronislaw Malinowski, for example,
refused to accept that any part of a culture could be disconnected from the rest of the
cultural system because it no longer had any function (Malinowski 1944).
To summarize, the notion of cultural trait is the architrave of Diffusionism, just
as the one of survivals is for Evolutionism. Both are theoretically useful for their
capacity to offer an account of what happens to local cultural facts from the field in
which they are observed and collected. Fieldwork, indeed, is nothing more than a
short break from a much longer time, a past, a present, and a future, and is nothing
more than a delimited spot of a much larger space, regional, national, international,
and global. Specific cultures are connected to the wider world beyond the local.
Wider in terms of time, as local cultural facts are imbued with the past and memory.
Wider in terms of space, as local cultural facts bring us elsewhere. In Tylors theory
of culture, indeed, cultural phenomena are of course localized but are not isolated in
separate contexts, for they are part of temporal chains, sequences or phases that link
their present condition to their preceding evolutionary steps and to the future of their
successive evolution. In the same terms as a cultural change theory, cultural traits,
complexes and patterns are parts of circles or areas that link their present collocation to their spread or centres of origin, as attested to by other cultural phenomena
expressed by other people elsewhere.
As we will see, if one accepts the premise that continuity, in time and/or in space,
is the logic from which to observe cultural change, then there is continuity and not
discontinuity in the cultural and social realm. Thus, going beyond the cultures
becomes a clear (but not simple) methodological matter (or imperative).
2.4
33
Sliding from Culture Toward Cultures
Franz Boas marked the progressive slide of anthropology from Culture toward cultures. Boas rejected large scale comparative analysis between cultures and societies
and argued for cultural pluralism, for cultures in the plural. With him the shift in
anthropological thought from the Culture of all Humanity to the particular theory
of cultures that characterized twentieth-century anthropological thought started.
When anthropological mainstream theory also thanks to Boas new particularistic insights about cultures turned towards an emphasis on delimited, intense
fieldwork, of course local cultural facts began to become more and more relevant for
themselves, and no longer relevant for fostering anthropological theories of Culture
(Evolutionism or Diffusionism).
After Boas emphasis on the plurality of cultures and on cultural relativism, and
after Geertzs claims (Other fields, the Javanese say, other grasshoppers) why
have anthropologists revealed themselves to be so inclined to interpret human diversity as the product of local cultures, and to (partly) abandon a generalist vision of
cultural process? In part, of course, to emphasize that human diversity is just a cultural
matter, a means to struggle against racism. But there are also more epistemological
reasons, rooted in the local nature of ethnographic epistemology itself.
In part, I would argue, it has to do with the characteristics of the classic field sites, where
much of anthropological thinking about culture has remained rooted: little communities of
enduring face-to-face relationships and a very limited division of labour. In such places a
large proportion of knowledge and experience may quite naturally come to be extensively
shared that is, uniformly distributed. Ongoing life is so redundant that much of the reproduction of culture occurs without much deliberate effort, more or less as a by-product of the
daily round of activity and commentary. Field workers may well take their leave of such
places, the task accomplished, with much ethnography, yet little specific concern with the
nature of cultural process. (Hannerz 1996: 37)
If we observe what has happened in the last two decades with the concept of
culture in the plural, we can do nothing but agree that the shift from the first to the
second level of cultural analysis could have been, for cultural anthropology, a
passage to a dead end. A great amount of effort has been put into analyzing the
content of specific cultures, expressed by a plurality of single societies, while just
marginal effort has been put into studying the Culture of all humanity and a theory
of cultural change. Nowadays, given that much of anthropological thinking about
culture has remained rooted in the field sites, anthropologists know a great deal
about invented (maybe) and local cultures, but do not know much more than 30
years ago about Culture, about how Culture works, and about how Culture changes
in the wider world beyond the local.
That ethnographic research that focused on local, delimited and specific social
and cultural contexts is of course of capital importance. We need to decode and
interpret the content of specific cultures, those specific webs of meanings which a
certain people produce in a certain environment, to grasp the sense of living on that
spot, and to make that world less opaque and more transparent to their gaze. Even
if, despite the difficulties of intense, prolonged engaged ethnography, we achieve a
34
V. Matera
partially complete and detailed understanding of some (small) portion of local

culture or of local cultural phenomena, it is scarcely or not useful to improve our
knowledge of Culture because, for the most part, our local insights lack connections
with the wider world. Field periods are limited, indeed, and fragmented. Local
cultures are not fixed, as recent critiques of the making of anthropological texts have
pointed out, but changing objects, embedded into wider temporal and spatial
frames.
Facts, said many years ago by Adamson E. Hoebel (1958), are not enough.
All phenomena have their meanings, but they never speak for themselves (ivi 1958:
xi). Cultural phenomena are indexes of wider frames, and of more general processes,
and these frames and processes are decisive for an anthropological knowledge with
all its fullness of meaning. If not, anthropology runs the risk of becoming a
fragmented, inconclusive and marginal plurality of ethnographic details and peculiarities without consistent epistemological and political openness (Ingold 2007; see
also Gellner 2012). As Alfred Kroeber stated:
[] while any national or tribal culture may and must for certain purposes be viewed and
analyzed by itself [] any such culture is necessarily in some degree an artificial unit segregated off for expediency [] the ultimate natural unit for ethnologists is the culture of
all humanity at all periods and in all places. (Kroeber 1945: 9)
Post-modern anthropology has clearly unbounded cultures (see Clifford and

Marcus (1986), Clifford (1988), and Hannerz (1996)). Post-modern anthropology
has also emphasized the misuses and abuses and the ideological representations and
the misunderstandings of a concept of culture which is essentialized and popularized (Markowitz 2004). Several anthropologists have shown that a certain kind of
talk involves a sort of reification of cultures, viewed as real objects with an autonomous existence and, furthermore, as compact, coherent, systematic, uniform
entities.10
10
See, for an example of cultural essentialism, Samuel Huntingtons The Clash of Civilization. His
use of the concept of culture as an essence, within a rigid and deterministic frame concerning
cultural and historical processes (Huntington 1994) has been scrutinized by Ulf Hannerz (2003b).
See also Marshall Sahlins (1999) for another useful analysis of the abuses of an essential vision
of culture as an instrument to revenge identities, and of the significance of the use of this concept
among the people anthropologists study. Also, Fran Markowitz (2004) presents an analysis of the
double binary the talks on culture go along. The anthropologists recognize its fragmented, invented
and historicized nature, and reject the reification of culture. Searching for alternative ways to
express cultural process and human creativity, for a couple of decades anthropologists have underlined a conceptual shift from understanding cultures as holistic, coherent and homogeneous to
accounting for multiplicity, fragmentation, and internal contradictions (Friedman 1994; Wright
1998; Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1992, 1996; Werbner 1997, 2002). With regards to global cultural
flows, the liquidity and hybridity of late modernity, they remind us that discretely packaged cultures are more the scholarly result of demands for closure than empirical reality, and that the reification of the past and its popularization have caused more harm than good (Stolcke 1995; Trouillot
2000). On the other hand, people all over the world have been embracing culture (Dunn 1998;
Hannerz 1996; Keesing 1994). For many people, culture is a thing or a package of traditions
that defines individuals and groups of individuals, and an agent that shapes them in certain and
predictable ways.
35
The same epistemological existence of cultures (both in the singular and in the
plural) has been discussed, in anthropological debate, a number of times:
Anthropology is the study of man as if there were culture. It is brought into being by the
invention of culture, both in the general sense, as a concept, and in the specific sense,
through the invention of specific cultures. (Wagner 1981: 10)
We are of course not obliged to abandon the concept of culture, to refuse it like
an invention, as Wagner argued (see, among many others, Abu-Lughod (1991),
Ingold (1993), Hannerz (1996, 2010), Bruman (1999), Sahlins (1999), Markowitz
(2004), Wikan (1992, 2013), and Fisher (2007)). We have many good reasons as
we have seen to accept (a) that such a thing we name Culture is socially
acquired and organized, that it is the software needed for programming the biologically given hardware of human beings. We can also accept that (b) it is somehow
integrated, even if the passage of Culture to integration is a soft one. Integration
in other words is a matter of degree. But we are not (any longer) held to accept the
assumption that it is uniformly distributed within communities, that it is something
packaged, strongly connected to different human groups, and that as a normal state
of things these groups are localized in territories. As a matter of fact, in the contemporary global world, people have a plurality of belongings made up of both material
and imaginary plural (or maybe creole?) identities as well as people of the same
group who probably count very different experiences and very complex
biographies.
Today the world is no longer (as it admittedly once was) made of a multitude of
separate and static local webs of meaning, as it is crossed by dense flows of meaning. If it is valid to conceptualize cultural traits as units of learned and repeated ways
of thinking and acts, it could be useful to rethink those cultural theories of the past
(see Hannerz (2010) about the past that can be used) that have at their centres the
idea that cultural facts are indexes of something else, spatial and temporal chains,
for example.
Today the equation one place = one people = one culture is less strong than in the
past. To grasp what is going on with regards to both the cultural dimension and the
identity making processes, the notion of cultural repertoire could be relevant for
an individualistic way to culture (Hannerz 1969; Swidler 1986). From this perspective, cultural dimension appears to be a tool kit from which people select different
pieces just as Lvi-Strauss bricoleur (see Matera (2013a)) according to
special strategies, or lines of action, or particular models or images they aspire to
A very interesting analysis, based on an intense and clever ethnography that goes beyond the
local context toward wider theoretical frames is that of Joel Kuipers (1997) about the changes in
ritual speaking and in traditional cultural traits among the communities of Sumba Island
(Indonesia). The process of essentialization of a linguistic trait, for Kuipers, is a process
whereby a linguistic feature that indexed a social group or category comes to be seen as essentially or naturally linked to it (ivi 1997: 152). Through the same process a cultural trait, or a cultural complex or also a cultural pattern, as well as a linguistic one, becomes natural and part of
the essence of the savage, or primitive, or backward condition, or, on the contrary, of the identity
of a certain people, group, social category and so on.
36
V. Matera
realize such as special cultural traits or patterns, special education processes, special
experiences, and special knowledge.11 People change their residence, their job, or
choose consumer styles even if this does not occur everywhere.
[] the distribution of cultural meanings over people all over the world is really complicated,
to the point that any social units we work with presents relevant epistemological problems,
with regard to its cultural uniformity. The idea of cultures in the plural is problematic;
maybe it can be considered little more than a limited analytical device. At the same time,
the idea of culture in the singular, encompassing as Kroeber claimed the entire more or
less organized diversity of meanings and ideas and expressions, may become more important than it has been, as we explore the way humanity inhabits the global ecumene. (Hannerz
1996: 23)
Within this theoretical framework, again with the idea of Culture in the singular
at the real centre, as a global flow encompassing the whole, more or less organized
diversity of meanings and ideas,12 the match between particular peoples and particular cultural traits and global cultural processes is a problematic one. To explore the
ways humanity inhabits the global ecumene means to look at how local people, as
they face global flows, try to make sense of their lives, produce meanings, and
create and recreate their cultures. Anthropologists, trying to make sense of the lives
of others, have disconnected these processes from the timeless cultural traits and
complexes that have usually been defined by the word culture in the plural (Boas
1948; Benedict 1934; Geertz 1973). Thus, while contemporary anthropology (and
social theory in general) as a theoretical narrative claims the spread and flexibility
of cultural traits and their consequent mixture, and underlines cultural hybridity
as the key to reading contemporary cultural processes, in public and political talks
about culture and cultures (and multiculturalism and identities) hybridity finds no
space or any kind of appreciation.
Despite the advantages of globalization that appear in the Great Narrative
(globalization as a natural stream, the world as a unique huge social and cultural
setting, and all humans as having equal opportunities and rights and so on) and
despite the efforts of numerous international organizations that commit to making
this Narrative real, the nation-states still maintain (or try to maintain) their control
over borders, and over peoples rights, belongings, identities and opportunities. All
the talk about post-national models of citizenship are still academic. Indeed, several
scholars suggest that, as they are invoked to support claims for rights and recognition and to push against global homogenizing tendencies, local cultures are going to
solidify (see Sayad (1999), Benhabib (2004), and Markowitz (2004)).
11
Connection: This toolkit view of culture is similar to the approach used, for example, by
economists to define culture and work with it in a framework in which the focus is on the single
agents rather than the groups, as can be seen in Sect. 12.2. A somehow related perspective is found
in the concept of individual trait used in Chap. 5 and defined in Sect. 5.1. On the opposite, Sect.
10.3 defines culture and cultural traits emphasizing a collective point of view, and Chap. 14 talks
in this sense about generational, organizational and national cultures. Chapter 7 analyzes the availability of multiple cultural syndromes and their activation by multicultural individuals.
12
Marshal Sahlins conceptualized this idea as a sort of indigenization of modernity, as a World
system as Culture of cultures (Sahlins 1994: 377394).
37
On one hand, globalizations key image of flows of money, media, ideas, people
and things (Appadurai 1996), encourages [] the imagination of almost endless
possibilities for creating plural identities, shaping selves and sharing in a common
humanity in an open world [] (Markowitz 2004). On the other hand, all the
flexibility and fluidity that it evokes are impeded by tough economic and political
policies. Again, cultural anthropologists are seeking to replace culture in the plural
with something else. But people out on the streets want their bounded, reified culture
and their solid identity (Bruman 1999). As Fran Markowitz puts it:
Just as it was important in the 1980s to crack the disciplines self-satisfied acceptance of an
ethnographic genre and a culture concept that did not quite work, it may now be equally
crucial to rethink anthropologys rejection of culture in the contemporary context of globalization, nation-states and human rights and understand why, despite a surfeit of proof as to
its partiality and constructedness, having a culture matters so greatly to so many people.
[] Of course, this makes all culture(s) ideology. But is that the point? If it were possible
in less than a century to dislodge the truth that peoples abilities come with their race and
consider instead the impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man (Geertz 1973:
33), then perhaps the 21st century offers hope that we can improve upon the idea that culture exists exclusively in localized national and ethnic units separate but equal in aesthetic
value and human worth (Gilroy 2000: 2478). A starting point for this endeavor is to
reinsert culture into anthropological theory (Brumann 1999; Ortner (1999), Yengoyan
1986), understand its genealogy and its use as a saliently politicized cultural symbol
embroiled in the increasingly universal globalization and human rights discourses, and then
perhaps find a way to move beyond it. (Markowitz 2004: 344)
To reinsert culture into anthropological theory I find some notions and perspectives from linguistics useful for many aspects. For Kuipers (1997), the linguistic
changes in Sumba as well as in contemporary Indonesia, and, enlarging the scale,
in every local place where the local has been factored into the national, or the
transnational (see Hannerz (1996)) or the global cannot be reduced to political coercion, economic necessity, or religious commitments. They are the outcome
of shifting communicative ideologies. With reference to ideology one can explain
how ritual speech and other traits of local language have moved from the centre to
the margins of the communicative world of local people. I argue, in my conclusion,
that an analogous ideological mediation is also the interpretive key of cultural
changes. In the sense that, if seen as the result of shifting ideologies, [] cultural
and social change becomes not a matter of culture contact and articulation as it
was in the old diffusionist theory but one of rethinking difference through contact (Ferguson and Gupta 1992: 35). Cultures, as well as languages, are not naturally disconnected, but always hierarchically interconnected.
Languages do not just up and die. They do not grow old, wear out, get sick,
decay or rot. Yet, it is true that we speak of language mixing, borrowing, and codeswitching, terms which seem to imply images of purity and pollution, wholeness
and partiality, completeness and fragmentation. However, languages are not organisms with lives of their own, separate from the actors who use them. [] languages
differentiate, change, grow, decline, and expand not because of natural life cycles
but because of the way that linguistic ideologies, held by interested actors and
38
V. Matera
speakers and those who hold power over them, mediate between features of linguistic
structure and socioeconomic relations (Kuipers 1997: 149).
Thus, whenever those who hold power over a certain area promote a pressure
(from a centre to a periphery), they could provoke a transformation of ideas about
local linguistic and cultural traits and structures, once seen as central and complete
in virtue of their relation to a locality, that comes to be viewed as part of a larger
grouping and then marginal and backward.
2.5
Cultural Creolizations
In this frame, the sociolinguistic notion of creolization plays a relevant role, as

much as it enables a way to underline that languages (and cultures as well) do not
exist in isolation. They are constantly changing, due to both internal forces, because
of conflicts among groups, and external forces, because of mobility (of people,
ideas, values, cultural meanings, linguistic traits, and so on) and, more recently, due
to global flows of cultural meanings.13
According to sociolinguistic definitions, a creole language is a pidgin language
that has become nativized as a first language, after significant elaboration in both its
functions and its structure (Foley 1997). This significant elaboration is close to
the real core of cultural creativity, or, in other terms, is the matrix of the spring of
new orders of difference (Clifford 1993: 15) according to James Cliffords vision
of the Lvi-Strauss metaphor of western culture as our own filth, thrown into the
face of mankind (Lvi-Strauss 1973: 38):
The filth that an expansive West, according to the disillusioned traveller of Tristes tropiques
(p. 38), has thrown in the face of the worlds societies appears as raw material, compost for
new orders of difference. (Clifford 1993: 15)
A creole culture is the complex, always partial and changing result of processes
of rethinking difference through contact situations usually asymmetrical and
ideologically mediated. Such situations occur when some parts traits? complexes?
patterns? of a culture, typically those of the politically and economically dominant
group (the superstrate culture), undergo radical simplification and are adopted as a
culture of wider identity by members of the groups in subordinate position (the
substrate culture). They are unable to learn the totality of the dominant culture
for some sociocultural reasons its full models are withheld from the substrate
people and the creole culture develops instead. The linguistic parallel is useful:
starting from a linguistic contact situation, pidgin and (eventually) creole languages
have arisen
13
Connection: This concept of cultural creolization can be applied to various specific cases. As a
matter of example we can refer to the process of new language creation, as in Chap. 18. Speaking
about musical language, we can think about the birth of jazz as in Chap. 8. Chapter 13 describes
the interaction and hybridization between different cultures in international cooperation.
39
The superstrate language provides the bulk of the pidgins lexicon, with some admixture
from the substrate language. [] pidgins have arisen [] always in cases where there is a
clear asymmetry in power and status between the speakers of the languages involved.
Pidgins are strictly simple normally little valued by their speakers. They are second
languages for all speakers, unless they become creole language. (Foley 1997: 392)
From linguistic contact situations, partial results could also emerge as code- and
mode-switching phenomena, linguistic borrowings, slides along the linguistic continuum (with the standard dominant language at one point and the creole language
at the other), and many other linguistic indexes of mixed and hybrid processes.
Arguing that something similar occurs in situations of rethinking cultural difference
through contact, I resume here the hypothesis that cultural traits are socially produced, transmitted, acquired and interpreted meanings, finally arranged into webs
or into more or less coherent and more or less integrated cultural patterns. I also
think that the linguistic metaphor is the best one we can use to understand how cultural mixtures occur, since cultures are travelling (Clifford 1999) or, better, cultural
meanings are travelling (because of people mobility or because of other kinds of
global interconnections), and flows of cultural meanings with no territories or origins match and create creolizations. As in Creole languages, the ultimate site where
the cultural/linguistic mixture actually occurs is the mind of speakers (or social
actors), which, as we have seen, resist some patterns and accept some others, eventually with some admixture from the local language. In this sense, I propose cultural
creolization as the key to grasping cultural change, like a combination of diversity,
interconnectedness, and innovation, in the context of global center-periphery relationships (Hannerz 1996: 67).
The global cultural dimension is, from this perspective, a creole-continuum,
made of flows of cultural meanings that are arranged in very complex ways by very
different actors at very different scales and degrees of reification or fluidity.
References
Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). Writing against culture. In R. G. Fox (Ed.), Recapturing anthropology
(pp. 137162). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Amit, V. (Ed.). (2000). Constructing the field. Ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary world
(EASA book series, pp. 118). London: Routledge.
Andersen, E. S. (1975). Cups and glasses: Learning that boundaries are vague. Journal of Child
Language, II, 79103.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Assmann, J. (1992). Das kulturelle Gedchtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt in
frhen Hochkulturen. Munich: C. H. Beck. Eng. transl. Cultural memory and early civilization:
Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
Barth, F. (Ed.). (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Barth, F. (1989). The analysis of culture in complex societies. Ethnos, 54(34), 120142.
40
V. Matera
Bateson, G. (1936). Naven: A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Benhabib, S. (2004). The rights of others. Aliens, residents and citizens. Cambridge: The Press
Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of
knowledge. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boas, F. (1948). Race, language and culture. New York: Macmillan.
Borofsky, R. (1994). Assessing cultural anthropology. New York: McGraw Hill.
Brumann, R. (1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded.
Current Anthropology, 40, 510527.
Cardona, G. R. (1985). La foresta di piume. Manuale di etnoscienza. Bari: Laterza.
Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, J. (1999). Routes. Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, MA:
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of writing ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Descola, P. (2013). Beyond nature and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, R. G. (1998). Identity crises: A social critique of postmodernity. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, J., & Gupta, A. K. (1992). Beyond Culture: Space, identity, and the politics of
difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 623.
Fisher, M. (2007). Culture and cultural analysis as experimental systems. Cultural Anthropology,
22, 165.
Foley, R. (1997). Anthropological linguistics. An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Friedman, J. (1994). Cultural identity and global process. London: Sage.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, C. (2000). Available light: Anthropological reflections on philosophical. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Gehlen, A. (1940). Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (1940), Frankfurt am
Main. Engl. Transl. Man. His nature and place in the world (trans: McMillan, C. & Pillemer,
K.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Gellner, D. N. (2012). Uncomfortable antinomies: Going beyond methodological nationalism in
social and cultural anthropology. AAS Working papers in Social Anthropology/AW
Arbeitspapiere zur Sozialanthropologie, 24, pp. 118.
Gilroy, P. (Ed.). (2000). Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday Garden City.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face behavior. New York: Random
House.
Gupta, A. K., & Ferguson, J. (1997). Anthropological locations. Boundaries and grounds of a field
science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Halam, E., & Ingold, T. (2007). Creativity and cultural improvisation. Oxford: Berg.
Hallowell, I. (1960). Ojibwa ontology, behavior and world view. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrils.
Hannerz, U. (1969). Soulside: Inquiries into ghetto culture and community. New York: Columbia
University Press. Re-edited University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational connections: Culture, people, placet. London: Routledge.
41
Hannerz, U. (2003a). Being there and there and there! Reflections on multi-site ethnography.
Ethnography, 4(2), 201216.
Hannerz, U. (2003b). Macro-scenarios. Anthropology and the debite over contemporary and future
worlds. Social Anthropology, 11(2), 169187.
Hannerz, U. (2010). Anthropologys world. Life in a twenty-first century discipline. New York:
Pluto Press.
Hastrup, K. (2004). Getting it right. Knowledge and evidence in anthropology. Anthropological
Theory, 4(4), 455472.
Herzfeld, M. (2001). Anthropology: Theoretical practice in culture and society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Paris, UNESCO.
Hoebel, A. (1958). Man in the primitive world. An introduction to anthropology. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Huntington, S. (1994). The clash of civilization and the remaking of the world order. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Inda, X. J., & Rosaldo, R. (2002). The anthropology of globalization, a reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ingold, T. (1993). The art of translation in a continuous world. In G. Palsson (Ed.), Beyond boundaries: Understanding, translation and anthropological discourse (pp. 210230). Oxford: Berg.
Ingold, T. (1998). Culture, nature, environment: Steps to an ecology of life. In B. Cartledge (Ed.),
Mind, brain and the environment (pp. 158180). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ingold, T. (2004). Culture in the ground. Journal of Material Culture, 9(3), 315340.
Ingold, T. (2007). Anthropology is not ethnography, Radcliffe-Brown lecture. London: British
Academy.
Keesing, R. M. (1994). Theories of culture revisited. In R. Borowsky (Ed.), Assessing cultural
anthropology (pp. 301312). New York: McGraw Hill.
Khun, T. (1969). The structure of scientific revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kilani, M. (1994). Linvention de lAutre. Essais sur le discours anthropologique. Lausanne:
Payot.
Kroeber, A. R. (1945). The ancient Oikoumene as an historic culture aggregate. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute, 75, 920.
Kroeber, A. R. (1952). The nature of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions.
Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
Kuipers, J. (1997). Language, identity and marginality in Indonesia. The changing nature of ritual
speech on the island of Sumba. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kull, K., Roepstorff, A., & Bubandt, N. (2003). Imagining nature: Practices of cosmology and
identity. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
Labov, W. (1973). The boundaries of words and their meanings. In C.-J. N. Bailey & R. W. Shuy
(Eds.), New ways of analyzing variation in English (pp. 340373). Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Leach, E. (1959). Political systems of highland Burma. London: The Athlone Press.
Levinson, S. (2003). Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. New York: Basic Books.
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1973). Tristes tropiques. London: Penguin Books.
Lewellen, T. (2002). The anthropology of globalization. Cultural anthropology enters the 21st
century. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Malinowski, B. (1944). A scientific theory of culture and other essays. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Markowitz, F. (2004). Talking about culture. Anthropological Theory, 4(3), 329352.
Matera, V. (2013a). Il nuovo Bricoleur. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, 15(1), 97103.
42
V. Matera
Matera, V. (Ed.) (2013b). Deconstructing the field. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, XVI,
15(2), 998.
Matera, V. (2013c). Ethnography: Experiences, representations, practices for studying cultural
diversity. Introductory notes. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, XVI, 15(2), 918.
Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive
Science, 7(3), 141144.
Ortner S. B. (Ed.). (1999). The fate of culture (pp. 113). Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Sahlins, M. (1999). Two or three things that I know about culture. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 5(3), 399421.
Sahlins, M. (1994). Goodbye to tristes tropes: Ethnography in the context of modern world history.
In R. Borofsky (Ed.), Assessing cultural anthropology (pp. 377394). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Said, E. (1973). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Sayad, A. (1999). La double absence. Des illusions de lmigr aux souffrances de limmigr.
Paris: Seuil.
Shore, B. (1998). Culture in mind. Cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. New York:
Speck, F. (1935). Naskapi. The savage hunter of Labrador Peninsula. Norman: The University of
Oklahoma Press.
Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations.
Man, 20, 7389.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Sperber, D., & Hirschfeld, L. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1), 4046.
Stolcke, V. (1995). Talking culture: New boundaries, new rhetoric of exclusion in Europe. Current
Anthropology, 6(1), 124.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: Symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review,
51(2), 73286.
Trouillot, M.-R. (2000). Adieu, culture: Between theory and politics. Paper given at Culture and
the Cultural: New tasks for an old concept? The Wenner-Gren International Symposium, 127.
Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy,
religion, language, art, and custom. London: John Murray [VI ed. 1920].
Wagner, R. (1981). The invention of culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Werbner, P. (1997). Essentialising essentialism, essentialising silence: Ambivalence and multiplicity in the constructions of racism and ethnicity. In P. Werbner & D. Modood (Eds.), Debating
cultural hybridity (pp. 226254). London: Routledge.
Werbner, P. (2002). Imagined diasporas among Manchester Muslims. Oxford: James Curry. Santa
Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Wikan, U. (1992). Beyond the words. The power of resonance. American Ethnologist, 19(3),
460482.
Wikan, U. (2013). Resonance. Beyond the words. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wissler, C. (1929). An introduction to social anthropology. New York: Holt.
Wright, S. (1998). The politicization of culture. Anthropology Today, 4(1), 715.
Yengoyan, A. A. (1986). Theory in anthropology: On the demise of the concept of culture.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23, 368374.
Chapter 3
Cultural Traits and Identity

Ugo E.M. Fabietti
The notion of a cultural trait was very popular in the early twentieth century, when
German-speaking ethnologists on the one hand, and American anthropologists on
the other, addressed the problem of exploring the phenomenon of contact between
cultures. Dissatisfied with the explanations of their evolutionist colleagues1,2 on
the presence of cultural similarities in different contexts, even when geographically
distant from one another, these academics tried, in Europe and in the United States,
to reintroduce the historical dimension to cultural analysis. The former devoted
themselves to research which, in their opinion, could lead to the reconstruction of
phases characterized by the migration of these traits from one point of the globe
to another. The latter, adopting a less ambitious perspective, devoted themselves to
the study of the transmission of cultural traits between groups of native North
Americans in adjacent areas. These two styles of investigation differed in some
important aspects. Whilst the German-speaking ethnologists aimed to reconstruct
1
In the context of cultural anthropology, evolutionism has acquired an inseparable universe of

meaning related to monistic linear progressionism, ethno- or Eurocentrism, and racism (even in
terms of differential distance of races and cultures from a hypothetical animal-like state). An evolutionist is, in the disciplinary language of cultural anthropology, someone who holds unethical
principles of that kind. A particularly strong barrier separating cultural anthropology from fields
that work with evolution, for example population biology, biological anthropology, or neuroscience, is mostly a side effect of this history.
2
Connection: The separation of evolution and progress is discussed at length, in Sect. 13.3, with
particular reference to cultural evolution. The possible heuristic and scientific value of non-progressionist evolutionary models for the study of cultural transmission is exemplified in Chap. 11
and Sect. 13.5. Additionally, consider Chaps. 12 and 18 to get an idea of how some disciplines, as
economics or linguistics, dealt with cultural transmission theory avoiding any reference to linear
progressionism. Evolutionary biology itself is much more concerned with relatedness and common descent that it is of progress (see Chap. 16).
U.E.M. Fabietti (*)
Riccardo Massa Department of Educational Human Sciences, University of Milano - Bicocca,
Milan, Italy
e-mail: ugo.fabietti@unimib.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_3
43
44
U.E.M. Fabietti
the cultural history of primitive peoples, the Americans tried to ascertain the connections between the cultures of native Americans. While the former presented
hypotheses of cultural contact between populations that could be very distant from
one another geographically, the latter tried to discover the chronological order of the
shift of the common traits between geographically adjacent populations. Whilst the
German-speaking ethnologists put forward hypotheses of historical connections
between cultures on the grounds of the largely arbitrary association between cultural traits, the US anthropologists relied on data that could be recorded and ascertained in the present. These two different ways of approaching the phenomenon of
cultural contact were nevertheless considered, from the 1920s onwards, as representative of what came to be known as diffusionism.
The pretension of studying the phenomenon of cultural contact in these terms
was abandoned fairly early on and anthropology concentrated on the analysis of
individual societies and cultures in a perspective which was mainly comparative
and, whilst not denying the element of cultural contact, did not make this the central
theme of its investigation. Research, as is known, moved towards the analysis of the
functioning of social and cultural institutions, towards attempts at generalization
based on various forms of comparison and then towards the study of the transformations that these institutions underwent under the pressure of firstly, the colonial
institutions and subsequently the expansion of market systems. Interest in cultural
traits, as these traits had been defined and dealt with at the beginning of the twentieth century, was lost. Questions on the transformation of social systems, on the
transmission of cultural models3 and, recently, on the circulation of ideas, images,
goods and people on the global scene became the centre of the discussion.
By raising the question of the connections between cultural traits and identity
(ethnic, national, religious etc.), at the end of the day, the arbitrary nature of sign
will be brought to the foreground. As is generally known, identity can be formed
both around symbolic elements which do not always have concrete empirical references, and around concrete elements which are overloaded with symbolic value.
There is effectively nothing more prosaic, when talking about culture, than what is
commonly understood as a cultural trait. Everything can be considered a cultural
trait: whatever belongs to a culture, and whatever is the product of the culture.
Coca-Cola is a cultural trait, as is a poem; and a certain model of airplane is one as
much as a rock painting is.
In this chapter, I intend to discuss how certain cultural traits, which are present
in certain (cultural) traditions, are re-used in other contexts, i.e. by other traditions,
and in turn contribute to shaping new identities.4 However, I believe that if we do
3
We must not confuse cultural models with cultural traits. Cultural models are to be understood as
complexes of symbols and structured behaviors (Geertz 1973: 9395). A cultural trait, instead,
may consist of any element of material culture, social organization, as well as economic, political,
or religious activity. Cultural traits are thus a broader notion than a cultural model. At the same
time, it is a much more generic notion and less useful for retrieving socially and culturally significant processes.
4
Connection: The concept of re-use is employed also in literary studies as explained in Sect. 21.1.
Moreover, the concept closely resembles the exaptation, as defined extensively in Chap. 17. Other
3 Cultural Traits and Identity
45
not want to completely dissolve the idea of a cultural trait without reducing it to the
prosaic vision of any element whatsoever present in a given cultural context, we
have to try and define a fairly specific conceptual context in which to place phenomena that are significant to understand the formation of identities in a global context
and from the point of view of cultural anthropology.5
3.1
Global Scenarios
The proliferation of identitarianisms in various forms (cultural, national, religious,

ethnic etc.) which apply to all areas of the planet today can be understood only in a
perspective which is commensurate with the global nature of these same phenomena. Today three factors seem to be acting powerfully, at the level of representations, on a global scale. These are the widespread tendency of block thinking,
denounced by Gaonkar and Taylor (2006) as the product of an ideological distortion; then what Hannerz (2009) has called geo-cultural imagination, or the way of
representing the nexus between spaces and cultures; and lastly the notions of
mediascapes and ideoscapes which, according to Apadurai (1996), contribute to
shaping our perception of the contemporary world.
The block thinking to which Gaonkar and Taylor refer, consists of the tendency
to trace a complex of cultural facts back to a single matrix, and identify this complex with something unitary and undifferentiated. This is what happens, for example, when things such as the exclusion of women from public life, female genital
mutilations, suicide terrorism, the burqa and the stoning of adulterous women are
identified with Islam tout court. A concrete case of block thinking, which we can
consider, is the destruction of the statues of Buddha, in the Afghan region of
Bamyan, in 2000 by the Taleban. This clamorous iconoclastic event can be traced
back, as has been done, to iconophobia in Muslim culture. This, however, is a
simplistic explanation, which depends on thinking in blocks. It could be pointed
out that a resolute adversion to images, and to sacred images in particular, is not a
cultural trait which is typical of Islam. Christianity also underwent a long iconophobic and iconoclastic period from the eighth to the nineteenth century. The real
reasons the Taleban blew up the statues in Bamyan certainly also have something to
do with a widespread aversion to the reproduction of sacred images (Muslim and
otherwise). However, if other elements were not taken into consideration, this conclusion would be misleading. For example, we have to take into account the fact that
uses of exaptation in Sect. 10.5, which, in turn, comments on Chap. 8. Notice that re-use and exaptation are, by definition, implied in the notion of cultural creolization explained in Sect. 2.5.
5
Cultural trait is employed as a technical term in this chapter and in the context of the anthropological studies tradition. However, let me emphasize that for what concerns the formation of collective identities cultural trait must be considered as something amenable to symbolic investment
(as a sign), rather than a given framed in some ethnographic objectivity (as it was, for example,
for early twentieth century diffusionists).
46
U.E.M. Fabietti
those statues belonged, according to UNESCO, to the cultural heritage of humanity,

a category that of cultural heritage built up, in the opinion of the Taleban, from
a culture, the Western one, on the basis of universalistic principles with which
the Taleban had no intention of identifying themselves. The Taleban are not the only
Muslims not to recognize themselves in this Western culture (another notion
which is affected by block thinking), but not all Muslims would have thought of
destroying statues which had been there for several centuries and had been considered Afghan monuments for a long time.
Block thinking is by no means new in recent history. The speed with which this
attitude has spread to every corner of the planet is simultaneous with another
present-day phenomenon of extensive scope: what Ulf Hannerz has called geocultural imagination.
The expression geocultural imagination refers to the increasingly widespread
tendency to speak about the world as being divided into large geographical areas
which are containers of specific cultures. Naturally, geocultural imagination and
block thinking go hand in hand. Both these ways of speaking about reality foster a
process of essentialization of culture, of reducing it to a few stable and clearly
identifiable elements, therefore there is a tendency to make it an index of belonging
and/or difference in a radical, oppositional and identity sense.
Hannerz defined geocultural imagination as a matter of fairly large-scale mapmaking, a way of referring to the distribution of things cultural, somehow cultural, over territories and their human populations (Hannerz 2009: 276). At the
same time, the expression geocultural imagination is a way of suggesting that [we
are] focusing on the way we think geoculturally, about the world and its parts, and
the main features of those parts (ibid.). Alluding to the diffusionism of the late
nineteenth-early twentieth century (see footnote 1), Hannerz specifies that: in
those days, a century or so ago, these were mostly activities of the ivory tower,
where scholars would argue over matters of conceptualization and categorization
mostly with their peers. In more recent times, it seems to me that the geocultural
imagination has become more volatile, occurring in both academic and public arenas and also crossing the boundaries between them more readily, and more ambiguously (ibid.).
These representations of a geocultural type would be, according to Hannerz, the
significant components in a transnational collective consciousness, a set of representations of the world which are circulated, received and debated in a worldwide
web of social relationships, and which again stimulate further cultural production
(ibid.). They are representations which, thanks to the spread of literacy and above
all television and electronic media, now concern very large sectors of the society
across the planet. Perhaps the clearest way in which geocultural imagination has
taken shape recently is the overlaps between culture, religion and geographical area.
The tendency to reduce culture to religion (and often vice versa) is what made
Samuel Huntington speak about the clash of civilizations (i.e. cultures) in 1996,
47
on the basis of a very problematic assimilation between the two terms.6 Assimilation,
naturally, is not problematic for those who support it for practical purposes (for
example Hindu nationalists, Muslim and Christian fundamentalists) or even for the
supporters of realpolitik like Huntington, who was an advisor to the US administration at that time. However, assimilation is problematic for those who consider that
it is forced, a simplifying manipulation of reality, despite being very effective on the
level of representation (due to its schematic nature) and that it can be used to great
advantage on the ideological level (due to the oppositional effect it produces). From
this point of view, the style of thought that Hannerz calls geocultural imagination
can be considered a further matrix of representations which is currently expanding;
a cultural trait which is promoted in certain Western milieus and which has also
been very popular as we will see outside the initial context.
Like many other contemporary processes linked with globalization, geo-cultural
imagination and block thinking are at the confluence of two groups of phenomena,
defined by Arjun Appadurai as mediascapes and ideoscapes respectively. For
Appadurai, the notion of mediascapes indicates two things at one and the same
time. In the first place, it indicates the communicative contexts, that follow the distribution of the capacity of electronic media to produce and diffuse general information (newspapers, magazines, TV stations and film production studios), which are
now at the disposal of an increasing number of public and private centres of interest
all over the world. In the second place, the notion of mediascapes refers to the
images of the world created by these media contexts (Appadurai 1996: 35).
Whatever is seized upon by the media and launched in print, over the airwaves or
on the web takes on a great capacity for diffusion and an exceptional effect of amplification. As a consequence, the idea of cultural, religious, ethnic identity etc. often
accompanied by the overlap of religion and culture, culture and politics, politics and
ethnicity, ethnicity and culture etc. has the possibility, once it has been launched
by the media, to be imposed as a further powerful matrix of reference for practical
and intellectual action.
The ideoscapes, which are also chains of images that are fuelled by the
mediascapes, are, in some way, more directly ideological because they come into
tension with the ideologies of states and the movements explicitly aimed at conquering state power, or which claim recognition. They are made up Appadurai
writes of elements taken from the global vulgate of the Enlightenment, which
consists of a series of ideas, terms and images, including freedom, well-being, sovereignty, representation, and the crowning term, democracy (Appadurai 1996: 36).
If we consider the ideoscapes by their nature and not their content, we find ourselves
face to face with a complex of words and representations capable of migrating
easily from one context to another, thanks to the increased circulation of individuals
6
Assimilation between religion and culture is problematic because it is inspired by a reductionist

leaning, which makes the assimilation overtly schematic. To consider culture and religion as coextensive would lead to, for example, confusion between European and Christian or Indian and
Hindu (an operation carried out by people for whom identifications of this kind are politically
rewarding).
48
U.E.M. Fabietti
from one part of the planet to another and to the mediascapes, so everything that is
mediatised lends itself, in some cases very easily, to being essentialized. The media,
precisely because it simplifies the world, reinforces block thinking and geocultural imagination since showing and talking about many different cultures is almost
always translated into a reductive and scarcely critical operation.
How and when block thinking and geocultural imagination come into action
thanks to the flow of media is something that we can experience every day. These
ways of thinking, which are very widespread today, mean that, despite the effects of
globalization, the planet appears to be divided into sectors that each has very well
defined cultural characteristics such as the Judeo-Christian West, the Muslim
Middle East, Buddhist China, Hindu India and so on.
3.2
Assimilation of Traits
I will now take into consideration two specific cases of migration and assimilation
of cultural traits. The first can be traced back to the idea of national identity; the
second to an idea of personal and collective identity based on the appropriation of a
scientific notion such as that of inheritance or genetic inheritance. These traits
have spread and continue to spread due to factors such as block thinking, geocultural imagination and the action of the media and of ideoscapes, all of which can in
turn be considered as cultural traits which are being diffused.
3.2.1
National Identities
The first case I will take into consideration is that of the development of an idea of
national identity amongst the Baloch in contemporary Pakistan.7 The Baloch form
one of the largest nations without a state in south-western Asia. Including the
immigrants in Gulf countries and the eastern coasts of Africa, as well as in Europe,
the USA and Central Asia, the number of speakers of the Baloch language, which
belongs to the Iranian family of languages, is considered to be in the region of 30
million individuals. As for the historical Baluchistan, it is today divided between
Pakistan, Iran and, to a limited extent, Afghanistan (Fig. 3.1).
As far as is known, the idea of Baluchistan as a nation was formulated for the
first time in an article published in 1933 in a weekly in Karachi, the official organ of
the Organization for the Unity of Baluchistan. The anonymous author of the article
translated the idea of a Greater Baluchistan into a map which, in addition to the
territories currently divided between Iran and Pakistan (the latter was at the time
7
Connection: For other analyses on cultural traits and national identities, refer to Chap. 7 and Sect.
14.2. Other kinds of identity are also considered in Chap. 14. Inter-national contact is the topic of
Chap. 13.
49
Fig. 3.1 Geographical Baluchistan divided into three Countries, and its largest linguistic and ethnic
groups
part of the Anglo-Indian Empire), should have also included, other regions of
present-day Pakistan which are considered to be the limit of maximum expansion
by some Baloch potentates during the sixteenth century.8
The idea of a Greater Baluchistan expressed in this newspaper article reflected
only one of the various projects formulated by those who, in those years, tried to
look forward to the future of the Indian Subcontinent once the British had left,
which they did in 1947. However, the projects of 1933 were not followed through
due firstly to the intervention of British intelligence, and then when Baluchistan was
annexed by Pakistan (in two stages, 1947 and 1958). However, the nationalist spirit
survived in the following decades, to regain new impetus in the 1970s and lead to a
dramatic clash with the then Pakistani government, which concluded with fierce
repression (Baloch 1987). Since then, the history of Baloch nationalism, which has
8
Connection: More reflections on the notion of map in relation to culture are found in Chaps. 9
and 10.
50
U.E.M. Fabietti
never waned, has been interwoven not only with that of Pakistan and Iran, but also
with that of the regional and world powers which, in the last decades of the twentieth century, came on to the scene of this strategic region straddling the Middle East
and the Indian subcontinent.
Baloch nationalism therefore seems to have been founded and developed in
response first to the British and then to the Pakistani presence in the region. As an
intellectual and political movement however, it was above all the result of the
encounter between local memories of identity and some ideas that had come with
colonial domination. It is difficult to imagine that, contrary to what the nationalists
today believe, before the British domination, the Baloch had had the same feeling of
common belonging as in present day. The differences between one region and
another of Baluchistan are often enormous at the level of social organization, forms
of adaptation and the economic bases of the populations inhabiting them. In some
regions, the affiliations are built up on the basis of tribal solidarity, whilst in others
they are moulded by a patron-client relationship (Fabietti 2011).
At this point, rather than considering all of the local elements that existed before
nationalism appeared with recognizable characteristics, I will look at the representation of the origins of the Baloch people.9
In a 1992 study on the social functions of memory, Aleida Assmann distinguished between two different types of memory: storage memory and function
memory (Assmann 1992). The storage memory is an amorphous mass, where all
the unorganized (unattached) memories can take on meaning becoming symbols and values if used by a function memory which fishes them out and bends
them to its own contingent purpose. Schematizing, we could say that these values
and symbols in the storage memory, inert in itself, are fished out by the function
memory to make them active in view of a reason.10
The function memory, on the other hand, exists for a certain purpose. As such, it
needs argumentative support capable of giving a recognizable and plausible shape
to its own purpose. In the early decades of the twentieth century, when the idea of a
Baloch nation took shape, ideas of nation and national unity had already been
circulating in the Indian subcontinent for some time. For them to be used by the first
nationalists, these ideas needed to be aligned with those discourses that could
scientifically support, including in the face of the colonizers, the legitimacy of an
idea of national identity. This support included that absorbed by the nationalist
movement in the colonial period, and then subsequently on the one hand the idea of
a nation as it had been developed in Europe in the modern era and on the other hand,
the theories of those European authors who were interested in Baloch history and
the populations who spoke other related languages. Lastly, it included a specific
form of neocultural imagination which had continued to develop during the
twentieth century thanks to media- and ideoscapes. On the basis of these considerations,
9
Connection: Section 10.2 features a philosophical discussion of the self-reassuring retrospective

creation of origins as typical of Western thought.
10
Connection: Section 14.3 and Chap. 12 discuss values as cultural traits in the context of organizations, also in relation with national cultures.
51
we can examine the question of the origins of the Baloch as they are seen today by
the nationalist movement.
The Baloch speak a language belonging to the Indo-European family. According
to tradition however, they descend from Mir Hamza, the paternal uncle of the
Prophet Muhammad (Janmahmad 1988). Mir Hamza is, very probably, a mythical
ancestor chosen at the time of the Islamization of the Baloch in the eleventh century,
for the purpose of producing a connection between their origins and the origins of
Islam (almost all the Baloch are Sunni Muslims). Poems and legends exist that tell
of conquerors from the north-west and precisely from the region south of the
Caspian Sea. They are believed to have begun their occupation of the area today
known as Baluchistan (western Pakistan and southern Iran) in the eleventh century
and completed it in the fifteenth century under the guidance of a legendary national
hero. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a part of the Sind (the region of
Karachi) and of the Punjab (the region of Lahore) also fell under the influence of
Baloch potentates and these elements were used to fuel, as we have seen, the idea of
a Greater Baluchistan. It is all too easy to notice the contradiction between a supposed Arab origin of the Baloch and their Indo-European language. As the anthropologist Sigfried F. Nadel has said, identity is based on a dogma, and not on
objectively ascertainable data (Nadel 1947).
The common origin on the one hand, and the linguistic homogeneousness of the
Baloch people on the other, have taken up a central position, in the nationalist discourse, thanks to the works of some European Orientalists who, with their theories,
have bestowed a coherent aspect upon the narration of the origins, which effectively
coincides with a function memory, finalized to support a theory.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, some European scholars presented the
origins of the Baloch in a perspective of migration. This perspective was closely
linked to a paradigm which had developed in the field of comparative linguistics
and the studies on the origin and the expansion of people and Indo-European languages. It was a matter of reconstructing, using linguistic data, the journey these
peoples made from their supposed place of origin in southern Russia (3rd millennium BC), and their spread, towards the south-east to the area where today related
languages such as (from West to East) Kurdish, Farsi, Dari, Pashtu and Baloch are
spoken. The central idea of this theory, the paradigm, was that these languages
were believed to have spread due to a fragmentation of a society and a culture, and
therefore a single proto-Indo-European language broke into a constellation of societies, languages, and cultures, different but related to one another through their
common origin (Renfrew 1987).
Supporting their theories, European philologists exhibited some evidence
obtained from the Baloch tradition, and in particular from their oral poetry which
began to be translated and published in Europe towards the middle of the nineteenth
century (Dames 1904, 1907). These were the oral texts which, as I have said, have
as their subjects the migrations and struggles with the former inhabitants of the
region which is present-day Baluchistan. These texts, whilst being the distant echo
of real historical phenomena, are a long way from reflecting that sentiment of unity
felt by the majority of Baloch today (Sardar Khan Balochi 1984).
52
U.E.M. Fabietti
If we consider the idea of conquest by the West, we can also state that its narration is reflected in a sort of spontaneous sociology deposited in the storage memory of the local populations. At the time of my research in southern Balochistan
(19861994), the morphological characteristics of the communities of farmers were
sometimes interpreted by the people I spoke to as proof of migrations in the distant
past. In southern Balochistan where, about 25 years ago, the structure of social relations was still considerably different from that in the north of the country, and where
the economy was based fundamentally on agriculture and trade rather than on herding (as is the case in the north of the country), there are numerous groups whose
members consider themselves the descendants of a common ancestor. These groups
are not concentrated in individual areas, but are spread throughout the territory. The
ethnographic data I collected suggest that this dispersion can be attributed to fluid
residential models, which derived from the regime of ownership of land and the
ways of organizing it (Fabietti 2011: 4570). When I suggested to the Baloch people I spoke to that the dispersion of the groups could have been caused by economic
factors, they seemed to agree with this interpretation. However, if I asked them to
reflect on the morphological characteristics of their communities, and their villages,
they tended to present the dispersion of the groups as above all a consequence of the
ancient invasion. Their opinion was that the conquering groups, advancing towards
the south-east, had left behind families and individuals who in some cases ended up
forming the nuclei of a demographic growth, at a local level, of the different groups
of descendants. This local sociology goes very well with the idea of a common
origin which underlies the nationalist discourse of many contemporary Baloch
intellectuals, whose ideas have not failed to make their way, thanks to the political
parties and activists, as far as the farming villages in the south of the country.
Once again it was the dogma of identity that prevailed over the historical data.
Some groups, whilst considering themselves Baloch to all effects, declared having
different origins, and in some cases even fairly recent ones, from the Persian Gulf,
India and the Arabian Peninsula. These diversities between Baloch emerged especially when it was no longer a matter of opposing (or negotiating) identity with
external agents such as the Pakistani state or the international media, but in the
context of local political relations, where the superiority of status of some groups
over others could still have, at the time of my stay, a certain importance as the foreign origins were often synonymous with a superiority of status which reflected a
form of domination imposed, in the past, with force (Fabietti 2011).
It could therefore be said that Baloch nationalism today refers to a founding past
(guaranteeing the common origins), weaving an oral epic with references to the
Islam of the origins; harmonizing a spontaneous sociological model with a theory
of conquest and reorganizing all these elements into a form of narration that draws
strength from the scientific authority of some historical-linguistic-cultural theories
which arrived with colonization. The nationalist discourse thus flows into what
Hannerz has called geocultural imagination: representations which today affect
broad sectors of global society thanks to the spread of the media, where cultures are
presented through hyper-simplified models of historical and cultural reality. There
can be no doubt that when the idea of a Greater Baluchistan was exposed in public
53
for the first time in 1933, this type of imagination was already present amongst the
nationalists: certainly not in the form of a clash of civilizations, but in the form of
an idea of a nation-state that was put into circulation, assimilated and discussed in
the network of the then colonial social relations.
3.2.2
Genethnic Identities
The second case that I will take into consideration here concerns the phenomenon
of ethnicity as an identity resource.
During the twentieth century, ethnicisms became increasingly accepted at a
global level. Initially, the ethnic phenomenon was above all the product of the gaze
of an external, usually predominant, subject, which catalogued, distinguished, differentiated and classified peoples into ethnic groups and tribes, taking it for granted
that each of them corresponded to a group with well-defined traditions, history,
language, religion and culture, distinct from those of other groups and tribes
(Amselle and MBokolo 1985). With time however, things have changed. Today it
seems that it is increasingly those who in the past had been ethnicized who are
promoting ethnicity. In recent years, ethnicity has taken on new configurations.
Although it continues to appear above all in the form of claims and requests for
recognition, there is a progressive inclusion of the ethnic dimension in the logic of
the global capital.
In the last part of the last century, we witnessed a brand new phenomenon: the
fusion of the ethnic theme with that of the economic enterprise in its most varied
aspects. From the enterprise in its strictest meaning to the demand of an (ethnic)
brand, or from the organization of gambling as the exclusive activity of some groups
of native North Americans to the capitalization of the environmental and even
genetic heritage to which the name of genethnics was given. Today, we can talk
about the business of ethnicity. What must be emphasized, about this transformation of ethnicity, are the means that have made it possible and their close ties to the
process of extending global capital and the export of ideas, concepts and representations of society, and the individuals which come under ideoscapes of Western
origin.
It has been known for some time how ethnicity can be something constructed
according to contingent and changing circumstances in which a group operates.
However, the idea of the ethnic group as a possible instrument to attain a purpose
has never been separate from that of ethnic identity as a source of an ascription, i.e.
the appurtenance by birth to a specific group. This double characteristic of the ethnic group the fact it is a cultural construct and is thought of at the same time as a
natural community seems to be endemic to cultural identity in the neoliberal age
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2011: 40). By way of example, the recent case of an
American citizen who was able, through DNA testing, to prove he belonged to a
group of native North Americans and consequently acquire the right to take part in
an economic enterprise reserved exclusively to native peoples can be quoted (ibid.).
54
U.E.M. Fabietti
The first case of ethnically reserved economic enterprise dates back in actual
fact to 1934, when the U.S. government passed the Indian Reorganization Act, in
which a reference was made to the fact that a tribe on a reserve (therefore in Indian
territory) could be considered, at the request of its members, an economic entity to
all effects (incorporated), capable of acting freely on condition of being within the
laws of the United States. It is therefore not surprising if, many years after the
Indian Act was passed, an American citizen can today have recourse to research
companies capable of finding an allele that proves Amerindian rather than African
or European ancestry. In the USA, companies with highly revealing names such as
Dna Tribes and Ethnoancestry offer to trace, for a figure that ranges from $100 to
$250, the ancestry of an individual satisfying says the slogan of one of these
companies the human hunger to learn about ones origins, and sometimes much
more (ibid.).
However, there exist many doubts about the real capacities of reconstructing
individuals ancestries exactly with these methods. The majority of genetic tests to
establish the (even geographic) origins of individuals take into account only a small
number of variables, those that are useful to confirm a hypothesis. In the majority of
cases, those who request these services do so out of mere curiosity, but others, like
the Indian citizen mentioned above, do so for eminently practical purposes. Others
do so in order to pursue, in a more marked way than others, their dream of identity,
the idea of truly belonging to some genetically recognizable group: Malians rather
than East Africans, Irish rather than Jewish. For the reasons mentioned above, by
merging the terms genetic and ethnic we can speak about a new aspect of the
dimension of identity: genethnics.
How and why genethnics is becoming imposed in the United States, and elsewhere (Trupiano 2009), is shown by the case reported by the Comaroffs in their
2011 study. A researcher at New York University stated that recent work by genetic
labs has validated the Biblical record of a Semitic people chose a Jewish way of life
several thousand years ago (ibid.; see also Abu el-Haj 2014). According to the
biologist, some acts of volition expressed in culture, i.e. voluntarily following a
series of customs, from religious to dietary, from marriage to oral traditions, were
at the basis of a common genetic background which subsequently reproduced a
Jewish identity. Culture, in this case, is therefore believed to have been at the origin of a genetic identity, which in turn reflected on the continuity of the cultural
identity. If it is possible to agree with the first part of the argumentation (the reiterated union between individual generations that share certain models of behavior and
thought can create, in the long term, a genetic community), it is on the other hand
much more problematic to agree with the second part of the theory, according to
which the genetic community is believed to be at the basis of the reproduction of the
cultural identity. This part of the argumentation cannot be agreed with as it does not
take into account the action that culture always continues to have on human beings.
A cultural identity can even be forgotten (for very widely varying reasons, such as
diaspora, forced conversion, persecution, free choice) with the result that the
genetic identity can be, as a consequence, lost from when individuals no longer
choose marriage partners on the basis of the fact that they share the same culture.
55
It cannot be denied that genetic identitarianism, linked certainly to the typical

human hunger to know ones origins, is becoming, as is now documented by a
number of studies (Tallbear 2007; Trupiano 2009), an increasingly widespread subject, a business in itself, but also, often finalized to support others.
The genetic model seems to be increasingly in vogue with those groups who try
to access resources reserved for them. Native North Americans, both in Canada
and in the United States, have in many cases elaborated an idea of belonging founded
on criteria which refer to genetic verification of descent. The purpose of this elaboration is to allow the redistribution of the resources provided to the native peoples
by the governments to a limited number of individuals; or to allow only Indians
whose purity has been ascertained to take certain initiatives of an economic type
on the basis of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 mentioned earlier.
Genethnics has also turned out to be a factor of reinforcement of ethnicity within
economic logics. Not only because genethnics is a business in itself as people pay
for the DNA tests for the purpose of discovering their origins but it also, and above
all, represents a multiplier of occasions when money can be invested for speculative
purposes on an ethnic basis.
3.3
Xhoba, the Magic Plant of the San
One point where many of the topics discussed in this chapter intersect is represented
by the case of xhoba, the magic plant that grows in the Kalahari Desert. Geocultural
imagination, ethnobusiness, mediascapes, genethnics and more have been condensed around the history of this plant, a succulent known by naturalists since the
end of the eighteenth century by the name of Hoodia gordonii. This plant belongs
to the Cactaceae (cactus) family, which is known for its, in part proven and in part
supposed, pharmacological properties. It appears that xhoba has the power to foster
without damage to the organism, weight loss, a topic very dear to the Western
world and North America in particular. As a well known presenter of highly popular
American programmes and talk shows on the subject of obesity and slimming commented a few years ago, the secret of weight loss might lie deep in the Kalahari
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2011: 87).
By virtue of these magic properties of the plant (xhoba is described as magic
on many websites) the Kung San, once hunter-gatherers from Namibia, South
Africa and Botswana mostly known only to anthropologists and a few travellers,
have become famous. The story of this double fame of xhoba and of the Kung
San is fairly long and intricate, but shows fairly well how ethnic identity, ethnobusiness and genetic inheritance contribute to mutual reinforcement.
The story begins in the 1930s, when a Dutch ethnobiologist carried out studies
on xhoba which revealed some of its properties, but these studies were soon forgotten. About 30 years later, these studies were taken into consideration once again by
the South African Ministry for Industrial Research and Development. The reason
for this renewed interest in xhoba was that the Army had reported to this Ministry
56
U.E.M. Fabietti
the extraordinary capacities of some San, deployed as explorers by the Army, to

resist for days on end in the desert thanks to the liquid extracts from Hoodia gordonii. The plant appears to contain juices which, whilst adequately nourishing the
organism, inhibit the symptoms of hunger.
In 1996, practically half a century after the research by the Dutch ethnobiologist,
the South African Ministry for Research granted exclusivity of P57 (the code of the
patent of research on xhoba) to a small British pharmaceutical company that sold it
to Pfizer, an American chemical-pharmaceuticals giant for $21 million, with a business potential then estimated at $6 billion. In the meantime rumours circulated that
xhoba had aphrodisiac properties similar to those of Viagra, another Pfizer product
of excellence.
It is at this point that the story of xhoba really meets that of the Kung San, but not
for the reasons connected with the aphrodisiac properties of the plant. The stories
meet because it is from this moment that the ethno-business begins, first slowly, but
then increasingly quickly, to come into action.
As soon as Pfizer announced the properties of xhoba to the media, maintaining
that the Kung San, who had discovered those properties, were a now extinct people, some Kung San took legal action against the pharmaceutical giant as victims
of biopiracy. With the help of various South African and international associations
for the protection of the rights of native peoples, the San were recognized in the end
as legitimate intellectual owners of the right of use of xhoba. As a consequence,
they were to be given a small percentage of the profits, which were, at least in perspective, enormous. Against an estimated value of $3 billion for the American market, the Kung San obtained only $100,000, as well as the satisfaction of being
acknowledged as the real owners of the magic plant.
In 2004 however, Pfizer declared that the substances of the plant were too difficult to synthesize in the form of tablets and started to look for a party to take over
the licence to exploit the plant. During this window of opportunity, products sold as
derivatives of xhoba, and made by pharmaceutical companies other than Pfizer,
flooded Western and North American in particular markets until Pfizer sold the
licence to exploit patent P57 to Unilever, which collected the inheritance in terms of
legal dealings with the Kung San. In the meantime, the Kung San, although protected by agreements on intellectual property, watched on powerlessly as largescale production of xhoba by Unilever was planned, with the possibility of using it
in the food sector, and replace some foods with pills based on xhoba.
Even if they had no capacity of initiative in the production and exploitation of
their magic plant, the Kung San nevertheless started, through the rights on intellectual property and the crumbs from a gigantic market, a process of auto-ethnicization,
which was to clash from the very start with some fundamental questions which
could all be traced back to the question Who are the real Kung San? Reciprocal
accusations of not being authentic Kung San but infiltrated profiteers, any black
person disguised as San to allow them to appear in the reserves in displays for
tourists, flooded in from all sides, whilst in the meantime the idea that it was
necessary to ascertain who was a real Kung San through the test of ancestry
appeared: genethnics once again.
57
If the question of Kung San ethnicity triggered disagreements between those

who self-attributed this identity in view of possible advantages on the level of access
to resources (it must not be forgotten that those who are considered Kung San or
who would like to be considered so represent a very deprived fringe of the population of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana), it is also true that at the same time
less conflicting and more constructive processes were triggered. These included: the
recovery of the languages once considered of the Koi-San group and encouragement to speak them, genealogical reconstructions by the young San in order for
them to gain awareness of their history, as well as the reinforcement or recovery of
that knowledge of the environment otherwise destined to be lost through urbanization and progressive impoverishment.
Naturally this Kung San renaissance is not without paradoxes. The stimulation
of a Kung San art consisted for example of the development of a painting style
which has nothing authentically Kung San, as it could have been an art on rock
typical of the tradition of these hunters-gatherers. Whilst another paradox of this
whole story lies in the fact that almost all the initiatives connected with the revival
of the San culture and identity through their inclusion and participation in economic activities of various types (exploitation of the intellectual properties of
xhoba, ethno-tourism etc.) are fostered, planned and conducted by South African
and international agencies and NGOs.
In all this, and despite all this, the Kung San or at least a part of them are
anything but passive subjects. It must also be said that the Kung San ethnic group
is the very recent product of this interweaving of events and situations that go from
the discovery of the magic plant by a Dutchman in the 1930s to the clamour aroused
in the 1990s by an American public obsessed with obesity; from the interests of
some pharmaceutical and food multinationals to the claims by native peoples on
ethnic rights; from the climate of complicity which was established between international agencies and NGOs on the one hand and peoples claiming their status as
natives on the other; from the international resonance and therefore solidarity
between native peoples (the Kung San received the official support of the Navaho
Indians of Arizona) to the idea that ones identity is a means to be present in the
market.
3.4
Conclusions
What these two very different cases the Baloch national identity and the San ethnic identity suggest is that certain cultural traits of external origin can act, as we
said at the beginning, as potential signs on which to build new forms of perception
of the collective and individual self. I want to underline here the hybrid nature of
these perceptions. Naturally, all cultures and all traditions are by definition hybrid
as no pure cultures or traditions exist, but I am using the term hybrid here as a
heuristic instrument to define the character of transcultural phenomena, and to show
the ambiguous character of the relationship between the colonized and the
58
U.E.M. Fabietti
colonizer, between the dominator and the dominated, where, within certain representations of history and society, both the agency of the former, with the wish for
emancipation and the hegemonic power of the latter are mixed. Borrowing some
themes of late nineteenth century Western scientific thought on the one hand and
reactivating representations taken from its storage-memory on the other, Baloch
nationalism actually succeeds in re-inventing its own tradition. Similarly, the story
of the Kung San and of their magic plant, put on show processes which in many
aspects are similar, where however, there prevails an idea of ethnic belonging
founded on the principle of genetic inheritance.
The languages of Western linguistics and of scholarship, like the suggestions of
European nationalism these are the cultural traits which came from outside were
functional to the reinvention of a Baloch identity which is perceived today as threatened, whilst an idea of ethnicity founded on the genetic continuity of the populations can be played in a context of competition for resources, as shown by the case
of the Kung San in Namibia and native North Americans.
The languages of social sciences and biology certainly exercise, in the contexts
that we have taken into consideration here, an action of dominion: at least in the
sense that local culture mimetically gets used to thinking of itself through ideas and
representations elaborated elsewhere, as does the idea of a nation based on a specific
form of geo-cultural imagination or the idea of belonging based on the idea of biological inheritance.
These processes of identitarian reinvention never take place within the context of
neutral situations. The circulation of meanings, this sort of trafficking of elements
or, if we wish, cultural traits from one cultural context to another, never takes
place within a space characterized by the equality of the interlocutors, but in a
scenario marked by specific relationships of power. Dialoguism and heteroglossia
the idea that everyone has something to say must not make us forget the way they
say it. This way depends on the relationships of power that can also be translated, as
well as everything that we know, into a hegemony of languages by one culture
over those of another. From this point of view, the themes of Baloch nationalism and
Kung San identity, although very different from one another, represent an example
of what can be meant today by historical relations of domination and dialogue
between cultures.
References
Abu el-Haj, N. (2014). The genealogical science: The search for Jewish origins and the politics of
epistemology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Amselle, J. L., & Mbokolo, E. (1985). Au coeur de lethnie. Ethnies, tribalisme et tat en Afrique.
Paris: La Dcouverte.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Assmann, J. (1992). Das kulturelle Gedchtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitt in
frhen Hochkulturen. Munich: C. H. Beck. Eng. transl. Cultural memory and early civilization:
59
Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2011.
Baloch, I. (1987). The problem of Greater Baluchistan. A study of Baluchi nationalism. Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag.
Comaroff, J. L., & Comaroff, J. (2011). Ethnicity, Inc.. Chicago/London: The University of
Chicago Press.
Dames, L. M. (1904). An historical and ethnological sketch of Balochi race. London: Royal
Asiatic Society.
Dames, L. M. (1907). Popular poetry of the Baloches. London: Folklore Society.
Fabietti, U. E. M. (2011). Ethnography at the frontier. Space, memory, and society in southern
Balochistan. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gaonkar, D., & Taylor, C. (2006). Block thinking and internal criticism. Public Culture, 18(3),
453455.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. for quotations, Ital.
transl. Interpretazione di culture, Bologna, Il mulino, 1988.
Hannerz, U. (2009). Geocultural scenarios. In P. Hedstrom & B. Wittrock (Eds.), Annals of the
International Institute of Sociology Frontiers of Sociology (pp. 267288). Leiden: Brill.
Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Janmahmad (Baloch, J.) (1988). Essays on Baloch national struggle in Pakistan. Quetta:
Gosha-e-Adab
Nadel, S. F. (1947). The Nuba. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Renfrew, C. (1987). Archaeology and language. The puzzle of Indo-European origins. London:
J. Cape.
Sardar Khan Baluch, M. (1984). Literary history of the Baluchis (Vol. 2). Quetta: Balochi Academy.
Tallbear, K. (2007). Narratives of race and indigeneity in the Genographic Project. Journal of Law,
Medicine and Ethics, 32(3), 354370.
Trupiano, V. (2009). Geni, popolazioni e culture. Roma: CISU.
Chapter 4
The Diffusion of a Museum Exhibit: The Case

of the Transparent Man
Elena Canadelli
4.1
Science Exhibits and Cultural Traits:

A Methodological Quest
The didactic exhibits of scientific and medical museums are extremely useful in
understanding the diffusion dynamics of cultural traits. In most cases, they are
mass-produced, fixed and recognizable items which carry simplified educational
messages, expressed through a standardized and stereotyped language. These special features make the exhibits easily traceable both at different stages of their life
cycle from birth to the peak of greatest diffusion, until their disappearance and
in their migrations and adaptations into geographical, political and social contexts
other than those of the original places of production.1
These museum objects are the sublimated quintessence of knowledge and knowhow shared by a certain culture in a given historical period. They act as catalysts
and detectors of cultural traits. The stereotypical simplicity of their language is
arranged to transmit the information as efficiently as possible to an audience of nonexperts. From this perspective, the exhibits can reveal a lot not only on the style
chosen for the exhibition, but also on the message that is transmitted through them.
Sometimes the same exhibit can be converted by absorbing new messages, but
leaving its appearance unchanged. Following the exhibits from one exhibition to
another it is possible to understand if and how these exhibits adapt to different contexts, or whether and why they remain the same even if engaged in a social and
cultural context that is different from the one where they originated.
Connection: Chapters 15, 16, and 17 raise and address many issues about conceiving material
artifacts and reconstructing their genealogies at various time scales.
E. Canadelli (*)
Department of Biology, University of Padua, Padova, Italy
e-mail: elena.canadelli@unipd.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_4
61
62
E. Canadelli
Like living organisms, the didactic science tools of science museums have a
specific genealogical and geographic history. As cultural objects these tools embody
a complex history, which is the result of a complex layering of styles, languages,
and references built up through time within a given culture. The effectiveness of a
popular scientific exhibit owes much to its expressive appeal, which is the result
of a carefully chosen selection of various ingredients and visual models that are part
of the heritage of a culture. In some cases these objects recall, recover, recycle and
reuse well established poses and cliches. These characteristics make them stereotypical, almost didascalic, but easily recognizable to the target audience. This mechanism of cultural bricolage is valid not only for the past, but also today, in a sort of
game of iconologic survival la Aby Warburg.
Narrowing the discussion to the medical and health museums that are at the core
of the present essay, one can think, for example, of the disruptive force of the motto
know thyself, which from the Temple of Apollo in Delphi has reached the entrance
to the Spanish science center, Domus Casa del hombre, the motto of which, has
been translated into 32 languages. The science center opened in 1995 at La Corua,
as a section of the Casa de las Ciencias. But the same motto could also be read in
popular nineteenth-century anatomical museums, where sensual real size anatomical Venuses were first presented to the visitor under the name of Know thyself
(Canadelli 2011). Another example could be when Gunther von Hagens, a German
researcher from the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Heidelberg, was
inspired by classic poses of art history, and presented some of the plastinated corpses
of his controversial and at the same time very popular touring blockbuster exhibition Krperwelten or Body Worlds,2 exhibited around the world since 1995: from
Auguste Rodins Le Penseur to the skin depicted in a sixteenth-century incision
found in the Historia de la composicin del cuerpo humano (1559) by Juan Valverde
de Amuscolo, or St. Bartholomew holding his own skin painted by Michelangelo in
Giudizio universale in the Sistine Chapel (de Ceglia 2013).
This paper focuses on a specific case of a twentieth-century science display on
the human body and the health education that is particularly relevant to the issue of
the spread of cultural traits: The Transparent Man, or Glserner Mensch in German.
We know a great deal about it including the date of origin, the context in which it
was created, the characteristic exhibition style, the message and the idea of body it
carried, the map of its distribution, the goals it had to meet, the episodes of its
2
Presented for the first time in Japan in 1995, the exhibition by von Hagens shows perfectly preserved human organs and whole bodies in various poses, while they run, swim or ride a bike, or as
imitations of famous works of art. The corpses are obtained by means of the technique of plastination invented by von Hagens. The initiative has on the one side given rise to controversy due to the
ethicalness of the enterprise, and on the other it has met with enormous financial and public success. Von Hagens speaks about his exhibition in didactical and educational terms, in the name of a
traditional healthy lifestyle, showing for example a smokers battered lung to praise a healthy life.
In reality, this merges with the ancient anatomical and artistic tradition, recovering an old style
disturbing medical-anatomical imagination and using the morbid allure of dead bodies which
come to substitute wax models, anatomical drawings, and organs in formalin. The bibliography on
von Hagens is plentiful. For a general introduction see Goeller (2007) and Hirschauer (2006).
The Diffusion of a Museum Exhibit: The Case of the Transparent Man
63
survival, and its legacy. It was designed around 1930 in the laboratory of one of the
greatest museums of the time in the field of health education, the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum Dresden, by Franz Tschakert, employed by the Museum in 1913
(Beier and Roth 1991; Vogel 1999). This life-size exhibit characterized by a translucent aesthetic quality and by an aseptic silhouette was for several decades considered a reference model at the international level in the field of popularization and
teaching of issues related to the human body, hygiene and health education.
The Transparent Man display spread quickly throughout Nazi Germany, in a
dark decade marked by racial eugenics and propaganda, and in 1935 was soon followed by the Transparent Woman. It embodied the idea of the New Man through
the perfection and transparency of its shape (Clair 2008). After a tour of Europe, the
exhibit migrated to the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s, where it was greeted with
great success. There it preserved an identical exhibition framework and met the
needs of the U.S. health policy of the time. The Transparent Man was the highlight
of the exhibition called The Man, in German Der Mensch, which followed a standard prototype proposed without variations by different countries. At the end of
World War II, the Transparent Man and the Transparent Woman exhibition, a sort of
Adam and Eve couple, also traveled to the Soviet Union. They were exhibited
during the conflict between the two Germanies, East and West, and continued to stir
up some interest in the U.S. at least until the 1950s, thus giving proof of their survival after the peak of their greatest success. They then transformed into something
else, an historical object that witnessed a specific season in the history of health
education.
The Transparent Man dominated the museology of health museums for about
two decades and became a reference model in the field. Its expressionless, essential
and transparent shape embodied at best the ideas underlying the health education of
the time and the vision of man which were at its foundation. It also answered to the
requests for interactivity and engagement made by the scientific museology of the
time as well as to the ancient desire to look inside the human body not through dissection, anatomical plates or X-rays, but through a plastic silhouette that used a
synaesthetic and interactive system. To follow the path of a didactic artifact such as
the Transparent Man in Germany and the United States in the decade before the
outbreak of World War II two politically different countries yet close on health
policy and management of the body enables us to delve into the layered intricacies
of cultural dynamics. These dynamics are promoted not only through the transfer
and movement of physical objects, but also through knowledge, skills and people.
As we shall see there were not only the exhibits traveling from Germany to the U.S.,
but also many of the people involved in the creation and dissemination of the original Dresden Transparent Man.
64
4.2
E. Canadelli
Human Body and Health Education: The Rise of Health

Museums
The Transparent Man is a particular example in a long tradition of medical exhibits

designed to educate non-specialist audiences on the human body. The styles and
arrangements of these exhibits were quite different: from the morbid anatomy of
dismountable sensual anatomical Venuses on tour at popular anatomical museums
of the nineteenth century to the drawings and models of Man as Industrial Palace
developed in the 1920s by the German pioneer of infographics, the gynecologist and
popular science writer Fritz Kahn; from the models of the brain or cell produced in
the mid-twentieth century by information designer Will Burtin, who later migrated
to the United States from Germany, up to the hands-on exhibits at numerous science
centers that have sprung up in recent years.
While the Austrian neo-positivist philosopher Otto Neurath, in collaboration with
the German artist Gerd Arntz, worked on the development of a method of visual
education known as Isotype, which focused on a language of graphic symbols, the
Transparent Man benefited from a golden age of German graphic and design, which
had in the Bauhaus one of its finest moments.3 The Transparent Man was the most
accomplished result of the educational model pursued by health museums in the first
half of the twentieth century. These museums derived from the hygienist movement
that developed during the previous century. They were designed for lay education
and provided notions of human anatomy, physiology, anthropology, and biology, but
they were especially aimed at conveying to the public the rules for proper and healthy
behavior and lifestyle on topics such as food, sexuality, sports, and parental care. As
told by one of the protagonists of this museological phenomenon, the health museums had the public health movement as their father and the idea of preventive medicine as their mother (Gebhard 1945: 42; Gebhard 1940). In that they distinguished
themselves from the medical and anatomical museums of medical schools, universities and hospitals, which for the most part were reserved for the professional education of future physicians concerned about diseases. While the emphasis in medical
museums was on collections and research, the emphasis in health museums was on
visual education by exhibitions, lectures and other means, presenting in popular
version the advances made in medical and health sciences, thus promoting personal
health and community hygiene (Gebhard 1945: 41).
The twentieth-century health museum continued a trend already begun in the
second half of the nineteenth century with hygiene exhibitions promoted by states,
often in collaboration with private industries, or with the foundations of museums
of hygiene, such as the Parkes Museum of Hygiene, which opened in London in
1879. Alongside these official institutions, during the second half of the nineteenth
3
Connection: Chapter 10 reflects, with some examples related to design, on cultural traits that are
typical of stylistic periods, and on their collective and conscious/unconscious nature. Chapter 14
includes an analysis of how generational cultures are influenced by the many socio-economical
conditions in which its members grow up. Chapter 3 argues for the importance of particular elements for the construction of national and ethnic identities.
65
century the popular anatomical museums had also spread. They were organized by
private art buyers, mostly in an urban context. They were close to a form of entertainment: these touring exhibitions were conceived to provide laypeople with
knowledge and advice on how to manage their own body, especially by focusing on
sexual diseases, reproduction, congenital malformations, and by warning about the
abuses that could harm the body such as smoking, an incorrect diet, and alcohol.
An eclectic list of objects was displayed there, from wax models of single organs to
attractive anatomical Venuses, from anatomical specimens to other curiosities,
which were also related to anthropology and ethnography, underlining the pathological aspects in relation to deformity and disease.
Between 1910 and 1930 the scientific museology experimented with new exhibition strategies. In those years the science museums in general had some afterthoughts. The museum was no longer conceived as a mausoleum for old bric-a-brac
(Dublin and Calver 1938: 121), a mere assemblage of dry bones or artificially
preserved tissues, or a cabinet of curiosities, but more as a living entity (Abbott
1930: 310). As shown by the example of the innovative Palais de la Dcouverte built
in Paris in 1937 on the occasion of the International Exhibition Arts et Techniques
Dans la Vie Moderne, there were now plays of light, moving models, and projections, which had the aim of involving the visitor without boring him. Conceived as
a modern laboratory of health education (Dublin and Calver 1938: 121), even the
health museum, in a climate of welfare-oriented eugenics and hygienism, aimed at
involving the visitor in an interactive and dynamic way. The audience was, in fact,
no longer convoked to simply assist in the dismemberment of the anatomical
Venuses (as in the nineteenth-century popular anatomical museums), but to directly
confront themselves with moving devices, three dimensional models, interactive
projections and installations concerning different aspects of the body. In these exhibitions, the visitor had the opportunity to press buttons, pull levers, test ones physical abilities and in general to play with the exhibits; that was a grateful relief to
the sightseer who has walked miles of musty galleries dotted with dont touch
signs (Kleinschmidt 1935: 11111112).
Therefore, the health museums were nothing less than science museums specializing in human biology and personal and public health. They wanted to create a
bridge between preventive and curative medicine with the aim of influencing social
behaviors through the choices of individuals. As with all science museums, their
exhibits were manufactured, not collected. For these characteristics, they had developed a particular focus on the language of the exposition and on the creation and
design of special exhibits aimed at persuasion and the involvement of as wide an
audience as possible. In these exhibitions, the human body was like a machine with
which visitors could interact, thereby becoming an active part of the learning process. In the exhibition halls, men and women were introduced to themselves through
two-dimensional exhibits (placards, paintings, photographs, X-rays, electrocardiograms, graphs, charts, and motion pictures) and three-dimensional exhibits (diorama,
animated diagrams, animated models, living demonstrations, moving apparatus, or
apparatus with which the observer could perform experiments by himself). The
health museums were not limited to providing basic concepts on human biology,
66
E. Canadelli
anatomy and physiology; their goal was also to teach to value life and live healthily,
to affect habits and behaviors involving individuals, the family, the community, and
the entire nation on the hot topics of family life, nutrition, mental hygiene, hygiene
of labor and industry, physical fitness, heredity and evolution, human reproduction,
and normal growth and development from embryo to puberty. The hygiene that was
taught in these museums was, thus, considered as a sort of applied biology and
social anthropology that combined public health education and the human state of
the nation. Contrary to what was claimed by one of the curators of the Museum of
Dresden, Bruno Gebhard was convinced that the museums are respected as places
where one can find unbiased information, where nobody tries to sell anything other
than true facts (1946: 1013).4 These science museums focused on the man and
health education and were anything but neutral, as they were involved with ideologies, commercialism, industrialism, and corporate interests which often financed
their opening in collaboration with the states. The visitors found not only just plain
facts about their own body and its functions, but also indications on behaviors and
lifestyles that confused knowledge, ideologies and propaganda when facing certain
topics regarding the human body.
Starting from the second decade of the twentieth century, we thus witness a proliferation of initiatives concerning public health within the political programs of
many governments, Germany above all (Hau 2003). At that time, health exhibits
were considered one of the main and successful media that could be employed in
the field of health education. The national and international hygiene exhibitions and
the touring exhibitions gathered big audience success; they also represented a form
of entertainment able to satisfy the thirst for knowledge and a personal curiosity
about the body (Weindling 1989: 413). The trend for the new set-ups was initiated
by the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden, founded in 1912 by the industrialist
Karl August Lingner, inventor of the mouthwash Odol, with the sole mission to
bring to the attention of the average person the need for protecting and promoting
his health, and to teach the basic principles of health conservation (Dunham 1931:
5; Vogel 2003). The museum incorporated the best pieces of the first International
Hygiene Exhibition of 1911, which saw the participation of 30 nations and more
than five million visitors, with around 100 erected pavilions. This exhibition combined state-of-the-art technologies and unprecedented lifelike displays and models
to spread knowledge about the human anatomy and address issues of proactive
health care and diet (Schrn 2003; Reichardt 2008).
The Museum was placed in a permanent location only in 1930 on the occasion of
the second International Hygiene Exhibition. The building was designed by the
architect Wilhelm Kreis, and with its 20 halls it was soon considered by his contemporaries as a teaching institution for giving health instruction to the general public.
Its material has been prepared and arranged with a view to attracting and holding
the attention of the casual visitor. Each exhibit is designed to teach a definite and
4
Connection: Chapter 5 examines, through a cultural traits perspective, the pervasiveness of
education and the deep cultural links between education and society, focusing on some present-day
examples.
67
simple lesson and the dominant health feature so emphasized as to force it upon the
attention (Dunham 1931: 45). This exhibition was a milestone because of its
structure, which was in the vanguard of pedagogical practice and novelty of exhibits.
The first floor dealt primarily with anatomy and physiology, thanks to the exhibition
The Man, made up of drawings, photographs, X-rays, films, moving models
colored or transparent of organs or the whole human body. This exhibition was the
focus of the museum, with a separate room for the Transparent Man statue-model.
The purpose was to demonstrate the normal structure and functions of the body and
the effect that abnormalities or violation of health rules had on the normal structure
and functions. Transparent life size models showed the location and relation of the
bones, blood vessels, nerves, and viscera. Moving models demonstrated functions
of the body, such as the mechanism of the heart and its valves, the maintenance of
blood pressure, the movements of the structures of the mouth and throat involved in
speech. Some models could be lighted. Skeletons and specimens were used to show
the evolution of humankind from the lower forms of animal life and to demonstrate
the different stages of development of the human body. On the second and third
floors there were the exhibitions dedicated to specific topics such as eugenics,
correct diet, digestion processes, motherhood, fertility, hygiene of nursing, industrial hygiene, physical exercise, and diseases such as tuberculosis, venereal diseases
or cancer. To emphasize the didactic and interactive context, there was also a school
for expectant mothers, a cookery school for special diets, and a gymnastic room
with explanations for laypeople (Dunham 1931).
4.3
The Birth of the Transparent Man: Embodying

the New Man
From 1930 on, the absolute symbol of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden
became the Transparent Man, the translucent statue-model, made in plastic materials
by Tschakert and exhibited for the first time at the opening of the second International
Hygiene Exposition in Dresden. Gebhard himself defined the Transparent Man as
the symbol of the health museum movement all over the world (1945: 44). The first
attempts to blow such a figure out of glass in order to make the shape and location
of the fundamental organs of the body visible were made in 1911. They were a failure. In search of transparency, that same year the Leipzig anatomist, Werner
Spalteholz, developed a technique to produce transparent specimens of real human
organs. During the first International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden 370 of these
specimens were shown. Later during the huge Gesolei exhibition, dedicated to the
care of Health, Social Concern, and Bodily Fitness (Gesundheitspflege, Soziale
Frsorge und Leibesbungen) in Dsseldorf in 1926, the Deutsches HygieneMuseum presented an exhibition called the Transparent Man. It was a great success
and provided a powerful stimulus to the development and improvement of the
Transparent Man. The invention of a cellon skin, a sort of plastic material, allowed
68
E. Canadelli
Tschakert and his team to perfect the transparent statue-model. As we shall see,
after the first sample was built in 1930, many others followed: they were created in
series and shipped all over the world.
The Transparent Man condensed the display requirements and didactic concepts
of a generation of museologists in the field of health education, combining art and
science, and popularizing human biology through visual education, interaction and
visitor participation. Content, form and space of the exhibition became one visual
unit. As the ambassador of German health education, it was designed as an attractive and instructive exhibit for educational purposes. Its aesthetics replacing the
anatomically morbid curiosities with a scientific exhibit of an expressionless plastic
robot was up-to-date with the taste and graphics of the time. While in the nineteenth century, dismountable anatomical Venuses with intense expressiveness and
sensuality and anatomical specimens of diseased organs and deformed subjects
were used to illustrate the journey into the human body, in the first half of the twentieth century aseptic bodies were chosen, more mechanical and healthy, without
emotion. The rhetoric of the flesh, of disease and the macabre made way for a
mechanical body where one pushed buttons and pulled levers, where specific parts
were lit up, for a Transparent Man who made the inside of the human body visible.
The motivation was still that of educating, by offering notions of biology and physiology to a health system which invested in sexuality, diet, disease prevention, and
sports. The sensuality of anatomical models was replaced by the translucent aesthetic quality of the Transparent Man which embodied the idea of the perfect, pure
and healthy New Man. The human body was reduced to an aseptic silhouette, a
machine that needs to be well oiled and maintained.
To many, the secret of the success of this model was that it enriched the desired
knowledge and aesthetic values of the visitor. Through the translucent skin one
could see the bones, tissue, veins, nerves, muscles, entrails, and respiratory organs:
The twenty organs are rebuilt in all their anatomical details and in natural color, the
skeleton is a real one, the main blood vessels are reconstructed as naturally as possible (Gebhard 1945: 45). The life-size figure helped people to realize that what
they saw was like the inside of themselves. Caught in a theatrical pose, positioned
within a space similar to a chapel, the Transparent Man was designed to provoke an
almost religious feeling, a mixture of reverence and wonder that celebrated the
beauty of the human body (Fig. 4.1). Even its form took up a recognizable and wellproven stance, with a religious flavor. Its arms were raised towards the sky as if in a
prayer, imitating the statue of the Praying Boy sculpted around 300 B.C. by Boedas,
son of Lysippus. Put on a pedestal at the center of a rotunda, the Transparent Man
was accompanied by a quotation by St. Augustine, Man wonders over the restless
sea/The flowing water, the sight of the sky/and forgets that of all wonders/Man himself is the most wonderful (Gebhard 1945: 47) substituting the motto Know thyself at the popular anatomical museums.
This model offered an innovative and synesthetic, museological performance:
when one organ lit up, so did the explanation on the pedestal, while a voice on the
phonograph told the fascinating story of the human body. Blending art and science,
69
Fig. 4.1 Exhibition The

Man (Der Mensch), with
the Transparent Man,
Deutsches HygieneMuseum, Dresden, 1930
(Courtesy of Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum)
the Greek classical and the modern technical development, the Transparent Man
suggested a conception of the human body as a scientific and artistic masterpiece of
nature.
The models displayed in the Dresden Museum were produced in an internal
workshop which in the beginning of the 1930s involved about 100 people. The
Museum was not only important for its permanent collections, but also for the
production of didactic material, often sold to other institutions or prepared for touring or hygiene exhibitions in Germany and abroad, such as Gesolei in Dsseldorf in
1926 or the Health Exposition The Wonder of Life (Das Wunder des Lebens) in
Berlin in 1935. The Museum also equipped and attended to traveling exhibitions in
most towns and villages of Germany, on topics such as Fight Cancer, Right
Nourishment, Healthy Women-Healthy Nation. An automobile exhibit with a special
tent, called the Healthmobile, traveled through the rural districts of the country. The
presence of a workshop of that size helped to both strengthen and disseminate
information in the area of health education from Dresden beyond geographical and
political barriers, making out the Hygiene-Museum a manufacturer of world reference. Nearly all the models and exhibits with this unmistakable mark used between
the 1930s and 1950s in health exhibitions and museums in the rest of Europe and in
70
E. Canadelli
the United States, with emphasis on the Transparent Man and Woman, came from
the workshop of the Dresden Museum.
4.4
The Migration of the Transparent Man: From Germany

to the U.S.
Within a few years, the Transparent Man became the leading ambassador of a specific model of man and health education. In most cases, it is possible to track the
spread of the individual specimens along their transnational migrations. In 1930 a
Transparent Man was exhibited at the London Health Society. In 1936 a Transparent
Woman was prepared for the Mother and Child exhibition in Stockholm and then
migrated to France for the Paris World Exhibition of 1937 (where a complete pavilion was provided for the Homme de verre), and to Madrid in 1944, disappearing
after that. In 1937 the Dresden Museum made a Transparent Woman for the Museum
of Nagoya, Japan (Vogel 1999: 4849).
Above all, it was the United States that imported many of these statue-models
and embraced the German health care and education models. This attraction exerted
by Germany strongly emerges when browsing some American magazines of the
time, such as the American Journal of Public Health and the Nations Health, with
reports and reportages on exhibitions and museums in Germany and on how to
import this model to the U.S. While sending correspondents to the Old Continent,
the U.S. was inviting to its soil the major protagonists of German health education,
such as Bruno Gebhard curator of the Museum of Dresden until 1937, who then
emigrated to the United States, first as technical consultant for the American
Museum of Health in New York, then as director of the Cleveland Health Museum
founded in 1940. In addition to private companies and foundations such as the
Rockefeller Foundation (Niquette and Buxton 2009), the American Public Health
Association was very active in the field. With its conventions and its magazines, the
association played a central role in the founding of health museums in the U.S.,
maintaining direct relations with the German Hygiene-Museum. In 1930 3 years
before the great Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933, titled A Century of Progress it was
the call of the association to confer upon the Committee on the American Museum
of Hygiene with the task to lead to the creation of the American Museum of Hygiene,
based on the prototype in Dresden. Among the cities most interested in the founding
of this institution were Cleveland, Buffalo, New York and Chicago: the same cities
visited by the Transparent Man and Woman.
In those years, in the United States, there was a great amount of attention given
to a new type of science museum and exhibition conceived as a powerful visual
medium, as well as focusing on eugenics and health education. In the same way, for
example, the exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics was organized
by Harry Hamilton Laughlin and showcased at the American Museum of Natural
History in 1932 (Stillwell 2012). The quest to avoid diseases and prolong life was
71
particularly strong, in an attempt to avoid a dangerous loss of efficiency for the

American nation. On topics such as hygiene and health, the welfare of the individual
was interwoven with that of the entire country. To insiders it was mandatory to act
immediately to afford instruction in health matters for the general public by exemplifying and demonstrating methods of conserving and promoting both individual
and community health. The American Public Health Association pointed out that
even though many diseases had been eradicated and the number of health facilities
had increased, the problem was, rather, bringing to the great mass of people the
benefits of the discoveries made in the laboratories and in the clinics. It was observed
that school, newspapers, and magazines had failed: the Christian Science movement
had grown and there was evidence of persistent ignorance, superstition, and gullibility about health and care of the human body (Dublin and Calver 1938). To remedy this situation, great expectations were pinned on the visual education of museum
exhibits. These types of museums were conceived as educational and cultural
agencies.
In the period prior to World War I in the United States little had been done to
address the situation; for example, only one exhibit on public health opened in
1912 in a section of the American Natural History Museum of New York. Yet after
1930, Dresden and its exhibits seemed to provide the right answer to the American
question on health policy and education about the human body: with its essential
shape and its trivial rhetoric about the wonders of the human body, the Transparent
Man became the symbol of the New Man. Although extensively debated, such
German medical and health exhibitions had been used in the U.S. as a political
device to win public support for forced sterilization and new immigration laws
(Niquette and Buxton 2009: 167; Rydell et al. 2006; Cogdell 2004; Khl 1994)
often associating eugenics with an evolutionary narrative that is typical of a Social
Darwinism.
To better understand the fascination exerted on the United States by the German
model, it is interesting to consider the illustrated reports presented by the American
delegates during their visits to the great exhibitions of hygiene in the new
Germany. In addition to describing with admiration the different sections and
objects on display, the correspondents focused on the possible ways to import
objects, methods and skills to the United States. At the 1930 International Hygiene
Exhibition in Dresden, George C. Dunham from the Medical Field Service
School reported extensively on his visit as the United States delegate and Army
representative. He emphasized the mingling of scientific and industrial purposes of
the exhibition by stressing the issues related to child hygiene, maternal hygiene,
industrial sanitation, sports, physical culture and preventive medicine. Beyond the
various pavilions, the most interesting part for the American visitor was the new
building of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, conceived and developed as a central
academy of public health (Dunham 1931: 5).
In 1935 it was the time of the successful exhibition Das Wunder des Lebens in
Berlin, described by Harry Edwin Kleinschmidt traveling as a fellow of the Carl
Schurz Foundation and director of the Health Education of the National Tuberculosis
Association in New York as an exciting adventure that showed the human body
72
E. Canadelli
in relation to elements in nature, to outdoor life, industry, and the whole life. The
exhibition gave voice to the racial propaganda of the Nazi regime. Earlier, in 1928,
the Rassenkunde exhibit was held at the Hamburg Museum fr Vlkerkunde, which
sought to educate the public to a eugenic racial vision (Evans 2008). Most of the
models and exhibits of the Berlin exhibition came from the workshop of the Dresden
Museum. Kleinschmidt gave a detailed description of them, focusing on every hall
and on the spectacular effect of the exhibition, where the visitor without being told,
feels rather than learns (Kleinschmidt 1935: 1108; see Tymkiw 2015). After the
striking Honor Hall, where there was a monumental relief frieze depicting the
onward and upward sweep of a nation, led by a giant eagle, the visitor passed into
a large, high-ceilinged, dimly lighted room, where the Transparent Man appeared
on a pedestal occupying a rotunda. As in Dresden, an inscription in gold letters on
the wall quoted Augustinus. Kleinschmidt wrote down what he felt in this sanctuary: There is nothing to divert the attention from this one work of art. For a
moment one enjoys the sheer beauty of the human body. The organs light up, one by
one, and the concealed voice of the phonograph tells the story. [] The chapel-like
space occupied by the Transparent Man creates an attitude of respect, if not awe
(1935: 11081109).
But in Berlin, next to models that explained the functions of individual organs
and functions of the human body circulation of blood, breathing, hearing, and the
structure of the brain there was also a large section devoted to race hygiene, with
eugenics charts and family trees, where the methods of German propaganda bureaus
and the educational activities of the Nazi Party were illustrated. Kleinschmidt wrote:
Sad galleries of unfortunate biological misfits idiots, people with heritable deformities,
incurable criminals drive home the logic back of the new sterilization laws. The antiSemitic policy is meticulously explained. [] To a foreigner interested in the present psychology of the German people and in the methods of public propaganda bureaus, this Hall
is, of course, a treasure house and more illuminating than pages of printed matter or folios
of documents. (Kleinschmidt 1935: 1111)
The strength of the German exhibition model was in arousing an admiration for
the marvel of the human body, appealing to the emotions of the visitor. The report
ended with a tough question addressed to colleagues: were the German teaching
methods effective and importable to the U.S. such as they were, or did they have to
be adjusted to the different environment? The United States favored the former
solution, importing the exhibits directly from Germany, or at most making home
copies of the German models, as was for example the case for the Human Factory
installed in 1935 in the Cabana Hall of Man at the Buffalo Museum of Science and
Industry. This three-dimensional animated exhibit reproduced the well-known
diagram invented some years before by Fritz Kahn in Germany; it compared the
normal functions of the human body to the operations of a manufacturing plant.
Still, in 1938, the members of the Committee on American Museum of Hygiene in
an article programmatically titled Health Education for the Millions wondered
whether and eventually how to change the winning example of Dresden to fit
American conditions. Designed as a double of the one in Dresden, for the setting of
the themes and division of spaces,
73
The Museum of Hygiene, as we have conceived it here, has already played a very important
part in the education of the German people. [] Certainly, the methods evolved by the
museum at Dresden and its branches have worked, and there is no reason why they should
not succeed equally well in a country like our own where similar conditions prevail as to
literacy, innate curiosity, and an emphasis on obtaining knowledge through sight and the
other senses. (Dublin and Calver 1938: 121)
There was no reason, then, to abandon the didactic devices that had worked so
well on the Germans. On the contrary, according to the Committees chairman and
secretary, Louis Dublin and Homer Calver, a country such as the United States,
known for its development of mass production, should capitalize on these experiences of our foreign confreres, adapting the best in their programs to our conditions
and our psychology (1938: 122). As stated by Gebhard at the Annual meeting of
the American Association held in Pasadena, thanks to visual teaching the fight
against sickness and unhygienic conditions knows no territorial boundaries (1934:
1151).
The diffusion and migration of certain ideas and the transfer and reuse of display
solutions did not occur only through the correspondents sent overseas for reporting
on these experiences. From Germany came numerous transparent organs created
with the technique developed by Spalteholz, interactive models of the exhibition
The Man, and of course, the Transparent Man and the Transparent Woman all of
them to be exhibited in worlds fairs, museums or traveling exhibitions. This kind of
material was often brought on tour to several cities, thus becoming a real standard.
The first relevant event that marked the entrance of the Transparent Man on
American soil was at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933, A Century of Progress,
where many models of the German Museum were displayed in the medical section
of the Hall of Sciences developed by the anatomist Eben James Carey (Fig. 4.2).
World fairs represented an important channel of circulation for this kind of science
exhibit. In conjunction with the opening of the Chicago Worlds Fair, in the Hall of
Man at the Field Museum of Natural History the exhibit The Races of Mankind was
set up. The 104 busts, heads, and life-sized figures made in bronze by the artist
Malvina Hoffmann remained there on display until 1967 (Kinkel 2011). In 1936, at
the Museum of Science and Industry of Chicago, a section on hygiene was inaugurated, always under the directorship of Carey.
The following year, members of the American Public Health Association invited
the Hygiene-Museum to organize an annual exhibition on the theme Eugenics in the
New Germany. Between 1934 and 1935, the traveling exhibition stopped in Los
Angeles, Portland, Salem, and finally at the Buffalo Museum of Science and
Industry, where it remained until 1943. Many exhibits made in Dresden were exhibited at this Museum. In the same year as the exhibition on German eugenics, the
museum in Buffalo paid for an exhibition largely made up of material from Dresden
and shown at the Chicago Worlds Fair (including the Transparent Man) for the
newly set up Hall of Man. Significantly, the popular American journal Popular
Science Monthly entitled its report on the exhibition Wonders of the Human Body
Reproduced in Museum by Machines and Electricity. By means of interactive
displays, transparent models, lighting effects and mechanical apparatuses, every
74
E. Canadelli
Fig. 4.2 The Transparent

Man in the Hall of Science
at the Chicago Words Fair
1933. From Souvenir of a
Century of Progress,
published by Chicago
Daily News, 1934
important organ in the human machine is brought to light for visual instruction of
the onlookers. Like in an amusement park, between one Transparent Man and a
self-propelled skeleton, the reporter described:
Press a button. A motor whirs; a skull nods; a wrist bone turns on a joint; a bony forearm
flexes and beckons. A human skeleton bids you come up close and scrutinize the machine
that is man. Press another button. A tiny bright light leaves the left half of a mechanical
human body, enters the right half of the heart, and goes out. [] At one end of the hall, in
a darkened circular alcove, atop a black pedestal, stands a complete human skeleton
wrapped in transparent material. A light flashes on, and the brain is illuminated. Another
light flashes; the heart glows. (Wonders of the human body 1935: 36)
The picture story showed middle class American women wearing fur coats who,
moving some of the levers, flipped through the vertical sections of a wooden book
shaped like the torso of a man, human silhouettes without faces, with a glass heart
into which a liquid was pumped, a rubber lung in a glass box which contracted with
the pressure of a lever, or a giant brain where different areas lit up when pushing
certain buttons, such as the ones employed when we speak, write or read.
During the fifth Annual Report of the Committee on the American Museum of
Hygiene, in 1936, the importance of increasing cultural relationships between
Germany and the United States was stressed, especially through the establishment
75
of a traveling health exposition of the type that had been so successful in Germany,
built around a substantial nucleus of exhibit material purchased from the Museum
in Dresden (Committee 1937). Meanwhile, between 1936 and 1937, at least two
different specimens of the Transparent Woman circulated in the United States; they
came directly from Germany. One was the so-called Miss Science, donated by the
corsetry manufacturer S.H. Kemp of Jackson, Missouri. She was first shown in
New York in 1936, at the Museum of Science and Industry, and then migrated to
shows in 100 towns in the U.S., ending in a science centre in St. Louis, Missouri.
The second one was the so-called Camp Transparent Woman, sponsored by Camp
& Co. It arrived at the Museum of Science and Industry in Buffalo in 1937. In 6
weeks on display, it had about 60,000 visitors. In the radio broadcast Unveiling of
the Camp Transparent Woman, whose manuscript is preserved in the archives of the
Buffalo Museum, the president of the American Association of Hygiene, Francis
Fronczak, celebrated the big event and the spectacle offered by the model, which
was capable of revealing nothing less than the mysteries of the female body, so
central to the logic of health education that focused on themes such as maternity,
pregnancy, and reproduction: The only woman who is not only completely stripped
of all decorative appendages, but is introduced to the public, not only in the nude,
but in crystal-like transparency, without withholding from view any anatomical
mysteries or secrets (in Niquette and Buxton 2009: 170). The same year, the specimen traveled to New York at the Museum of Science and Industry, doubling the
average weekly paid admission.
The New Yorks Worlds Fair of 1939 provided an important opportunity to
develop exhibits related to health education. Once again, the exhibition solutions
insisted on the dynamic approach of the Dresden Museum by using three dimensional
materials and moving objects for different types of visitors. The Oberlaender Trust
of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation secured many dollars worth of duplications from the German Hygiene-Museum. The exhibition was staged in the Hall of
Man at the Medical Health Building, funded by major partners such as the Carnegie
Corporation NW, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Oberlaender Trust, life insurance
companies, pharmaceutical houses, health and medical associations. Already at the
planning stages, the organizers emphasized the willingness to comply with the previous
exhibitions, expressing the wish that:
dominating this section of man himself and visually summing up the health story of his life
may be a life-size man, woman and child, all transparent (as was the Transparent Man at the
Century of Progress), naturally posed and inwardly illuminated to furnish a brief lesson in
gross anatomy and surrounded with working models of the heart, the lungs and other
organs, so that the visitor can see how the wheels go round and thus better understand the
care of his body. (Health Exhibit 1936: 375; Dublin and Calver 1938)
The Hall of Man was juxtaposed with the Hall of Medical Science with focuses
on diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes, and heart diseases; the Hall of
Public Health, with a focus on health administration, control of maternal health,
mental hygiene, and food control; and the Theater of Hygiene, with a program of
lectures, demonstrations, and motion pictures.
76
E. Canadelli
Before being on display at the Worlds Fair, these exhibits from Dresden were
shown at the exhibition Story of Man at the New York Museum of Science and
Industry at the Rockefeller Center, in the winter of 19371938. Once again, 3 years
after the exhibition at the Buffalo Museum of Science, the same journal, Popular
Science Monthly, entitled the new story on this topic Scientific Peep Show Tells How
Our Bodies Work. As well, shown in the photos accompanying the short article, the
interactive exhibition with dramatized displays was very similar, if not actually the
same as the one at the Buffalo Museum:
By pressing buttons, turning cranks, and pulling levers, visitors can test their strength, their
lungs, and their voices and see for themselves how blood circulates, how their muscles
work, and a host of other interesting details. Controlled by a maze of motors, the exhibits
provide a fascinating introduction to the mysteries of human anatomy and physiology.
(Scientific Peep Show 1938: 54)
The New York Fair was also seen as the best opportunity to initiate a great
museum similar to Dresden. After the Fair, the Medical Building was presented as
the new American Museum of Health (Niquette and Buxton 2009: 175). In
November 1940, the Cleveland Health Museum was also opened to the public
(McLeary and Toon 2012). The director was Bruno Gebhard, the former curator of
the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum: he set up the new museum replicating the model
of Dresden with interactive displays and the Transparent Man (initially taken on a
loan from the American Museum of Health in New York). The visitors could make
their own finger print cards, test their lung capacity, dial a machine to find out their
life expectancy, answer games about the food, watch health films and attend lectures
for expectant mothers. The process of duplicating the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum
in the U.S. and the dissemination of the Transparent Man and other exhibits made
in Dresden was now complete.
4.5
Survival and Fall of a Symbol: Attempting a Conclusion
On February 1314, 1945, the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum was severely damaged

by fire following an Allied air raid. The first exemplar of the Transparent Man was
destroyed, but his brothers in the U.S. were not. Sentenced to migrate, many of
these exhibits returned home many years later, laden with new meanings: no longer
as ambassadors of an ideal of Man or a model of health education, but as historical
artifacts, witnesses to a phase of German history and a season of the medical and
scientific museology that had come to an end. In 1943 and 1950, the Buffalo
Museum destroyed some exhibits that had arrived in the 1930s from Germany,
which were now considered offending material. The Transparent Man was not
among them. This statue-model survived and was later transferred to the Deutsches
Historisches Museum of Berlin in 1989 as an expression of friendship between the
U.S. and Germany. After a long stay at the Science centre in St. Louis, Miss
Science is also now back in Germany, at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (on
loan at the Hygiene-Museum of Dresden). While the Transparent Man at the
77
Education Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester has been in place since its arrival
in the 1940s, others had a more troubled fate as for the Transparent Woman which
arrived at the Cleveland Museum in 1950 and since has moved to the Allen Memorial
Medical Library, following the shutdown of the Cleveland Health Education
Museum in 2006. The destiny of many of these models is unknown.
Before crystallizing and becoming an historical object, the Transparent Man
lived a phase of restructuring and reuse that could be called camouflage. Although
after World War II the world had entirely changed, during the 1950s the lure of the
Transparent Man survived, along with some key players in its history, from the creator Tschakert to the curator Gebhard. As demonstrated by Vogel (1999), after
World War II the exhibit was involved in the propaganda of the Cold War: it was
fought between East Germany, with the renewed Museum of Dresden, responding
to the demands of the Soviet Union, and West Germany, with the new German
Health Museum founded in 1950 near Cologne, supplying the western world and in
particular the United States. The world was now divided in two and thus needed two
Transparent Men. A large group of former employees of the Museum of Dresden,
including Tschakert himself, moved into the new museum in Cologne (Das grsste
Wunder 1950; An inside job 1955). Here they produced the Transparent Man and
Woman, such as the one sold to the Cleveland Museum in 1950; organized the
Deutsche Hygiene-Ausstellung in 1951; and studied new materials such as detailed
enlargement models of parts of the body for traveling health exhibits. Meanwhile,
Dresden remaining isolated and with limited resources reiterated the rhetoric of
the knowledge of man and the human body, this time turning to Moscow and proper
Socialist ideological needs. In 1949 a Transparent Couple traveled to Moscow on
the occasion of the birthday of Stalin. Both museums continued to be center of diffusion of the Transparent Man and other exhibits, carrying on to promote as in the
years before the war initiatives in the field of health education; health education
which had in the meantime changed its tone, but not its end messages, in order to
pursue a healthy lifestyle.
Stripped of eugenics and racial hygiene, today the Transparent Man has lost its
ideological force of which it has long been the bearer. Becoming a historical artifact, at one point, stopped it from spreading a certain idea of man and health, while
remaining an important witness to a period of the history of ideas. What does, therefore, remain today of the rhetoric of this object and its message? On the one hand,
the desire for transparency of the human body remains a goal to chase, for example,
through the immaterial body of the medical diagnostics and new technologies. An
example of this is the Visible Human Project website of the U.S. National Library
of Medicine, with its electronically reassembled three dimensional bodies. On the
other hand, the claim for health education and body care is still alive, as shown by
the many science museums dedicated to human body which have emerged in the
last years, and thanks to private funding from Corpus Journey through the Human
Body in Holland to the Health Museum in Houston (Canadelli 2011). The discourse
at the core of the twentieth-century health museums such as Dresden has therefore
taken new forms, adopted new languages, and found new channels of diffusion; the
78
E. Canadelli
Transparent Man has given way to new hands-on and interactive exhibits, plastinated corpses, diagnostic or 3D images, and endoscopic images.
Today the human body is exhibited in different ways in different museological
contexts with educational and instructive purposes, directed at a diverse public, and
aimed at mediating concepts such as health and prevention for a body shown in its
normal everyday nature (correct diet, sexuality, sport, diseases). On the one hand,
the Transparent Man was replaced by von Hagens plastinated corpses, which without much imagination rescued the element of the morbid wonders of the body. On
the other hand, the real body is gradually disappearing making room for digital,
synthetic and virtual images of itself. The human body has been made transparent
by the new medical diagnostics and by the latest discoveries of endoscopy. The way
museums display it today involves virtual reality, computers, 3D animation, digital
technologies, interactive and hands-on models of large size human parts, thereby
developing an edutainment, which in some cases makes these exhibitions look
like actual playgrounds of science. The need for interaction which emerged vigorously in the 1920s and 1930s is today amplified. From levers, buttons and projections we have passed on to the search for immersion by means of 3D technology and
computer graphics. Like in the past, in these contemporary museums the knowledge
of the human body, which is discussed in enthusiastic tones full of mystery and
wonder, is not an end in itself, but rather it is aimed at assimilating a regime of the
healthy life; something that makes the active role that private sponsors play in these
initiatives more problematic. Searching for a difficult balance between entertainment and instruction, between current issues and medical information, the exhibitions of our day swing between the old strategies of museology and the innovative
attempts of communication, between a stereotyped language and new
experimentations.
For some decades the Transparent Man has been able to convey a specific cultural trait linked to a conception of the human body and its wonders, interpreting the
issue with a distinctive design able to score a trend that has spread from Germany to
the U.S. It survived the fall of the National-Socialist ideology and has then gradually turned into a scientific historical exhibit.
References
(1935). Wonders of the human body reproduced in museum by machines and electricity. Popular
Science Monthly, 127, 3637, 96.
(1936). Health exhibit: New York worlds fair of 1939. California and Western Medicine, 45, 375.
(1938). Scientific peep show tells how our bodies work. Popular Science Monthly, 132, 5455.
(1950). Das grsste Wunder. Der Spiegel, 32, 44.
(1955). An inside job on a big maw: A plaster head gets a checkup. Life, 38, n. 17, 99100.
Abbott, M. E. (1930). Book review The medical museum. The Canadian Medical Association
Journal, 22, 310.
Beier, R., & Roth, M. (Eds.). (1991). Der glserne Mensch. Eine Sensation: zur Kulturgeschichte
eines Ausstellungsobjekts. Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje.
79
Canadelli, E. (2011). Scientific peep show: The human body in contemporary science museums.
Nuncius, 26, 159184. doi:10.1163/182539111X569801.
Clair, J. (Ed.). (2008). The 1930s: The making of the new man. Ottawa: National Gallery of
Canada.
Cogdell, C. (2004). Eugenic design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Committee on American Museum of Hygiene. (1937). Seventh Annual Year Book. Supplement to
American Journal of Public Health, 27, 3840.
de Ceglia, F. P. (2013). Mostre di cadaveri e nuova visibilit della morte. Il caso di Gunther von
Hagens. In F. P. de Ceglia & L. Dibattista (Eds.), Il bello della scienza. Intersezioni tra storia,
scienza e arte (pp. 1128). Milan: Franco Angeli.
Dublin, L. I., & Calver, H. N. (1938). Health education for the millions. American Journal of
Public Health and the Nations Health, 28, 117122.
Dunham, G. C. (1931). The International hygiene exhibition. American Journal of Public Health
and the Nations Health, 21, 110.
Evans, A. D. (2008). Race made visible: The transformation of museum exhibits in early-twentiethcentury German anthropology. German Studies Review, 31, 87108.
Gebhard, B. (1934). Health education in Germany. American Journal of Public Health and the
Nations Health, 24, 11481151.
Gebhard, B. (1940). Health exhibits. American Journal of Public Health and the Nations Health,
30, 657660.
Gebhard, B. (1945). Art and science in a health museum. Bulletin of the Medical Library
Association, 33, 3949.
Gebhard, B. (1946). What good are health museums? American Journal of Public Health and the
Nations Health, 36, 10121015.
Goeller, A. (2007). Interior landscapes: Anatomy art and the work of Gunter von Hagens. In
K. Kutzback & M. Mueller (Eds.), The abject of desire: The aestheticization of the unaesthetic
in contemporary literature and culture (pp. 271290). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hau, M. (2003). The cult of health and beauty in Germany: A social history 18901930. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Hirschauer, S. (2006). Animated corpses: Communicating with post mortals in an anatomical exhibition. Body & Society, 12, 2552. doi:10.1177/1357034X06070883.
Kinkel, M. (2011). Races of mankind. The sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Kleinschmidt, H. E. (1935). New Germany teaches her people: An account of the Health Exposition
of Berlin. American Journal of Public Health and the Nations Health, 25, 11081113.
Khl, S. (1994). The Nazi connection: Eugenics, American racism, and German National
Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLeary, E., & Toon, E. (2012). Here man learns about himself. Visual education and the rise and
fall of the American Museum of Health. American Journal of Public Health, 102, e27e36.
Niquette, M., & Buxton, W. J. (2009). Sugar-coating the educational pill: Rockefeller support
for the communicative turn in science museum. In W. J. Buxton (Ed.), Patronizing the public:
American philantropys transformation of culture, communications and the humanities
(pp. 153193). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Reichardt, E. (2008). Health, race and empire: Popular-scientific spectacles and national identity in Imperial Germany, 18711914. Raleigh: Lulu.com.
Rydell, R., Cogdell, C., & Largent, M. (2006). The Nazi eugenics exhibit in the United States,
193443. In S. Currel & C. Cogdell (Eds.), Popular eugenics: National efficiency and American
mass culture in the 1930s (pp. 359384). Athens: Ohio University Press.
Schrn, J. (2003). Ein grosses, lebendiges Lehrbuch der Hygiene. Die Internationale HygieneAusstellung in Dresden 1911. In C. Kretschmann (Ed.), Wissenspopularisierung. Konzepte der
Wissensverbreitung im Wandel (pp. 309322). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
80
E. Canadelli
Stillwell, D. (2012). Eugenics visualized: The exhibit of the third International Congress of
Eugenics, 1932. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 86, 206236. doi:10.1353/bhm.2012.0025.
Tymkiw, M. (2015). Den Krper spielerisch erkunden. Die Ausstellung Wunder des Lebens in
Berlin 1935 und ihr Nachleben. In S. Nikolow (Ed.), Erkenne Dich selbst! Strategien der
Sichtbarmachung des Krpers im 20. Jahrhundert (pp. 320-342). Kln: Bhlau.
Vogel, K. (1999). The transparent man: Some comments on the history of a symbol. In R. Bud,
B. Finn, & H. Trischler (Eds.), Manifesting medicine: Bodies and machines (pp. 3161).
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Vogel, K. (Ed.). (2003). Das Deutsche Hygiene-Museum Dresden 19111990. Dresden: Stiftung
Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden.
Weindling, P. (1989). Health, race, and German politics between National Unification and Nazism
18701945. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Chapter 5
The Incompetent Subject in the Kingdom

of Technical Terms. A Possible Role
of Pedagogy in the Study of Cultural Traits
Rossana Brambilla
5.1
Education and Culture
Education1 does not interest only pedagogical studies or educational

environments.
First of all, it continuously happens in our everyday life. We are protagonists of
an educational process as learners every time we understand something new or learn
a new way of doing. This also occurs in ordinary moments and spaces/environments
of our life: at home, while we are working, in our free time, and sometimes while
we are walking along a street. When we understand or learn something new, we
have been educated. But, every day we can also be educators of other people. It
happens when someone learns thanks to us. The power of education in our life does
not end here. Every one of us has their own idea about how children/teenagers must
be educated, and also about the right behaviors in different situations or places we
go. So we always take our concepts of education with us, which inevitably derive
from how we have been educated in our family, in institutions and at the places we
have spent our time. Our ideas can also derive from educational theories we have
learned. Most often, those concepts result from an intersection of all the aspects
written above. Riccardo Massa (1975, 1986), considered to be one of the most
important contemporary educationalists in Italy, has shown how the educational
methods2 we choose are strictly related, directly or by opposition, with the ways we
1
By education I mean any process in which people learn something or change their ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. However, the concept will be better explained during this first paragraph.
2
Massa claims that an educational method is a web of different educational elements (spaces,
times, the role of the bodies, every kind of activities, rituals, kinds of interactions and communications, languages, words, rules, etc.), organized in a specific way.
R. Brambilla (*)
e-mail: rossana.brambilla21@gmail.com
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_5
81
82
R. Brambilla
have been educated in our life (1991). Directly refers to the fact that sometimes we
simply repeat the education we have received. An example is when we teach someone something and we tend to use words and gestures we experienced with our
parents, our teachers, etc. On the contrary, we act by opposition when we intentionally choose (or at least try) to do exactly the contrary of what we have experienced in our lifetime. So, if we are aware of having suffered for our parents and
teachers education, our efforts will tend to say and act contrarily with respect to
what we have experienced. Following this particular link between our different
ideas of education, different ways to educate and our familiar, social background it
is possible to claim that our educational ideas and our educational methods are cultural traits. Sometimes, we could be carried to think of education as something natural, just because it represents a process which continuously happens in our lives and
which has interested every historical age. After all, educating children is the most
natural thing in the world. But this is not exactly how things are. On the contrary, as
many of the most important thinkers of the world have shown,3 our ideas of education and all our ways to educate are always typical expressions of our historical,
social and familiar background. So, referring to the 2001 UNESCO Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity,4 you could also add that culture should be
regarded as the set of distinctive educational (ideas and methods) features of society
or a social group.
Secondly, education normally happens in every social institution. Schools, other
social educational spaces/environments, and prisons, churches, etc. can be called
educational because they exist in order to make people change their ways of thinking, feeling and behaving (Foucault 1961, 1975, 1999; Papi 2001). To reach their
specific goals of change, social institutions operate by precise methods, which are
strictly linked with the kind of society and culture in which they are located. An
example concerning the scholastic institution can better explain this claim. For our
kind of society and our historical moment,5 school is the most important educational
3
Thinking of education as something of strictly related with history and society, so deeply cultural,
makes reference to some of the most famous thinkers of the world: Marx, Engels (1845, 1845
1846), Marx (18571858), Freud (1909, 1913, 19151917, 1925, 1929), and also Rousseau (1762),
Dewey (1916, 1929), Althusser (1965a), Althusser and Balibar (1965b), Horkheimer and Marcuse
(1965), Horkheimer (1968), and Foucault (1968a, b, 1969). Among some of the most famous
educationalists claiming this way of thinking about education we can remember: Makarenko
(19331935), Milani (1967), Freire (1968), and Massa (1975, 1986). Further, among some great
psychologists, we can remember Bruner (1990). Finally, among contemporary psychoanalysts,
you can see Voltolin (2013) [see also Bonazzi, this volume].
4
I refer to Panebianco and Serrellis words, when, presenting this book, they wrote: UNESCO
Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2 November 2001) defines culture with an emphasis
on cultural features: culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, intellectual and
emotional features of society or a social group, encompassing, in addition to art and literature,
lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.
5
To better understand how some educational methods and perspectives change according to different historical moments see Aris (1960). An English translation of the book, Centuries of
Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, is available from 1962.
5 The Incompetent Subject in the Kingdom of Technical Terms. A Possible Role
83
place/environment. It represents the expression of how, from the point of view of

our social and cultural background, children and teenagers should be educated, and
also what they are being educated for. So, a scholastic institution the environment
where the first important learning and socialization process of children and teenagers is organized is the expression of our social and cultural background. At the
same time, school is also the expression of the right content children and teenagers
must learn in order to fit in with the social and cultural background they belong to.
In other words, every scholastic institution expresses the right educational method.
Clearly, I am not claiming that teaching techniques have always been the same.
Over the years some techniques have changed, but, undoubtedly, scholastic institutions have uncontestably remained places aimed at teaching to children and teenagers. This might seem obvious, but if we think of one of the most famous pedagogical
texts, Emile ou De lducation, written by Jean Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth
century, we can perceive how really cultural our way of thinking about scholastic
institutions is. In Rousseaus opinion, the best way of educating children and teenagers consists of organizing their educational process in contact with Nature and not
in any artificial environment.
Something similar can also be claimed for places/environments we do not usually call educational, but whose fundamental goal is to change some peoples
ways of thinking and behaving.6 Prisons are typical examples (Foucault 1975). The
organization of every prison expresses what a certain society thinks about punishing
and re-educating a guilty person. Moreover, it expresses the processes a society
activates to support punishment and re-education. In this sense, comparing laws and
ways to organize prisons in different countries, also within Europe, could be very
interesting. For example, there is a broad difference between a typical Italian prison,
where sentenced persons are mainly penned in prisons and spend a great part of
their time in prison cells, and some Swedish punishment and re-education experiences, according to which sentenced persons have precise rules to follow, but they
can live in a village, in a house, and have a job. This issue needs wider consideration. But here, it is important to understand how our institutions really represent
cultural traits. They are typical expressions of our culture and they teach the ways
of thinking, feeling and behaving our society wants. In this sense, I will also speak
about individual traits, meaning those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reside
in individuals and that are manifest expressions of the culture in which the individual is raised and educated.7
Ideas about education, educational practices, and languages can be considered
cultural traits, as can all our social institutions with their precise ways to organize
6
Connection: Chapter 4 talks about museum exhibits that instruct people on health and hygiene.
These artifacts deliver, along with scientific notions, specific views about man and woman, their
relationships with themselves and with society. These deeper messages can be unseen, showing
that, even in explicitly instructional contexts, there is varying awareness about messages or traits
that are transmitted.
7
Connection: All this Chapter closely relates to the idea of individual cultural traits, transmitted
from agent to agent through institutions and exercise. Somehow related to this, is the toolbox
view of culture, presented in Sect. 2.4 (see also the Connection therein).
84
R. Brambilla
educational processes. Looking at education in this way, it becomes possible to

understand how our ideas of education, our educational practices and languages,
and also our social institutions, could be changed, perhaps radically.
This first section, as a sort of introduction, has been written in order to introduce
some other disciplinarists to what education is and to how it concerns our ordinary
life. But it is right to clarify that this introduction inevitably expresses a particular
way to look at the object-education. Actually, when we look at something we always
make reference to a particular literature of the field, as Louis Althusser teaches very
well in his Lire Le Capital (1965b). This is the why, before introducing some results
of my research about pedagogy and cultural traits, I shall synthetically review the
main scientific theories on education.
5.2
Main Contemporary Perspectives on Education
Education is a very complex object of study. Actually, it can be studied from many
disciplines and, among these disciplines, from different theories. This happens due
to the many aspects (historical, social, political, anthropological, psychological,
etc.) which are typical of any educational process. So, often, terms such as pedagogical studies and educational studies may be conflated. The latter are studies that,
moving from different disciplines, focus on single and particular aspects of education. So, there are studies in history of education, sociology of education, politics of
education, anthropology of education, psychology of education, and so on (Massa
1990). Pedagogy is one of the many sciences of education, being the discipline
which intends to understand how the processes of human formation and transformation operate in all their complexity as well as to produce theories for planning and
managing those processes in a professional way. These definitions are further complicated in the international literature by the fact that there is no uniform way to
define persons who study education from a pedagogical point of view. Actually, all
scientists who study education are simply called educationalists.
In any case, beyond these specific epistemological and terminological problems
of educational and pedagogical debate, an important study of Tara J. Fenwick
(2000) offers a possible taxonomy of the main international and contemporary perspectives on education. Obviously, in presenting these perspectives, I will make
reference to other studies, but Fenwicks study will be particularly useful for its
valuable synthesis and definitions of the different perspectives, and also for its neutrality in presenting them.
Introducing different perspectives, I will proceed in the following way: first, I
will briefly explain different perspectives in the most objective way. Then, in addition to this first presentation, I will make some considerations about what kind of
relations they entertain with the complexity of the object-education and also about
how different perspectives deal (or do not) with the issue of cultural traits. The latter
critical reflection is a contribution from my research.
5.2.1
85
From a Constructivist Perspective: Reflection
The most popular perspective about education can be called Reflection. Being a
constructivist perspective it sustains that education operates by means of each
individuals mind and particularly by means of the minds ability to reflect on the
individuals actions in the world. This reflective activity allows the individuals to
become aware of their beliefs and then to open their mind to other ways of thinking
and doing. Fenwick (2000: 248) claims that the reflection perspective, as a matter of
fact, casts the individual as a central actor in a drama of personal
meaning-making.8
This way of imagining education considers individuals, and in particular their
mind, as the undisputed protagonist of their educational process. Each individual
changes thanks to their mind. The cultural traits considered by this perspective are
human beliefs9 which derive from society and culture, but then can change thanks to
reflective activity. All the theories under the Reflection perspective have the merit of
emphasizing the minds power upon learning and changes. The same theories
emphasize how educators must be reflective workers and how they have to support
the reflective ability in people they meet. However, a further consideration is possible. It is true that subjects also learn from their reflection, sometimes supported by
other people. But reflection not only produces awareness, it produces new typical
individual traits. Every time we reflect, or we are supported in reflecting, we act
along some precise conceptual tracks, which tend to lead our reflection in some
particular directions. In order to better understand this claim, we can think of an
ordinary counseling situation, in which individuals are supported to organize their
reflection by means of precise disciplinary concepts, which are strictly related to the
gazes and the languages of discipline and theory of the counselor or consultant. Any
way of thinking, any practice or concept which supports reflection, is again, deeply
cultural, and ends up reproducing specific individual traits. In other words, it brings
individuals to think in a specific way. In order to restrain this educational power, any
practice should declare from what perspective and theory it is reflecting, what it is
choosing to privilege in its analysis, what it is leaving in the background of its
exploration, and why it is operating in such way. Finally, while every reflective
activity aims to carry us towards a certain way of thinking, speaking, feeling and
behaving, at the same time it tends to separate us from alternative ways of thinking,
speaking, feeling and behaving. Also, Reflection, by means of its practices and languages, spreads individual traits. It does not produce only awareness, but, from a
deeply cultural way of reasoning and speaking, always teaches individuals to reason
8
Schn (1983) particularly claims this point of view. Also in Italian debate we can find a lot of
positions based on a constructivist perspective. Some examples are Kaneklin and Scaratti (1998),
Pontecorvo et al. (1991), and Reggio (2011).
9
Farr and Moscovici (1984) particularly argue the meaning and the role of the human beliefs.
Another interesting work about the human beliefs is Lascioli 2001. This Italian author lets us
understand how the human beliefs play a crucial role in the treatments of the persons with some
disabilities.
86
R. Brambilla
and speak in a new specific way which is deeply rooted in the disciplines, theories
and values the Reflection activity is based on.
5.2.2
From Freudian Psychoanalysis: Interference
A second perspective about education can be called Interference and it is a psychoanalytic perspective rooted in Freudian tradition. It sustains that education operates first of all by means of the unconscious life of individuals, by their resistances,
deep desires, impulses and all tensions that inhabit them in different situations.10
According to Interference theories, we learn through our reflective conscious mind,
through our unconscious, and often through hidden conflicts which act in the
encounter between conscious reflections or meanings and unconscious life. Fenwick
writes: [a]lthough the unconscious cannot be known directly, its workings interfere
with our intentions and our conscious perception of direct experience (2000:
251).11
From this second perspective, the individuals are still the protagonists of their
educational processes, and their undefinable internal movements play a crucial role.
Sometimes the subconscious can be repressed or cared for. However, it is substantially separated from every situation in which it is involved. This perspective has the
considerable merit of highlighting the great role of the unconscious with respect to
our learning and changes. This is particularly important for educational situations
which are a real theatre of some deep affective dynamics both for educators and
for people who have to be educated.12 Educators, from this point of view, must
continuously exercise in reading unconscious dynamics within themselves and
inside educational situations.13 Nevertheless, there is another way, also within psychoanalytic theories, to understand events, such as the emergence of individual
desire. Material and educational situations are not only able to repress or funnel (or
care for) individual desires. Situations and practices also have the power to generate
deep desires. Actually, by following a Lacanian author, we discover that, a deep
desire sometimes needs an encounter, an event, in order to emerge and to be experienced (Recalcati 2012: 20). It needs a precise and unexpected situation able to
10
Connection: on this view of education and transmission, see Chap. 6.

Even if the most important educational perspective linked with psychoanalysis is rooted in
Freudian tradition (there is also an Italian contribution Gelli and Arcidiacono (1994) in which
the authors move from the Freudian tradition to develop an educational approach for teenagers
within schools), there are different educational positions linked with other psychoanalytic theories.
Winnicott (1993) is an example. Again, in Italy, Mantovani et al. (2000) move from the Bowlbian
attachment theory to develop an educational method for nursery schools.
12
An Italian study, Mottana (1993), is of particular value in showing how many possible affective
dynamics could be generated from an educational situation.
13
Massa (2001) sustains that educators should also make some constant affective exercises (the
Italian expression is atletica affettiva and it comes from Antonin Artauds thought), in order to
become aware of the affective dynamics which deeply influence every educational process.
11
87
inflame it. Accordingly, there is a direct connection between some internal movements and some situations. Desire, for example, can also be (at least partially) generated or shaped by means of an encounter between an individual and his/her
context, society, or culture. Once again, not only do we have the individual and his/
her internal movements as protagonists of their education. The encounter between
an individual and a specific situation is able to open undreamed-of possibilities for
that subject. This resembles a possible pedagogical sense (Massa 2001) of two
important theatrical works as Le Thtre et son double (Artaud 1964) and Towards
a Poor Theatre (Grotowski 1968). Before this, Freud helped to think how psychological pains are always deeply cultural, because of their profound connections with
their historical and social backgrounds. Following these important authors, we can
say that any internal movement, and particularly desires (which are greatly important for educational processes), are always strictly related, directly or indirectly, to
social and cultural backgrounds by which they emerge and find shape and
expression.
5.2.3
From Neuroscience and Evolutionary Theory:

Co-emergence
A third perspective14 about education can be called Co-emergence, and it is the

enactivist perspective emanating from neuroscience and evolutionary theory
(Fenwick 2000: 247). It assumes that cognition depends on the kinds of experience
that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities embedded in a
biological, psychological, cultural context (Ivi: 261). Here, education operates by
means of a continuous process of transaction among all the aspects of the individual
(his/her body, his/her mind and his/her internal movements), and also between the
individual aspects and contexts in which people spend their time. Fenwick even
claims that what is often called habit or tacit knowledge by others, enactivists
view these understandings as existing not within ourselves in ways that drive our
actions but as unfolding in circumstances that evoke these particular actions (2000:
262). According to this perspective, the context acts deeply on our way of thinking,
feeling and behaving, so much so that speaking about environment and learner
is a false dichotomy: There is no context separated from any particular system such
as an individual actor (Fenwick 2000: 261). This is why the enactivist perspective
insists that learning cannot be understood except in terms of co-emergence
(Fenwick 2000: 263).
Co-emergence has the considerable merit of underlining the role of any element
involved in educational processes and continuous interactions among all elements.
It also underlines the important role of each individuals body as regards the learning and changes of individuals. So, it sustains that every formative effect is deeply
14
Here, in order to follow the course of my reasoning, I have changed the order of presentation of
Fenwicks study.
88
R. Brambilla
cultural. This perspective, greatly influenced by studies focused on individuals or

different dynamics among individuals, is mainly focused on actors involvement,
movements and interactions.15 But perhaps, beside this focus, it would also be interesting to study how some individual traits are generated through a particular interaction between individuals and specific social backgrounds, or, more particularly,
between individuals and peculiar practices-activities-languages.
5.2.4
From a Situated Cognition Perspective: Participation
A fourth perspective about education can be called Participation and it derives

from perspectives of situated cognition, which:
maintains that learning is rooted in the situation in which a person participates, not in the
head of that person as intellectual concepts produced by reflection nor as inner energies
produced by psychic conflicts []. In other words, individuals learn as they participate by
interacting with the community (with its history, assumptions and cultural values, rules, and
patterns of relationships), the tools at hand (including objects, technology, languages, and
images), and the moments activity (its purposes, norms, and practical challenges).
Knowledge emerges as a result of these elements interacting. Thus, knowing is interminably inventive and entwined with doing. (Fenwick 2000: 253)
Following this perspective, as shown by Wenger (1998), one of its principal

advocates, education operates by means of doing within specific communities, and
through specific activities and tools.16
With respect to the previous three perspectives, here the formation of an individuals ways of thinking as well as of his/her ways of feeling and behaving is more
connected with specific contexts. The Participation perspective has the merit of
exposing the important role of doing and participating in some practices, activities
and communities in order to learn and change, and this is a fundamental awareness
for educators who have to plan educational processes. The Participation perspective
seems to claim, albeit indirectly, that communities, activities and tools produce specific individual traits. Actually, it is just in a specific way of doing that individuals
are learn specific ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. However, it is important
to underline that Participation is mostly focused on the ability of the individual to
stay, interact and participate in communities and activities. It is not just chance that
this theory is particularly used in business training. Beside this focus, it could be
interesting to critically study what kind of culture different communities of practices express and what kind of individual traits they tend to produce and spread.
15
Thus, at the moment, this perspective has the same educational consequences of a systemic point
of view. In order to understand peculiarities of a systemic gaze, see Bateson (1979). Again, in
Formenti (2000) and Scabini and Cigoli (2000), two Italian contributions, you can find a systemic
way to look at family and also some educational consequences deriving from that gaze.
16
Borgatti and Cross (2003), in their A Relational View of Information Seeking and Learning in
Social Networks, move just from the Participation perspective in order to show how communities,
activities and tools interact in order to produce a particular kind of learning.
5.2.5
89
From a Critical Cultural Perspective: Resistance
Finally, a fifth perspective about education can be called Resistance. It is a critical cultural perspective which starts from the premise that any system is a complex site of competing cultures (Fenwick 2000: 256). This point of view about
education is well expressed by the following passage of Fenwicks study: Critical
cultural perspectives suggest that learning in a particular cultural space is shaped by
the discourses and their semiotics (signs, codes, and texts) that are most visible and
accorded most authority by different groups (2000: 257).
This perspective highlights that education is deeply linked to the most powerful
cultures and discourses which circulate in the environments where people spend
their time. These theories concentrate particularly on how culture influences individuals. Resistance has the merit of visualizing the great power of the main cultures,
first among the main discourses that leak into life contexts. It also underlines how
groups of power, which can be linked to a particular race, gender, class, profession,
etc., continually try to win over others, first of all through particular language that
supports themselves. According to Resistance, when we speak and use only male
expressions in order to refer both to men and to women we tend to support male
power.17 Studies of Resistance are greatly important for educators, reminding them
that they cannot forget, in their work, how their own educational practices and language, due to their specific powerful position, continually try to win against the
culture of people they have to educate. Moreover, this perspective helps to understand how all that we learn and acquire is always deeply cultural. Nevertheless, it
often tends to concentrate on cultural traits that identify ideologies of particular
communities, groups of people (and their values), focus on dimensions like race,
class, or gender. Accordingly, this perspective risks being mainly concerned about
demonstrating the existence of what it calls the structures of dominance.
Furthermore, in Resistance theories, only a single individual with his/her awareness
can fight against structures of dominance in a certain cultural context. This is why
this perspective is called Resistance. But, within our society, there is a power of
practices that doesnt necessarily have to be linked to some groups of people and
that continually produces particular individual traits.18 Moreover, the duty of pedagogy is not only to help subjects to resist. In my opinion, pedagogy ought to suggest
a social transformation and new social planning. Indeed, as Adorno (1973) and
Horkheimer (1965, 1968) believe, every society needs theories that are able to show
the social and cultural risks it is running, in order to open the possibility of change.
Pedagogy, as I see it, has a specific critical role.19
17
Among the Italian authors, Demetrio et al. (2001) argue that both women and men should
become aware about the sexual and gender differences. They also write that those differences
should start to get a word in the different stories and discourses. Mapelli and Bozzi Tarizzo (1998)
sustain the necessity to early introduce teenagers to the sexual and gender differences during the
school time.
18
This point will be specifically treated in the next paragraphs.
19
I have particularly argued for this role of Pedagogy in Brambilla (2012a).
90
5.3
R. Brambilla
Some Unseen Cultural Traits
Moving from a Foucaultian educational perspective (Massa 2002), I have had the
possibility to see some unseen cultural traits which are spreading in our society.20
Here, a brief premise about this particular perspective on education is necessary.
Thanks to Michel Foucault we know how our social organization does not tolerate social, economic, moral or cultural disorder. That is why it constantly needs to
discipline (or to educate) peoples ways of thinking, feeling and behaving (Brambilla
2009). Indeed, any social institution requires precise rules and suitable ways of
thinking and behaving. In addition, people, following those rules and ways, are
slowly educated on them. The scholastic institution is the first of these social institutions. But, there are a lot of other places in which we must respect some rules, times,
rituals, procedures, and patterns of interactions and languages.
Following this Foucaultian perspective, it is possible to focus on a particular
mechanism, which able to explain some deep formative effects which have been
produced on individuals: the mechanism of exercise.21 Much of what leaves a mark
or changes our life derives from repeated experiences: repeated practices, activities,
gestures, words, relations, etc. Those practices, activities, gestures, words, and relations, especially when repeated for a long time or with a certain intensity, take part
of our life, enter into our way of thinking, feeling, behaving, speaking, etc. When I
speak about repeated experiences and exercises, I do not necessarily mean voluntary
exercises. Sometimes, we do not choose to repeat some experiences in certain
places. Nonetheless, in repeating those experiences, we are being trained in ways
which are typical of those experiences. For example, as I argued in my first paragraph, we can interiorize some ways we have been repeatedly treated in our life,
even if we are not aware. This means that if we pass a lot of time in a certain place
and we practice its aspects, we have more possibilities to be marked by the style of
that place.
Indeed, when our society needs to re-educate certain people, it sends them to
special spaces (prisons, drug rehabilitation centers, etc.) where, day by day and
without other social interferences, they are trained to follow some new rules by
doing some new activities and using some new words, and so forth. According to
our society, through that kind of training, individuals will be able to change their
way of thinking, feeling, and behaving as well as their outlook on the world, other
people and themselves, and so, they will be able to go back to normal life. All
social institutions, from this point of view, operate in order to spread useful individual traits. For a similar reason, when monks decide to live respecting a praying
and working rule, they need to live in spaces far from our cities, to organize their
20
Connection: Compare this analysis of contemporary cultural traits with Sects. 6.3 and 10.3,
whose notion of cultural traits entails that they can be recognized only retrospectively and on a
large observation scale.
21
By exercise I mean when people are kept in activities through a series of acts that develop,
strengthen and make them capable of performing certain functions.
91
lives by following precise times and rituals, to pass their lives among some objects
and symbols which are able to remind them of the meaning of their choice.22
Thus, repeated exercises always discipline people in some specific traits; they
always realize a sort of normalization, both when some people are forced to live
some experiences as in the case of prisons, drug rehabilitation centers, etc. and
when people decide freely to live some other experiences as in case of monks. But,
if every educational process tends to regulate individuals, this does not necessarily
mean that behind every practice and language we will find a particular group of
power, or that behind institutions we will always find an implicit goal to reinforce
some differences we already know, such as race, class, gender, etc. The case of
monks provides precious evidence.
Facing education as a process of normalization, which operates particularly in
some institutions, could carry pedagogy to study what kind of normalization is
operating in a precise social and cultural context. In particular, pedagogical studies
should focus on two specific questions: firstly, which main effects (individual traits)
are produced by a certain social and cultural normalization? That means also: which
aspects of the individual are exposed to being ruled by the educational strategies of
a precise social and cultural context? Secondly, which social educational means are
involved in producing those effects?
5.3.1
A First Trait
While studying the deep effects society is able to produce on individuals, I have
found some interesting philosophical premises in Carlo Michelstaedters thought. In
his La persuasione e la rettorica (1982), he focuses on some effects of social institutions and he allows us to make progress beyond Michel Foucaults analysis. Foucault
lets us understand that every educational process is a process of normalization and
also that society is continually seeking to preserve its balances thanks to education.
But Michelstaedter also underlines how society, in order to fulfill its needs and
ensure its survival, tends to avoid any truthful relation of a human being with
himself/herself, or in his words to avoid persuasion.
In Michelstaedters opinion, persuasion is the mastery of oneself.23 A person
is persuaded when he/she knows his/her aim24 and why25 (1982: 41) he/she does
or chooses something during his/her life. Moreover, persons are persuaded when
they knows their reason for being,26 when they knows the sense27 (1982: 54) of
22
Massa (2003) argues deep educational power of the communities since the time of the communities where the Medieval monks and also the authors of manuscripts of the Dead Sea lived in.
23
The original Italian expression is il possesso di s stesso.
24
il suo fine.
25
perch.
26
la sua ragione dessere.
27
il senso.
92
R. Brambilla
their life. Here, the author is thinking of a personal aptitude in listening to and
understanding yourself, in choosing the sense of your own life, and also in taking
care of the fact that every single action is truly respectful of that sense.
However, society continually disagrees with this kind of relation of the individual with himself/herself. Indeed, society incessantly offers its social goals and constantly tries to persuade individuals of the truthfulness of those goals. In
Michelstaedters words, society is always ready to offer to individuals its anchor
bolt28 (1982: 54) and individuals often end up acting upon that anchor bolt. In
exchange for that acceptance, society gives individuals an illusion of social safety
(1982: 54, 146).
Finally, Michelstaedter claims that the less the individuals internal life is, the
less their reason for being is, and the more he/she ends up in the mercy of goals
continually offered by society and culture (1982: 65).
Michelstaedter adds that society tries to avoid a certain relationship of a human
being with himself/herself and consequently that he/she could reach the persuasion. It happens, for example, in primary schools when students are forced to
respect practices, rules and contents only in order to pass exams and to get a good
mark. But this kind of school experience inevitably educates children on sufficiency and calculation29 (1982: 187). As a matter of fact, when education operates by using those kinds of methods, it does not train students to ask themselves
what the possible sense of school is, or the relationship between its contents and the
students life. It does not train students to give sense to their actions.
A similar experience can even occur in our universities. For example, when students are treated as simple containers to be filled with contents, when professors are
more worried about celebrating their theories rather than supporting a critical way
of reasoning, an environment where students can debate the sense (and limits) of
theories and where students can think of the relationships between theories and their
lives as well as when theories are presented as ultimate truths, especially on human
beings, or when researching appears to be a simple ability of combining methods
and techniques rather than a deep attitude of human beings. In such a context, even
if teachers are not aware, specific practices, languages and also uncritical relations
between teachers and their theories end up educating students to avoid a truthful
relationship with themselves.
In the cases listed above, society operates through practices and languages which
tend to avoid that relationship. But society also pursues that effect by means of
practices and languages which explicitly promise the individuals they will reveal
who they are or will help them to reach that truth. Here, society seeks to replace
individuals in their personal effort of research.
Finally, both social strategies end up educating students to become irresponsible
arms of society and unaware instruments (Michelstaedter 1982: 188) of goals or
ways of thinking or doing chosen by someone else. But this kind of effect is, I claim,
28
29
il pernio.
sufficienza and calcolo.
93
only the premise for a more specific individual trait which is emerging from our
social organization.
5.3.2
A Second Trait
Society does not limit its action to avoidance (in this case, as we have seen, avoidance of a human beings truthful relationship with himself/herself). It also operates
producing a precise type of subject whose goals and life could be ruled better and
better.
I am claiming that we are attending to the evolution of a new type of subject I
would call the incompetent subject. By using incompetent I take on the following
meanings of an English Dictionary (Merriam-Webster 2014):
1.
2.
3a.
3b.
Not legally qualified

Inadequate to or unsuitable for a particular purpose
Lacking the qualities needed for effective action
Unable to function properly
In our society, subjects are constantly pushed towards perceiving themselves as

incompetent because of some practices and languages which are continually
engaged in treating them as incompetent. In particular, even if many scientific discourses are celebrating the individual as a meaning-maker,30 I maintain that subjects are constantly being buried under a lot of strategies that send them a completely
different message. Indeed, many practices and languages continually treat individuals as unable to gain knowledge of themselves or to live their life without external
aid. Thats why they often come to think of themselves as incompetent.
This effect involves all kinds of subjects without differences about class, gender,
race, age or literacy. On the contrary, this effect seems to be influencing people we
could even consider to be very self-aware.
Social means that may reinforce such an individual effect are manifold. By
describing them, it is also possible to better understand what I mean with the expression the incompetent subject.
5.3.3
A Third Trait
Among social means involved in producing the described kind of person there are
some big social institutions. Within them, you can find some different and precise
educational strategies which work to realize that individual trait.
Hospitals constitute a first example. Let us consider a diagnostic moment as a
typical hospital practice in which a medical officer and a sick person are interact30
In order to better understand this concept see in particular Schn (1983).
94
R. Brambilla
ing.31 The medical officer usually asks questions and the sick person answers. That
interaction seems to be built around the premise that only medical officers can
understand and solve the sick persons problems, and it is thought to be ordinary
behavior. Indeed, only the medical officer, with his/her theories and his/her experience, can know how to help a sick person. That is why, in that kind of interaction,
the patients words, expressions, ways of thinking and self-awareness are not usually admitted. Sometimes, a sick person can say something, but essentially along
some tracks provided by the medical officer.
This kind of practice and use of language acts powerfully because at its basis
there is the commonly shared idea that a sick person is fundamentally incompetent
at his/her clinical diagnosis. Hospital practice is factually based on the certainty that
medical theories are undoubtedly more trustworthy than any persons self-awareness.
This way of proceeding does not allow one to think that the physical awareness of a
sick person could exceed the state of theories in any case. Naturally indeed, culturally it does not consider that a sick persons awareness could ever allow medical officers to advance some new theoretical hypothesis about the causes of a disease
or how to care for the patient. In my view and experience, the premise of the incompetence of a subject has two serious consequences. Firstly, an epistemological consequence: hospital practice rules itself out of a possibility to improve its own
knowledge. Secondly, an individual effect: training the subject to be treated as
incompetent often ends up by making him/her feel incompetent. It should be specified that in hospitals these educational strategies can rely on the alliance of the
emotional situation of a sick person, who is going through a frail moment of his/her
life.
Finally, I claim that typical practices and language operating in hospitals lead us
to abdicate our ability to listen to and understand ourselves. Moreover, they operate
by means of specific language, technical terms, particular dynamics of questions
and answers, emotional situations and medical technologies. From a certain point of
view, those strategies can support medical power and, sometimes, in those practices
and languages you will find the reproduction of some specific differences of class,
gender or race. But the described educational strategies overstep both the issue of
the groups of power and the reproduction of some precise differences. This implies
that an exclusive focus on those two elements would make us blind to those strategies and to the fact that they simply emerge, in a guiltless background, regardless of
the differences that catch everyones attention.
Similar educational strategies also operate in schools and in other experiences
that are explicitly defined as educational experiences.
Italian Parents schools provide an interesting example. These practices have
been spreading rapidly in the Italian context. Parents schools have different styles.
However, they are based on a similar organizational structure. Most of them are
31
In Good (1994) you can find a very interesting and critical point of view about hospital interactions. Also Zannini (2001), an Italian author, shows the various ways to think to health and illness,
and consequently to care people. In her opinion it is necessary to educate the hospital workers to
the different possibilities to interact with patients.
95
meetings during which psychologists or educationalists present the correct ways to

interact with children to parents, explaining how to stay with them and also how to
face some difficulties within parental life. Sometimes, at the beginning of those
meetings, specialists point out that no general laws are possible about interactions
with children because every relationship and every child or teenager has his/her
particularities. Nevertheless, no care in language is able to contrast the meaning of
the Parents schools practice. In other words, the meaning of practice exceeds
specialists intents: parents are incompetent at managing their relations with their
children and they need help. Clearly, I am not claiming that parents never need help.
Indeed, in a previous work, I have demonstrated the possibility to help some parents
with very different educational strategies, allowing their own competence in child
care to emerge (Brambilla 2009).
But similar educational strategies do not operate only in some traditional social
institutions. They also operate by means of mass-media as we are continually
exposed to TV programs where parents are presented as people unable to listen to
and care for their children and as people who need external help, even to solve ordinary situations32; in other TV programs we find people unable to choose what to
wear and how to dress.33 And there are many other programs in which we find
people unable to choose and to do many other things. Thus, individuals are dogged
daily by all sorts of messages of incompetence in every skill and also in ordinary
tasks. Furthermore, I do believe that every single environment in which normalization acts is able to reach its effect easily. This happens because every place can rely
on the alliance of many similar strategies acting in different social contexts. In other
words, in our society, subjects are continuously trained to practice incompetence.
In fact, some specific mechanisms also operate in ordinary places such as supermarkets. There, for example, it may happen that, in order to obtain discounts, people
must sign documents, in which they may find all sorts of difficult legal terms and
rules.
I could provide many other examples of social institutions, places and situations where these educational strategies operate unnoticed. This is a widespread
phenomenon of our social and cultural background. Its diffusion would deserve
theoretical and empirical pedagogical studies. However, here it is important to
note how the incompetent subject and the specific educational strategies
described above should be considered only as two average cultural traits. Actually,
they are two premises for another individual trait and to some new practices
strictly linked with it.
32
A typical Italian example of this kind of TV program is SOS Tata (derived from an American
program: Nanny 911). You can find it on one of the main Italian TV channels.
33
There is a special TV channel, significantly called Real Time, which is almost completely dedicated to this kind of program.
96
5.3.4
R. Brambilla
A Fourth Trait
Incompetent persons are fundamentally disoriented and they necessarily need some
external help. They need someone or something that is able to teach them who they
are, what the best choices are, the right words to define their experience and also to
find some answers to their problems. Treatments of all sorts proliferate which seem
just ready to face and to answer each persons, couples, parents, groups, social
and economic organizations incompetence. It is also curious that no one seems to
be worried about such a large explosion of consultancies and professions of counselors and consultants (Brambilla 2012b).34 We are living a sort of sleep of reason
regarding this phenomenon. What exacerbates the situation is that some scientific
disciplines are offering all kinds of counseling-consultation practices and promoting a real market of those services, without considering some of the human and
social consequences of their choices. From this point of view, science seems to be
playing its part in producing subjects that are unable to have their original internal
life, their own meanings, and their personal words to express their experiences.
From life coaching for individuals to business consultations,35 every kind of consultancy has its own language and its own technical terms, and through the promotion of continual training, such as lessons, use of technologies, group-work, etc., it
educates people in the use of its own particular terms. For this reason, every consultancy can also be seen as a seller of its technical terms. As a consequence, individuals really end up learning to define their experiences, their relationships, to solve
their problems and to choose in accordance with the practice they have been processed by. What is being stressed is the paradox of the emergence of incompetent
subjects in a sort of kingdom of technical terms.
But there are even some greater risks. The mixing of practices and technical
terms risks slowly leading individuals to complete inability to communicate their
intimacy, their own ideas, to search for their own meanings. Consequently, individuals risk unlearning the fundamental effort to create their own words and languages
and their own ways of living, thinking and feeling. By contrast, they are learning
how to use terms and meanings, which are already available in their context, often
sold by specific counselors and consultants.
Carlo Michelstaedter, in his La persuasione e la rettorica, is worried about technical terms. He predicts there will be a moment in the future when people will speak
only languages decided elsewhere, even if they believe they are speaking their own
language. They will speak, but they will not say anything about themselves (1982:
168). The author thinks that if the international language will be the language of
technical terms36 (1982: 135), our society will come to minimize the individual37
34
In this article I have especially argued about the issue of counseling and consultation, and particularly about the issue of the pedagogical consultancy.
35
One of the most famous approaches of business consultation is described in Schein (1987).
36
The original Italian expression is La lingua internazionale sar la lingua dei termini tecnici.
37
La riduzione della persona.
97
(1982: 154) with the support of science and will produce a real degeneration of
mankinds wisdom (1982: 130).
Such a gaze does not intend to depict apocalyptic scenery. It simply shows that
some means and mechanisms are leading our society, and the individuals, in a particular direction with some serious consequences. At the same time, this position
intends to represent a critical approach in the sense worked out by Frankfurt
School of Critical Theory.
5.4
A New Possible Direction for Pedagogical Studies?
After having studied the cultural traits explained above in depth, I have tried to
understand why the main perspectives on education do not let this kind of cultural
traits emerge. Here, I would hazard a guess. Perhaps, the main contemporary perspectives on education are still too largely built on the basis of the cognitive sciences and chiefly on a psychological way of reasoning, where theories are focused
on individuals, their relationships, their groups and communications. The languages
of the main theories on education, at least seemingly, support this guess. Two simple
examples can better explain what I am claiming. First, we can observe how a large
part of key-words concerning educational theories are drawn from psychological
theories (thus, when educational theories speak about educational processes, they
speak in terms of cognition processes, a typical psychological concept). Secondly,
when theories speak about the educators role, they always speak in terms of a communicative role, very similar to the psychologists role.
Here, I do not wish to underestimate either the role of each individuals force and
awareness, or the role of communication in educational situations. Similarly, I do
not want to demonstrate, as a general law, that practices and discourses are always
more powerful than individuals. Nonetheless, in order to study some deep cultural
traits of our society, pedagogy also needs to be thought of as a science of educational strategies, a discipline able to study the dialectic between social means and
individual effects that those means are able to generate. Both social means and
individual effects are cultural traits that need to be analyzed and sometimes
transformed.
While it is necessary to know the role of the subjects mind, the role of their
unconscious, the role of doing in some communities, the dynamics of the coemergence and the role of power in education, it is also necessary to study which
kind of educational strategies our society and culture has been developing, and
where they risk driving our society and individuals. A further step would be to seek
how to modify those educational strategies.
In this study, I have moved from looking at education as a form of normalization
which operates (also) by the mechanism of exercise. Then, I have tried to answer
this kind of question: by what form of training are individuals now ruled? Here, I
have shown that our society is working to prevent a truthful relationship of each
human being with himself/herself, producing incompetent subjects, and to eventu-
98
R. Brambilla
ally shape individuals that are able to speak only in technical terms. Beside this, I
have tried to answer another crucial question: which social means and educational
strategies are involved in this process? Here, I have shown how many institutions
and places are, even if unconsciously, responsible for those individual traits (schools,
universities, hospitals, some educational environments, mass media, and ordinary
places such as supermarkets).
A pedagogy that is able to work in these terms and around these questions is
particularly important for educational environments (schools, etc.). In order to
plan educational spaces and activities, educators need to know what educational
goals they have to aim for and by which means they can reach those goals. In other
words, they need educational methods. But, at the same time, educators should be
able to see if some effects are hidden under the official goals. Moreover, they should
know very well which educational means have been operating in society and what
effects they have. Indeed, in my opinion, educators are called to give individuals
some possibilities that are not allowed for by the social context. This kind of pedagogical study could also increase awareness in single individuals. Above all, and on
a wider social plane, they could be used to plan some social alternatives in treatments of individuals, even outside of normal educational environments. Thus,
such a pedagogy will be able to reduce the power of some cultural traits (both social
educational means and their individual effects), especially when they risk limiting
human freedom.
Acknowledgments Here, I would thank Emanuele Serrelli and Fabrizio Panebianco for the possibility to participate in this interdisciplinary book. Thanks in particular to Emanuele Serrelli for
his personal esteem and for the interest he has often expressed for my studies. Thank you to Paola
Manciagli for having introduced me to Carlo Michelstaedters thought, for all her patient, critical
readings, but above all because I can always communicate, share and discuss my thoughts and
ideas with her. Thanks to Sandra Castoldi because she is always present when I need help. Finally,
thanks to Adriano Voltolin and Daniele Sartori for some important bibliographical advice.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1973). Philosophische frhschriften. In R. Tiedemann (Ed.), Gesammelte Schriften
(Vol. 1, pp. 325371). Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp.
Althusser, L. (1965). Pour Marx. Paris: Franois Maspero.
Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1965). Lire Le Capital. Paris: Librairie Franois Maspero.
Aris, P. (1960). Lenfant et la vie familiale sous lAncien Rgime. Paris: Seuil.
Artaud, A. (1964). Le thtre et son double. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and nature. A necessary unity. New York: E.P. Dutton.
Borgatti, S. P., & Cross, R. (2003). A relational view of information seeking and learning in social
networks. Management Science, 49(4), 432445.
Brambilla, R. (2009). La differenza pedagogica. Consistenza e funzionamento del campo educativo. PhD thesis in Human Sciences, University of Milano - Bicocca. http://hdl.handle.
net/10281/25187
99
Brambilla, R. (2012a). Critica della pedagogia e teoria critica delleducazione. Costruzioni

Psicoanalitiche, year XII(23), 105120. http://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/Scheda_rivista.
aspx?IDArticolo=45266
Brambilla, R. (2012b). Disorientamento educativo e consulenza pedagogica. Alcune coordinate di
intervento. MeTis: Mondi Educativi. Temi Indagini Suggestioni, 2(1). http://www.metis.
progedit.com/anno-ii-numero-1/75-ex-ordium/232-disorientamento-educativo-e-consulenza-pedagogica-alcune-coordinate-di-intervento.html
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Demetrio, D., Giusti, M., Iori, V., Mapelli, B., Piussi, A. M., & Ulivieri, S. (2001). Con voce
diversa. Pedagogia e differenza sessuale e di genere. Milano: Guerini Studio.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Dewey, J. (1929). The sources of a science of education. New York: Horace Liveright.
Farr, R. M., & Moscovici, S. (Eds.). (1984). Social representations. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
Fenwick, T. J. (2000). Expanding conceptions of experiential learning: A review of the five contemporary perspectives on cognition. Adult Education Quarterly, 50, 243272.
Formenti, L. (2000). Pedagogia della famiglia. Milano: Guerini Studio.
Foucault, M. (1961). Folie et draison: histoire de la folie lge classique. Paris: Plon.
Foucault, M. (1968a). Sur larchologie des sciences. Rponse au cercle dpistmologie. Paris:
Gallimard, ed. 1994.
Foucault, M. (1968b). Rponse une question. Paris: Gallimard, ed. 1994.
Foucault, M. (1969). Larchologie du savoir. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (1999). Les anormaux. Cours au Collge de France 19741975. Paris: Gallimard Le
Seuil.
Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogia do oprimido. New York: Continuum, ed. 2007.
Freud, S. (1909). Five lectures on psychoanalysis. In Sigmund Freuds complete work, vol. VI (first
Italian edition: Opere di Sigmund Freud. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri 19761980).
Freud, S. (1913). Das Interesse an der psychoanalyse. In Sigmund Freuds complete work, vol.
VII (first Italian edition: Opere di Sigmund Freud. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri 19761980).
Freud, S. (19151917). Vorlesungen zur einfhrung in die psychoanalyse. In Sigmund Freuds
complete work, vol. VIII (first Italian edition: Opere di Sigmund Freud. Torino: Bollati
Boringhieri 19761980).
Freud, S. (1925). Geleitwort: A. aichhorn, werwahrloste jugend. In Sigmund Freuds complete
work, vol. X (first Italian edition: Opere di Sigmund Freud. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri
19761980).
Freud, S. (1929). Das unbehagen in der kultur. In Sigmund Freuds complete work, vol. X (first
Italian edition: Opere di Sigmund Freud. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri 19761980).
Gelli, B. R., & Arcidiacono, C. (Eds.). (1994). Psicologia di comunit ed educazione sessuale.
Verso un modello di educazione socioaffettiva-sessuale. Milano: FrancoAngeli.
Good, B. J. (1994). Medicine, rationality, and experience: An anthropological perspective.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Grotowski, J. (1968). Towards a poor theatre. Oslo: Odin Teatret Forlag.
Horkheimer, M. (1968). Traditionelle und kritische theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag.
Horkheimer, M., & Marcuse, H. (1965). Philosophie und kritische theorie. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
Kaneklin, C., & Scaratti, G. (Eds.). (1998). Formazione e Narrazione. Costruzione di significato e
processi di cambiamento personale e organizzativo. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.
Lascioli, A. (2001). Handicap e pregiudizio. Le radici culturali. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Makarenko, A. S. (19331935). Pedagoghiceskaia poema [The pedagogical poem].
Mantovani, S., Restuccia Saitta, L., & Bove, C. (2000). Attaccamento e inserimento. Stili e storie
delle relazioni al nido. Milano: Franco Angeli.
100
R. Brambilla
Mapelli, B., & Bozzi Tarizzo, G. (1998). Educare alla sessualit. Guida per insegnanti della
scuola secondaria superiore. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.
Marx, K. (18571858). Grundrisse der kritik der politischen konomie (first Italian edition: Marx,
K. Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell'economia politica, 18571858, 2 voll., Firenze:
La nuova Italia, 19681970).
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845). Die heilige familie (Italian edition: Marx, K., & Engels, F. Opere
complete. Roma: Editori Riunioni, 19721990).
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (18451846). Die deutsche ideologie (Italian edition: Marx, K., & Engels,
F. Opere complete. Roma: Editori Riunioni, 19721990).
Massa, R. (1975). La scienza pedagogica. Epistemologia e metodo educativo. Firenze: La Nuova
Italia.
Massa, R. (1986). Le tecniche e i corpi. Verso una scienza delleducazione. Milano: Unicopli.
Massa, R. (Ed.). (1990). Istituzioni di pedagogia e scienze delleducazione. Roma/Bari: Laterza.
Massa, R. (Ed.). (1991). Saperi, scuola, formazione. Materiali per la formazione del pedagogista.
Milano: Unicopli.
Massa, R. (2001). La peste e il teatro. In F. Antonacci & F. Cappa (Eds.), Riccardo Massa. Lezioni
su La peste, il teatro, leducazione (pp. 1595). Milano: FrancoAngeli.
Massa, R. (2002). Lesperienza della follia nel trattamento educativo e nel discorso pedagogico. In
P. Barone, J. Orsenigo, & C. Palmieri (Eds.), Riccardo Massa. Lesperienza della follia
(pp. 15203). Milano: FrancoAngeli.
Massa, R. (2003). Residenzialit e corporeit tra psichiatria e pedagogia. In M. Rabboni (Ed.),
Residenzialit. Luoghi di vita, incontri di saperi. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2014).
Michelstaedter, C. (1982). La persuasione e la rettorica. Milano: Adelphi.
Milani, L. (1967). Lettera a una professoressa (a cura della Scuola di Barbiana). Firenze: Libreria
Editrice Fiorentina.
Mottana, P. (1993). Formazione e affetti. Il contributo della psicoanalisi allo studio e alla elaborazione dei processi di apprendimento. Roma: Armando Editore.
Papi, F. (2001). Sulleducazione. Milano: Edizioni Ghibli.
Pontecorvo, C., Ajello, A. M., & Zucchermaglio, C. (1991). Discutendo si impara. Interazione
sociale e conoscenza a scuola. Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica.
Recalcati, M. (2012). Ritratti del desiderio. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.
Reggio, P. (2011). Il quarto sapere. Guida allapprendimento esperienziale (Lapprendimento
esperienziale, Vol. 1). Roma: Carocci.
Rousseau, J. J. (1762). Emile ou de lducation. It. ed.: Emilio o delleducazione. Milano: Oscar
Mondadori. 1997.
Scabini, E., & Cigoli, V. (2000). Il famigliare. Legami, simboli e transizioni. Milano: Raffaello
Cortina Editore.
Schein, E. H. (1987). Process consultation. Lessons for managers and consultants. New York:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Schn, D. A. (1983). The reflexive practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Voltolin, A. (2013). Il rifugio e la prigione. La psicoanalisi tra clinica e critica. Milano: Mimesis.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1993). Talking to parents. Boston: Merloyd Lawrence Books.
Zannini, L. (2001). Salute, malattia e cura. Teorie e percorsi di clinica della formazione per gli
operatori sociosanitari. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Chapter 6
The Unary Trait of Psychoanalysis.

Identification, Transmission, Generation
Matteo Bonazzi
The identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from
the person who is its object. (S. Freud, 19561974, Group Psychology and The Analysis of
the Ego, p. 3798)
The present contribution aims to discuss the function that the notion of trait
acquires in the psychoanalytic discourse, at first in Freud and then in Lacan. Upon
close inspection, this notion looks pivotal for a psychoanalytic theory on the subject
of the unconscious. At the same time, its articulation displays a remarkable originality
that can contribute to reflections on the topic of cultural traits.
When we talk about cultural traits we immediately have to face a problem from
a psychoanalytic point of view. According to psychoanalytic tradition the trait is
indeed neither cultural nor natural, it is rather the condition of possibility of
nature and culture, as well as that of their difference. Following this argument,
the differences within each field i.e. nature and culture are produced by
distinctive traits. So it is the difference between nature and culture derived from
a trait that separates and puts these two fields in relation. These differences, within
each field and between them, are horizontal. On the other hand, the radical version
of the concept of trait which is addressed by psychoanalysis points toward an
absolute difference that we will call vertical. If we think about it, the horizontal
differences that articulate the field, as well as the knowledge that we have of them,
emerged because of the trait in its vertical difference. In this sense, the radical
version of the trait cannot be ascribed to either the human field or to the so-called
animal one, as will hopefully become clear at the end of this contribution. A human
being marks his difference from an animal with a trait; he kills the Thing, as Lacan
says with a Hegelian terminology, and he carries the Thing at the level of a human
M. Bonazzi (*)
e-mail: bonazzim@tiscali.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_6
101
102
M. Bonazzi
activity (das formierende Tun). The violence of the trait is thus a fundamental part
of the foundation of a human being; yet nothing of the human, as much as of the
animal, would be comprehensible if one did not notice that this trait can be, for
structural reasons, neither human nor animal. It points toward a new place and an
indeterminate space, traces of which psychoanalysis invite us to follow. But psychoanalysis is not alone if we consider, for instance, the latest reflections of Jacques
Derrida who took some Heideggerian meditations on the human/animal difference
and turned them around. With this contribution, we would like to propose an interrogation of the concept of trait, starting from the discourse of psychoanalysis and
contemporary philosophy, and ask the reader to take a walk with us following the
traces not of the animal that we were but rather of an animality to-come, or as
J. Derrida said thinking of lanimal que donc je suis (Derrida 2006).
According to the psychoanalytic discourse, the trait cannot be referred to either
the natural sciences or to the so-called human sciences. What is at stake is rather
what makes this very differentiation possible and is, therefore, at the same time
subtracted from both disciplinary fields. Freudian discovery opened up a new practice and a new discourse, especially because it disclosed an object of inquiry that,
according to Freud himself, cannot be connected to either the field of psychic
knowledge or to that of somatic knowledge: the space of drive, that the trait as
we shall see comes to produce and to nourish, identifies an intermediate place, a
Grenzbegriff between the psychic and the somatic fields. The Freudian Trieb cannot
be reduced to a mere psychological discovery; rather, it represents a proper ontological notion, with a special status,1 whose trait is the condition of possibility as
well as the logical operator that enables it to function. As Jacques Lacan underlines,
to this regard:
Trieb can in no way be limited to a psychological notion. It is an absolutely fundamental
ontological notion, which is a response to a crisis of consciousness that we are not necessarily obliged to identify, since we are living it. (Lacan 1992a: 127)
The status of Trieb, which is structurally linked to the trait, cannot be referred to
the instinctual sphere nor is it circumscribable within the cultural or the symbolic
fields. In other words, we should understand the Freudian invention of Trieb as a
push that aims to overcome the cultural and symbolic register but that, at the same
time, without such a register could not exist at all. This is the reason why we will
not discuss cultural traits exactly, but rather a unary trait (unique, primordial,
vertical) that creates culture in its structural difference from nature: the trait
that produces this very difference and that, articulating the cultural field, retroactively brings the imaginary space of nature into existence as its own mythical
origin.
1
The possibility to deduce an ontology from a psychoanalytic approach, and especially from
Lacan who was probably the most inclined to open a dialogue with philosophy is highly problematic. This project was addressed by Jacques-Alain Miller himself in his latest seminars, well
aware of Lacans fundamental lesson according to which The gap of the unconscious may be said
to be pre-ontological [] it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized (Lacan 1978:
2930).
6 The Unary Trait of Psychoanalysis. Identification, Transmission, Generation
6.1
103
Identification
The first signifier is the notch by which it is indicated, for example, that the subject has
killed one animal, by means of which he will not become confused in his memory when he
has killed ten others. He will not have to remember which is which, and it is by means of
this single stroke that he will count them. The subject himself is marked off by the single
stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers. (Lacan 1978: 141)
The unary trait, ein einziger Zug, enabled Freud to explain the psychogenesis of
a subject along with that of the masses. In On Narcisism and Group Psychology and
The Analysis of the Ego, we find the same function that Freud gave to the unary trait:
the driving force of identification.
Differently to that a living being, which is born biologically, the birth of a subject
depends on recognition. The subject emerges as and when it can be interpreted, as
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce said. In this sense, the subject is being born
insofar as it is located in the sphere of the symbolic, of language, of the Other,
where only it can be recognized. Should we then say that the life of a subject is
cultural? That the distinctive trait which makes it a particular subject is a mere
cultural fact that could be studied by a human science sociology, anthropology, or
psychology? No, the birth of the subject cannot be ascribed to the field of culture,
because it exceeds that field; it makes that field possible.
The trait inscribes a living being in the field of language the field of the Other
so that a subject can be born. Such a process of capture corresponds, on the analytical level, to what Hegel, in his own terms, defined Aufhebung: a living being
which has, at the same time, been erased from its condition of mere life and elevated
to the level of a subject or as it has been translated by Derrida, is withdrawn.
This passage simultaneously entails a gain and a loss: a loss of bare life and a gain
of a relational and symbolic dimension that is thus granted to the subject. According
to this perspective, it is more correct to adopt the term bare life instead of animality,
given that the latter is a cultural construction which was retrospectively inscribed in
order to give an imaginary face to the enigma of the origin.
Such a passage occurs as a consequence of the trait that inscribes the subject in
the field of the Other through a primordial signifier that produces an identification.
If from the philosophical point of view, this process is anthropogenetic as well
reconstructed by Alexandre Kojve based on Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit ,
from the psychoanalytic point of view it is the passage from the Ideal Ego to the
Ego Ideal.
The first structuring of the little human being occurs with an imaginary recognition at the mirror. This first step, common to speaking beings and other primates,
opens up the field of mimetic and specular intersubjective relationships. The Ideal
Ego that the little human being recognizes in the mirror, allows him to set a limit to
his originally fragmented body and to adopt a proper form. Here, we are still in the
field of needs that are articulated through the mimetic interplays which were
described so well by Ren Girard. In order to move from this first level of structuring
based on imitation, to the proper subjective level based on identification, it is necessary
to introduce the function of the unary trait.
104
M. Bonazzi
The little human being who recognizes himself in the mirror, stabilizes his
own identity with the insertion of a third element between the living being and the
imaginary: the Other (in this case a mother, a father, or in general an adult person).
However the Other is not a person, but only one of its traits usually marginal, a
minimal detail, almost insignificant that captures the living being and stabilizes
his imaginary recognition through the first identification. Freud mentions this in On
Narcisism: even before the Oedipus, the subject identifies himself with something
that in the father the Other par excellence has the function of a unary trait: ein
einziger Zug. This trait activates an overcoming (Aufhebung) of the Ideal Ego and of
the subjects ideal image, and produces an elevation (another Aufhebung) into the
symbolic field of language, where the subject is finally recognized, nominated and
identified.
The unary trait makes the passage from imitation to identification possible; from
specular needs to desires; from Ideal Ego to Ego Ideal. If the former, the Ideal Ego,
is an image that tends to saturate, to complete, to photograph (you are the one whom
you see in the mirror), the latter, the Ego Ideal, is merely a variable, an x. The
subject does not know who is in the field of the Other, but he knows that only there
can he inhabit and find an answer to his question. For this reason, the Ego Ideal is
an identification that inscribes the subject in a, potentially endless, search, for his
own authenticity: it is not an answer, but the opening of a profound question, where
the life of the subject can be articulated.
The unary trait is, for example, a hint of love that the gaze of the Other can
show to the subject. In this case, the gaze of the Other corresponds to a request of
love from the subject insofar as it goes unanswered. This question does two things
at the same time: on the one hand it asks the Other, it is an invocation from the subject to the Other; on the other hand, it kills the Thing, i.e. it produces the primordial
loss of the living being on whose basis the already mentioned dialectic of Aufhebung
is produced. The request is pure [] that it is only a question to be heard (Lacan
2001: 419) this is how Lacan summarizes the two functions and explains the passage from need to desire. If a need can always find an object of the world to satisfy
it, a question that kills the mere presence of the object opens up the dimension
of desire which is, in the end, always the desire of nothing: i.e. of that object of
nothing that in the request of love emerges in the place of the object of need.
The renowned Lacanian definition (and before that Hegelo-Kojvian), according
to which the desire of man is the desire of the Other, thus emerges from the function
of the unary trait. The trait erases the Thing, instills the desire in the question and
sets it in motion through an identification. The human desire, without an object able
to satisfy it, is realized through an articulation with the desire of the Other: the
subject desires to be desired by the Other as a desire.
A subject emerges from the unary trait, not before it. Lacan illustrates this clearly
when he tells the story of a child who used to say: I have three siblings: Paolo,
Ernesto and myself. In this example the subject is counted by the trait. Only in this
way, at another point, will he be able to position himself as a counter:
105
[B]efore any formation of the subject, of a subject who thinks, who situates himself in it
the level at which there is counting, things are counted, and in this counting he who counts
is already included. It is only later that the subject has to recognize himself as such, recognize
himself as he who counts. (Lacan 1978: 20)
According to this schema, the unary trait illustrates the dynamic of subjectivization as being operative in a single individual as well as in mass phenomena. In
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud writes:
We already begin to divine that the mutual tie between members of a group is in the nature
of an identification of this kind, based upon an important emotional common quality; and
we may suspect that this common quality lies in the nature of the tie with the leader. (Freud,
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: 3800)
Human space is not natural, it is symbolic. And it is formed by the function of

identification produced by the unary trait. Nature is an imaginary construction
that a human being, divided by the trait, retroactively applies in order to treat the
enigma of his origin. Psychoanalysis teaches us that at the origin there is no simple
substance, but rather a trait, a division. Such being the situation, the subject cannot
but get attached to this trait in the place of the Other, in order to construct an identification which sustains him in his lack-of-being and that characterizes him as a
speaking-being. This is how a fight for life and death emerges: a fight for pure prestige that shapes, on an individual as much as on a social level, the dialectic of recognition within the structure that Lacan calls the discourse of the Master. The
unconscious discovered by Freud has at its core the identification with the trait as a
response to the ontological fragility of the speaking being.
But now, lets try to take a step further with Lacan, and lets pass from identification to transmission. The recognition, as it was effectively portrayed by Kojve,
shows an irresolvable paradox at its core. Lacan puts it in the following way:
The desire of desire, in the Hegelian sense, is therefore desire of a desire which responds to
the appeal of the subject. It is desire of a desirer. Why does he need this desirer, who is the
Other? It is because from whatever angle you place yourself, but in the most articulated
fashion in Hegel, he needs him in order that the Other should recognize him, in order to
receive recognition from him. What does that mean? That the Other as such is going to
establish something that we called a, which is precisely what is involved at the level of what
desires this is the whole impasse in requiring to be recognized by him. There where I
am recognized as object. (Lacan 2004: 34)
The subject desires to be recognized but, precisely when he is recognized, he

suddenly disappears. This is why, paradoxically, he does not want what he wants.
Such is the intrinsically neurotic structure of a human subject who, as a speaking
being, is surrendered by the trauma of language into the aporia of an undecidability.
Clearly this discourse is neither merely theoretical nor simple speculation, if we
consider the fact that a subject directly experiments with this paradox in his own life
through the only affect that according to Lacan does not deceive, i.e. anxiety. In
anxiety a subject has a double experience of bewilderment and revelation. When
anxiety causes us to question the identifications through which we have constructed
our lives, it shows us the signifiers that prescribe everyones existential poem. Here
as well, the function of the trait is crucial: if the unary trait inscribes us in the field
106
M. Bonazzi
of the Other and is used to facilitate an identification, anxiety contrarily is a trait that
cuts the identifications, it is indeed what out-scribes us, i.e., what produces a
dis-identification.
6.2
Transmission
[T]he final word, the final sound, floating off, slowly vanishing in a pianissimo fermata.
Then nothing more. Silence and night. But the tone, which is no more, for which, as it hangs
there vibrating in the silence, only the soul still listens, and which was the dying note of
sorrow-is no longer that, its meaning changes, it stands as a light in the night. (Thomas
Mann 1999: 515)
Anxiety emerges when the differential articulation of signifiers tends to be

reduced to a minimum. The muttering that characterizes a subject ends up almost
disappearing. Here, a trait that out-scribes the subject from the field of the Other
appears.
The unary trait attaches to the subject and throws it into the metonymical
displacement of the differences in a horizontal plane. The object nothing produced
by the murder of the Thing by the unary trait, makes human desire structurally
impossible to fulfil: it is always a desire of another thing. The metonymical displacement forces desire to move horizontally from signifier to signifier up to the trait
of anxiety which, precisely because of that Lacan says , does not deceive
(Lacan, SX). It stops, nails down and blocks the subject on a signifier that does not
proceed any further: this signifier is not articulated anymore with other signifiers in
order to establish a meaning, nor does it want to have anything to do with signification. The trait exposes the subject to the absolute difference of its vertical singularity. Here, the subject is no longer with the Other but alone with his anxiety, facing a
singular trait that does not have anything to do with recognition or identification.
Lacan explained very well that, if anxiety is what shows the truth of the Hegelian
formula, [] the truth of the anxiety [is] desire in the analytic sense (Lacan 2004:
3536). From Freud to Hegel, from Hegel to Kierkegaard, and finally, back to Freud.
Freuds discovery of the unconscious showed us the function of the trait that
guides the identification structuring the discourse of the Master for the individual as
well as for the political articulation of the masses.2 But Freud also exposed the
implicit failure of the civilization project. In the end, a subject cannot but search for
himself in the Other even though in the Other there is no signifier able to represent
him. The aporia of the trait contains in itself the whole problem of the historical
crisis of representation. The subject does not have an essence, it is a pure lack of
being that searches for a trait in the Other to which he can attach himself: but this
trait, in the last instance, does not exist. And it is precisely when the subject loses
any hope of finally being represented that he encounters an absolute difference that
2
Connection: Section 10.3 postulates that traits, to be cultural, must be unconscious, meaning not
planned and repeated out of control.
107
concerns him more than anything else. Everyone has his own singular way to incarnate the paradox of recognition and thus of being discontented with civilization.
This is precisely the definition of the trait: what cannot be recognized on the level of
identification and that nevertheless gives a subject a singular way in order to make
something out of the failure of a civilization.
If the unary trait is manifest and the subject has to identify with it in order to
emerge, the trait that out-scribes instead cannot be manifested. It exists only in its
effects, where the subject subsequently becomes a supporter of the trait for other
subjects. It is not the root of identification but what causes it, and what sustains it.
There is only an absolute difference a singularity of the trait for a subject that
can incarnate, for the Other, the unary trait: that can help the identification while at
the same time being already beyond it. This is what psychoanalysis aims to transmit:
there is no Other of the Other. But how is it possible to transmit the impossibility of
transmission? How is it possible to sustain another discourse which differs from the
discourse of the Master, beyond the identifications that are produced by that discourse? How is it possible to teach without being a master?
This second function of the trait (out-scribing) cannot be put into words. It
exceeds the signifying Aufhebung and can only be transmitted. In the transmission
the trait will show, even if only aprs coup, if and how it has become operative.
Lacan comments on this delicate passage by quoting the myth of Diana and Acteon
that was also very dear to Giordano Bruno:
For in these undertakings truth proves to be complex in its essence, humble in its offices and
foreign to reality, refractory to the choice of sex, akin to death and, on the whole, rather
inhuman, Diana perhaps Actaeon, too guilty to hunt the goddess, prey in which is caught,
O huntsman, the shadow that you become, let the pack go without hastening your step,
Diana will recognize the hounds for what they are worth [] (Lacan 2006: 362363)
In the end, precisely that which is impossible to transmit becomes an opportunity

for transmission and even its condition of possibility. There is transmission only
when something unrecognizable produces effects beyond itself; when not-knowing
is fecund and unconscious is generative.
In place of the enigma of the origin and of its imaginary cover-up the nature
the psychoanalytic trait exposes us to the notion of cause. It is a matter of ceasing
to say what cannot be said (the origin) in order to make it the cause of what one
says. What cannot be symbolized, what is impossible to say, what cannot be represented cannot be understood according to the decadent skepticism afflicting the
common discourse, but it nevertheless has to become the cause of our actions. In
this way, the trait becomes fecund. The barred, erased, repressed origin of the trait
is turned around in the silent and yet fecund cause of actions moved by a radically
disenchanted desire: the exact opposite of a dead desire. The disenchantment, i.e.
the discovery that there is no signifier of the Other able to represent me; that the
subject does not have a place in the world because he is the hem, the edge, the limit
and never an internal element the anxious encounter with the inconsistency of the
Other that does not respond but only corresponds to us, opens up the ethic of an
indestructible desire. Such is, in the last instance, the absolute difference that has to
be transmitted.
108
M. Bonazzi
Freud said that education, government and psychoanalysis are three impossibles
(Analysis Terminable and Interminable). They are impossible, not because they
lack the conditions, the instruments or the subjects that are able to make them possible, but because structurally, in the transmission that each of these practices
requires, there is a blind spot, an insurmountable obstacle, an aporia. Lets take, for
instance, education. Education requires the transmission of something that cannot be
transmitted. In the end, however, disciplines, theories, discourses, norms, methodologies, and practices are taught, but what counts the most in such a transmission
cannot be taught. Nonetheless there would not be anything to teach without the
aforementioned discourses, disciplines and theories. Thus, in education, the double
aspect implied in transmission should be considered: on one hand, transferring a
subject matter; on the other hand, underlining that precisely what should be transmitted the most cannot but remain trans-missed. This aporia is due precisely to the
structure of the trait that articulates knowledge with its possible transmission.
Knowledge is always the elaboration of an event that discloses its field of inquiry.
Knowledge will never know its event; it will never be able to include in its field the
reason of its emergence. Therefore, we have the paradox that what is most distinctive in a field of inquiry its distinctive trait cannot be included within that very
field. Every practice of knowledge has an impossible that needs to be transmitted if
it wants to keep its experience of truth alive. Transmitting within knowledge the
unknown event the unconscious trait.
Thus the trait writes, among practices of knowledge in their respective differences, the still unknown legacy that future generations will have to bring to their
knowledge (not to ours). Transmission is an unconscious trace transiting between
practices of knowledge, beyond their disciplinary fields even though not in the name
of an abstract and universal interdisciplinary pretension as if in the name of a
supposed universality a metalanguage existed and were able to create a dialogue
between different disciplines and different regional ontologies, to borrow an expression from Husserl. A transmission occurs irrespectively of its different disciplinary
fields, whereas, as we said, everyone in their own way is exposed to the transit of
truth. The specific trait of every practice of knowledge something that any practice
of knowledge will never be able to address, being its own event and not its object of
inquiry is an invocation addressed to a subject to-come, to a humanity that has
never existed here and now, but always somewhere else and in another time. What
cannot be said (the origin as a trait) must be left to come: it must be written by itself.
This is how truth can be transmitted not in the practices of knowledge, but between
them and beyond them.
6.3
Generation
I will never forget the sight. [] certain incredible and eerie natural products that Adrians
father managed to breed from some bizarre culture, and which he likewise permitted us to
observe. [] The crystallization vessel in which this transpired was filled to three-quarters
109
with a slightly mucilaginous liquid, diluted sodium silicate to be precise, and from the
sandy bottom up rose a grotesque miniature landscape of different colored growths-a muddle of vegetation, sprouting blue, green, and brown and reminiscent of algae, fungi, rooted
polyps, of mosses, too, but also of mussels, fleshy flower spikes, tiny trees or twigs, and
here and there even of human limbs [] when Father Leverkhn would ask us what we
thought they were, and we hesitantly answered that they might be plants, he would reply,
No, that theyre not, they only pretend to be. But dont think less of them for it! The fact
that they give their best to pretense deserves all due respect. (Thomas Mann 1999: 2223)
What, in the end, is a trait? If we have followed the proposed argument so far, we
should agree that such a question is misplaced: it is rather the trait that is a condition
for the very act of questioning. The question therefore should be radicalized and
brought to the level of a question regarding ones own act of questioning. In this
sense, the cultural trait exposes us to what Maurice Blanchot called the profound
question, a question that echoes here when we interrogate the cultural traits as
much as in the psychogenesis of the subject, as we have seen. It is a question
subtracted from the form of what is it the Socratic ti esti because it posed a
question before the ontological reduction of the question. The trait is not a what is
it, not a thing nor a being: we could alternatively say provisionally that it precedes
the thing as much as its being. It belongs, as we have already said, to the order of the
event.
Lets try to define what the trait is not. It is not a thing or even a word it is what
is left once language and reality are abandoned. We could say that the trait is a ruin,
abandoned on the field, when apparently it almost does not mean anything anymore.
Lets take, for instance, the famous shoes of Van Goghs painting a paradigmatic
ruin and lets read what Lacan says about them (Fig. 6.1):
You must imagine [] clodhoppers ohne Begriff [] if you are to begin to see Van Goghs
own clodhoppers come alive with their own incommensurable quality of beauty. They are
simply there; they communicate a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal
distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier. This signifier is not
even a signifier of walking, of fatigue, or of anything else, such as passion or human
warmth. It is just a signifier of that which is signified by a pair of abandoned clodhoppers,
namely, both a presence and a pure absence something that is, if one likes, inert, available
to everyone, but something that seen from certain sides, in spite of its dumbness, speaks. It
is an impression that appears as a function of the organic or, in a word, of waste, since it
evokes the beginning of spontaneous generation. (Lacan 1992a: 297)
The trait is not a signifier of walking, or of fatigue; it does not refer to anything
other than itself in order to signify something else, but it is not even an object of an
imaginary reality, a thing, a being or a representation. The trait is the ruin of the
word and the thing. And it is precisely as a ruin that it tells the truth of the words and
the things. It says, in fact, that things are words of things (Wort des Dinges) and
that words are themselves things of the world. And again, having said all that, the
Thing that interrogates us and to which these abandoned shoes refer as signs, is
neither a word nor a sign, but a differing. The Thing, das Ding and not die Sache, is
the differing of difference itself: the tracing of the trait that makes words and things
possible. On a field of ruins, left after the eclipse of nature and culture, space for a
possible spontaneous generation is opened up. It is the spontaneous trace of life
110
M. Bonazzi
Fig. 6.1 Vincent Van

Gogh, A Pair of Shoes,
1886
that endlessly consumes itself and lives in a continuous entropy that is at the same
time the condition of possibility of the very generation itself.
Back to the issue of understanding cultural traits, we could say: cultural traits
are always ruins.3 What is most relevant in a culture is precisely its ruins. It is
because of its ruins that we, following generations, reconstruct what will have been
the characteristic trait of a culture. When a culture is alive, its trait transits silently
and unacknowledged like an underground river moving toward us its interpreters.
We could say that culture exists whereas, beyond its signs, its customs and traditions,
its habits and its practices, a deposition of its ruins that can become ruins for
others occurs. The ruins are without any doubt a legacy, but a legacy whose destiny
cannot be known in advance. In this sense, ruins are pure traces: they do not display
the typically metaphysical structure of signs, which manifest something that does
not appear here and now. Culture is not made only of signs but also of traces that do
not erase a full presence that is supposed-to-exist before or somewhere else; traces
produce a presence which is retroactively constituted from an originary absence. As
Derrida said it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace,
which thus becomes the origin of the origin (Derrida 1997: 61).
The trait is structurally not originary: it cannot be referred to a metaphysics of
presence; it is not a being-in-the-world subsequently erased and then transferred to
signs that testify to its past presence, as absence (Wesen, Gewesen). The trait is an
act of sending, without any origin, of a trace that creates a destiny in its own occurrence. This is the reason the trait does not have the structure of a first time: it is
always a second time, producing, aprs coup, the illusion of a first time.
Therefore, cultural identity appears to us as an imaginary construction produced
from the written traces those traits, events of practices that will have meant
3
Connection: Section 10.3 agrees with this hindsight recognition of culture. Compare with Sect.
5.3 for an analysis based on different assumptions.
111
something to someone-to-come. In this sense traits are always generative of something culture cannot master yet. The truth of a culture does not lie in the distinctive
trait that identifies it and differentiates it from other cultures, but in the generative
effects of the ruins that will have meant something to others.
This new field made of traces, where nature and culture tend to blur, becomes
evident when time operates on the cultural signs of the past, when stones are dressed
and the evolutionary-progressive logic of human civilization is turned around: das
formierende Tun. The educational activity that makes the environment more human,
that confers temporality to the space, that elevates Nature into History has been
overturned by another activity that on one hand appears regressive, but on the other
also reveals a materiality that culture tries to tame, if not utterly erase it, in vain
with the word nature. Therefore, the stones once again become mere stones, under
the edifice that the signs of man gave to History. Lets think, for instance, about the
landscape of Selinunte, in Sicily (Fig. 6.2).
The sea and the wind accompany, in a hyper-historical time, the magnificent
signs of this eternal civilization: the erosion of time transforms their signs into
traces, ruins, that are increasingly confused with the surrounding material from
which the labor of man once extracted them. In this confusion between nature and
culture, the ruins more so when man leaves them to their fate and does not try
to recuperate the cultural project that brought these stones where they are become
the eternal traits of what that world was for us. Not of what it effectively was, but of
what it will have been from the contamination of biological and historical time for
us who walk through it and become its interpreters. In the ruins the trait is freed
Fig. 6.2 Greek ruins dating V Century BC in Selinunte, Sicily, Italy (picture by the author)
112
M. Bonazzi
from its reduction to a sign, to a signifier, to a culture and it is opened up to the

history of its generative effects.
As Derrida wrote observing the Acropolis of Athens:
the Acropolis, visible from the balcony, illuminated through the mist until sunrise, I loved
I also love through, the word through [a travers]. [] in a word, everything about my
crosstruths. My little truths, if there are any, are neither in my life nor in my texts, but
through what traverses them, in the course of a traverse that, right at the last moment,
diverts their encrypted references, their sidelong wave, down a counterpath [le salut en
contre-allee]. [] en route toward the uninscribable that is going to comeor that has just
come [vient de venir] to me, but always without horizon, without prior announcement. At
least without my knowing it, and neither in the text, nor in life, but between and through.
[] And the Odyssey. There is there, in the infinite detour, really another origin of the
world, an insurmountable secret, and death on the way, the other that is the least reducible
to the inside (careful, not the other inside, but th eother least reducible to the inside).
The one that commands us through a transversal, or transverified deviation: the poem of the
wholly other. For we are indeed talking about a poem, a whole poem, (Athens, 1821
December 1997). (Derrida and Malabou 2004: 259)
The trait is not a simple erasure. We should try to think of the presence starting
from the trace and not the other way around. In saying this, Derrida takes on the
legacy of psychoanalysis consisting precisely of this radical questioning of the
origin as presence, with the notion of trait inscribed in the Freudian castration: It is
a non-origin which is originary [] The irreducibility of the effect of deferral
such, no doubt, is Freuds discovery (Derrida 1978: 255).
The trait, then, does not erase what exists somewhere else or before its advent.
The trait produces, generates, it is fecund. In this sense, it is a supplement: it
compensates (supplire) something which does not exist and it is a compensation
(supplente); but it also produces something more, something supplementary, like an
insert (supplemento) of a newspaper. Here we start to approach a viable answer to
the question of the transmission of the impossible and the problem of generation: we
have to be a substitute (supplente) for an absent teacher not in order to represent
him while he is absent, but in order to make his absence fecund.
If we take the traditional example of the mark left by Friday on the beach so that
someone, anyone, could meet him. Robinson sees the mark of a human presence
that now is gone but that did exist somewhere, somehow. The island is not deserted.
There is a Human Being because there is an Other. Robinson will not be alone. If
we look closely though, the mark does not say all of this as of yet. The fact that the
mark is there only to be a sign for the Other as another human being, lies in the
narrative, in the human, maybe too human interpretation of the reader. In fact, the
mark simply refers to another mark. The encounter of Robinson with Friday, indeed,
does not take us out of the field of the marks: it is, so to speak, only a supplement of
Friday (like the insert/supplement of the Friday edition of the newspapers). Friday
is after all a mark for Robinson himself. Experience itself is only a network of traces
and not an encounter with a full presence. We could even say that the very living
presence (lebendige Gegenwart) mentioned by Husserl is none other than this
redundant effect due to the continuous intertwining of traces. And again, there was
an encounter between Robinson and Friday precisely because something generative
113
and new was produced between them: not in their presence, but in what they cannot
know in advance. Every encounter is always an encounter of traces, of traits, or
marks, which are not signs of presence but supplements; and such traits can always
create the generative opportunity for something new with the supplement they
produce. In this sense, every missed encounter is always a successful encounter. It
is a poem and, as Derrida says, at the core of the poem [there is always] a stone
(Derrida 2008) a stone, a ruin, around which the poem revolves.
The trait is generative because when it erases and it produces a void, it also
produces a fullness. When it subtracts space it also gives a supplementary push,
which is called drive (das Trieb) that is neither natural nor cultural. Here we are at
the Trieb we started from. Life keeps writing and erasing itself, getting transmitted
and dispersed, transiting through difference and multiplying it. As we said, a trait
always marks the beginning of spontaneous generation, however this does not mean
embracing a Bergsonian vitalism. Life for psychoanalysis, as Lacan reminded us in
Rome in 1974, is precisely something we do not know anything about: I wrote the
word life at the level of the circle of the real, because undeniably, apart from that
vague expression consisting in the enunciation of the enjoyment of life, we do not
know nothing about life (Lacan 1992b, tr. it.: 35). We do not know, as old Freud
said in 1938, that the psyche as theorized by psychoanalysis is not a mental, _
interior or profound dimension that inhabits us; it is rather out there, as Lacan
said of the unconscious, and it is extended, as underlined by Freud: Psyche is
extended; knows nothing about it (Freud, Findings, Ideas, Problems: 5078). The
space of this extension, neither natural nor cultural, is the field of forces generated
and transmitted by the writing of the trait: the space of drive.
This is how it could be put, while approaching the conclusion: the trait is life,
that while erasing itself it becomes a libidinal object. The trait is the birth, the point
of capture and emergence, the core of transmission and the spontaneous opportunity
of generation. In the transmission, life is renovated and lost at the same time. What
has to be transmitted is not what is known, but the unknown the unconscious
which is not a Kantian regulative ideal of truth that a path toward knowledge would
slowly approach. The unknown, as we said, is the event, vertical like a trait, of any
and every particular knowledge.
Therefore, in a transmission it is crucial that what has to be transmitted could be
reversed in a surprise, or in a spontaneous generation. Generation is the truth of
transmission: it reverses the impossible-to-be-said into an invention, a novelty, an
unforeseen innovation. There is no transmission without innovation; there is no
innovation without a passage. This is how, analytically, life is renewed and transmitted:
through the generative cut of death. Life is not a universal: it should rather be
written, as Derrida suggested, all together life-and-death (la vie-la mort). What
makes life and death possible, one for the other, and what makes life what it is, is the
trait that exposes life to its opposite. Life is the transiting of this trait that is transmitted spontaneously.
This is why the trace of life produced by drive cannot be reduced to a vitalist
concept of life: we cannot compare Darwinian or Spencerian evolutionism with the
creativity of Bergsonian lan vital; or the logic of quantitative temporality with the
114
M. Bonazzi
logic of qualitative temporality. As we said at the beginning, the analytical trait

cannot be reduced to this Western stereotomy: nature/culture, inside/outside,
quantity/quality, or animal/man. The life concentrated in the singular intensity of
the object of drive has its own condition of possibility in the trait. There is no life
without a signifier who comes to cut it or, as Lacan would say in Hegelian fashion,
to kill it. From this trauma, which is the trauma of language, life can emerge. Not
before or otherwise. And still, precisely because of this reason, life cannot be
reduced to the trace of the signifiers, because it exceeds their horizontal differential
articulation. It is the absolute difference, the singular event, through which the
infinite substance unravels not because it already existed before or somewhere
else, but because it is none other than this very unraveling in the infinite singular
modes, each in its own way, that cause it to exist.
The logic of traits is, in the end, a logic of contingency. The spontaneous trace of
the traits needs to be let be, so that these traits can become intertwined with each
other and at the intersectional points they can produce something unforeseeable,
something unpredictable, something new. Culture gets knotted once again with
Life; not because it can recuperate the vital nourishment of the lost origin, or
because it can immerse itself in the Lebenswelt, but rather, because it is left without
reserves to the dissipating movement of the traits. The free interplay, the spontaneous combinations, the chiasmatic intertwining can contingently produce the birth of
the New. Life emerges, is transmitted and is generated in these points of contact:
here, every single discipline encounters, in the friction and not in the dialogue with
others, the opportunity to be exposed to its proper truth. The trace of life is written
through these points of intension that the intertwining of different fields of
knowledge produces beyond them. The Thing itself exists only where the trait is
transmitted and thus, through a regeneration, is lost.
Acknowledgements Italian to English translation by Pietro Bianchi.
References
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. (2006). Lanimal que donc je suis. Paris: Galile.
Derrida, J. (2008). N. 5 of Pension Victoria. By V. Wardel (Ed.). 28 Nov 2008. Paris.
Derrida, J., & Malabou, C. (2004). Counterpath. Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Freud, S. (19561974). Freud complete works. Electronic version of the standard edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (translated by James Strachey in collaboration
with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson). London: Hogarth Press.
Lacan, J. (1978). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis 1964. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Co.
Lacan, J. (1992a). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959
1960. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
115
Lacan, J. (1992b). La troisime. In Lettres de lEcole freudienne, 16(1975), 177203; It. tr. In La
Psicoanalisi, 12(1992), 1138.
Lacan, J. (2001). Le Sminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 19601961. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2004). Le Sminaire. Livre X. Langoisse 19621963. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2006). The freudian thing. In J. Lacan (Ed.), crits (translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Hlose Fink and Russell Grigg) (pp. 334363). New York/London: W.W. Norton
& Co.
Mann, T. (1999). Doctor Faustus. The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkn as told by a
friend. (Eng. trans: Woods, J. E.). New York: Vintage.
Chapter 7
Cultural Diversities Across and Within

Cultures: The Bicultural Mind
Olivia Realdon and Valentino Zurloni
In the present chapter, a theoretical conceptualization of cultural traits, meant as

situated and contingent cultural affordances, that need to be unpacked within a situated cognition approach to culture will be sketched out. The bicultural mind research
domain will first be outlined, showing how, in the current transition from structural
to process models in the scientific inquiry on culture dynamics, culture is not viewed
as consensual, enduring, and context-general, but as fragmented, fluctuating, and
context-specific (situated cognition model; Oyserman and Sorensen 2009). Such a
situated cognition perspective provides the theoretical framework for the construct
of bicultural mind, meant as the one possessed by bicultural individuals that, through
enduring exposure to at least two cultures, have come to rely on the systems of
meanings and practices of both cultures, and can switch between them depending
on the cultural cues available in the immediate context (cultural frame switching;
Hong et al. 2000).1 The bicultural mind construct will then work throughout the
chapter as the theoretical milieu apt to address the why and how (rather than what)
issues on the managing of cultural diversities within and across cultures. After highlighting how the perspective on culture as situated cognition meets current theorizing and research on the cognitive functioning of the human mind, considered as
embodied (Barsalou 2008) and grounded in sensory-motor interactions with the
environment (Mesquita et al. 2010), the bridging between the embodied mind and
the bicultural mind will be outlined. Then, rooted in a co-evolutionary perspective
on biology and culture, the basic device in the appropriation of a bicultural mind
(the expert-novice dynamics; Rogoff 2003) and recent research on the dynamic
1
Connection: Compare the coexistence of different cultural systems with the toolkit view of
culture presented in Sect. 2.4 (see also the Connection therein). A strictly related analysis, looking
at national identities, is performed in Sect. 3.2.1.
O. Realdon (*) V. Zurloni
e-mail: olivia.realdon@unimib.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_7
117
118
O. Realdon and V. Zurloni
bicultural brain (Ng and Han 2009) will be discussed, showing how they are in line,
respectively, with models of transmission of cultural information through concrete
episodes of social interaction (Kashima et al. 2007) and with perspectives on the
embrainment of culture (Kitayama and Uskul 2011). Finally, the transition from one
culture to the other in the bicultural mind will be set as the focus, viewing culture
within a mind-context interdependence which is neither an on-off device, nor a
mono-dimensional process, since it stretches along a continuum between distal
(cultural syndromes) and proximal variables (context cues). Along this line, cultural
traits will be considered not as uni-dimensional stable entities, but as affordances
whose stability lies in episodic and joint embodied actions that are activated in interdependence with context.
7.1
7.1.1
Settling the Bicultural Mind Research Domain

The Bicultural Mind Construct
A minority of (mostly young) individuals have nowadays come to possess a

multicultural mind. Individuals with a multicultural mind are those who, through
enduring exposure to at least two cultures, can rely on systems of meaning and
practices of both cultures (thus defined biculturals; Hong et al. 2000; Anolli 2011).
They can therefore switch between such cultural orientations alternating between
them depending on the cultural cues (cultural primers) available in the immediate
context.
Indeed, although the multiplicity of cultural contacts and influences due to
migration, globalization, and travel, is hardly a new phenomenon, the research
focus on bicultural individuals has only quite recently been paid attention to, and
psychologically elaborated vis--vis related constructs (such as the acculturation
strategies research domain; Sam and Berry 2006), as shown in Nguyen and BenetMartinez (2007). Specifically, laboratory studies supporting the theoretical elaboration of the construct of the multicultural mind were first documented in a seminal
paper at the turn of the millennium (Hong et al. 2000), with several experiments
conducted with bicultural Chinese university students in Hong Kong, raised both in
traditional core Chinese values (Ho 1986; Hong et al. 1999), and in Western social
beliefs and mindsets (at that time in Hong Kong not only was English the official
language of instruction in about 80 % of the secondary schools, but large British and
American expatriate communities and the salient presence of English-language
television and films also extensively exposed Hong Kong Chinese students to
Euro-American cultural models; Young et al. 1986).2 Hong Kong Chinese bicultural
students therefore had the opportunity to be continuously and extensively exposed,
together with native Chinese cultural models, to the ones from another different
2
Connection: Compare this analysis with the one in Chap. 14 about organizational cultures, with
particular reference to values.
Cultural Diversities Across and Within Cultures: The Bicultural Mind
119
and quite distant culture, encompassing values, beliefs, and ways of reasoning and
categorizing their experience, of managing verbal and nonverbal communication, of
shaping their emotional experiences and expressing them, etc. Specifically, experimental studies conducted by Hong and colleagues showed that, when primed with
either Chinese cultural icons (e.g., the Chinese Dragon), or American cultural icons
(e.g., the Statue of Liberty, Capitol Hill), Chinese-American biculturals were significantly more inclined to interpret an ambiguous event, respectively, in a typically
Chinese (vs. American) way. That is, when primed with Chinese cultural cues (for
an extensive meta-analytic study on cultural primers, see Oyserman and Lee 2008),
Hong Kong Chinese biculturals accessed, and subsequently activated, paths of
sense-making and actions highly distributed within Chinese cultural groups (interpersonal harmony and cooperation, filial piety, strong social obligation, conformity
with respect to the reference group, etc.); conversely, when Anglo-American context cues were made salient, they relied more on independent self-construals, sense
of personal efficacy and individual self-esteem, search for personal success and
ingroup competition, etc. The different cultural models those bicultural individuals
had come to possess were therefore not blended within them, but could independently be activated and applied depending on the situational factors that called them
to mind in the contingent situation.
This result is in line with narratives from biculturals in previous studies and
ethnographic accounts reporting how the two different cultures were alive inside of
them, taking turns in guiding their thoughts and feelings (LaFromboise et al. 1993;
Phinney and Devich-Navarro 1997), as if constantly flip-flopping (Shore 1996:
6). Similar cultural priming effects have been replicated in studies using different
bicultural samples (e.g., Chinese-Canadians, Dutch-Greek bicultural children) with
a variety of cultural primes (e.g., language, experimenters cultural identity; Ross
et al. 2002; Verkuyten and Pouliasi 2002; Benet-Martinez et al. 2002, 2006) and
further obtained across different psychological domains, such as spontaneous
self-construal (Ross et al. 2002), cooperative behaviors (Wong and Hong 2005), and
representations about work and family (Pouliasi and Verkuyten 2007).
Empirical results in the paper by Hong and colleagues and in further experimental studies were obtained within a methodological paradigm (the so-called linkage
studies) that, according to Matsumoto and Yoo (2006), can be considered as the
ultimate generation in cross-cultural research. Within this research paradigm, priming studies empirically link the observed differences in means or correlations
among variables with the specific cultural sources that are hypothesized to account
for such differences. That is, in priming studies what are believed to be the global
culture concepts that embody the cultural differences are experimentally activated
or primed (Higgins 1996) so as to observe the effects of their temporary activation.
Such a methodological research option differs from culture comparison studies
where the research focus is to uncover what cultural differences are. Indeed, in
these studies, systematic cultural differences are typically detected by administering
some tasks like attitude measures or experimental scenarios to observe psychological processes in samples taken from distinct cultural groups, and characterize
observed group differences in psychological processes in terms of global culture
120
concepts such as individualism and collectivism, as in Hofstede (1980), or analytic

and holistic cognitive styles, as in Nisbett et al. (2001). Instead, in the culture priming option, the methodological urge is to uncover the social cognitive mediating
processes that generate cultural differences: hence the focus is on why and how
cultural differences are generated, rather than on what they are. Such a methodological paradigm shift is connected with a consistent major theoretical paradigm
shift in conceptualizing culture.
7.1.2
The Theoretical Paradigm Shift: Culture as Situated

Cognition
Besides being rooted on the methodological premises just briefly discussed, the
construct of the bicultural mind leads towards a significant paradigm shift from
structure to process models currently modeling psychological theory in the scientific inquiry on culture dynamics (Kashima 2009). Structure perspectives tend to
view culture as a coherent system of meanings and practices that are shared among
a group of people over a period of time (Geertz 1973), thus as consensual, enduring,
and context-general. Conversely, current process perspectives take culture to be
more fragmented, fluctuating, and context-specific (situated cognition model)
(Oyserman and Sorensen 2009). Within this conceptual framework, culture is considered as a loosely defined network of patterned beliefs, attitudes, and mindsets
named cultural syndromes such as individualism-collectivism, analytic-holistic
thinking, honor and pride, power distance, etc. that is, what is popularly described
as culture. Cultural syndromes work as domain-general constructs, nested within
societies, that create meanings and make certain ways of being, thinking, and acting
accessible only when they are triggered or cued. Context cues (the situation) are
therefore considered as triggers of cultural syndromes in that, if one aspect of a
syndrome (which is stored in the long-term memory) is primed, other aspects of the
syndrome are also likely to be made available and activated in the working
memory.
Thus cultures should not be viewed as stable entities that are localized within a
particular society or national group3: although cultural attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets are likely to have emerged from distal social and geographic contexts, they have
continuing influence on both societies and within individuals, so that cultural syndromes exist that may, in different combinations, pervade several different societies
and individuals.
Along this line, societies may on average have a higher prevalence of one or
another cultural syndrome. But such a prevalence does not imply that less common
syndromes are absent from that society. Rather, it depends upon the frequency with
which specific context cues (i.e. aspects of ones self-concept that are related to
3
Connection: On the possible dynamic relationships between cultural traits and national identities, see Chap. 3.
121
ones public image vs. those that are related to ones private self-evaluation; proximal variables) are made situationally salient so as to activate the link with other
parts of the network, such as collectivism vs. individualism as cultural syndromes
(distal variables). In other words, as Oyserman and Sorensen (2009) state, societies
differ, not in whether a syndrome (e.g. collectivism) exists, but rather in how such a
syndrome is likely to be cued. The situated model on culture just described, hence,
predicts that the effects of cultural syndromes (distal features) on cognition, selfconcept, and behavior actions are not direct, but affect them via their impact on
more proximal features. Specifically, distal features impact the likelihood of experiencing a specific set of contingent situations and, more importantly, they influence
how an individual is likely to make sense of, and respond to these situations. That
is, context cues are influenced by cultural syndromes in a mediated fashion, along a
continuum from distal to proximal features, just as these ones are interpreted. This
happens because even if the same situation occurs, it may not carry the same meaning for an individual: it can cue, for instance, a collective or individualistic cultural
syndrome response, depending on the subjective meaning in context. Therefore,
within this view, the appropriation of a specific cultural syndrome does not entail
relying on it continuously, so that even contradictory or conflicting syndromes
(i.e. interdependent vs. independent self-construals) can be possessed by an individual, although they cannot simultaneously guide cognition and action. Its only when
context cues make that syndrome accessible that it comes to the fore, activates other
aspects of the mindset and social representations associated to that syndrome, and
guides the process of making sense of that stimulus and subsequent actions.
7.1.3
The (Bi)Culturally Situated Mind

and the Embodied Mind
This perspective on culture as situated cognition meets current perspectives on the

functioning of the human mind, considered as grounded and situated in sensorymotor interactions with the environment (Mesquita et al. 2010). Rather than elaborating, computing and storing abstracts and amodal symbols, our minds have the
main function of guiding and controlling our behaviors, moment by moment, in
specific contingencies. Conceiving our mind as situated implies that knowledge,
contexts and actions are tightly linked, and not separated into different modules
(Semin and Echterhoff 2011). Indeed, as Damasio (1989, 2010) showed, the different sensorial and motor modalities, instead of being translated into amodal abstract
symbols, are elaborated by related specific cerebral areas (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.). Elaborating further on this situated conceptual framework, Barsalou
(1999, 2008) stated that our knowledge is grounded in experience, employing
multimodal information derived from different sensory-motor systems (embodied
mind). The core representational formats of our mind are the perceptual symbols
that are generated from each aspect of experience: from vision, to other sensory
122
modalities, to proprioception and movements. A wide variety of perceptual symbols

are stored in a distributed manner in brain areas and then integrated and patterned
within a frame related to experiences with any specific category (e.g., happiness,
home, friendship). Moreover, each mental representation functions as a device
generating mental simulations starting from the available context. That is, mental
simulations are central nervous processes which, also in the absence of real perceptual stimuli (offline), are able to reliably represent sensory-motor properties in order
to mentally reproduce, in a simulative way, the original experience in its various
components. Each mental simulation is therefore a multimodal situated conceptualization related to a specific situation, able to represent and re-activate a certain
aspect within a given context.
The bicultural mind therefore is an embodied mind, whose cognitive functioning, like an extensive mind (Menary 2010) is situated and dynamic as it refers to
contingent aspects of experience (Mesquita et al. 2010), in line with the perspective
on culture as situated cognition.
7.2
7.2.1
The Bicultural Mind Within Cultural Evolution

The Intertwining of Cultural Transmission
and Appropriation in Cultural Evolution
Every human being, when born, is living in an environment profoundly and radically transformed (and increasingly exploited and degraded) by the culture of those
who preceded him. This legacy is cumulative in nature, because culture always goes
forward and proceeds inexorably, being placed in time. The concept of inheritance
refers to the temporal continuity of culture. It has a driving force that pushes forward in every circumstance, without ever repeating. Depending on the situation, it
takes different forms, not necessarily incremental, in which all parties take part. For
this reason we speak of cultural evolution, generated by constantly changing
devices, with a different pace in different time periods.4 We are in the presence of an
interdependent process of transmission (by the experts) and appropriation (by the
novices) as an inextricable whole. In this way, both continuity and change of cultural forms are guaranteed.
Lets consider cultural transmission, first of all. Since around the 1970s, a major
line of theorizing on cultural evolution highlighted, though declined from different
perspectives, that cultural information diffuses from one person to another through
4
Connection: Cultural evolution is a complex and multifaceted concept. Chapter 13 applies it to
international cooperation, and Chaps. 16 and 17 to material culture. Chapters 11 and 12 explain
evolutionary mathematical frameworks. Chapters 19, 20, and 21 directly refer to biological
evolution to explain the existence of particular domains of cultural variation in Homo sapiens,
while notes in the introduction of Chap. 3 address the complicated relationship between cultural
anthropology and evolution.
123
social interaction (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Campbell 1975; Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldman 1981; Dawkins 1976; Sperber 1996).5 In other words, cultural stability and
continuity resides in experts efforts in transmitting specific ways of acting and
sense-making to younger generations. However, this assumption paves the way
although indirectly to conceive the transmission of cultural information as an
automatic transfer of knowledge and practices from experts to novices (that is,
individuals that have little or no experience of that piece of cultural knowledge),
something like fax transmission of information from one person to another, as in the
line of reasoning about memes advanced by Dawkins (1976). But culture is neither
a domain confined by precise boundaries nor is it a sort of package of knowledge
and practices to be passed on from one generation to the other. If culture dynamics
took place in this way, a substantially passive and receptive position would be
assigned to the novice (meant as an empty container) within a unidirectional process
(top-down). He would be a mere repeater and a simple cultural clone, able only to
copy and replicate what others delivered.
Rather, cultural transmission is to be considered as a never-ending evolution.
What we are suggesting is in line with Sperbers (1996) epidemiological model of
cultural evolution, especially as regards the focus on the microsocial structure of
cultural information transmission, highlighting the degree of cognitive inferences
embedded in the social nature of such processes. More specifically, as Kashima and
colleagues pointed out (Kashima et al. 2007), cultural information is transmitted
within concrete episodes of social interaction of the sort that typically occur when
two or more interactants are engaged in a joint activity, like having a dinner table
conversation or greeting each other, or having a lunch break at school or at work
(Kashima et al. 2007; Kashima 2009). The acquisition and use of cultural information thus take place episodically, through the sharing of concrete experiences jointly
acted among participants.
During the process of cultural appropriation the second factor involved in the
evolution of culture the novice has to grasp the forms and manifestations of his
own culture to become, in turn, an expert. This path assumes the specific cultural
learning ability humans possess to acquire new information regardless of genetic
endowment. Humans have the distinctive and very likely exclusive feature to
perpetuate learning from one generation to another. Hence we have a process of
accumulation of learning, made on the basis of individual experience, especially in
the social sharing of knowledge.
In this process, the focus is not on what the expert is able to convey, but rather on
what the novice is able to acquire and adapt to his needs and expectations in terms
of his way of life and of the changes in the environment in which he lives.6 In this
way, participatory appropriation entails that novices are actively engaged in the
process and, as they are part of it, they transform culture at the same time in which
they, together with experts, come to possess beliefs, values, and practices to hand on
5
Connection: See Chap. 11 for an epistemological reflection on the work of the cited authors.
Connection: Section 18.3 talks about the active role of the novice with reference to language
learning.
124
to younger generations in modified forms, while actively adapting to continuously

changing environmental challenges (Rogoff 2003). Within this theoretical framework, the expert-novice interaction highlights the dynamic participation of actors in
the process, rather than focusing on the target of progressively piling up knowledge
and practices. More than on outcomes, the attention is directed on the process
through which individuals build up their cultural expertise. This process highlights
the dual nature of culture (Anolli 2004): it is neither an objective collection of
artifacts and practices to be transmitted, nor just a constellation of mental models.7
As a result, the concept of appropriation emphasizes that culture is a psychological
process before being a structure or system of artifacts. As a process, appropriation
mainly concerns the mechanisms and devices of active adaptation to environments
and their constant changes. In this regard, the term adaptivity refers to the ability to
actively adapt to the evolution of the environment, and guarantee cultures working
continuity. Culture is a never ending evolution, and the appropriation process can
explain the complex dynamics between both cultural changes and cultural
stability.8
7.2.2
Bicultural Mind Appropriation: The Expert-Novice

Dynamics
The appropriation of the bicultural mind takes place in the same way in which the
appropriation of culture takes place, that is, through an experience-based learning
where individuals of different cultures are in turn experts and novices in the appropriation process of the practices and interpretative frames of both cultures (Anolli
2011). Hence the bicultural mind appropriation mainly resides on social learning, as
Boyd and Richerson (2005) pointed out. As we have just seen, the cultural expertnovice dynamics predicts that experts that are in charge of transmission of the
systems of meaning and practices of the culture they have been raised into are, at the
same time, novices in the appropriation of the cultural models of the new culture
(Rogoff 2003). In this way, the appropriation of the bicultural mind makes no
distinction between either dominant or non-dominant cultural groups; and, likewise,
no distinction is made between attitudes in maintaining, both from the dominant and
non-dominant points of view, the specific group heritage culture (see, for instance,
Sam and Berry 2006). In a similar vein, coming to possess interpretive frames, and
even conflicting ones, of different cultures does not require some kind of integration
between them, nor does it raise any issue of authenticity meant as the safeguarding of ones native culture being challenged. It simply means that new interpretive
Connection: Compare this complexity with the relationship between artifacts and mental models
postulated in Chaps. 15 and 16.
8
Connection: Chapter 18 takes this learners activity into account in models of language transmission and learning.
125
and behavioral options are made available, first, in the working memory (proximal
variables: contingent context cues, i.e. behavior options) and then, through them, in
the long term memory (distal variables: cultural syndromes, i.e. interpretative
frames). In becoming available to the working memory, such context-specific pieces
of cultural knowledge can activate the associated (and more general) cultural
syndromes, apt to make sense of a variety of other ongoing experiences, often
related to different psychological domains.
Besides social learning, cultural learning also takes place through tacit learning,
that is, learning by mere exposure to the environment, through the activation of different sensory-motor modalities (embodied learning).9 In analyzing how rats could
find their way out a maze, Tolman (1932) had first detected that they could learn it
even in the absence of reinforcements, by simple repetition of motor activities.
Polanyi (1966) further elaborated on this process by highlighting that tacit learning
regards how things are done, rather than what is done (the domain of facts),
why they are done (the domain of science) or who does them (the domain of
interpersonal relationships). Tacit learning encompasses the leaning of procedural
knowledge which, although mostly learned implicitly, results in routine strategies
and procedures that give individuals the opportunity to effectively meet the environmental demands of their cultural habitat. Social learning and tacit learning are
cultural learning processes that need repeated experiences in both cultures so as to
be able to activate the expert-novice dynamics in univocal and coherent contexts of
learning. Social learning through repeated experiences within coherent cultural
contexts makes possible what Dewey (1910) identified as the basic device in learning
by experience: comparing what we are doing with the perception of efficacy in
what we are doing through establishing a backwards (referred to as the past) and
forward (referred to as the future) connection between them. In this process, what
is done by an individual is cognitively elaborated and carefully evaluated before
getting back to action and experience.
7.3
7.3.1
The Embrainment of Culture

The Dynamic Bicultural Brain
Is the bicultural mind somehow split into two, if not to say schizophrenic? Of course
not. Its functioning is just as intact as that of a monocultural mind; but, simply, it
works through a double equipment, instead of one. In the dynamic relationship
between culture and brain, culture does affect the nature and meaning of the sensory
stimulation that is fundamental for the brain to develop (Wexler 2006). Indeed, by
9
Connection: See Chap. 5 for an analysis of the ubiquity of education and on the tacit learning of
unseen cultural traits through exercise.
126
setting the cultural environment and transmitting it to the next generation, each
generation fashions the brain for the next.10
Bicultural learning gives rise to a neural architecture that is different from that of
monoculturals. It is the dynamic bicultural brain (Ng and Han 2009), that is, the
neural evidence which highlights that the bicultural mind is a psychological construct supported by the so-called brain facts (Smith and Kosslyn 2009). According
to the perspective advanced by these authors, in line with what Chomsky (1967) had
called explanatory adequacy, facts about the structure and function of the brain can
provide justification and support for a psychological theory. This entails that cognitive theories are limited by facts about the brain; the facts dont dictate the theories,
but they limit the range of what can be proposed (Smith and Kosslyn, cit.: 15).
In detecting the neural correlates of self-representation though functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, neuroscientists scanning monocultural
Europeans found that only the self was represented in the ventral medial prefrontal
cortex (VMPFC) (Heatherton et al. 2006; Macrae et al. 2004; Northoff et al. 2006;
Northoff and Bermpohl 2004). Differently, for Chinese monoculturals, both the self
and mother were represented in the same brain area (Zhu et al. 2007). Zhu et al.
(2007) interpreted their neuroimaging results as supportive of Markus and
Kitayamas (1991) theory of interdependent versus independent self-construal: the
neural structure of the Chinese self is more closely connected with others (interdependent self-construal) whereas that of Westerners is more highly differentiated
from others (independent self-construal). In light of these results, relying on fMRI,
Ng et al. (2010) adopted a within group experimental design to test whether the
bicultural brains of Westernized Chinese students resonated to culture primes in
representing the self, mother, other Non-Identified but personally considered
significant Persons (NIP; e.g. ones boss), and type font (as a control condition).
After going through the culture priming procedures (Western priming on one day
and Chinese priming on another day), bicultural Chinese-American participants
carried out four personality trait judgment tasks that focused their attention on either
self, mother, NIP, or type font. Brain imaging was conducted during the judgment
tasks. As illustrated in Fig. 7.1, results show that, after Western or Chinese culture
priming, respectively, Western priming increased (using the VMPCF region exclusively in self-referential processing), whereas Chinese priming decreased (using the
VMPFC region to reference self, mother, and NIP) the neural differentiation of
mother and NIP from self.
In light of these neuroimaging results, the distinction between self-inclusiveness
(self including also significant and non-significant others; interdependent selfconstrual) and self-exclusiveness (self-differentiated from others; independent selfconstrual) can be detected in the same bicultural individual using the VMPFC to
activate different neural circuits: either to reference both the self and significant
others such as mother, or exclusively in self-referential processing.
10
Connection: The relationship between brain and culture is problematized in Chaps. 2, 16, 20,
and 21.
Western cultural priming
self minus non-identified person
t-values
6
4
2
0
0.5
signal intensity
0.4
127
self minus mother
t-values
6
4
2
0
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
Chinese culture Western culture
Priming
Fig. 7.1 (a) Brain activation observed in the contrasts between self vs non-identified person and
between self vs mother in the Western cultural priming condition. (b) Results of region-of-interest
analysis of the parameter estimates of signal intensity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (black
bar stands for non-identified person, white bar stands for self) (Ng and Han 2010)
Such neuropsychological evidence shows that the human brain is uniquely

evolved to acquire basic cultural capacities since, culture is, after all, stored in
peoples brains (Ames and Fiske 2010: 72). Hence, when an individual comes to
possess the mindsets of at least two cultures, and the standard proper repertoire
actions that follow them, the brain consistently alters (Kitayama and Uskul 2011).
7.3.2
Culture and the Brain in Human Evolution
The bicultural mind is thus twined with a bicultural brain, just as culture is borne
out of biology through a long and discontinuous evolutionary path. As Pievani
(2011) highlighted, it is a contingent miscellany of events that makes natural evolution a sort of bricolage.
According to population genetics the influence of biology (specifically, of the
genetic footprint) on the genotype of individuals gives rise to less than 12 % of their
genotypical variations when taken altogether (Cavalli-Sforza 2005). Although
rooted in biology, culture also developed so far through a wide array of other-thanbiological trajectories. Both individual and social cultural learning, which add up in
a cumulative fashion, shape our neural activities giving them precise instructions
in order to suitably diversify the neural circuits (Hebbian learning, neural plasticity,
etc.). Thus, our genetic endowment unfolds as a function of the environment it
actively adapts to. And the gene is not to be considered as an atomic, wholly packed
up and discrete piece of evolutionary heritage (deterministic perspective), but as a
marker in the differentiation of traits with respect to contingent biological, climatic,
and cultural conditions (probabilistic perspective).
Therefore, biology and culture, genes and learning, constantly co-vary as a function of contingent situations. Biology influences culture at the same time in which
culture influences biology in order to adapt to the environment. Going beyond the
128
nave notion of interaction between biology and culture (assuming linear additive
effects of the one on the other), Lewontin (2000) argued that genes and the environment acquire their properties from their interdependent relation one with the other,
and the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration (Levins
and Lewontin 1985). Hence, biology affects culture at the same time in which
culture affects biology so as to fashion it to the best of its options, to adapt it to the
environment.
This position entails that the mind is wider than the brain (Rose 2005). Rather than
being made of dichotomous categories, both the biology-culture and the geneenvironment (once, nature-nurture) relationships are to be considered as coming out
of intrinsically intertwined factors (double inheritance theory, Levinson 2005). Indeed,
as Damasio pointed out, the brain and the mind are reciprocally interdependent.
Newborns possess none of the distinctive assets of our mind (language, thought, mental imagery, self-awareness, awareness of others, etc.). These functions develop only
through the interaction with other individuals, in a given cultural environment. To
give rise to ones mind, the brain needs the minds of others. Both culture and the brain
are therefore necessary, though not sufficient, if taken individually, to give rise to and
to develop our mind, since it is up to the mind to provide the brain with the stimuli apt
to set up and activate the neural circuits involved in our basic and distinctive psychological activities (language, thought, decision-making, mental imagery, etc.).
Extensive research in the cultural neuroscience domain empirically showed how
culture shapes the functional asset of our brain (Ames and Fiske 2010; Zhou and
Cacioppo 2010). Considering, for instance, the neural processes subserving basic
numerical processes, one recent fMRI study examining Western English speakers
and Eastern Chinese speakers performing various number comparison and calculation
tasks involving Arabic numerals documented that, whereas Western participants
preferentially activated regions of the left perisylvian cortex (e.g. Brocas area) for
mental calculation, Chinese participants tended to recruit a visuo-premotor association network (e.g. premotor association area) (Tang et al. 2006). Parallel cross-cultural dissociations also occurred for number comparison tasks and even for simply
judging the orientation of numerals. In Japanese Abacus clubs (Hatano 1997),
expert abacus operators aged 880 can answer 3 3 or 4 2 digit multiplications
within 5 s, basically error free (when they use a real abacus), or with quite respectable accuracy when they use their mental abacus (Sato et al. 2004). In an fMRI
study, Tanaka et al. (2002) documented that, whereas Western people retain series
of digits in verbal working memory (revealed as increased activation in the corresponding cortical area, including Brocas area), Japanese mental abacus experts
hold them in visuospatial working memory, showing activation in the bilateral superior frontal sulci and the superior paretal lobe. In addition, in the domain of emotion
processing and visceral awareness, Ma-Kellams et al. (2012) found that Asians, in
comparison to European-Americans, were less accurate in perceiving their own visceral states, that is, they were more likely to make errors in attributions involving
their bodily changes than European-Americans. At the same time, Asian participants were more likely than European-Americans to infer their internal states as a
function of contextual cues. According to the authors, this result could be supported
129
by different brain activity involving the regions identified as the most relevant in
visceral self-perception (Craig 2003, 2008; Lewis et al. 2007). Our brain is not
self-sufficient, as the cases of feral children, or of sensorial deprivation, have
compellingly shown. Whenever the brain runs out of sensory-motor stimulations, its
functions do not work properly since, from its earliest times, it is always immersed
in context (be it biological, physical, social or cultural), providing a variety of
continuously different and changing stimuli.
Following these premises, the distinction between what specifically pertains to
the mind and what specifically pertains to the brain appears fairly documented,
partly unknown, and quite blurred. Such a distinction can be conceptually modeled
in terms of borders, that is, something that binds and parts at the same time, rather
than in terms of definitely set and discrete boundaries (that simply close in, to their
very extent). Along this line, the borders between cerebral and mental processes can
be conceptually designed as the neutral, sometimes invisible, space where such
processes are, at the same time, enclosed in and conjoint, put in contact.
7.4
The Transition from One Culture to Another

in Bicultural Individuals
The situated embodied mind makes domain-general cultural syndromes available

for a bicultural individual that experienced them. These interpretive perspectives are
abstract enough to be applied to different situations so as to provide biculturals with
an extensive repertoire of cognitive, affective, and social mental devices to meet and
to actively adapt to contingent contextual demands. Such a potential repertoire of
mindsets has been defined by Kitayama and Markus as cultural affordances
(Kitayama and Markus 1999), that is, matrixes of meaning that do not work as
single-fold devices able to guide action, but need to be unpacked in domain-specific
features before generating subsequent corresponding and specific actions. Cultural
affordances imply that the bicultural mind, just as the monocultural one, operates
interdependently within the immediate context. However, differently from monoculturals, biculturals can make sense of context cues through a wider cognitively
accessible array of distal and proximal features, resulting in more flexible trajectories
to actively adapt to ongoing social, cognitive, and affective demands. The accessibility of cultural syndromes makes an ongoing event intelligible, in turn affecting
the appropriateness and relational effectiveness of behavior. It is the cultural frame
switching strategy (Hong 2009; Hong et al. 2000), declined in alternating cultural
models as a function of their tuning with contextual demands (Anolli 2011). In this
way, bicultural individuals do not need to translate one culture into the other.
More simply, they can rely on different cultural trajectories, and when, with respect
to consistent contextual cues, they enter one, they follow it without making
comparisons of one with the other just as monoculturals do.
Certainly, although the activation of cultural mindsets appears to be spontaneous,
it is important to note that it is not a knee-jerk response to contingent cues.
130
According to Hong (2009), once the evoked cultural frame is activated, it will be
appraised for its applicability to the immediate context before it is applied. That is,
an accessible cultural mindset will not exert any influence over individuals behaviors
unless it is applicable to the task at hand, that is, to the current judgment context
(Hong et al. 2003) or in its meeting the individuals epistemic need (Fu et al. 2007).
For instance, as shown in Wong and Hong (2005), in a domain judgment in a
Chinese context, Chinese icons activated cooperation in Hong Hong ChineseAmerican biculturals when these participants played a Prisoners Dilemna game
with friends, but not with strangers. Hence, a cooperative (vs. competitive) script
becomes applicable for Chinese-American biculturals only when interacting with
friends (but not with strangers).
Within this alternating perspective, a fundamentalist stance is ruled out, both
theoretically and by experience. At the same time, the bicultural mind positively
affects psychological well-being (Chen et al. 2008), being supported neither by the
need for cultural integration (fusion and potential confusion of cultural
identities) nor for cultural conversion (with the associated psychological
drawbacks connected with the fluctuations between loyalty and betrayal of ones
native culture).
7.5
Bicultural Mind and Situated Cultural Traits
The bicultural mind is a situated embodied mind that entails that knowledge, contexts and actions are tightly linked. From this perspective, the ground of cultural
knowledge is the actual daily activities and practices: they are essential to reliably
and valuably have knowledge of a specific object or event, including information
regarding the situation in which that object (or event) is placed, that are necessary
to involve actions performable on it. The meaning of an object (or event) is therefore
not a-priori fixed but it is radically dependent on its immediate context.
At the same time, as the situated cognition approach predicts, the effects of distal
cultural syndromes on a current situation are not straightforward, but are mediated
along a continuum that includes subjective construals in making sense of context
cues. Such an approach therefore fully acknowledges the role of context affordances.
Along the line sketched out by Gibson (1966), cultural syndromes are cultural affordances in that they do not exclusively belong to individuals minds, nor are they
directly cued by situational factors; they exist only in interdependence between an
actor and the contingent situation. Therefore, context is not viewed as a fixed set of
features (e.g., Chinese language as a straightforward prime to Chinese cultural
syndromes, as in the case of Chinese-other culture biculturals), but as a set of
features that, in interdependence with the individuals mindsets, are selected, and
then indexed to the mindset that makes sense of them. Such a mind-context interdependence is not an on-off device, nor is it a monodimensional process: it stretches
along a continuum between distal (cultural syndromes) and proximal (context cues)
variables. For instance, individualism as a cultural syndrome can be unpacked into
131
a range of proximal variables such as personal efficacy, self-esteem, autonomy of

choice, relying on inner dispositions in social inferences, and frequent use of an
explicit and overt communication style, etc. These proximal variables can be easily
operationalized into actions (Kashima 2009), that are what the diffusion of cultural
information and the transmission/appropriation of cultural models work through, that
is, concrete episodes of social interaction jointly acted by two or more interactants.
Such an episodic sharing of actions conjointly made sense of, turns out to be, in the
case of biculturals, the terrain where cultural differences are managed within them,
and between the other interactants, be they mono- or biculturals as well. This conceptual framework hence paves the way to conceive cultural traits as situated and
contingent cultural affordances that, to be acted, need to be unpacked along the
continuum between distal and proximal variables and further back. In other words,
a situated cognition view on culture leads to viewing cultural traits not as unidimensional stable entities, but as affordances whose stability lies in episodic joint and
embodied actions that are activated in interdependence with context, and that are
linked to more general mindsets that add up in abstractedness to make sense of
such actions.
Hence, while one culture emphasizes certain domain-specific devices more than
others, bicultural individuals embody and embrain the opportunity to manage
cultural differences within them and between cultures. So that, in Goulds perspective
on punctuated equilibria (2002), the bicultural mind could even be viewed as the
next evolutionary jump within the human species.
References
Ames, D. L., & Fiske, S. T. (2010). Cultural neuroscience. Asian Journal of Social Psychology,
13(2), 7282.
Anolli, L. (2004). Psicologia della cultura [Culture psychology]. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Anolli, L. (2011). La sfida della mente multiculturale. Nuove forme di convivenza [The challenge
of the multicultural mind. Novel trajectories for shaping the way to live together]. Milano:
Raffaello Cortina Editore.
Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22,
577609.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617645.
Benet-Martinez, V., Leu, J., Lee, F., & Morris, W. M. (2002). Negotiating biculturalism: Cultural
frame switching in biculturals with oppositional versus compatible cultural identities. Journal
of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33(5), 492516.
Benet-Martinez, V., Lee, F., & Leu, J. (2006). Biculturalism and cognitive complexity. Journal of
Cross-Cultural Psychology, 37(1), 386407.
Boyd, D., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Campbell, D. T. (1975). On the conflicts between biological and social evolution and between
psychology and moral tradition. American Psychologist, 30, 11031126.
132
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. (2005). The human genoma diversity project: Past, present, and future.
Nature Review: Genetics, 6, 333340.
Chen, S.-X., Benet-Martinez, V., & Bond, M. H. (2008). Bicultural identity, bilingualism, and
psychological adjustment in multicultural societies: Immigration-based and globalizationbased acculturation. Journal of Personality, 76(4), 803838.
Chomsky, N. (1967). Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton.
Craig, A. D. (2003). Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Current
Opinion in Neurobiology, 13, 500505.
Craig, A. D. (2008). Interoception and emotion: A neuroanatomical perspective. In M. Lewis,
J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 272292).
New York: Guilford Press.
Damasio, A. R. (1989). Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for
the neural substrates of recall and recognition. Cognition, 33, 2562.
Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self comes to mind. New York: Pantheon.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston: Heath.
Fu, H.-Y., Morris, M. W., Lee, S. I., Chao, M. C., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y.-Y. (2007). Epistemic
motives and cultural conformity: Need for closure, culture, and context as determinants of
conflict judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 191207.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gould, S. J. (2002). The structure of evolutionary theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Hatano, G. (1997). Commentary: Core domains of thought, innate constraints, and sociocultural
contexts. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 75, 7178.
Heatherton, T. F., Wyland, C. L., Macrae, C. N., Demos, K. E., Denny, B. T., & Kelley, W. M.
(2006). Medial prefrontal activity differentiates self from close others. Social Cognitive
Affective Neuroscience, 1, 1825.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In E. T.
Higgins & A. E. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133
168). New York: Guilford Press.
Ho, D. Y. F. (1986). Chinese patterns of socialization: A critical review. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The
psychology of the Chinese people (pp. 135). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.
Hofstede, G. (1980). Cultures consequences. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Hong, Y.-Y. (2009). A dynamic constructivist approach to culture: Moving from describing culture
to explaining culture. In R. S. Wyer, C.-Y. Chiu, & Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.), Understanding culture:
Theory, research, and application (pp. 323). New York: Psychology Press.
Hong, Y.-Y., Yeung, G., Chiu, C.-Y., & Tong, Y. (1999). Social comparison during political transition: Interaction of entity versus incremental beliefs and social identities. International Journal
of Intercultural Relations, 23, 257279.
Hong, Y.-Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-Y., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000). Multicultural minds: A
dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55,
709720.
Hong, Y.-Y., Benet-Martinez, V., Chiu, C., & Morris, M. W. (2003). Boundaries of cultural influence: Construct activation as a mechanism for cultural differences in social perception. Journal
of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 34, 453464.
Kashima, Y. (2009). Culture comparison and culture priming. In R. S. Wyer, C.-Y. Chiu, &
Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.), Understanding culture: Theory, research, and application (pp. 5377).
New York: Psychology Press.
Kashima, Y., Klein, O., & Clark, A. E. (2007). Grounding: Sharing information in social interaction. In K. Fiedler (Ed.), Social communication (pp. 2777). New York: Psychology Press.
Kitayama, S., & Markus, H. R. (1999). Yin and yang of the Japanese self: The cultural psychology
of personality coherence. In D. Cervone & Y. Shoda (Eds.), The coherence of personality:
133
Social cognitive bases of personality consistency, variability, and organization (pp. 242302).
New York: Guilford Press.
Kitayama, S., & Uskul, A. (2011). Culture, mind, and the brain: Current evidence and future
directions. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 419449.
LaFromboise, T., Coleman, H., & Gerton, J. (1993). Psychological impact of biculturalism:
Evidence and theory. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 395412.
Levins, R., & Lewontin, R. C. (1985). The dialectical biologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Levinson, S. C. (2005). Introduction: The evolution of culture in a microcosm. In S. C. Levinson
& P. Jaisson (Eds.), Evolution and culture (pp. 143). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lewis, P. A., Critchley, H. D., Rotshtein, P., & Dolan, R. J. (2007). Neural correlates of processing
valence and arousal in affective words. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 742748.
Lewontin, R. C. (2000). The triple helix: Gene, organism, and environment. Cambridge, MA:
Macrae, C. N., Moran, J. M., Heatherton, T. F., Banfield, J. F., & Kelley, W. M. (2004). Medial
prefrontal activity predicts memory for self. Cerebral Cortex, 14, 647654.
Ma-Kellams, C., Blascovich, J., & McCall, C. (2012). Culture and the body: EastWest differences
in visceral perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 718728.
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion,
and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224253.
Matsumoto, D., & Yoo, S. H. (2006). Toward a new generation of cross-cultural research.
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(3), 234250.
Menary, R. (2010). The extended mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Mesquita, B., Barrett, L. F., & Smith, E. R. (Eds.). (2010). The mind in context. New York:
Guilford.
Ng, S. H., & Han, S. (2009). The bicultural self and the bicultural brain. In R. S. Wyer, C.-Y. Chiu,
& Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.), Understanding culture: Theory, research, and application (pp. 329342).
New York: Psychology Press.
Ng, S. H., Han, S., Mao, L., & Lai, J. C. L. (2010). Dynamic cultural brains: A fMRI study of their
flexible neural representation of self and significant others in response to culture primes. Asian
Journal of Social Psychology, 13, 8391.
Nguyen, A.-M. D., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2007). Biculturalism unpacked: Components, measurement, individual differences, and outcomes. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1(1),
101114.
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought:
Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291310.
Northoff, G., & Bermpohl, F. (2004). Cortical midline structures and the self. Trends in Cognitive
Science, 8, 102107.
Northoff, G., DeGreck, M., Bermpohl, F., & Panksepp, J. (2006). Self-referential processing in our
brain A meta-analysis of imaging studies on the self. NeuroImage, 31, 440457.
Oyserman, D., & Lee, S. W.-S. (2008). Does culture influence what and how we think? Effects of
priming individualism and collectivism. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 311342.
Oyserman, D., & Sorensen, N. (2009). Understanding cultural syndrome effects on what and how
we think: A situated cognition model. In R. S. Wyer, C.-Y. Chiu, & Y.-Y. Hong (Eds.),
Understanding culture. Theory, research, and application (pp. 2552). New York: Psychology
Press.
Phinney, J., & Devich-Navarro, M. (1997). Variations in bicultural identification among African
American and Mexican American adolescents. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 7, 332.
Pievani, T. (2011). La vita inaspettata [The unexpected life]. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. London: Routledge.
Pouliasi, K., & Verkuyten, M. (2007). Networks of meaning and the bicultural mind: A structural
equation modeling approach. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 955963.
134
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Rose, S. (2005). The 21st century brain. London: Cape.
Ross, M., Xun, W. Q. E., & Wilson, A. E. (2002). Language and the bicultural self. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 10401050.
Sam, D. L., & Berry, J. W. (2006). Cambridge handbook of acculturation psychology. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sato, T., Namiki, H., Ando, J., & Hatano, G. (2004). Japanese conception of and research on intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), International handbook of human intelligence (pp. 302324).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Semin, G. R., & Echterhoff, G. (Eds.). (2011). Grounding sociality. London: Taylor & Francis.
Shore, B. (1996). Culture in mind: Cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. New York:
Smith, E. E., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2009). Cognitive psychology. Mind and brain. Upper Saddle River:
Pearson.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Tanaka, S., Michimata, C., Kaminaga, T., Honda, M., & Sadato, N. (2002). Superior digit memory
of abacus experts: An event-related functional MRI study. NeuroReport, 13(17), 21872191.
Tang, Y., Zhang, W., Chen, K., et al. (2006). Arithmetic processing in the brain shaped by cultures.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(28),
1077510780.
Tolman, E. C. (1932). Purposive behavior in animal and men. New York: Century.
Verkuyten, M., & Pouliasi, K. (2002). Biculturalism among older children: Cultural frame switching, attributions, self-identification, and attitudes. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33,
596609.
Wexler, B. E. (2006). Brain and culture: Neurobiology, ideology, and social change. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Wong, R. Y.-M., & Hong, Y. (2005). Dynamic influences of culture on cooperation in the prisoners dilemma. Psychological Science, 16, 429434.
Young, L., Giles, H., & Pierson, H. (1986). Sociopolitical change and perceived vitality.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10, 459469.
Zhou, H., & Cacioppo, J. (2010). Culture and the brain: Opportunities and obstacles. Asian Journal
of Social Psychology, 13, 5971.
Zhu, Y., Zhang, L., Fan, J., & Han, S. (2007). Neural basis of cultural influence on self representation. NeuroImage, 34, 13101317.
Chapter 8
Birth and Evolution of Jazz as Effects

of Cultural Transfers
Stefano Zenni
The mission of this essay is to treat cultural transfer in jazz as an example of complex influences caused through migration and forced migration, starting from my
book Storia del jazz: una prospettiva globale [The History of jazz in a global perspective] (Zenni 2012), an attempt to renew a field of study, the history of jazz,
which in Italy has been at a standstill for many years.1
The essay will show how jazz evolved from such complex transfer and how complex transfer is still in place in more recent developments of the music due to its
productive nature, which asks whoever plays it to put his own soul into it as well as
refer to the traditions of jazz. What interests us here is to understand the interaction
of cultural forces that produced a new music, which, moreover, was immediately
perceived by contemporaries as something devastating and innovative (and in certain respects opposed to this).2
8.1
Cultural Transfer Leading to the Evolution of Jazz
For a long time, we were lulled by a series of generic statements, well known to
those who are familiar with jazz literature, which stated, for example, that jazz is the
union of European and African cultures, and already saying African culture
1
In Germany, as an anonymous referee suggested, Hendler (2008, 2010) recently worked in a similar direction.
2
Connection: The process of jazz creation can be interpreted in terms of cultural creolization, as
described in Sect. 2.5: elements are re-combined to create a totally different outcome. Section 10.5
refers to this process as exaptation, a concept explained in depth in Chap. 17. For more links, see
the Connection in the introduction of Chap. 3.
S. Zenni (*)
Conservatory of Music G.B. Martini, Bologna, Italy
e-mail: stzenni@me.com
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_8
135
136
S. Zenni
appears to be an unacceptable generalization; that certain cultural traits come from

Africa and others from Europe (the rhythm comes from Africa, the harmony from
Europe); and that this synthesis came to maturity in North America during the nineteenth century until jazz developed in the early twentieth century, during the first
decades of which, until 19121915, when jazz fairly quickly took the shape we
know.
These generic statements need to be detailed. In a lot of literature on jazz it is still
said that even today it is not possible to distinguish the contribution of the African
slave communities, which were brought to the United States, because once these
communities arrived in America they were mixed with one another and so their
original traits admitting that they were stable were lost. Therefore, we would not
be able to say what the contribution of, for example, the Wolof of Senegal or the
Kongo ethnic groups was to the music of New Orleans. In actual fact, this reconstruction is possible and in recent years research has been done that allows us to
understand the ethnic and linguistic composition of the slaves taken from Africa to
the Americas exactly.
In a time like ours, which has made global migration one of the essential features
of the exchange of cultures, jazz helps us to understand how a new music can come
into being precisely from complex migratory phenomena of individuals, goods,
cultures and ideas. Let us start from the map that opens a remarkable atlas on the
slave trade (Eltis and Richardson 2010). It shows us the geographical, topographical
and quantitative aspects of the forced migration of slaves to the Americas. To understand it, I refer to the model of migrations by the historian Patrick Manning (2004),
according to whom migration is an essential aspect of the human species, and is one
of the most powerful sources of cultural growth through contact and exchange. The
very spread of homo sapiens throughout the globe in the last 100,000 years reminds
us that we are an intrinsically migratory species. Manning identifies four types of
migration in animal species. Here we are dealing with the fourth type, which is typically human: inter-community migrations, when individuals or groups move from
one community to another, whether voluntarily or forced by external and even dramatic phenomena such as war, slavery or similar.
We must not believe that the quantitative data (the number of people who migrate)
is directly proportional to the cultural change that comes about. Many of the slaves
from the north-western part of Africa (the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra)
and central-western Africa (Angola and so on) were taken to the Caribbean and
South America. Only a small fraction of these unfortunate individuals were deported
to the British colonies of North America and yet the impact exerted by this relatively reduced presence was even greater there than in other areas.
This first map in Eltis and Richardsons atlas shows us where the slaves left from,
where they were taken to and how many of them there were. In each of the areas
where the slaves arrived, the encounters between different cultures produced new
types of music, many of which have kept marked African linguistic, ritual and musical features, for example the candombl in Brazil, or the santera in Cuba, but the
most original of all is, without any doubt whatsoever, jazz.
8 Birth and Evolution of Jazz as Effects of Cultural Transfers
137
The questions now are: why did music such as the blues or jazz come into being
in the United States and not in Brazil or in Cuba? Why do we find drums, bells,
polyrhythms and languages of African origin in Afro-Cuban or Afro-Brazilian
music but not in the United States? Why did percussion instruments, the banjo and
the blues (a singer with a guitar) become widespread in North America, but we do
not find the groups of drums from the Afro-Cuban scene there? It is true that those
percussion instruments are present in Afro-Cuban jazz, but they came at a later
point, the result of a later fusion. The geography and chronology of these forced
migrations help us find an explanation.
In the North American colonies, and especially in the city of New Orleans, the
first waves of slaves arrived from the northernmost part of the slave area, presentday Senegal and Gambia. The music of those areas is influenced by the Arab world
which, to simplify slightly, is based on solo, melismatic song (in which each syllable is enriched by many notes), with a rhythm that is often free. It is a culture of
chordophones, such as harps, harp-lutes and lutes with one, two, three or more
strings. This substratum, which was brought to New Orleans by the Bambara
culture-ethnic group, is the basis of many cultures in the Caribbean and the north of
the United States. We have accounts of the banjo from the seventeenth century, an
instrument of African origin (likely related to the xalam of the Wolof): in the same
period, it is also documented in Western Africa (Sierra Leone), in some areas of the
West Indies and later in the British colonies in North America.
Vocal, melismatic and solo singing are also widespread in areas of western
Sudan. One impressive example, of the Tikar ethnic group, was documented by
Gerhard Kubik (1999). In a village in Cameroon, Kubik found a kneeling girl who
was grinding millet with a concave stone, which she beat rhythmically as she sang.
The girl was not only singing a melody which was exquisitely blues a tumbling
strain, as Curt Sachs would have defined it but was lulling herself with a rhythm
that could be defined as 12/8, like a shuffle rhythm and blues. Imagine this type of
vocality combined with the culture of chordophones and you have the blues of the
south of the United States. It was Kubik who associated the Tikar girl with the blues
singer Mississippi Matilda.
In fact, other instruments and cultures also arrived in the south of the United
States, but they came from Africa in different ways and were assimilated or prohibited on the American continent. What have drums got to do with this story? In 1526,
the Emperor Charles V issued an edict to regulate the trade of slaves from
Senegambia from the Sahel in general. These individuals, who were fighting to
defend their freedom, created many problems in the American colonies. In his edict,
Charles V ordered the abandonment of trading slaves who wore turbans the Wolof
in particular and to extend the activity towards the more southern coasts of Africa.
Here, we come into a completely different cultural world, to which, incidentally, the
Tikar girl also belonged: that of the Niger-Congo languages (also called Bantu languages, perhaps not completely appropriately).
When tens or hundreds of thousands of Bantu-language slaves arrived in
America, Bantu words began to appear in the Caribbean: conga, samba, mambo,
rumba and even tango. The first appearance of the word tango is documented in a
138
S. Zenni
Spanish colony, not Buenos Aires as might be expected, but New Orleans, which in
1763 became a Spanish colony after having originally been French. To try and remedy the din that the black people made in the streets, singing, dancing and making
music until late at night, the governor of New Orleans issued a decree (in Spanish)
in 1786 which imposed putting an end to tangos, o bailes de negros after a certain
time (Sublette 2008). This reminds us that, as a French and then Spanish colony,
New Orleans is culturally not an Anglo-Saxon city but belongs to a European,
Caribbean and Catholic cultural sphere.
The Catholic and the Protestant settlers had two opposing ways of treating slaves.
They were both cruel, violent and exploitative, but adopted different strategies to
keep the slaves culture under control. To simplify, in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant
colonies in general, the slaves were not allowed to use their own instruments, rites
or languages. As a consequence, one of the most important forms of communication
at their disposal was repressed. For example, in Bantu cultures, which use tonal
languages, the drum is used to communicate through melodic forms which reproduce the curves of the spoken language. In North America therefore, not only the
languages of the slaves, but drums as well, were prohibited. This is perhaps the main
reason we do not find drums like the djemb of Senegal or certain groups of Angolan
or Congolese drums in the folklore of the slaves in Virginia.
The Catholics often adopted another strategy. Under certain conditions slaves
were allowed for example in appropriate, guarded places and at appropriate
times to practise the Catholic religion using the language, the music and the instruments of their own cultures, a process which then led to the birth of syncretic religions. The Bantu slaves who crossed the Atlantic from the seventeenth century
onwards brought and kept their Bantu culture, especially in the Catholic cultures
such as Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Brazil and Mexico.
In addition, Bantu traits were also preserved in North America through expressive reconversions. In the absence of a drum, the rhythms were beaten on the body
(a practice called patting juba), or they danced in a circle beating out simplified
rhythms by clapping their hands and stamping their feet: this was the origin of the
ring shout, a circular dance dedicated to Yoruba divinities such as Eleggua. In
recordings that document survival of these rites, clear Bantu cultural traits can be
perceived (exchanges between soloist and choir, and asymmetrical rhythms), but
without drums.
By the fifteenth century, the Bantu cultures had spread to many areas of the
Western world and, in certain aspects, dominated it: with those dances and music
that circulated first throughout the Mediterranean and then travelled to the Caribbean
(and then New Orleans as well) and back to the Mediterranean across the Atlantic
for more than a century and a half. The black seamen of Bantu origin took their
dances, melodies and rhythms practically everywhere with them. Dances, which
histories of traditional music attribute to European culture, such asthe sarabande,
are actually of Afro-Mediterranean origin and spread to Lisbon, Seville and Naples.
Dances such as the sarabande or the chaconne were known in Havana to the same
extent as in the Mediterranean; and in Naples, the moresche contained whole passages sung in the Kanuri language, spoken by slaves from the north of Nigeria.
139
Fig. 8.1 Flows of human beings and commodities between eighteenth and nineteenth century
Figure 8.1 shows us the complexity of the processes that led to the fusion of
African cultures in North America.3 Let us try to understand the meaning of the
arrow that goes from north to south. At the end of the eighteenth century, importing
slaves was gradually prohibited in the United States (but not domestic slave trade,
let alone slavery). In the same period, in 1793, the mechanization of short-stalk
cotton cleaning gave impulse to the intensive cultivation of the crop at various
latitudes. This over-abundance of production was not met with sufficient labour
because slaves could no longer be bought from outside (although there was still a
considerable illegal market). This marked the start of the most brutal phase of
slavery: breeding slaves, who were made to mate to produce children who were
investments, capital that tomorrow would become labour. The spread of slave breeding marked the end of the direct relationship with African cultures; these slaves born
in the United States had no direct memory of their cultural origin and were bought
and sold, then dispersed, throughout the United States.
At the same time, however, there were African memories that came from the
south. Between 1790 and 1804 the great slave revolution of Saint-Domingue led to
the proclamation of the first republic of former slaves, who renamed the island with
its original Indian name of Haiti. The revolution, which was long, very violent and
full of bloodshed, caused the great migration of former landowners and many of
their slaves to Santiago de Cuba. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, the French
who lived in Cuba, who had come from Haiti, were expelled and had become
migrants once more, went to New Orleans, which was culturally very similar and
familiar to them. We thus see the arrival of thousands of Frenchmen and African
slaves in the New Orleans of the early nineteenth century, who enriched the already
complex ethnic stratification of the city, which was to gradually become even richer
3
Connection: For a philosophical discussion of the nature of maps, see Sects. 10.4 and 10.5.
Chapter 10 explicitly comments on the view of the history of jazz presented here.
140
S. Zenni
with the immigration of Germans in the middle of the century, Jews from much of
Europe and later, from the 1880s onwards, Italians.
In this mass of cultures, New Orleans presents a Bantu nucleus, which was reinforced by the immigration of refugee slaves from Haiti. Until the early nineteenth
century, meetings were held on Sundays in Place Congo where the slaves would
dance to the sounds of drums, bells and singing: Bantu music that nevertheless coexisted with the banjo and other more Arabic-influenced singing. The city gradually
became Anglicized, and so certain instruments were prohibited, certain cultures
were repressed and another transformations of cultural traits were put into action.
To put it briefly, jazz comes from the confluence of very different worlds and
cultures, at different times, which became stratified and interwoven. All this
happened in a place like New Orleans: where a French-Catholic and Bambara
phase, and a Spanish and Bantu phase were stratified, then followed by European
immigration, progressive Americanization and an intense exchange with Cuba
(it was while imitating the Cuban danzn orchestras that the typical ragtime and
jazz bands of New Orleans took shape). In this melting pot, we see fascinating
examples of reconversion of cultural traits, above all the birth of the drum kit.
Drums, which appeared in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century, had
been invented by Dee Dee Chandler, a black man who had had the idea of taking the
instruments of a band and playing them solo for dance evenings and then with fixed
members. The various parts of the drum kit could be played seated, operating the
bass drum with a special pedal. The instrument that became the ubiquitous sign in
the world of African American cultural domination had been born.
Discussing the origins of jazz, it is worth dwelling on another question. Here we
are speaking about origins in the plural. As historians know, it is never possible to
trace the origin (in the singular) of something. In fact, every origin is always a fluid
process of many origins and events interwoven in time. This apparent aspect is
rarely discussed adequately in histories of jazz.
Jazz itself is part of a plural panorama, as shown in Fig. 8.2. In the first decade of
the twentieth century, there were various types of black music throughout the United
States, of which jazz was only one example. Moreover, it was the only one which at
the time did not yet circulate freely, confined as it was to New Orleans. In the years
when jazz was coming to light, ragtime, which had taken shape in St. Louis, was
played everywhere, including in New Orleans. In the countryside the blues were
sung, both in the Mississippi Delta and in Texas; and the blues played on the piano
by the woodcutters in the Texan forests were called fast western (later boogie woogie). Soon the rural blues ended up in the centre of the music business when some
composers transcribed pieces from the oral tradition and published them with
chords and a form of 12 measures: William Christopher Handy made considerable
profits out of this, first with Memphis Blues and then above all with St. Louis Blues,
published in 1914.
That year, the great season of Black Broadway in New York had almost completely sold out, when everybody went to see musicals written and performed (not
produced) by African American composers and artists like James Europe, Joe
Jordan and Will Marion Cook who also conducted the great ragtime orchestras.
141
Fig. 8.2 Different genres of black music in the USA at beginning of twentieth century
In the meantime, in the most degraded areas of Manhattan, such as Hells Kitchen,
stride piano started to take shape, all at the same time and independently of the birth
of jazz. All these types of music then converged into what we call jazz and in part
they have kept their original features: in part they have adapted and in part jazz itself
was transformed when it came into contact with them, for example, with the blues.
What we call jazz is actually something that is certainly focused on New Orleans
but which is also the result of a mix of all the types of black music present throughout America and therefore the result of many beginnings and many origins.
There is a last aspect to be underlined on the origins of jazz. Jazz came into being
in New Orleans, but did not develop in that city. This is one of those cases in which
there are material or cultural phenomena which arise in one place but then develop
elsewhere. The New Orleans musicians first migrated to the West Coast, to Los
Angeles and San Francisco, from there they went to Chicago (where many had gone
directly) attracted by new models of business, entertainment and leisure and from
there to New York. From this moment, New Orleans was no longer important for the
development of jazz: the flows of musicians tell us that that music developed
elsewhere.
8.2
Cultural Transfer in Recent Jazz History
Another couple of questions on the issue of diffused cultural traits also touch on
ideological issues. Critics and some musicians from the United States continue to
show a certain condescendence towards European jazz. Profound ignorance about
what is happening outside the USA can also be perceived: the Americans rightly
consider jazz as their music, with a history that is completely American. However,
142
S. Zenni
they find it difficult to realize that jazz, immediately after its birth, reached the four
corners of the world like a sort of big bang. Between the end of the second decade
of the twentieth century and the early 1930s jazz was being played everywhere: in
Johannesburg, Rome, Berlin and Paris, which in the 1920s was the third capital of
jazz along with Chicago and New York. Bombay and Calcutta, where jazz was
being played, were very lively cities but perhaps the greatest oriental capital of jazz
was Shanghai. Imagine the faces of the Muscovites or the inhabitants of St.
Petersburg when they saw Sidney Bechet arrive in 1926 with his soprano sax. What
do these cities have in common? They are places of transit, commercial junctions
for ships, railways and roads, that carry individuals, goods for example records,
scores and instruments and merchandise: in short, they are nerve centres of the
worlds great capitalist trade. Jazz is the offspring of the capitalist and commercial
boom of the early twentieth century and spread in the places of global leisure, entertainment and business, including Shanghai, which was one of the most important
terminals of this network. Buck Clayton, the great trumpeter and key soloist of
Count Basies orchestra from 1936, before joining that orchestra, had spent 2 years
playing jazz in Shanghai. We also know the story of the excellent pianist Teddy
Weatherford very well, who lived and worked in Shanghai, Sri Lanka and India, and
that of the clarinettist Rudy Jackson, who went from Duke Ellington to jazz in
Bombay.
This type of approach questions one of the fundamental paradigms of the history
of jazz by American historians: i.e. only what belongs to the U.S. cultural context or
what is influenced by that context is historically relevant. What does not fall within
that cultural influence is excluded from the picture, to the extent that American
historians are often seriously embarrassed by a figure such as the gypsy Django
Reinhardt, one of the greatest geniuses of the jazz guitar, but who does not have a
place in the model of development of American-centric jazz language. This paradigm must be subverted, because jazz is a global music of which the cultural traits
have spread all over the world. This is also true for the spread of apparently secondary traits, such as the business models (for example jazz festivals) or the circulation
of critical ideas (books, magazines etc.), a point which we will not go into here in
depth.
Artistic history must now take local heroes (Atkins 2003) into account: they
are musicians who had an enormous influence at local level and therefore are the
leading figures of other non-U.S. artistic centres. Jazz is multi-centric, and some of
these centres bypass American influence. One clamorous example is South African
jazz: not only Abdullah Ibrahim, who was actually stateless (although he lived in
the USA), but above all the Blue Notes, who in the early 1960s fled from Cape Town
to London, where they joined the vibrant local scene which mixed what was later to
be progressive rock, radical free jazz and South African jazz. While Ibrahim and
the Blue Notes were influenced by American jazz, the music produced in London in
the 1970s and 1980s shows little connection with the traditions and development of
jazz in the United States.
As a final example, one of the most fashionable record companies today is ECM,
which has asserted a real aesthetic of contemporary jazz worldwide that is defined
143
by a certain sound, and by atmospheres of refined lyrical intimacy which also

influence American jazz. The origin of this aesthetic dates back to the early 1960s
and the great Swedish pianist Jan Johansson. Johansson understood that one of the
possible paths for European jazz could be opened by mixing jazz with the popular
songs of his country, but with an original sound and approach which owed very little
to American jazz. Today that approach has become a second centre of influence for
jazz: from Sweden, thanks to ECM, it has extended to a broad section of contemporary jazz. As examples we can take Esbjrn Svensson, the Keith Jarrett of his solo
records and Brad Mehldau. They are all musicians to be scaled down, after having
listened to Johansson, whose music also challenges the theme-solos-theme model,
in favour of variation, where the theme is subject to minor alterations and harmonized differently each time. A new approach that then spread as a cultural trait in
other areas of jazz piano-playing.
References
Atkins, E. T. (Ed.). (2003). Jazz planet. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Eltis, D., & Richardson, D. (2010). Atlas of the transatlantic slave trade. Yale: Yale University
Press.
Hendler, M. (2008). Vorgeschichte des jazz: vom aufbruch der portugiesen zu Jelly Roll Morton.
Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt.
Hendler, M. (2010). Syncopated music: Frhgeschichte des jazz. Graz: Akademische Druck-u.
Verlagsanstalt.
Kubik, G. (1999). Africa and the blues. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Trad. it.: LAfrica
e il blues, Fogli Volanti, Subbiaco 2007, with CD.
Manning, P. (2004). Migration in world history. London: Routledge.
Sublette, N. (2008). The world that made New Orleans. From Spanish silver to Congo Square.
Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.
Zenni, S. (2012). Storia del jazz. Una prospettiva globale. Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa.
Chapter 9
Geographical Boundaries as Places of Meeting

and Diffusion of Cultural Traits
Stefano Malatesta, Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg,
and Enrico Squarcina
9.1
Boundaries and Places
Il fabbricato lungo la via che sin dai tempi pi remoti collega il Veneto con il
Tirolo1 (Rigoni Stern 1998: 52). These words mark the opening of the novel,
Sentieri sotto la neve, by Mario Rigoni Stern, an Italian writer famous for narrating
the places that, between 1915 and 1919, delineated the war front between the
Kingdom of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Osteria di confine (Rigoni
Stern 1998)2 tells the story of an old building that, from the end of the sixteenth
century up until the outbreak of World War I, had provided lodgings for the travellers, merchants, military officers and smugglers crossing one of the most stable
borders in European history: the historical boundaries between the AustroHungarian Empire and the Italian Kingdom.3 In fact, the reading of the historical
cartography of this region (Anzoise and Malatesta 2010) relates the substantial
continuity of these border lines even when, after World War I, the Treaty of Versailles
(1919) converted the Austro-Hungarian southern limits into an administrative
border between three Italian provinces.4 The Osteria5 has remained a symbolic
place independent of the political conflicts and treaties that, over a period of several
centuries, have defined these border lines both before and after 1919. It may be
1
The building is along the road that, since ancient times, has connected Veneto to Tyrol.
Literally the inn of the border.
3
We use the words borders and boundaries as synonymous, to mean the limits that demarcate the
political and cultural geographies of regions and territories.
4
Connection: On the importance of boundaries, especially the most stable ones, in channeling
cultural dynamics, see, for example, Chap. 15 for artifacts, and Chap. 18 for languages.
5
Osteria is an Italian word meaning both small restaurant and inn.
2
S. Malatesta (*) M. Schmidt di Friedberg E. Squarcina

Riccardo Massa Department of Educational Human Sciences, University of Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy
e-mail: stefano.malatesta@unimib.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_9
145
146
S. Malatesta et al.
argued that places such as this have represented to a greater extent than cartography or political documents the true elements of continuity within the history of
this border, and that this continuity has thus been reified in the material objects that
have accumulated in the area. Rigoni Stern described the symbolic value of these
places, writing that the Osteria had been one and the same for centuries, the only
building left standing after wars and fires (Rigoni Stern 1998: 57). Furthermore,
this relevance is confirmed by the toponymy of this region, since currently the
crossing point located along the administrative border is still named Osteria al
Termine, which literally means the inn on the limit. The Osterias status as an
object physically present on the border allowed it to become a symbolic place in the
construction of the local landscape and a reference point for the population of
the entire region. Indeed, in inns such as this, the Italians [who] crossed over to the
Austrians and the Austrians [who] crossed over to the Italians (ivi: 54) shared
the produce of local pasturelands and fostered the diffusion of the cultural traits that
characterized the entire border region between the two kingdoms, including local
dialects, techniques of pasturage and folk-tales.
These places still wield significant symbolic power, especially if we consider
that the southern limit of Trentino (the borderline we are describing here), for centuries finis terrae of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has come to take on a decisive
function in the composition of the local landscape. Although having lost its secular
international value, it has preserved an important role in the geographical image of
this multicultural region (Anzoise and Malatesta 2010: 44). In effect, on examining
the case of southern Trentino from a combined historical and geographical perspective, the extent of the changes in the function of the border as a political institution
immediately becomes apparent: from a boundary delimiting national jurisdiction it
became a war front, later going on to become a symbol of independence and more
recently, during the last decade in particular, becoming a brand that is functional
to the construction of a successful tourist image for an area with otherwise limited
appeal from the point of view of its natural and cultural heritage.
This is the setting chosen by Rigoni Stern for his metaphor of the encounter
among historical events, local practices and folk tales. The author described this
encounter as an imaginary dialogue between historical figures that played a prominent role in World War I and lesser-known personages taken from local history. The
Osteria is the concrete and physical site at which this encounter takes place. Seated
together in the same room, we find Franz Conrad von Htzendorf, who led the
Strafexpedition6 of 1916, Luigi Cadorna, Commander-in-Chief of the Italian army
up to that year, King Vittorio Emanuele III, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and
Robert Musil who, in 1916, was a serving Imperial officer. The Osteria materially
represents the space, that is to say, the border, and the time, that is to say, 1916, in
which these historical figures were active. As illustrated by the case of the Osteria,
the Finnish geographer Anssi Paasi has explained that all places are the outcome of
a complex encounter of materiality, processes and practices: regions and localities
6
Literally punitive expedition. This was the term used to describe the counteroffensive launched
by the Empire in 1916 along the Italian front.
Geographical Boundaries as Places of Meeting and Diffusion of Cultural Traits
147
are understood [] as being a complex synthesis or manifestation of objects, patterns, processes, social practices and inherent power relations (Paasi 1996: 32). We
may, therefore, see places as centres in which cultural traits and social relations join
together giving rise to original hybrid forms.7 Focusing our attention on the materiality of places and their location within space that is to say on the conditions
required for the encounter between the various dimensions of human life helps us
to understand how, especially in particular areas such as the border regions, cultural
traits are strongly related to their location in space; so much so that, as discussed in
the closing section of this paper, certain symbolic places may be included in the set
of traits characterizing the cultural systems of border regions. This interpretation
implies that places located within liminal spaces are particularly relevant to the
reading of these encounters and processes of cultural hybridisation (Bhabha 2004).
The aim of a geographical reading is to identify how these places of encounter
generate new representations, practices, languages and narratives (of borders) that
allow subjects to go beyond the boundaries (Bhabha 2004). Seated inside the
Osteria, Mario Rigoni Stern turns to Emperor Franz Joseph and to King Vittorio
Emanuele III asking them: what have you reached? I used to get together with
people. With everyone: here and on the other side of the border (Rigoni Stern
1998: 58). In other words, as an inhabitant of a border region, he explains to their
majesties that in 1916 the Osteria wasnt merely a checkpoint located along a political limit, but that this building allowed the meeting and cultural hybridization of two
human communities who spoke different languages and owned different stories.
If we are satisfied in defining cultural traits as units of acquired behavior and
material objects transmitted within spaces internal to human communities or
between one human group and another, then the places from which they are transmitted become a topic of key interest. In this paper we do not focus on the mechanisms governing this transmission of culture through space, but rather on the
materiality of the places in which it takes place.8 This is because in cultural geography places are viewed as the product of the encounter within space of practices,
relationships, artifacts and representations, in other words, of the immaterial and
material elements that make up the cultural traits of a human group. A place is such
because it is associated with a practice, because it corresponds to a socially produced
image or because it symbolizes values, stories or narratives shared by individuals
who recognise themselves as belonging to a human group. In border regions, such
imagery and values play a key role in the sharing and hybridisation of geographical
narratives, languages and images: that is to say, in the diffusion of cultural traits in
space. In the present paper, our leading interest is in the places that materially form
the landscapes of border regions (Minghi and Rumley 1991); therefore, we analyze
Connection: See the process of cultural creolization described in Sect. 2.5. The origin of jazz
(Chap. 8), the hybridizations taking place in international cooperation (Chap. 13), and some cases
of origins of new languages (Chap. 18) can be interpreted in this framework.
8
Connection: Mechanisms of cultural transmission are described in many other Chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6,
7, and 10. Chapters 11 and 12 refer to mathematical models of cultural transmission.
148
S. Malatesta et al.
the material and immaterial cultural components that encounter one another by virtue of their position within space, in other words, by virtue of being on a border.
In the first paragraphs we discussed the definitions of boundaries both as political
entities and as objects of cultural representations. We aimed to stress how these
cultural representations can be understood as political, social and private narratives:
in other words, as key elements in the construction of the geographical image of
border regions. In the following, we will attempt to show how this dual nature that
is, being both a political subject and a cultural object is understandable if we focus
on a number of symbolic places that are both physical signs of the political geography and material symbols of the geographical image of these border regions.
According to this interpretation we re-read the novel by Rigoni Stern as a metaphor
that stands for a border place exercising both functions: a political sign and a cultural object. We focus on the chronological and spatial processes that transformed
this building into a cultural object located along the border. While Mario Rigoni
Stern describes this building as a landmark of the cultural and political geography
of his own lands, the Osteria can even be considered a peculiar cultural trait of the
these regions.
9.2
Boundaries as Political Subjects
In 1977, sociologist Raimondo Strassoldo claimed that all systems are spatially
localized and bounded, defining the border as a line circumscribing the localities
in which [] human (and material) components (of social groups and institutions)
are placed (Strassoldo 1977: 84). While this is clearly a very broad-level definition,
it nonetheless defies the notion that we live in a borderless world. Indeed, as Josef
Langer has recently observed, in the broadest sense, every entity (buildings, bodies,
empires, organizations, landscapes, and ideas) has a limit. Hence, the ideological
postulation of a borderless world is an illusive and misleading notion (Langer
2012: 183). The evolution of historical processes and of contemporary political
geography has not rejected the political function of borders, tending rather to
redefine the value and meaning attributed by human communities to such political
boundaries. In this view, borders continue to feature prominently in contemporary
descriptions of the political geography of regions. Also within the realm of geography, Peter J. Taylor and Colin Flint remind us that as geographers, together with the
capital cities, boundaries are the artifacts that most demand our attention (Taylor
and Flint 2000: 161).
Political geography has long associated borders with the scale of the nation state,
viewing them as the limits which map out power relations between states, within a
perspective that identifies political institutions with the Westphalian State Model
(Paasi 1996; Raffestin 2005). Political limits or, to use a Latin word, fines, have long
been used as a key category for defining political, social and geographical processes
149
on this scale.9 While attempting to develop a theory of limit, Claude Raffestin

(2005) has observed that, according to spatial analysis, the border is connected to
the idea of drawing a line of separation, and, in particular, to the Latin expression
regere fines: that is, to govern a space, mark out a border and create a norm. The
limit coincides with the exercise of state power over a territory: at the same time it
is an imposed norm and an institution that creates difference. According to one very
clear definition the borderline expresses the limit inside of which a state may
sovereignly exercise its coercive power (Raffestin 2005: 7).10 Within such an
interpretation, there is a key difference between boundary and frontier understood not as a definite line of separation [but] as a zone of contact (Taylor and
Flint 2000: 288), or, as a more detailed definition would have it, the geographic
area of proximity to the border of the state within which territorial development is
influenced to some degree by the existence of the border itself (Newman 2005: 26).
Discussing this distinction Elena dellAgnese (2005) reminds us that, in political
geography, the word frontier has a number of different meanings; she stressed the
idea of the frontier as an expansive fines, underling the transformative and mobile
nature of this geographical feature and the linkage between the frontier and the
landscape: frontier is the belt of territory around a border, where the meeting of
two different political but also cultural, according to the nation-state vision
entities determines a particular landscape (dellAgnese 2005: XIII). In this paper,
we do not explore the theoretical and etymological distinctions between boundaries
and frontiers beyond pointing out that, within our own perspective, these two terms
facilitate two different readings of the political and cultural geography of a given
region: frontiers materialize processes, whereas borders materialize institutions; or
more precisely, they are institutions. The association between borders and institutions has been discussed by David Newman (2003, 2005), who has illustrated how,
in the political geography of a region, borders establish rules that define the degree
of inclusion and exclusion of subjects within space, and that, as we have already
pointed out, borders do not cease to exist but change their function and meaning
over time. It follows that borders are active subjects in the process determining the
relationship between human communities and the places in which they live. It is
therefore possible to define borders as political subjects that are resilient to change,
not only because they continue to fulfil an institutional function in the social and
political life of human communities, but above all because they are constituent elements of the cultural geography and landscape of a region (Minghi and Rumley
1991).
Political geography has attempted to produce a classification of the different
types of boundary (Prescott 1987).11 However, if we aim to develop an understanding
9
Connection: See Chap. 3 on the use of geographical boundaries and maps to build national identity. Chapter 7 provides some elements to reflect on the disjuction of cultural and national
identities.
10
The authors translated the quotations originally written in Italian.
11
For a reading of the famous Genetic Boundary Classification, developed by Richard Hartshorn,
see dellAgnese (2003).
150
S. Malatesta et al.
of the function of boundaries in the cultural geography of a region, we need to go

beyond this level of analysis, because, as demonstrated by Anssi Paasi (1996), the
latter is destined to fail. We must therefore approach borders from a broader
perspective according to which political limits are explicit products of a set of
cultural, economic and political interactions and processes occurring in space (ivi:
26). Anssi Paasis vision is key because it enables us to grasp the symbolic and
cultural meaning of these political and cultural institutions. In his view, which could
be related to the rethinking geopolitics led by Gearid Tualthail and Simon
Dalby (1998), boundaries are a means of reifying power, rendering visible the
power emerging from social practices, from social and spatial relations (Paasi
1996: 28). Therefore boundaries are political actors that influence both cultural
geography and social relationships. Furthermore, as institutions, they are subjects
that construct the political geography of states, regions and human communities,
and, at the same time, they are objects, on the basis of which narratives and geographical images of these states, regions and human communities are constructed.
In this paper, we examine the ways in which the places that are located along borders fulfill this dual function of political subject and cultural object. Our reading of
borders frame them as institutions that contribute to establish a relationship between
places, cultures and representations: in other words, as the core subject matter of
cultural geography (Claval 2003). We refer again to the Osteria of Rigoni Stern: the
dialogue between historical figures and lesser-known local personages reminds us
that everyone, some more than others, has dealt with this place (Rigoni Stern
1998: 58). Comparing the political history of this region with the stories of local
communities, the author shows how the Osteria is a place born from the encounter
between the political geography here represented by World War I and by its
historical figures and the cultural traits here represented by the local practices
and folks of these lands. A shepherd, addressing Franz Conrad, says: after youre
gone, in 1919, I returned here with my sheep and I found many shelters to sleep
(Ivi: 61).
9.3
Boundaries as Cultural Objects
A mutual relationship exists between the historical evolution of a political institution and the material transformation of places. For example, changes in a borderline
influence the position of a checkpoint or customs house, and at the same time, the
construction or transformation of this checkpoint or customs house, bridge or military outpost contributes to redefining the meaning attributed by local communities
to a place located on the border, or even to the border itself. This mutual relationship
is a key element in cultural geographical readings of border regions, because it helps
us to understand that political and social transformations are linked to the construction of the geographical imaginary and that human affairs on the local scale act
on often redefining the association between places and how they are represented;
indeed, pressures for change in territorial structures emerge from social, economic
151
and political action, new representations and the struggle to create new stories, new
significations for social communities (Paasi 1996: 23). Undoubtedly, this focus on
the association between materiality and the representation of places is informed by
a specific cultural reading of borders according to which all frontiers are [] at
the same time as they are barriers, places of communication and exchange (Morin
1977, in Bennington 1990: 217). At the same time, it also falls within a consolidated
geographical tradition spearheaded, in different periods, by Yi-Fu Tuan (1974)
and David Knight (1982) that views borders as playing a key role in the creation
of spatial mechanisms of identity construction through the affirmation of otherness.
In the words of David Newman in creating otherness, we produce separate identities that are maintained through borders. The location of a border may be modified
over time [] but borders continue to demarcate the parameters within which
identities are conceived, perceived, maintained and reformulated (2005: 23). This
interpretation certainly places the emphasis on limits as constructors of difference
at the political-institutional level, but also at the level of the socialization processes
through which human communities associate places with an us and a them
(Paasi 1996; Forsberg 1996; van Houtum 2000). Indeed, as highlighted once more
by David Newman, contemporary geography studies the process of identity
construction enacted by boundaries via which territories and populations are
included in or excluded from a hierarchical system of groups, affiliations and identities (2005: 19). Again, this brings into focus the relationship between borders as
political institutions and the narratives that are produced about them at a local level.
It is to be noted that, from a somewhat similar perspective, cultural anthropology
has also focused on borders as cultural objects, in line with the idea that cultural
constructions [] give meaning to the boundaries between communities and
between nations (Wilson and Donnan 1998: 4). Cultural anthropology aimed to
investigate how border practices and imaginaries form key elements of the anthropology of the local communities (Cole and Wolf 1974).12
According with this cultural reading of boundaries we aim to discuss the relevance of border places representation within the political, social and private
spheres. Therefore, we use some geographical key concepts such as landscape,
material memory and mental maps (Lynch 1960; Gould and White 1974). We may
identify three key elements that act on the relationship between border places and
public narratives: the cultural durability of boundaries; the importance of symbolic
places for private geographies; and the representation of symbolic places as places
of memory. Through these three levels, the border becomes an object of cultural,
political and private representations: not merely as an abstract idea, but as a material
sign of cultural geography. Indeed, these narratives are strictly linked to the existence of physical landmarks such as the Osteria. In Sterns novel, the building,
described as a place of encounter, passes through these three representational levels:
it is a sign of the geopolitical limits things changed since 1866 because the new
state border passed near the Osteria (Rigoni Stern 1998: 53), but it is also the symbol of the border in the geographical images and mental maps of the inhabitants.
12
Connection: See, again Chap. 3.
152
9.3.1
S. Malatesta et al.
The Cultural Durability of Boundaries
The durability of borders relates in some sense to the attribute that political geography, from Richard Hartshorne onwards (dellAgnese 2003), has associated with the
so-called relic boundaries: that is to say, with those institutions that, despite having lost their political function, continue to play a key role in cultural geography.13
This attribute has already been discussed, in the second section above, where we
defined borders as institutions that are resilient to historical change. If we transfer
this property to the domain of narratives, folk tales and geographical representations, we realize that the border retains a powerful and prominent role in mechanisms of identity construction and in the attribution of meaning to places by local
communities, even when its geopolitical function has been redefined or suppressed.
A clear example of this is the earlier cited case of the southern limit of Trentino,
where the Osteria is located, for centuries finis terrae of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and since 1919 the administrative border of three Italian provinces. There is
direct influence of boundaries on the construction of geographical images and social
relations on the local scale, even when their meaning has been strongly redefined
within the political geography of a region. Indeed: it is clear that the day-to-day
lives of individuals, and even their life-histories, are organized in relation to various
territorial units which have to be produced [and that] the construction of spatial
boundaries is always a part of the construction of territorial units and spaces (Paasi
1996: 32). Therefore, according to David Newman, these institutions continue to
demarcate the territories within which we are compartmentalized, determine with
whom we interact and affiliate, and the extent to which we are free to move from
one space to another (dellAgnese 2003: 123). Borders may fulfill this powerful
function not only as political institutions that are resistant to change, but also thanks
to the material nature of the symbolic places that are accumulated, built, transformed and celebrated throughout border regions. The representations, narrations
and imaginaries that are constructed around the notion of border possess great
political and cultural value, which is captured, once more, by David Newman: one
means of gaining a deeper understanding of how a border is perceived may be to
explore narratives on the border itself and the ways in which it is represented through
a great variety of images, from landscapes and real life practices to literature, media,
artistic representations, maps, stamps [] (2005: 29).14
13
Connection: Cultural traits that lose or change their function can be seen as undergoing a process of re-use or, in evolutionary terms, exaptation. To deepen these concepts, see the Connection
in the introduction of Chap. 3.
14
Connection: The reflections of Chap. 21 on the function of literature may add some elements to
think about the artistic representation of places.
9.3.2
153
Boundaries and Private Geographies
Beyond this corpus of public, and culturally important, representations, the places
that materially constitute a border are objects at another representational level, that
is the mimesis of spaces into private or collective mental maps (Lynch 1960; Gould
and White 1974). According to both behavioral geography (Gold 1980) and spatial
behavior theory (Golledge 1997), our behaviors within space and our attributions to
places of affective and value-laden meanings, are associated with the representation
that we construct of our spatial experiences. This is a theoretical framework that we
do not discuss in depth here. However, we focus on some of its key concepts to draw
a link between the mechanisms underlying the construction of mental maps, that is
to say, our graphic representations of our lived spatial experiences, and the significant influence that border places exercise over local cultures. The construction of
mental maps depends on our experience, not so much as isolated subjects but rather
as individuals who share a cultural background with a social group. This background is related to local practices, geographic imaginaries, languages and stories.
In our experience, this corpus of cultural objects is hybridised with our private
perceptive, emotional and experiential spheres.15 The resulting encounter is complex
and difficult to tease out. Nonetheless, a comparative reading of different mental
maps allows us to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms by which the
geographical imaginary is produced at the social level. This comparative reading is
feasible because the graphic representations of our spatial experiences are based on
landmarks and limits that describe and define objects that are spatially significant for us and for our reference group, and that establish the form, meaning and
above all the boundaries of our spatial experiences. When we transpose our mental
maps into graphic form, we attempt to represent a place that is defined and distinctly
separated within space, by endowing it with form and providing linear and spatial
criteria of inclusion and exclusion, in other words, margins.16 We also enrich it with
objects that define its nature, meaning and function, that is to say, landmarks and
symbolic places. The margins help us to include all the elements that at a spatial
level make up our image of a place, excluding those that literally are not that
place; while the landmarks express the functional and symbolic value that we attribute to a place, whether it is a district, street, square or border crossing. The limits
act as a spatial primitive (Golledge 1997) in the transfer from the perceptive to the
representative sphere: along with nodes and paths (Lynch 1960), they are the category around which we tend to organize our spatial experience and, above all, around
which we structure our graphic representations and narratives of this experience.
Although landmarks are not a spatial primitive, they are equally important because
through their location on our mental maps we endow the representations we
15
Connection: Some psychological processes of cultural elaboration are presented in Chap. 7,
especially with regards to multicultural minds.
16
Connection: See Chap. 10 for a philosophical reflection on the notion of map, and on some
typologies of maps in representing the origin and diffusion of cultural traits.
154
S. Malatesta et al.
produce with social and cultural value, transforming a pattern of spatial organizers
(limits, nodes and paths) into the narrative of a place, thereby attributing personal,
social and cultural value to space. A behaviorally-informed reading of spatial
experience is far from immune to criticism; nonetheless its emphasis on the key role
of landmarks i.e., symbolic objects and margins i.e., boundaries in the
construction of geographic imaginaries, brings us to the second level of analysis
referred to above the significant direct influence of boundaries on the construction
of private geographies and social relations on the local scale by enhancing our
understanding of the symbolic function exercised by the places that are accumulated, constructed and celebrated throughout border regions.
9.3.3
Boundaries and Memory
In this section we have alluded more than once to the association between celebration and boundaries. The celebration of borders, through public events, annual
festivities, monumental objects and artistic performances, is a further representational level linking symbolic places with the diffusion of cultural traits in border
regions. Just as in the earlier example of the political limit between the Kingdom of
Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, border regions are often affected by wars
that are fought by states but at the same time impact heavily on the materiality of
places on a local scale, and in consequence on the culture geographies of the human
communities inhabiting these regions. It often happens that the memory of these
events is celebrated for a great number of years afterwards, through public events
and exhibitions that emphasize the association between memory and place.
According to the historian Pierre Nora (1989), this association is the result of a
process through which human communities attribute a symbolic meaning to material objects, as reifications of shared values.17 For this association to be assimilated
both by the inhabitants of the places in question and by visitors, it is necessary to
construct, through a celebration, a link that goes beyond the time and place in which
the original experience was lived. In other words, it is necessary to create the illusion
that visiting these places or monuments means personally experiencing the memory
of past events. Thanks to this illusion the forging of a link between memory and
place can even occur at a great distance from the spaces where those events actually
happened. Within geography, a substantial body of literature has interpreted this
function of monuments in light of strategies of celebrating power through landscape
and the materiality of places (Jackson 1984; Lacoste 1990; Minghi and Rumley
1991; dellAgnese 2004).
What we wish, above all, to highlight in this paper is that in this way too border
places, as cultural objects, carry out both a material and a symbolic function in the
diffusion of stories, narratives and geographical images in space. This function, as
we have seen, is visible at the political (borderscapes), social (celebrations) and
17
Connection: For a discussion of values as cultural traits, see Sect. 14.3 and Chap. 12.
155
private (mental maps) levels. It is therefore a prominent component in the construction of the cultural heritage shared by the human communities inhabiting border
regions.
9.4
Symbolic Borderplaces: Places as Cultural Traits
It is true that the cultural value of border places must be read in light of the historical, geographic, social and ideological context within which they are situated (Paasi
1996). It is equally true however that their being on the border and their being
a representation of the historical, geographic, private, social and ideological
happenings on that border leads us to claim that, above all else, these objects materialize the cultural geography of the human groups inhabiting them. Whether these
places are points of contact between different cultural or social systems as illustrated by Geoffrey Bennington (1990), or symbolic objects in the representation of
political power as envisaged by Julian Minghi and Dennis Rumley (1991).
In this paper, we have placed great emphasis on the local scale and on the materiality of places, following the view that localities define [] lives in which class,
gender and ethnic identities are constructed as imagined places (Taylor and Flint
2000: 288). In fact, our key interest was to link the production and hybridization of
given cultural traits, particularly geographical narratives and representations, to the
places that physically constitute the landscapes of border regions. It is clear that we
have not delved into the vast corpus of evidence on the forms and representations
making up the cultural and political geography of the different regions in which
limits still exercise a key function as political institutions or relic borders. To make
our case, we have drawn on a single example from Italian history (the southern
border of Tirol) and a metaphoric place (the Osteria al Termine), which we have
also used to frame our reflections within a precise social, geographic and ideological context, as recommended by Anssi Paasi whom we have cited above. At the
same time, however, we underline that the value of symbolic places in the cultural
geography of border regions may also be read independently of context, first of all,
because border landscapes with customs houses and associated controls, and
varieties of defensive structures, have become distinctive locations in the modern
world (Taylor and Flint 2000: 161). Therefore, the objects we have described in
this paper contribute to the construction of landscapes in the most diverse border
regions existing in the world. Secondly, because, as pointed out at the beginning of
the paper, the changes that affect a border as a political institution, and those affecting the representations and meanings attributed by local communities to border
places, are highly relevant to any social and geographical context that one may
choose to study. The interpretative value of this reading or an attempt to place the
relationship between political institutions and the materiality of places at the heart
of cultural geography, also lies in the idea that clearly without overlooking local,
social, historical or ideological typicalities the objects making up the landscapes
of border regions are key elements of the different cultural systems to be encountered
156
S. Malatesta et al.
Fig. 9.1 The Osteria today. The building is still located on the path that crosses the ancient border.
Source: photo by Valentina Anzoise, September 2006
in areas crossed by limits, whether geopolitical boundaries or relic borders. This

was the case for the historical events at the Osteria narrated by Mario Rigoni Stern.
Up to 1919, and later up to and including the present this building was both an
element denoting a political limit and a meeting place for human, historical and
cultural events throughout the finis terrae of Tirol and Venice. The Osteria successfully fulfilled both functions because it was a symbol of the border and an institution
in the life of the local communities, but above all a material object that was and
is recognizable thanks to its key position in the geography of these border regions
(Fig. 9.1).
At this point we can go further, proposing an even more daring reading of the
function of border-places within cultural geography. In order to do so, we need to
start from a very broad-level definition that put forward at the outset of our discussion which allows us to encompass different interpretations from within contemporary cultural geography: cultural traits are units of acquired behavior and material
objects transmitted within spaces internal to human communities or between one
human group and another. This transmission, according to human geography, may
be described in terms of spatial diffusion, similar to the models used to interpret the
spatial evolution of religious or migratory movements; but also in terms of the accumulation across a given territory of material signs linked with a reference culture or
social system, as in the cultural and social reading of geographic landscapes. The
stratification of material objects, or landmarks which exist because they are linked
to the geography, i.e., a specific location within space, and to the human events, i.e.,
the history, society and culture, of a border region may be interpreted as a process
of construction and signification of the cultural heritage of human communities.
157
Fig. 9.2 A detail of a touristic map printed by the local council. The Osteria al Termine is a part
of the cultural heritage of the region presented to travellers, together with the memorial stones
(Cippo Battaglia del Basson), the war cemeteries and the military outposts of World War I (Forte
Bisa Verle, Forte Cima Vezzena). The broken red line represents the political boundaries and the
World War I frontline. Source: Anzoise, Malatesta 2010, APT Folgaria, Lavarone, Luserna
By constructing these material objects and attributing a symbolic meaning to them

on account of the human events that take place in them, the various social and political actors effectively enact processes of space- and place-making. The term spacemaking specifically refers to the set of strategies, measures, and material objects
through which political institutions act on areas crossed by a political limit in order
to control, and to communicate their control, over space. Place-making, on the other
hand, refers to the set of processes through which social actors and local inhabitants
give meaning to the symbolic landmarks located along boundaries.
Referring to our case, over the centuries the Osteria has been the object of both
space- and place-making processes. This building was first a public shelter for
travelers, then a private inn, then a refuge for shepherds, followed by a military
outpost and a checkpoint, and finally as a landmark drawn on travelers maps
(Fig. 9.2).18 Indeed, nowadays, the Osteria is a known meeting point for bikers,
tourists and hikers that visit this region and stop there while crossing the border
between Trentino e Veneto. This redefinition is the result of both a space-making
strategy led by the political institutions, and a place-making process that involved
private, public and social representations. We can affirm that the complex political,
social and cultural structure that has passed through this place has transformed the
Osteria into a key element of the cultural geography of this border region.
18
Connection: More reflections on the notion of map in relation to culture are found in Chaps. 3
and 10.
158
S. Malatesta et al.
These processes are of great cultural importance, because they allow us to think
of border places not only as places of communication and exchange (Morin 1977),
but also as material objects that actually make up the local culture of border regions
and which may therefore be included amongst the set of traits, such as local dialects
and folk-tales, that are transmitted within human communities and between one
human group and another. At the beginning of this paper we demonstrated that the
symbolic places that arise along a border constitute its material form, but are also
the object around which both public and subjective representations of the border
itself are constructed. We put forth the Osteria as an example of a spatial theatre in
which cultural encounter and hybridization takes place. The same is true of the
bridges, customs houses, frontiers or smugglers passes that are distributed along
any border. The places that constitute the material and narrative nature of borders,
within the cultural and political geography of border regions, also function as cultural traits that are resilient to change. Similar to language, myths and folk tales
(traditionally defined as local cultural traits) they are the constituent material of
cultural heritage and of the relationship between human communities and local
geography. Undoubtedly, the landscape that they contribute to creating is subject to
a continuous action of re-signification. Nonetheless, as happened in the case of the
old Osteria al Termine, within this ongoing re-signification process, symbolic
places continue to function as generators and disseminators of practices, symbologies and narratives connected to borders, thereby helping to amplify the importance
of the borders themselves, as cultural objects and key political subjects within the
geography of the regions that they pass through.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank Clare OSullivan for her language revisions.
References
Agnew, J. (1998). Geopolitics: Re-visioning world politics. London: Routledge.
Amilthat-Szary, A. L., & Fourny, M. (Eds.). (2006). Aprs les frontiers, avec la frontier. Nouvelles
dynamiques transfrontalires en Europe. Avignon: ditions de laube.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London: Verso.
Anzoise, V., & Malatesta, S. (2010). Visual and tourist dimensions of Trentinos borderscape. In
P. Burns, J. A. Lester, & L. Biddings (Eds.), Tourism and visual culture (Methods and cases,
Vol. 2, pp. 4446). Wallingford: CABI.
Barowsky, T. (2002). Mental representation and processing of geographic knowledge. New York:
Springer.
Bennington, G. (1990). Postal politics and the institution of the nation. In H. K. Bhabha (Ed.),
Nation and narration (pp. 211234). London: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Brambilla, C. (2009). Ripensare le frontiere in Africa. Il caso Angola/Namibia e lidentit
kwanyama. Torino: LHarmattan Italia.
Claval, P. (2003). La gographie culturelle. Paris: Armand Colin.
Cole, J. W., & Wolf, T. M. (1974). The hidden frontier: Ecology and ethnicity in an alpine valley.
New York: Academic.
Cosgrove, D. (1999). Mappings. London: Reaktion.
159
Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (Eds.). (1988). The iconography of landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
dellAgnese, E. (2003). Political geography as a discursive narrative: Hartshornes genetic
boundary classification. Paper presented at the conference of IGU Commission on political
geography, political geography and geopolitics: Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Moscow, June
2003.
dellAgnese, E. (2004). Sarajevo come paesaggio simbolico. Riv Geo Ita, 111(2), 259283.
dellAgnese, E. (2005). Introduzione. In E. dellAgnese & E. Squarcina (Eds.), Europa. Vecchi
confini e nuove frontiere (pp. IXXIX). Torino: Utet.
Farinelli, F. (1992). I segni del mondo: immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in et
moderna. Scandicci: Nuova Italia.
Farinelli, F. (2003). Geografia: unintroduzione ai modelli del mondo. Torino: Einaudi.
Forsberg, T. (1996). Beyond sovereignty, within territoriality: Mapping the space of late-modern
(geo) politics. Cooperation and Conflict, 31(4), 355386.
Gold, J. R. (1980). An introduction to behavioral geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Golledge, R. G. (1997). Spatial behaviour. New York: Gulford Press.
Gould, P. R., & White, R. (1974). Mental maps. Middelsex: Penguin Books.
Habermas, J. (2012). The crisis of the European Union. A response. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying, practices. London:
Sage.
Jackson, J. B. (1984). A pair of ideal landscapes. In J. B. Jackson (Ed.), Discovering the vernacular landscape (pp. 955). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jackson, P. (1989). Maps and meaning. London: Unwin Hyman.
Knight, D. (1982). Identity and territory: Geographical perspectives on nationalism and regionalism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 72, 514531.
Lacoste, Y. (1990). Paysages politiques. Paris: Librairie Gnrale Franaise.
Langer, J. (2012). The contingency of Europes boundaries. In F. Hllinger & M. Hadler (Eds.),
Crossing borders, shifting boundaries. National and transnational identities in Europe and
beyond (pp. 179200). Frankfurt-on-Main: Campus.
Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Malatesta, S., & Squarcina, E. (2011). Where does Europe end? The representation of Europe and
Turkey in Italian primary school textbooks. RIGEO, 1(2), 106134.
Minghi, J., & Rumley, D. (1991). The geography of border landscapes. New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, D. (2005). Landscape. In D. Atkinson, P. Jackson, D. Sibley, & N. Washbourne (Eds.),
Cultural geography: A critical dictionary of key concepts (pp. 4956). London/New York:
Tauris.
Morin, E. (1977). La Mthode. La nature de la nature. Paris: Seuil.
Newman, D. (2003). Boundaries. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, & G. Tualthail (Eds.), A companion
of political geography (pp. 121137). Malden: Blackwell.
Newman, D. (2005). Unagenda per la ricerca. In E. dellAgnese & E. Squarcina (Eds.), Europa.
Vecchi confini e nuove frontiere (pp. 1932). Torino: UTET.
Newman, D. (2006). The lines that continue to separate us: Border in our borderless world.
Progress in Human Geography, 30(2), 143162.
Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mmoire. Representations, 7(26),
724.
Tualthail, G., & Dalby, S. (1998). Introduction: Rethinking geopolitics: Towards a critical
geopolitics. In G. Tualthail & S. Dalby (Eds.), Rethinking geopolitics (pp. 115). London/
New York: Routledge.
Paasi, A. (1996). Territories, boundaries and consciousness. The changing geographies of the
Finnish-Russian border. Chichester: Wiley.
Paasi, A. (2003). Territory. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, & G. Tualthail (Eds.), A companion of
political geography (pp. 109122). Malden: Blackwell.
Prescott, J. R. V. (1987). Political frontiers and boundaries. London: Unwin Hyman.
160
S. Malatesta et al.
Raffestin, C. (2005). Confini e Limiti. In E. dellAgnese & E. Squarcina (Eds.), Europa. Vecchi
confini e nuove frontiere (pp. 516). Torino: UTET.
Rajaram, P. K., & GrundY-Warr, C. (Eds.). (2007). Borderscapes. Hidden geographies ad politics
at territorys edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rigoni Stern, M. (1998). Osteria di confine. In M. Rigoni Stern (Ed.), Sentieri sotto la neve
(pp. 5263). Torino: Einaudi.
Rygiel, K. (1998). Stabilizing borders: The geopolitics of national identity construction in Turkey.
In G. Tualthail & S. Dalby (Eds.), Rethinking geopolitics (pp. 106130). London/New York:
Routledge.
Strassoldo, R. (1977). The study of boundaries. The Jerusalem Journal of International Relations,
2(3), 81107.
Taylor, P. J., & Flint, C. (2000). Political geography. World-economy, nation-state and locality.
Harlow: Pearson Education.
Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes and values.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Turco, A. (2009). Topogense : la gnalogie du lieu et la constitution du territoire. In M. Vanier
(Ed.), Territoires, territoriallit, territorialisation. Controverses et perspectives. Rennes:
Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Van Houtum, H. (2000). An overview of European geographical research on borders and border
regions. Journal of Borderland Studies, 15(1), 5783.
Wilson, T. M., & Donnan, H. (1998). Nation, state and identity at international borders. In T. M.
Wilson & H. Donnan (Eds.), Border identities. Nation and state at international frontiers
(pp. 130). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, T. M., & Donnan, H. (2005). Territory, identity and the places in-between: Culture and
power in European borderlands. In T. M. Wilson & H. Donnan (Eds.), Culture and power at the
edges of the state. National support and subversion in European border regions (pp. 130).
Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers.
Chapter 10
Maps, Diagrams and Charts: Making

the Cultural Trait Visible
Fulvio Carmagnola
10.1
Introduction
This brief paper, which the curators have kindly insisted on including in the book,
is completely fortuitous and has no claims to being scientific. The idea came from a
comment on a recent book on jazz, Storia del jazz. Una prospettiva globale, by
Stefano Zenni, on the illustrations, or better, the diagrams or charts contained within
it, some of which are used in this piece to support my explanations.1
This subsequently led me to study the book by Franco Moretti (2005), La letteratura vista da lontano (Literature from afar), in which an important distinction is
made between the notion of diagram and that of map. Some useful elements for the
discussion on the way we represent or could represent cultural traits will perhaps,
then, emerge.
This paper is made up of several distinct parts. The longest of which is a comment
on the maps in Zennis book. There are also some considerations on the possibility
that the notion of cultural trait, which in itself is problematic, can be applied to
some fields of human sciences even beyond literary theories, and some digressions
on the representation of history and on the very concept of map.
Connection: Stefano Zenni presents some of the arguments of the cited book in Chap. 8, where
some other figures can be found.
F. Carmagnola (*)
e-mail: fulvio.carmagnola@unimib.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_10
161
162
10.2
F. Carmagnola
Origin, Cause, and Value
The reconstruction of a phenomenon, for example a musical phenomenon such as

jazz, raises a question that emerges repeatedly with regard to history: do historians have the job of tracing a journey from the origin of history or to the origin of
history? The question of the origin in philosophic thought, especially due to the
influence of Nietzsches work, brings with it several other questions concerning that
of the cause and that of the value. For instance, how and where does a cultural
trait originate? What is or are the causes? And what position does it have on the
scale of importance of a certain culture?
The question of the origins holds a very important position in contemporary philosophy, as a problem. It could be said that the origin of the origin as a problem or
as a discussion on the question of the origin has its origin in Nietzsche. Michel
Foucault re-visited this question very effectively more recently. His view on origins
has an exemplary value: history must be understood not as a search for the origin, but
on the contrary, to dispel the chimera of the origin as Foucault wrote in a short and
well-known text on the conception of history in Nietzsche (Foucault 1971: 29ff.).
Jacques Derrida, the twentieth century French philosopher, contributed a fundamental component of thought, in keeping with Foucault and with the whole or the
koin to what is known as the French Theory (Cusset 2003), which consists precisely
of the criticism of the myth of the origin. Derrida insisted a great deal on the
contemporary awareness that there is not one origin, and that the passion of the
origin is a typical passion of reassurance or self-reassurance.
Critical reflection on the origin, as stated in that important part of contemporary
philosophy, accentuates rather the creation of the origin. We could even say, a
reflection which characterizes the attitude of the Moderns to history. Indeed, the
origin is a retrospection, an aprs-coup that we ourselves make, by ourselves, here
and now.2
The question of the origin is also the question of the meaning: unattainable,
either to be rendered or to be discovered. The meaning and the origin are paired like
hidden objects or treasures of research where we are forced to the meaning, as
Roland Barthes wrote.
In their most recent development, the theories of evolution accentuate the dimension of plurality in this thought. The origin must be understood in the plural and as
we study the magnitude and the scale in greater depth, we realize this. There is not
one but several origins, several histories (Bocchi and Ceruti 1993), several trees
and therefore several maps.3
A further question that emerges concerns the reason for, or the theme of, the
cause. History inevitably seeks hierarchies in the events, but what emerges in most
cases is rather the casual nature of the invention, the innovation or the development.
2
Connection: See Chap. 3 for a discussion of the retrospective creation of origins and the
construction of ethnic identity from the point of view of cultural anthropology.
3
Connection: The evolutionary point of view on trees, origins, and branchings in cultural history
is addressed in Chaps. 16, 17, and 18.
10
Maps, Diagrams and Charts: Making the Cultural Trait Visible
163
No materialist theorem can ensure a wholly logical and exhaustive answer on the
causes of an innovation or how something new emerges.
In reference to the history of music, or rather of musical instruments, questions
like the following come to mind: why did the accordion originate in Castelfidardo?
or why did violins originate in Cremona? I recall a splendid reflection by Michel
Serres on the birth of the Tiberina island in ancient Rome:
the Tiber continues to drag matter which, by chance and due to the circumstances, joins
these heaps. An island coagulated, took shape from these adhesions and its contingencies.
[] Each laminar lamella of water drags a grain, an atom, of sand, with it. The flow of time,
the flow of water, the flow of sand, the atoms fall. Lucretius has returned. [] physics and
history merge in time. (Serres 1983, It. transl.: 89, my italics)
Historical research and research on evolution are in general close to philosophy

in showing the inconsistency of these myths: origin and cause are restored to their
casual and multiple nature. Serres concurs that, this is the matter or the basis of
history: the distribution of energy, the distribution of multiplicity (Ibidem: 11).
We are obsessed with the model of a linear type and with the search for the
origin but research into evolution shows, starting from biology, that it also has a
trend, a rhythm and an essentially non-linear dynamic. This is a fundamental point
on which contemporary philosophy has concentrated and that the evolutionary
sciences show.
One theme, then, is to try and understand whether evolutionary models of this
kind can also apply to what are known as the human sciences. The work by
Moretti and others has dealt with this regarding the history of literature (Moretti
2005). Indeed, it would be of some value if research demonstrated that it could also
be applied to other fields of human science like the history of art and even philosophy;
that is, whether, regarding philosophical concepts as well, studies of this type makes
sense. The question of value, in the specific field of cultural traits, can also be put
into terms of power, which is another phenomenon to be taken into consideration.
We are used to accepting the idea that cultural phenomena are, so to say, autonomous and come into being on neutral ground, but this is not the case. Cultural
phenomena come into being in areas of power. I am not only thinking of economic
power and the distinction between structure and superstructure: Marxism itself
was based on such a mechanical type of derivation, in addition to the relationship
between cultural phenomena, in general, and a form of power that I would call
institutional. The processes of valorizing cultural traits and individual works have
a relationship within areas of institutional power. The value of the cultural phenomenon is not within and of the phenomenon itself. The value and the influence of a
cultural phenomenon derive from a series of elements that are extraneous to the
cultural object in itself and which are at the basis of the processes of valorization, as
Pierre Bourdieu (1992) amongst others, has shown.
Michel Foucault, in this regard, makes a very sound observation which concerns
the relationship between power and truth and which has a singular exemplification
in the field of the theories of evolution. It is not enough, says Foucault, to tell the
truth in a wild exteriority, it is necessary to be-in-the-truth. What does being in
the truth mean? The product of the subjective will I am an artist! is not as
164
F. Carmagnola
significant as it would seem according to the romantic myth of creativity. The activity
of the subject has to be legitimized by a power that makes it be in the truth. There
is no shortage of examples, especially in the field of science: Mendel and Darwin
told the truth but it is only with the union of the two that those conditions
historical, institutional come about that they are capable of producing an effective
movement in knowledge, in making the truth-stated coincide with the truth-approved
and accepted.
Similar examples can be found in the history of art: the derision to which Czanne
was subjected by his contemporaries, the solitude and despair of Van Gogh, the
almost comic condition of Douanier Rousseau, the desperate life of Ligabue and others. The space of subjectivity is not per se capable of establishing the value. What
really counts, especially by contemporary standards, is the system, the systemic,
and the cultural space that establishes and at least makes the hierarchy visible. Every
type of discourse, insists Foucault, cannot be credited if it is not in conformity
with a certain type of rules or constrictions. Therefore it is necessary to:
understand the networks of institutional power which are not discursive, which cannot be
formalized, which are not exquisitely scientific, to which the knowledge is linked at the time
when it is put into circulation. (Foucault 1978, It. transl: 78)
An example in relation to a significant cultural phenomenon, that of contemporary art, is the establishment of the value of the contemporary artist: Maurizio
Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney and others. I am referring to
the superstars of contemporary art, of media phenomena on an international scale
whose value is inseparable from the space devoted to them in the media.
How is the value of an artistic artifact established? We are still prey to a prejudice
of the idealistic type similar to that of the origins. It is as though the value were
based on the artistic phenomenon considered in its pure state, but that is never the
case. The phenomenon always interacts with a series of elements of institutional
power.
We can think of how the media influence the literary value of a work today. Does
it exist or not? What is it? Is it our personal pleasure or our success? What is our
personal pleasure measured against? It follows that there is an extremely complicated
mesh of causes that contradict linearity.
10.3
Cultural Trait and Style
The diffusion of cultural traits is a hypothesis of research. Let us re-state the

definition of cultural trait which was given to us preliminarily by the curators of
this book: a cultural trait is every trait the production of which in individuals
depends on social learning.
This is a fine definition. However, there is a tautological aspect: a trait is a trait.
So the question that must be addressed is what a trait really is. And what is a trait
when it is cultural? I would venture this as a definition: it is a characteristic aspect
10
165
which can be perceptible (aesthetic, therefore, in the proper sense, visible or tangible) or intangible (a decipherable habit, for example, a specific way of speaking, an
inflection, a tone).
A characteristic trait defines a singularity, i.e. it defines a perceivable difference
with respect to an environment. Now, this singularity can be individual or collective.
Clearly, then, it is cultural when it is collective.4
However, there is a problem: should a trait not be, in order to be cultural,
unconscious?5 If we do not want to call it unconscious, perhaps we can be a bit less
committed, we can call it casual, that is, we can say that the diffusion of cultural
traits has to or must necessarily have to be cultural an aspect of being not part
of a plan, and of repetition that eludes control. Things can, and must, happen by
chance in the sense of not planned not under the control of the players. These
things must be repeated and must be identified (later) as recurrent. This is the importance of quantitative analysis: series, numbers and recurrences.
In this regard, we can find a significant position in the founder of the theory of
the unconscious, Freud, and we find it with regard to style. It is important to note
that while common opinion, and also a part of the influential philosophical tradition
for example Cassirer associates style with the planning activity of the conscience,
Freud effectively shows that style is the repetition of identifiable aspects that distinguish a singularity and that cannot be reproduced, precisely because they elude the
conscious project.
Let us put the two positions in contraposition. The attitude of the scholar,
Cassirer, when he tackles the question of style in philosophy is notable the style of
Kant, for example. It is the fruit of a deliberate proposition, an accurate planning
where in place of the free movement of the imagination and the witty remark []
there is the rigour of abstract conceptual analysis (Cassirer 1921, It. trans.: 167
168). In short, style is planned and the style of Kant seems to hold as ideal for a
strategy, at least when we are speaking about philosophical writing.
We would then oppose the conceptual style of philosophy and its discourses to
literary or poetic style, but this is also a clich. Anyone who carefully examines the
writings of some major contemporary thinkers ideal cases being those of Derrida
or Barthes will most certainly notice that, on the contrary, style consists of letting
oneself be dragged by the same dynamics as writing, in relying on a sort of drive or
drift in which the subject itself is captured and enmeshed. We could say that in these
cases the motto of style is not only I cant do without it, a sort of constriction in
writing but also in the graphic or pictorial stroke. One example is noteworthy:
Derrida, Feu la cendre/Cinders (Italian translation 2000), describes a continuous
drive of this type at work the style as the rhythm, that possesses the subject and
which defies the linearity of the ability to develop plans.
4
Connection: This collective view on culture departs from individual perspectives, such as that
discussed in Sect. 2.4. Several layers of collective cultures are theorized in Chap. 14, with respect
to nations, generations, and organizations.
5
Connection: On a notion of trait as related to the unconscious in psychoanalytic thinking, see
Chap. 6, which also agrees with the a-posteriori recognition of culture.
166
F. Carmagnola
Fig. 10.1 Pencil-sharpener by Raymond Loewy, an example of streamlining (Sources: Loewy

repertoire, LIFE archives, and USPS 2011)
By extension there is the hypothesis that the cultural trait has to be collective
and unconscious; there is the diffusion of cultural traits when there is something that
negates a conscious development of projects, which is asserted independently from
a design, from an overall architecture conceived from the beginning.
That is not all: if we look at the evolution of cultural traits, including those close
to us, we see a phenomenon of imitation and epidemic diffusion at work. For example, during the stylistic period of what is known as streamlining in the United
States (Fig. 10.1).6 For example, during the stylistic period of what is known as
streamlining in the United States, we have phenomena of a completely projectbased nature, and therefore conscious, of a diffusion of elements the fins, the
tapered lines etc., which even reach the grotesque. Two examples include a pencilsharpener designed by Raymond Loewy, which is aerodynamic and the floorpolisher with an aerodynamic line.7
Yet, we have to add that the evolution of a cultural trait, even when it is part of a
project in the individual dimension, does not elude a sort of duress or constriction.
That is, the overall movement of generalization, of diffusion, has something that
eludes us: if we were to consider a historical period as a whole, we would discover
that the diffusion of a style could be found in unplanned areas which elude the
project. What for the individual appears to be planned, considered on a wider scale
appears not to be deliberate. Nobody designs the style of a period.
I would now like to perfect my definition of a cultural trait as follows:
A profile with perceptible coherence, obtained by abstraction, subsequently, at a distance,
on the basis of a multiplicity of occurrences which are not necessarily homogeneous in
reference to a very extended domination in time and which is developed in an unplanned
way by the players created or which can be summarized in a single name.
6
Connection: To have an idea about how cultural transmission of traits is linked to epidemiological
models, refer to models of diffusion of traits as diffusion of diseases in networks as in Sect. 12.5.
7
Connection: Chapter 4 analyzes a science exhibit which is also an object of design and the
expression of a stylistic period in a particular national context.
10
167
The use of the phrase at a distance refers explicitly to the methodological distinction, which is found in Morettis book La letteratura vista da lontano (2005),
between close reading qualitative, idiosyncratic, focused on the single copy and
distant reading, which centers on quantity and the mass of data. Importing the latter
point of view into human sciences distinguishes the proposal of Moretti and other
scholars.
What is there in common then between cultural trait and style? In what way
can it be said that they are unconscious in the sense that Freud speaks of them?
The style Freud refers to is strictly individual: the inimitable style of an artist or
a painter which can be identified precisely in the traits that elude control. It is here
that Freuds reasoning differs from positions such as that of Cassirer: the fundamental role of the unconscious.
Freud approaches the question of style in reference to the work of art in his 1913
essay on The Moses of Michelangelo. The reference is to the methodology of
attributing works of various artists used by the Italian scholar Giovanni Morelli. In
a famous, fundamental passage, Freud argues that Morelli had reached his remarkable results by
insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of
a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details [] which the copyist
neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way []. It
seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or
unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations. (Freud 1913, It.
transl.: 311, my italics)
I would like to emphasize what interests us here in this context: the unnoticed,
what falls below the threshold of attention, is what apparently characterizes style.
In the field of literary theory we have remarkable evidence of this proximity to
the psychoanalytic notion of style: Antoine Compagnon recalls in particular the
analyses by Leo Spitzer regarding traits of style. The definition of the trait of style
represents a point of resonance between Freud (not mentioned by Compagnon in
this regard) and literary theory: Leo Spitzer defines style as the characterization of
an individual or of a culture through symptomatic details which evade conscious
control. Thus,
the trait of style is offered to interpretation as an individual or collective symptom, of the
culture in the language. And, as in the history of art, it depends on a detail or a fragment, on
a minimal and marginal clue that allows reconstructing a whole vision of the world.
(Compagnon 1998, It. transl.: 202)
The resemblance to the hypothesis of Freudian research is clear. We can then

state that in the cultural trait there is a structural aspect that eludes the control of
the consciousness of the players. They do it but they do not know said Marx
about the main players of the complex dynamics of the economy. Put another way,
the coherence, the profile, and the overall configuration of a cultural trait are not
immediately visible in the time of the players. It can be seen only in the historical
168
F. Carmagnola
gaze that does not deal with the evenemential, of the qualitative or the idiosyncratic,
but rather of quantities and series.
It is of note that Michel Foucault took a cue from his research to outline his great
dynamics on madness, prison or desire, from the quantitative history of long periods, according to the research strategy of the Annales and authors such as Moretti,
who worked on the evolution of the novel, refer precisely to this type of research.
Therefore the cultural trait like style, to a certain extent would be seen afterwards, from outside or afar, on the quantity and not on the singularity, although
the close consideration of the singularities as exemplary still holds an important
place in research.
10.4
Schemas and Diagrams
Amongst the most interesting figures in the work by Stefano Zenni, Storia del jazz. Una
prospettiva globale (2012), are photographs and maps. Maps are an extraordinarily
effective instrument, and once again the question must be posed: What is a map?
A map, as such, is not such a simple tool, indeed it is something remarkably
refined. With recourse to my philosophical references, I find a possible definition of
map in none other than Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century.
We could say that the map is an in-between, i.e., an intermediate means of expression between the perceptible level and the purely intelligible, conceptual level.
Therefore, at first sight it seems to resemble the Kantian notion of a schema, which is
defined in Kantian philosophy as an operation that consists of rendering perceptible
something that does not belong to the level of the sense. This in turn transfigures, on
a perceptible plane, relational elements which do not belong to the perceptible level
but rather to that of intellect. This corresponds fairly well, it would seem, to one of
the aspects of the notion of diagram on which Franco Moretti reasons.
The schema in Kant is a rule. It is a rule of the intellect which determines the
intuition in conformity with a concept. It is a question of building a level of visibility
that does not derive from things, that is not in things, but rather derives from
something that we ourselves put there. Hence, it is the making of or subjecting of
visible elements to conceptual elements:
Now this representation of a general procedure of the imagination for providing a concept
with its image is what I call the schema for this concept. (Kant 1787, It. transl.: 165)
The schema, therefore, is the work of an activity of imagination at the service

of the concept, but concepts can be pure or empirical as Kant suggests in his
example of a dog:
the concept of a dog signifies a rule in accordance with which my imagination can specify
the shape of a four-footed animal in general, without being restricted to any single particular shape that experience offers me or any possible image that I can exhibit in concreto.
(Ibidem: 165166)
We can ask if maps are map schemas, or rather, as Moretti seems to state, diagrams? The term diagram is used in the text by Franco Moretti to define the activ-
10
169
ity of visibilization. Now, Moretti does not refer to Kant, but rather to On Growth
and Form by DArcy Thompson, a scholar of morphology in the first half of the
twentieth century.
The diagram, with respect to the schema, brings in an important element: the
notion of force, or another vision of the dynamics. We could say that the diagram
represents the result of the action of the force on the form. There is a sensitive force
in the diagram, visible in its effects: a force which is transposed into form this
is the part of the notion of diagram that Moretti obtains from reading Thompsons
work.
The notion of diagram also emerges in Francis Bacon. Logica della sensazione, by the philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, on the work of the artist Francis Bacon
(Deleuze 1981). Deleuze belongs to the same koin which I spoke about earlier. For
Deleuze, regarding the artistic form, the diagram is, lets say, the specific map that
summarizes and describes the dynamic of the forces of a certain artist and every
artist has his own. It is unknown whether Deleuze was acquainted with the work of
Thompson, but there is certainly a strong correlation between the ideas of these two
men. We can therefore find, in very different milieus, the same dynamic relationship
between force and form. It is a way, different from that of the Kantian way, of
bringing time into form.
10.5
A Brief Analysis of the Maps
I have mentioned only mentioned a series of interesting problems which human

sciences are facing on the basis of recent programmes of qualitative research inherited from evolutionary sciences. I believe that the field will be extended and I will
make some later mention in this regard. However, I would now like to go back to the
maps of Zenni (2012), with an observation that derives from the previous concise
statements. Is it possible to see, observing the maps on the evolution of the history
of jazz, a difference of cultural trait in that specific domain? Perhaps it is, or at
least a hypothesis can be risked.
In the book, Storia del jazz, Una prospettiva globale, there are numerous,
beautiful, maps. The question I pose is: which of them most closely approaches the
evolutionary dimension of the post-Darwinian models tree/network, an evolution which takes into account the dimensions of diversification or resemblance, and
so on?
In the case of the history of jazz as well, we are led to a discussion about a
non-linear evolution, in which there exist episodes of exaptation, of sudden transit
which cannot be planned and is not planned, and which produce innovations.8 I have
made a review of some maps taken from Zennis book, which has generated a very
Connection: Some further links to the concept of exaptation can be found in the Connection in
the introduction of Chap. 3.
170
F. Carmagnola
elementary map of the maps, oriented very simply on two axes: the conceptualperceptible and the static-dynamic.
The abstract graphic configuration, which I temporarily call schema/diagram/map
is or can be the graphic form of visualizing the cultural trait that shows its profile
or contour in static terms or in dynamic terms. An influential work in this field is
that of James Elkins (1995). It is to be noted that while for Elkins graphic forms are
also to be classified in the images category, Moretti in line with Kant insists
on the character of abstraction of the map. According to Elkins, maps are images
[] conceived essentially [] to deliver information (cit.: 157) and it is this
characteristic that distinguishes them from artistic images. They are, however, (like
works of art) fully expressive and
can raise questions regarding the representation, the convention, the medium, the production, the interpretation and the reception that are more complex than those raised by much
of fine arts. (Ivi: 158, my italics)
The important point is this: they are a tool for research and they can lead to
discoveries by being exhibited or by their presence. They speak, it could be said,
equally eloquently when answering different questions. In Morettis case, it is
through the production of maps that something new and unexpected emerges in
research: the importance of the notion of clue in the evolution of the nineteenth
century English detective novel (Moretti, cit.: 90ff.) or the discontinuities in the
cultural trait of the indirect free discourse in the passage to twentieth century
literature (Ivi: 105ff.).
I have tried to situate some of Zennis maps in the four territories identified by
my crude meta-map (Fig. 10.2). Naturally, if I bear in mind the non-linear theory of
evolution we are referring to by analogy (we talked about metaphor, but perhaps
the word analogy is more appropriate) I think that the most interesting terrain par
excellence is field C, the conceptual and dynamic. It is conceptual because it
produces abstractions from the sensitive terrain and dynamic because it shows a
temporal diachrony, i.e. it shows developments, but which are not linear.
In field A, the static/perceptive, there are some topographical maps such as those
of Chicago or New York (Fig. 10.3), which show the concentration of jazz clubs.
They are very instrumental because they give the idea, the precise perception of the
vicinity, therefore of union, of coalescence.
Fig. 10.2 Meta-map of the
maps employed by Zenni
(2012) to tell the history of
jazz from the perspective
of cultural musical traits.
The types of maps are
classified according to two
dichotomical axes:
conceptual-perceptual and
staticdynamic
10
171
Fig. 10.3 A topographic map showing jazz clubs in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s and 30s
(from Zenni 2012, Fig. 12 on p. 70, courtesy of Nuovi Equilibri publisher). The map falls into the
A field (static/perceptive) of the meta-map of Fig. 10.2. For another example of the same kind,
see Fig. 8.2
172
F. Carmagnola
Fig. 10.4 Diagram of relationships between bebop and jump style. This map is to be classified
into the B field (static/conceptual) of the meta-map in Fig. 10.2. Modified and translated from
Zenni (2012, Fig. 21 on p. 281, courtesy of Nuovi Equilibri publisher)
I put maps like Fig. 10.4, which are perhaps the most complex of all, in field B,
the static/conceptual, where the notion of time does not intervene as a fundamental
variable but where abstract relationships can be seen. For those who know the
history of jazz, these maps become very significant.
I put the maps of migrations par excellence into field D (see Fig. 8.2). Naturally,
the word perceptible is used once again, metaphorically. It is not because I see the
migrations physically, but I have an idea of projection on the geographic level that
still gives me a hold on what is perceptible.
In field C, which I find the most innovative, I put the maps that represent a cross
between conceptual and dynamic: they must simultaneously have a strong abstraction
therefore, be the two-dimensional graphic representation of an abstract relationship
and a strong diachrony, i.e. one must be able to understand the derivations, which
are derivations of either a genealogical or genetic type (the latter preferentially) and
which involve a before and an after, therefore an inheritance. I would give the
definition of diagram only to this type of map (Fig. 10.5).
This is the classification that came to mind and here we could stop. However, a
final attempt at classification can be made: I have tried to make a comparison with
another book on jazz by Joachim Berendt (1979). This book, with the first edition
dating back to the 1950s, was subsequently republished in the 1970s. I was struck
many years ago by the fact that this book has maps, and I wonder now what the
difference is between the maps that we see in Berendts book and what we have
talked about here.
If we browse through them we see that these maps have a very different structure.
See for example Fig. 10.6. Could the difference tell us something?
They are maps that have a backbone, a fishbone structure, i.e. they have a principal
element and derivations, whereas the maps I found in Zennis book especially those
in field C, have a remarkable particularity: they tend to be rhizomatic, or at least
10
173
Fig. 10.5 Development of jazzs tonal harmony. This map falls into the most interesting and innovative field of the meta-map in Fig. 10.2: C (dynamic/conceptual). Redrawn from Zenni (2012,
Fig. 20 on p. 256, courtesy of Nuovi Equilibri publisher)
have a plurality of centres. This brings us back to the beginning of my discourse:

Zennis type C maps show how, effectively, there is not an origin, a single origin. In
contrast, Berendts projections are not only diachronic (with a firmly oriented direction) but also centralized and so divide the extreme complexity of the living into
principal and secondary, making it highly hierarchical.
Returning to the discussion on trees which is found in Moretti (2005) or to be
precise, to the discussion on the distinction between the tree of natural evolution and
the tree of cultural evolution (Ivi: 99),9 cultural evolution has an important characteristic, that of convergence. Moretti quotes Stephen Jay Gould: unlike natural evolution, which produces divergence,
cultural change receives [] a very strong boost from the amalgamation [] of different
traditions. A good traveller who sees a wheel in a foreign country can import the invention
to his own country and change its culture radically and forever. (Moretti 2005: 98)
Moretti concludes that in cultural evolution, as in the branches of Kroebers

tree, divergence and convergence are interconnected, alternate and co-exist (Ivi:
100). In short, a non-linear dynamic prevails here that evokes a network or in the
language of Deleuze, the rhizome rather than the tree.
9
Connection: To deepen Kroebers idea of horizontal transfer as a peculiarity of cultural evolution

with respect to biological evolution, see the Woesian perspective on technological change explained
in Chap. 17. See also Chap. 16 on material culture and Chap. 18 on languages.
F. Carmagnola
174
African rhythm tradition
Marches
BABY DOODS
Z. Singleton
Tony Spargo
Ben Pollack
Ray Bauduc
CHICK WEBB
Don Lamond,
B.Rich, L. Bellson,
Grady Tate, Mel Lewis:
SID CATLETT
Mod.
Big BandDrummer
COZY COLE
L. Hampton
George
Wettling
JO JONES
DAVE TOUGH
D. Best
Art Blakey
KENNY CLARKE
SHELLY
MAX
MANNE
ROACH
PHILLY JOE JONES

Peta La Rocca
S.MURRAY
B.Purdie Rash. Ali
Idr. Muhamad
Milf. Graves
ELVIN
JONES
J. De Johnette
Rhythm &
Blues
GENE KRUPA
J. Morello
C. Kaye
Alan Dawson
Roy Haynes
Ay. Dunbar
TONY WILLIAMS
B. Higgins
ED BLACKWELL
AI Mouzon
BILLY COBHAM
Rock
Ginger Baker
Fig. 10.6 Genealogy of drum kits from Berendt (1973, It. tr. 1979). Besides the direct descent
line, we find black drummers on the left, and white drummers on the right. Up to Kenny Clarke,
black and white percussionists develop expression modes independently and with reciprocal
proportionality, and yet with exact correspondence
10
175
Lastly, I would say that to our way of seeing evolution, which emerges from the
most recent study, looking at the inheritance of Darwin, is that we are ourselves, in
our vision of maps and diagrams, powerfully influenced by the idea of network
rather than by the idea of tree and this can apparently also be seen in the evolution
of the composition and configuration of the maps. Is this perhaps a cultural trait
that distinguishes us? And to what extent are we aware of it?
10.6
Provisional Conclusions and Propositions
The cultural trait would seem to have a sort of elusive existence, yet it is an interesting
challenge for research in the field of human sciences. Firstly, attention to the
evolutionary dimension today challenges, both in the field of sciences of natural
evolution and in the cultural dimension, the linearity and the idea of simple origin,
but accentuates plurality. Contemporary philosophy in particular denounces in the
very concept of origin a sort of retrospective vice. Equally problematic are the
notions of cause and value. What distinguishes philosophy in particular is an
attitude, a style and a method which go under the name of genealogy.
Secondly, in the discussed notion of trait, which can be ambiguous, I have put
forth two questions in particular: one, to what extent can we compare a trait to the
notion, typical of the history of art, of style?; and two, is it possible to ask the
question about the unconscious for the cultural trait as well? There exists an opposition (Cassirer/Freud), which I have outlined with regard to the style, which shows
us how this distinction can make sense.
In the third place, the notion of map, used to visualize cultural evolution in
numerous studies, leads us to wonder what relationship there is between these constructions, these operations of visualization and other, so to speak, resonant notions
the diagram and the schema which have been present for some time in philosophical
research and which philosophy has specifically discussed and problematized.
Lastly, a brief analysis of the specific maps in Zennis book on the history of
jazz from which I started perhaps allows us to identify in the evolution of the maps
a clue or a sign, of the difference of cultural traits: sequence versus network or
rhizome, to simplify.
This discussion has remained at the simple level of a statement of the issues.
However, another one can be added, which could perhaps be the object of a specific
study, in the wake of what is already in course in the field of literary evolution.
An object of analysis which is particularly significant in my opinion is perspective. As we know, this is a key theme in the history of art and its evolution from the
proto-modern period (the fifteenth century in Italian painting), about which pages
and pages have been written, both in the specific discipline of the history of art and
in relationship with the evolution of sciences (cf. e.g. Kemp 1990).
Research into perspective in the early twentieth century was powerfully influenced by the philosophical notion of symbolic form (Cassirer 1923). In the field
of the history of art, the notion led Erwin Panofsky to elaborate on what is perhaps
176
F. Carmagnola
the most influential position on the theme of perspective (Panofsky 1927). In this
major work, Panofsky defines his point of view as the way in which a particular
spiritual content is connected to a concrete perceptible sign and intimately identified
with it (Ivi: 41).
The intimate connection between the spiritual content and perceptible sign,
in the case of perspective, defines the modern sentiment of space unlike, for
example, space in classic art which is not yet a perfectly unified world but rather
a space of aggregates (Ivi: 47). It represents, the scholar concludes, a triumph of
the sense of objectifying and distancing reality and therefore a triumph of the
(modern) willpower of man (Ivi: 66).
Looking more closely at the syntagms that appear in this definition, in the first
place, there is spiritual content. Beyond the use of the obsolete term spiritual, we
could say that this indicates a sort of shared unifying element consciously or not. In
other words, it is a cultural form, characteristic of a period or, in the terms of Spitzer,
a vision of the world or a spiritual etymos (Compagnon 1998, It. transl.: 202).
And what does perceptible form mean? We could say that it is a recurring
signifier, publicly recognized and accepted in that time. It is the whole of the two
aspects that defined the Symbolic, as an expressive form of the law. It has to be
coherent, shared and practised, but not necessarily conscious or planned.
We could now ask, if we superimpose the notion still provisional and to be
investigated of cultural trait onto the well known notion of symbolic form,
which results could we obtain? Which changes in point of view or which discoveries would we make? Perhaps it would be possible to compose a diagram similar
to that of Moretti, which shows evolution in the long term, the bifurcations, the
filiations and above all the discontinuities and the stopping points that they have
produced, in the late modern period, the crisis and the catastrophe of the perspective
view, as well as the evocative alternatives such as the one shown at the time by
Svetlana Alpers between narration and description (Alpers 1983).
Would the word perspective as a cultural trait, once removed from the typically enlightened and modern point of view of the symbolic form, exhibit an
evolution parallel to the history of the subject and its birth and death, which was
outlined by the genealogy of Michel Foucault? Or are the two notions symbolic
form and cultural trait all in all, interchangeable and would an analysis of this type
not produce any significant advances in the field of knowledge?
References
Alpers, S. (1983). The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. It. transl. Arte del descrivere. Scienza e pittura nel Seicento olandese. Torino:
Bollati Boringhieri, 1984.
Berendt, J. E. (1973). Das jazzbuch von rag bis rock. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer. Engl. transl. The jazz
book. London: Paladin, 1973. It. transl. Il libro del jazz. Dal ragtime al rock. Milano: Garzanti,
1979.
10
177
Bocchi, G., & Ceruti, M. (1993). Origini di storie. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bourdieu, P. (1992). Les rgles de lart. Gense et structure du champ littraire. Paris: Seuil. Eng.
transl. Rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Redwood: Stanford University
Press, 1996. It. transl. Le regole dellarte. Genesi e struttura del campo letterario. Milano: Il
Saggiatore, 2005.
Cassirer, E. (1921). Introduction to vol. 11 of E. Cassirer (Ed.) in coll. with H. Cohen, A. Buchenau,
O. Buek, A. Grland, B. Kellermann, & O. Schndrffer (Eds.). Immanuel Kants werke.
Berlin: Bnde, 19121922. Eng. transl. Kants life and thought. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981. It. transl. Vita e dottrina di Kant. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1977.
Cassirer, E. (1923). Philosophie der symbolischen formen. Erster teil: Die sprache. Berlin: Bruno
Cassirer. Eng. trans. The philosophy of symbolic forms. Volume one: Language. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1955. It. transl. Filosofia delle forme simboliche. Firenze: La Nuova
Italia, 1966.
Compagnon, A. (1998). Le dmon de la thorie: Littrature et sens commun. Paris: Editions du
Seuil. Engl. transl. Literature, theory, and common sense. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004. It. transl. Il demone della teoria. Letteratura e senso comune. Torino: Einaudi,
2000.
Cusset, F. (2003). Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux
tats-Unis. Paris: ditions La Dcouverte. 2nd edition, 2005. Eng. transl. French theory: How
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. It. transl. French theory. Foucault, Derrida,
Deleuze & Co. allassalto dellAmerica. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2012.
Deleuze, G. (1981). Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. France: Editions de la Difference.
Eng. transl. Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. London/New York: Continuum, 2003. It.
transl. Francis Bacon. Logica della sensazione. Macerata: Quodlibet, 1995.
Elkins, J. (1995). Art history and images that are not art. The Art Bulletin, 77(4), 553571. It.
transl. La storia dellarte e le immagini che arte non sono. In A. Pinotti & A. Somaini (Eds.),
Teorie dellimmagine. Il dibattito contemporaneo (pp. 155ff.). Milano: Raffaello Cortina,
2009.
Foucault, M. (1971). Nietzsche, la gnalogie, lhistorie. In S. Bachelard et al. (Ed.), Hommage a
Jean Hyppolite (pp. 145172). Paris: PUF. Eng. transl. in P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault
reader (pp. 8790). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. It. transl. Nietzsche, la genealogia, la
storia. In A. Fontana & P. Pasquino (Eds.), M. Foucault, Microfisica del potere. Interventi
politici (pp. 29 ff.). Torino: Einaudi, 1977.
Foucault, M. (1978). Italian translation 1997, Illuminismo e critica, a cura di P. Napoli, Roma,
Donzelli.
Freud, S. (1913). Der Moses der Michelangelo. Imago, 3, 1536; G.W., X, 172201; The Moses
of Michelangelo. SE, 13, 209238. Eng. transl. The Moses of Michelangelo. In J. Strachey
(Ed.), in coll. with A. Freud, assisted by A. Strachey & A. Tyson. The standard edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIII (19131914): Totem and Taboo
and other works. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute Of Psycho-Analysis. 1st
Edition, 1955. It. transl. Il Mos di Michelangelo. In C. L. Musatti (Ed.), Opere, 191214
(Vol. 7, pp. 293ff.). Torino: Boringhieri, 1975.
Kant, I. (1787). Kritik der reinen vernunft [Eng transl. The critique of pure reason] Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999. It. transl. Critica della ragion pura. Roma-Bari:
Laterza, 1977.
Kemp, M. (1990). The science of art: Optical themes in western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat.
Yale University Press. It. transl. La scienza dellarte. Prospettiva e percezione visiva da
Brunelleschi a Seurat. New Haven, CT, Firenze: Giunti, 1994.
Moretti, F. (2005). La letteratura vista da lontano. Con un saggio di Alberto Piazza. Torino:
Einaudi.
Panofsky, E. (1927). Die perspektive als symbolische Form. In E. Panofsky (Ed.), Aufstze zu
grundfragen der kunstwissenschaft. Berlin: Spiess, 1980. Eng. transl. Perspective as symbolic
178
F. Carmagnola
form. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996. It. transl. La prospettiva come forma simbolica.
In Neri G. D. (Ed.), La prospettiva come forma simbolica e altri scritti (pp. 35ff.). Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1966.
Serres, M. (1983). Rome: Le livre des fondations. Paris: Grasset. Eng. transl. Rome: The book of
foundation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Cited It. transl. (excerpt) Lisola
Tiberina. Aut aut, 193, 621.
Zenni, S. (2012). Storia del Jazz. Una prospettiva globale. Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa/Nuovi
Equilibri.
Chapter 11
Evolutionary Genetics and Cultural Traits

in a Body of Theory Perspective
Emanuele Serrelli
The fact that methods of evolutionary genetics can deal with culture and cultural
traits has recently become one argument to some hyper-enthusiastic claims that the
social sciences could be unified by an evolutionary approach.1 In this paper, while I
try to explain how culture is indeed tractable by evolutionary genetics, I adopt a less
pretentious attitude. The basis of this attitude are the well-defined accumulations of
scientific knowledge I call bodies of theory, made of mathematical methods, mathematical models and painfully achieved knowledge about these models. Bodies of
theory are deposited in the traditions of the sciences just like the notions and
achievements about particular topics. Bodies of theory, whose usefulness depends
on generality, get expanded over time, and sometimes get modified to study new
problems, new domains, where, in turn, they promote definite ways of constructing
problems and understanding things. I treat evolutionary genetics as a body of theory
that had inherited and radically transformed Darwins way of thinking of characters.
The body still includes long-lasting mathematical tools that were invented by
statisticians and people such as Francis Galton in the nineteenth century, but the real
boost was the mathematical theory of Mendelian populations elaborated since the
late 1910s. In the 1970s, evolutionary genetics was pushed by some empirical problems towards incorporating learned or cultural behaviors into its mathematical
Connection: Note that, in almost every discipline, evolution has nothing to do with the concept
of progress. Refer to the introduction of Chap. 3 for a commentary and further links. The
separation of evolution and progress is discussed at length, in Sect. 13.3, with particular reference
to cultural evolution.
E. Serrelli (*)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_11
179
180
E. Serrelli
models, generating a way of describing culture in terms of traits. Before telling this
story from the beginning, I introduce, with a minimum of technicalities, the encounter
of evolutionary genetics with cultural transmission. In the end, I will argue for a
humbler view of the relationship between evolutionary genetics and culture, and,
accordingly, for a less demanding epistemology of cultural traits.
11.1
What Would You Like for Breakfast? Cultural

Transmission and Evolutionary Genetics
The following example aims to illustrate why, in the 1970s, a scientific discourse
started to emerge that treated things like the lactase gene and things like italian-style
breakfast in a unified way, that is, as genetic and cultural traits. That discourse,
scaffolded by mathematical modeling, developed the notion of characters that was
present in the tradition of biology since Darwin.
Food customs are one of the most celebrated kinds of cultural differences.
Breakfast, for example, is highly variable across countries. Italians are known for
their cult of coffee, cappuccino, and various combinations of coffee and milk. It is
not rare that people from different ethnic, linguistic, or national groups praise or
disapprove each other for the kind of food or cooking method. Fortunately, food is
also a matter of curiosity and happy exchange and cultural hybridization. In sum,
feeding customs are culture. But what if human organisms, more specifically adult
people, were definitely partitioned into milk-digesting and non-milk-digesting
people? And what if milk-digesting people were very unevenly distributed in different
regions of the world? Could breakfast habits in different cultures be affected by
peoples varying capacity to digest milk?
Young mammals synthesize an enzyme called lactase that hydrolyzes the main
carbohydrate of milk, lactose, into glucose and galactose. In this way they process
their diet which is essentially composed by milk. After the weaning, mammals
usually reduce lactase production. In humans, instead, many individuals continue to
express lactase throughout adult life, and are thus able to digest the lactose contained in fresh milk. This capacity as reported in a recent survey, Gerbault et al.
(2011) is called LP, standing for lactose-persistence. LP is not ubiquitous in
humans: it varies widely in human populations, both between and within continents
(Fig. 11.1). As Gerbault et al. explain, in lactase non-persistent individuals, the
fermentation by colonic bacteria and osmotic effects of undigested lactose often
cause symptoms such as abdominal pain, bloating, flatulence and diarrhoea
(Gerbault et al. 2011: 864). The exact genetic basis of the LP trait is much more
complex than a single gene, and is still not fully known.2 It has been shown that
some individuals who arent able to synthesize lactase can in fact consume
2
In recent years, a number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been found in association with the LP trait in different populations. The first to be identified, -13910*T, is found not in
the LCT gene (the lactase gene) but within an intron of a neighbouring gene, MCM6. This nucleo-
11 Evolutionary Genetics and Cultural Traits in a Body of Theory Perspective
181
Fig. 11.1 Interpolated map of the distribution of lactose-persistence, LP, from Gerbault et al.
2011: High frequencies of LP are generally observed in northern European populations, varying
from 15 % to 54 % in eastern and southern Europe to 6286 % in central and western, to as high
as 8996 % in the British Isles and Scandinavia. In India, LP frequency is higher in the north
(63 %) than further south (23 %) or east. There are relatively little data on East Asians but the trait
seems rare there. In Africa, the distribution of LP is very patchy, with high frequencies being
observed mainly in traditionally pastoralist populations (Gerbault et al. 2011, Fig. 1a)
lactose-containing products without any obvious ill effects, and changes in the
composition of the gut flora a non-genetic trait may be as important as the active
enzyme. Nonetheless, for simplicity, I will talk about the lactase gene. One of the
amazing features of the evolutionary genetics body of theory is just its relative independence from the genetic details of the considered trait, up to traits like lactose
digestion that are not reducible to any DNA feature.
Can the lactase gene be an example of genes influencing the differential probability of assuming and keeping cultural habits? Lactose intolerants who are able to
blame milk for their morning nausea, and who lack access to chemical remedies or
lactose-free alternatives (e.g., soy milk), may be reluctant to adopt the breakfast
pattern from their family or colleagues. Therefore, their genotype will influence the
probability distribution of different cultural alternatives. On the other hand, there is
the issue of social pressure towards having breakfast in a certain way. In Italy, going
for coffee and pastry is a very important social activity, so it might turn out difficult
to avoid milk. Furthermore, family habits may be highly important in conditioning
individual behavior, making you feel like you would never start your day without a
cup of fresh milk and your favorite butter biscuits from back when you were teen.
Personal aversion and social pressure to milk consumption, with their respective
strengths, will influence the probability distribution of consuming milk, and many
tide change affects lactase promoter activity, and the allele explains only partly the distribution of
LP (its frequency map does not completely overlap that of LP).
182
E. Serrelli
factors will eventually settle individuals down on a landscape of alternative behavior

types. Settling on one alternative doesnt necessarily mean a life choice. Of course,
it is possible for the individual to choose a definitive stand on the matter, and to
drink always and only orange juice instead of cappuccino, but maybe the individual
will choose from time to time whether to have latte or not, or she will switch from
time to time to stable solutions that are adequate to the various periods of life. The
probability distribution of different cultural alternatives aims to subsume and
synthesize all those individual life solutions, making them comparable and allowing
scientists (for instance, medical researchers) to make general considerations on
breakfast behavior.
Population genetics a field explained below began to consider these issues as
relevant when it was already a mature, 60-years-old field, thanks to the work of
important innovators such as Marcus Feldman and Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Population
genetics is a fundamental part of evolutionary biology. As the name says, it deals
with questions about populations and their genetics: why does the lactase gene
occur at particular frequencies across populations of the world? What populations
characteristics are relevant to this issue?
Population genetics considers a gene as something that spreads and remains in a
population by means of reproduction through generations. More precisely, population genetics studies the fate of particular forms of genes, called alleles, with respect
to alternative forms of the same genes. In the case we are considering, LP (lactosepersistence) is an allele, while its alternative is lactose intolerance. The expansion
or decline of the LP allele in the population depends on how often and how luckily
the allele ends up into the offspring. LP has been a lucky allele in some populations.
If we analyze a particular population, say, Italians, and we find that LP is almost
omnipresent (while less frequent in other populations), population genetics will
guide us to some historical factors that may explain why. If lactose intolerance has
been unlucky in Italy, for example, the reason might be that for millennia Italians
had been farming and consuming milk as a primary element in their diet. In a milkconsuming population, the lactose intolerance allele is unlucky because it finds
itself in individuals that, on average, are slightly sicker than the population mean.
Therefore, lactose intolerance gets transmitted less frequently due to health problems
of its bearers. In technical terms, in a milk-consuming population, lactose intolerance has a lower fitness than LP. Population genetics calculates, for example, how
long must a population sustain milk consumption in order to erase the influence of
initial frequencies of milk tolerance and intolerance on the current amount of lactose tolerance; as time goes by, in fact, the influence of those initial frequencies will
decay. Other dynamics such as rates of emigration and immigration may be very
important, and are considered and quantified in population genetics.
In the 1970s, mathematicians such as Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman found out and
understood that to explain or predict the frequency of an allele such as LP it is
absolutely insufficient to characterize the population as milk-consuming or not.
Rather, the individual bearers behavior will be crucial to determine how lucky the
gene is. If a lactose intolerant person is, on average, also milk-aversive, then lactose
intolerance will be pretty as much fit as milk tolerance: the allele will be lucky to
183
end up in a person that, being intolerant, decides to refrain from consuming milk. In
other words, while the fate of the allele still depends on how frequently the allele
ends up in a combination rather than another, it is the gene-behavior combination
that has a fitness. And, as we have seen in talking about breakfast, when you know
whether a person has a certain gene, you still dont know what her behavior will be.
Social and cultural pressures will play a role. In a milk consuming population, for
example, for various reasons and through all kinds of particular cases that are not
even visible at the population level, the social pressure towards drinking cappuccino
for breakfast might be very low. This would allow for relative well-being of lactose
intolerance: people will choose only with their bellyache. Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldman demonstrated in this prototypic case that the strength of cultural transmission in a population is a crucial measure to establish sound relationships between
genes (lactose persistence and intolerance), behavior (milk consumption), their
frequencies and their change through time. They also demonstrated that social and
cultural pressures are needed to explain the observed frequencies of LP.
We will get back to the issue of lactose absorption later, to show how powerful a
body of mathematical theory can be in resolving historical scenarios. But first we
are going to see how the body of theory of evolutionary genetics came about in the
first place, to appreciate that the value of a body of theory lays not only in its modeling power, but also in the amount of work that has been necessary to build it and
accrue knowledge around it.
11.2
The Historical Growth of a Body of Theory:

Evolutionary Genetics
Charles Darwins idea of a character was foundational to evolutionary biology. In

Darwins Origin of Species (1859), the character got early and tightly related to
inheritance.3 Darwin made the strong statement that Any variation which is not
inherited is unimportant for us (ivi: 12), and wrote: Perhaps the correct way of
viewing the whole subject [of characters], would be, to look at the inheritance of
every character whatever as the rule, and non-inheritance as the anomaly (ivi: 13).
Due to the law of natural selection, characters are so important that they become
almost autonomous phenomena in the evolutionary process:
Although natural selection can act only through and for the good of each being, yet characters and structures, which we are apt to consider as of very trifling importance, may thus be
acted on. When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled-grey; the alpine
ptarmigan white in winter, the red-grouse the colour of heather, and the black-grouse that
of peaty earth, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in
preserving them from danger. (Darwin 1859: 84, emphasis added)
Natural selection acts upon characters only in an utterly metaphorical way, but
characters, inheritance, and natural selection, along with individual organisms, are
3
Connection: Darwins thoughts, as expressed in his writings, are protagonist also of Sects. 13.3,
16.2, 18.2, 20.3, and 20.4.
E. Serrelli
184
inseparable faces of the same phenomenon. Color is a real thing: a certain shade of
green protects a species of leaf-eating animals, and in this way it prevails on other
shades of green and on other hues. A character in Darwin has the crucial features of
being inherited and variable. In Darwins words we also see foreshadowed the
population genetics idea that a character has a fitness:
I can see no reason to doubt that an accidental deviation in the size and form of the body, or
in the curvature and length of the proboscis, &c., far too slight to be appreciated by us,
might profit a bee or other insect, so that an individual so characterised would be able to
obtain its food more quickly, and so have a better chance of living and leaving descendants.
(Darwin 1859: 94)
We see here that Darwin had a more mechanistic view of fitness than the more
probabilistic one that would emerge later. Yet, the idea that one of the crucial
dimensions of a character in evolution is inter-generational transmission was
already clear. Work on inheritance and evolution was carried out after Darwin, way
into the twentieth century, and resulted in the construction of a powerful mathematical,
statistical body of theory that is still with us today, centered on a mathematical
object called Mendelian population.
11.2.1
Galton
William Provine in his classic book The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics
(1971) tells the story of how the issue of inheritance was addressed after Darwin.
The story begins with Francis Galton, who was not at all convinced of Darwins
theory of inheritance, i.e. pangenesis (1869). Galton, in trying to demonstrate his
own theory of inheritance, invented regression analysis, a mathematical method that
became perhaps the first tool in the evolutionary genetics body of theory. Galtons
methods are still used today (Hartl and Clark 2007), although interestingly
disconnected by most of his ideas. For example, Galtons saw his own methods as
endorsing his anti-Darwinian idea of evolution by jumps; moreover, his hypothesis
that genius was a hereditary trait (1869) fell squarely in the context of the foundation of human eugenics, an extremely controversial idea (and later, a practice)
entangled with ideologies and tragedies in history.4 Still, as Provine says, if some of
Galtons derivations and positions were questionable on empirical as well as on
philosophical grounds, he nevertheless opened the door to a statistical analysis of
correlations of characters, an analysis which was to have immense influence upon
evolutionary thought (Provine 1971: 2223).
Galtons problem was to model the transgenerational dynamics of traits such as
size in sweet peas, and stature, eye color, temper, artistic faculty, and disease in
humans. These were quantitative, as opposed to discrete, traits. Stature is inheritable tall parents generally have tall children but is not copied identically from
one parent, nor is it simply the parental mean. How are parents and offsprings
stature correlated? Galton measured that the stature of the adult offspring is, on the
4
Connection: see Chap. 4 for some more hints on eugenics.
64
72
66
68
F
70
72
C
185
REGRESSION
FROM
MID-PARENT
TO SON
76
68
66
64
B
Fig. 11.2 A chart from Galtons Natural Inheritance (1889: 96). Graduations on the left (bottom
to top) represent mid-parent height, i.e. the average height of two parents. Graduations along the
top (left to right) represent offsprings height. M = 68 is the mean height of the population. Galtons
empirical measures (the dots) lined up as shown by the line CD, which is the parent-offspring
height correlation (its slope is the correlation factor). Line AB represents the hypothetical correlation in which offsprings height is equal to parental mid-height. With respect to AB, the line
CD shows regression to the mean, i.e., offsprings are always closer to the mean than parents, to
an extent proportional to the parents deviation from the mean. This is a still valid, foundational
example of how phenotypic, continuously-varying traits are studied with reference to inheritance
whole, more mediocre than the stature of their parents, that is to say, nearer to the
general populations median (Galton 1869: 95; cit. in Provine 1971: 20; see Fig.
11.2). This phenomenon, valid for all continuous characters studied by Galton, is
named regression, and implies, for example, that offspring of extreme individuals
are quickly brought back towards the median of the population, more so the larger
the parental deviance. For Galton this implied that natural selection acting on
variation can be of no permanent value for evolution, because there is a constant
tendency in the offspring to regress towards the parental type (Galton 1869: 34;
cit. in Provine 1971: 23). No cumulative change through selection was possible for
Galton, who thought that new characters in evolution only emerge as new
complexes in equilibrium called sports not subject to regression. Types of
intelligence, for example, were explained in this way (Galton 1869).
186
11.2.2
E. Serrelli
Statistics, Biometrics, and Mendelism
Provines famous reconstruction proceeds, after Darwin and Galton, with the rediscovery of Mendels work in 1900, and with the consequent, all-British intellectual
battle between so-called Mendelians and Biometricians, featuring scientists such as
Karl Pearson, W.F.R. Weldon and William Bateson. The parties were linked by the
study of variation as the key to unresolved problems in evolution (Provine 1971: 38).
From several aspects of the story, one is tempted to frame the conflict as one between
scientists who knew mathematics and others who didnt know or value it. Whether
this is the case or not, views and methods provided by biometricians were to survive,
suitably incorporated into the later mathematized theory of evolutionary genetics.
Weldon, a prominent biometrician, wrote this telling aphorism: It cannot be too
strongly urged that the problem of animal evolution is essentially a statistical problem
(Weldon 1893: 329; cit. in Provine 1971: 31). And later, he wrote that the questions
raised by the Darwinian hypothesis are purely statistical, and the statistical method
is the only one at present obvious by which that hypothesis can be experimentally
checked (Weldon 1895: 380381, cit. in Provine 1971: 49). Weldon, working
directly with Galton, developed Galtons methods to address the amount of interrelation between characters within an individual, thus introducing the correlation
coefficient, a fundamental feature of evolution. Weldon also had Pearson working
on a problem of characters distribution in the shore crab. In such animal, all characters had normal distributions except one: the relative frontal breadth. With the
method of moments for fitting a theoretical curve to observational data, Pearson
uncovered dimorphism of frontal breadth, signaling the presence of two distinct
races in the crab. The statistical methods used by Pearson and Weldon, although
developed from Galtons, countered his view of evolution: they were particularly
suited for the study of continuous variation and its evolution, whereas Galton had
emphasized sports (Galton 1889). According to Provine, for Pearson and Weldon
Galton had simply misinterpreted his own valid methods (Provine 1971: 34). This
story illustrates several epistemological peculiarities of mathematized science. For
example, sometimes a law can get to be interpreted in a radically new way, while
remaining mathematically the same. This happened in 1898, when Pearson corrected and revised Galtons law of ancestral heredity (Galton 1897) quantifying
the contribution of each past generation to the heritage of the current one. Pearson
made the law consistent with Darwinian selection, and was even praised by Galton
for doing that. These statisticians and statistically-inclined biologists like Weldon
and Pearson were Darwinists as well as continuists, for their belief in the effectiveness of natural selection. Opposite positions were held and strongly defended by
the Mendelian, William Bateson, who was convinced of Galtons dichotomous view
of variation, combined with the discrete nature of the characters studied by Mendel:
although continuous variation was actually there, the major source of novelties in
evolution had to be something else. For Bateson, the source of innovation was
hybridization between distinct variants. Bateson provided biological arguments,
and it is true that the issues brought out by this controversy have persisted under
187
different forms and still are important in evolutionary biology. However, as Provine
notices, Bateson never became competent in mathematics a sore point in his later
controversy with the biometricians (Provine 1971: 36). Mendelians worked under
Mendels idea that characters depend on factors that are somehow transmitted
from parents to offspring. A pea plant has white flowers because it carries a certain
two-factors combination. Wilhelm Johanssen coined the distinction between phenotype
(the type of flowers, e.g., white) and genotype (the particular combination of
factors). Factors from the parents will segregate in the offspring and their recombinations will result in the observed variability among siblings. We see that by the
time Mendels work on heredity was rediscovered by Hugo De Vries, Carl Correns
and Erich von Tschermak, the situation was already tense (Provine 1971: 55). The
theoretical dispute on whether evolution is continuous and driven by natural selection, or discontinuous and realized through sports or macro-mutations, surrounded
the subsequent period of intense experimental researches on heredity.
As Provine says, by 1918, primarily as a result of the analysis of successful
selection experiments, many geneticists had realized that Mendelian heredity and
Darwinian selection were complementary (Provine 1971: 130) and that Mendelian
characters, mostly very small and preserved throughout crossings, provided the
variability for selection. While experimental data and findings piled up, along with
interpretations thereof, mathematical methods were laid down into the toolbox that
was taking shape and that was to become evolutionary genetics.5 Udny Yule (1903)
and Pearson (1904) had outlined mathematically the possibility already grasped by
Mendel that if two or more pairs of factors are involved in a phenotypic character,
the result might be an apparently continuous array of variations. Natural selection
operating through continuous variation might thus provoke sorting of the involved
alleles. Assuming random breeding populations, Yule, Godfrey Hardy and German
Wilhelm Weinberg had independently studied the equilibrium frequencies, i.e. those
frequencies that, once reached, are conserved due to the mechanism of segregation
alone. In the U.S., H.S. Jennings and Raymond Pearl tried to derive formulas to
calculate the genetic composition of a population. H.T.J. Norton and Howard
C. Warren had quantified the effect of selection on a gene under different conditions.
With the celebrated systematic work by Ronald Alymer Fisher, Sewall Wright, and
J.B.S. Haldane, along with the progressive demonstration that Mendelian inheritance
could account for observed correlations (parent-offspring, fraternal) and for
observed responses to artificial selection, we see the gradual emergence of a logicalmathematical object the Mendelian space to which all quantitative considerations would apply. Evolutionary genetics was born.
Case studies surely played a role as well, as exemplars, in the toolbox, used by scientists through
the epistemological strategy of abduction. But my focus here is on mathematical generalizations
rather than on case studies.
188
11.2.3
E. Serrelli
The Mendelian Combination Space
The Mendelian space is probably the most important object of evolutionary genetics.6 It is a mathematical object. It is the space of all possible individual combinations given a number of loci with their correspondent sets of alleles. It is thus a
combination space: an ordered collection of individuals, where each individual
consists in a combination, i.e. an array of alleles, in the number of two for each
genetic locus. Genetic loci are the same, in number and identity, all over the space:
all individuals share the very same loci, but each individual is a unique combination
of coupled alleles occupying each locus. Conversely, for every genetic locus a
number of different alleles are available, and any combination of them is allowed in
the space, including the homozigous combination (i.e., two copies of the same allele
in a locus). At any time, only a number of individuals conventionally designated
with the letter N are considered existent, and N is exceedingly small compared to
the number of possible combinations in the space. These N individuals are one
population at a particular moment, a subset of the Mendelian space. Individuals
are sexually reproducing, and reproduction consists in the production of novel
individual combinations in the space by random recombination between parents.
Every new generation replaces the previous one, as generations are conventionally
non-overlapping in the Mendelian space, but the composition of the new generation
depends on the previous. How does a population of N individuals explore this space
This statement is a simplification and is exposed to several criticisms. For example, it could be
argued that the Mendelian space is central to only one tradition of population genetics. For
Lewontin (1980), population genetics was actually split into two fundamental research traditions, each of which based on a theoretical structure or scheme with deep roots in the history
we have told so far. Lewontin viewed the two traditions as dating back to, respectively, Sewall
Wright and Ronald A. Fisher. In the latter a continuation of biometrical genetics (see Sect.
11.2.2) everything is dealt with in terms of phenotype, while genes get lost in the shuffle
(Lewontin 1980: 63). It was Fisher (1918) who showed compatibility or even mathematical
entailment between the kind of continuous variation which is found in phenotypic traits and the
distribution of discrete Mendelian genetic variation with a number of independent loci (Hartl and
Clark 2007: 12). In this way, however, Fisher legitimated the two traditions in pursuing autonomous research strategies, each through equations that handled the continuity of variation and
change in different ways. Today, one of the most used handbooks of evolutionary genetics, by Hartl
and Clark (2007), avails Lewontins idea of the two traditions, and shows a flourishing development of the part Lewontin called Mendelian genetics (Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). Only Chap. 8
deals with evolutionary quantitative genetics. In this theoretical structure, the variance of a quantitative trait is partitioned into various components representing different causes of variation.
Reminiscent of Galtons work, quantitative genetics describes systematic relationships between
traits, across parents and offspring or also within an organism. However, the most promising
results come from merging the two theoretical traditions. For example, the response of a trait to
selection is necessarily tied to genetic variation affecting the trait (ivi: 397). Therefore, while, e.g.,
heritability can be interpreted in purely statistical terms, with no genetic contents, if we postulate
that there are Mendelian genes underlying the phenotypes, then the genetic underpinning allows us
to do more (ivi: 403).
189
over generations? This became the central question definitely, a non-trivial question of the new evolutionary genetics body of theory.
On the one hand, the establishment of a research community and tradition around
the Mendelian space allowed for the accumulation of a large and precious knowledge base. Modifications to the space were introduced to reflect both advancements
in computational tools and empirical discoveries (e.g., linkage disequilibrium,
namely the non-complete independence of segregation between physically contiguous loci). On the other hand, one can safely say that the Mendelian space was nwvwr
known in full, as all methods are partial and require several layers of theorization
and statistical summarization. As Sewall Wright had noted already in 1932, a
Mendelian space with a realistic number of loci contains a number of combinations
that is greater than the number of protons in the universe. How can we know what
happens in such an astronomically huge space?
For comparison, take an extremely simple abstract system described by CavalliSforza and Feldman in a book we will encounter later (1981: 7884). The system is
composed by some agents, each of which can be in one of only two states H or h.
The agents mate in couples. Each couple necessarily finds itself in either one of four
states: HH, hh, Hh, or hH. The couples give rise to the new generation of agents.
How does this system behave over few or many generations? Dont try to answer
with your intuition: even with only two agent states, H and h, the systems dynamical behavior can vary very much according to different assumptions. The graph in
Fig. 11.3 shows how fast or slowly H may disappear (leaving room to h), or otherwise conquer the whole population. We see that each trait has a trajectory in evolutionary genetics, which is the temporal dynamics of its frequency in the population,
possibly in relation with the trajectories of other traits, and certainly in dependence
from many features of the population. The graph gives a sense of how many things
you should know (or assume) about the system to be able to predict its dynamics:
the initial frequency of H, how often the alternative types of couples are formed, as
well as each kind of couples probability to have H or h offsprings. See the Figures
caption for some details. Deposited knowledge about this abstract system will thus
include at least: (1) a whole list of parameters that are, or can be, relevant to the
dynamics of systems of this kind (for example, p0, p1, p2, p3, i.e. the respective
probabilities of the different couple types to be formed at each generation; b0, b1, b2,
b3, explained in the Figure caption); (2) ideas on the effects of different configurations of the parameters onto the system dynamics, with relative weights for their
importance (e.g., population size has great effect); and (3) mathematical methods,
some numerical and some probabilistic, to statistically analyze what goes on in the
system.
We are starting to get a sense of how much knowledge is promoted and, at the
same time, required by a single simple model. Lets add that evolutionary genetics
has to derive, from studies of these simple-but-complex models, the dynamics
across the hundreds or thousands of loci in a realistic population exploring the
Mendelian space. In light of this complexity, the body of theory accumulated around
the Mendelian space acquires a huge importance: the body of theory is a fragile and
190
E. Serrelli
100
b3=1, b2=b1=0.5, b0=0
C1
90
B1
80
70
b3=.9, b2=.7, b1=.5, b0=.2

D1
A1
60
b3=.9, b2=.7, b1=.5, b0=0
A2
H% 50
A3
40
30
b3=b2=1, b1=b0=0
C2
20
10
0
10
15
20
25
30
35
Time in generations
Fig. 11.3 Some trajectories of trait H in the simple Hh system. The vertical axis shows the
frequency of H individuals in the population. The horizontal axis is time (number of generations).
Trajectories A1, A2, A3 start with different frequencies of H, yet they all reach a stable equilibrium
around 66 %. They share, in particular, the same values for b parameters. The b parameters b0,
b1, b2, b3 express probabilities that an H offspring is born from, respectively, an HH, and Hh, an hH,
ad an hh couple. Some configurations of b parameters thus make the system lean towards a certain
equlibrium regardless initial frequencies. Trajectory B1, with the same starting frequency as A1,
results from a small increase in b0, meaning that an H offspring is no longer impossible, although
still unlikely, for an hh couple. Trajectory D1 is the rapid loss of H with vertical transmission
alone, i.e., when an H offspring results always and only from HH couples (b3 = 1, other b parameters = 0). Trajectories C1 and C2 are neutral equilibria resulting from further configurations of
parameters. Other configurations not depicted here result in cyclical trajectories, i.e. dynamic
rather than static equilibria (From Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981), pp. 7884)
complex ensemble, full of assumptions and theorems, but it is the unescapable way
of accessing what happens in determinate kinds of systems.
History teaches that one good reason to be conservative and to go with familiar
mathematical systems is that knowing the behavior of even simple mathematical
systems is so laborious, despite the fact that they are built by us, that it requires the
establishment of a community of people that improve upon each others work for
years and decades, developing a knowledge tradition.
11.3
The Application of Evolutionary Genetics to Culture
Evolutionary genetics is now a mathematical body of theory with a centennial history. In the 1970s, the body began to be modified to accommodate other transmission patterns than the Mendelian one. The occasion was provided by lactose
191
absorption, which was playfully introduced earlier in this chapter, and by other
empirical case studies.
11.3.1
Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, and Gene-Culture

Coevolutionary Theory
Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman kicked off a collaborative stream of work
in 1973, taking cue from a debate over the genetic basis of Intelligence Quotient
(IQ). They built mathematical models of a new kind, where the phenotype of a
child is determined by the phenotypes of his parents and the childs genotype
(ivi: 619). Studying the mathematical systems in which these two transmission
mechanisms work together ranging from one extreme, i.e., pure cultural transmission, to the other extreme, i.e., pure biological transmission the authors performed
one of the most typical services of a mathematical body of theory: they spelled out
all the relevant statistical measures that necessarily influence the outcome, presenting
them as guides to empirical investigations of problems such as the IQ heritability.
They concluded that formalization of the contribution of cultural transmission to a
trait is possible (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1973: 636, emphasis added). A dry
and useful review of what happened thereafter is provided by Feldman and Laland
(1996). A new branch of evolutionary genetics was born that, in addition to
modeling the differential transmission of genes from one generation to the next,
incorporates cultural traits in the analysis (Feldman and Laland 1996: 453), where
cultural traits are those traits for which, in the mathematical model, a different transmission mechanism with a whole set of parameters is set up. Cultural alleles are like
H and h in the model presented above (Fig. 11.3): they do not combine in pairs
because there is no genotype-phenotype distinction, and they get transmitted accordingly. With respect to purely Mendelian systems, systems with the addition of one
culturally transmitted trait are more complicated. The possible combinations
(sometimes called phenogenotypes) are at least doubled, and the transmission
mechanisms intersect. Therefore, very different trajectories and stable equilibria are
possible for the system. To predict the outcomes, a remarkable extension of the
evolutionary genetics body of theory is required. I like to describe this expansion as
an application of the body of theory to a new domain.7
In the body of theory perspective presented here, cultural traits were added
into the known mathematical systems because this was elicited by some situations
the body of theory ran into, and was not prepared to. Lactose absorption was studied
7
Many philosophers of science have reflected on this problem. I only cite one stimulating work by
Ankeny and Leonelli (2011), who talk about the changing representational scope of a model.
The representational scope is distinct from the representational target, i.e. the initial domain that
inspired the construction of the model. The scope can stretch in unpredictable ways as science
proceeds. If we take the Mendelian space as a model in the sense of a stable target of explanation
(Keller 2002: 115), then culture will constitute an extension of its original representational scope.
192
E. Serrelli
thanks to the addition of cultural traits in the models (Aoki 1986; Feldman and
Cavalli-Sforza 1989). The formalization assumed three possible genotypes for the
genetic trait (AA, Aa, and aa) and two possible states for the cultural trait: milk user
and non-user. Despite the fact that the genetic bases of lactose absorption were even
less clear than today (Gerbault et al. 2011), the studies were able to explore
variable by variable, parameter by parameter the conditions under which the
absorption allele does spread or does not. From the lactose absorption frequencies
actually observed in populations across the world, the models were built to work
backwards, evaluating the conditions for those frequencies to come about. Another
interesting domain of analysis was the spread of agriculture (Aoki 1987; Aoki et al.
1996), where the researchers set up mathematical models to aid determination of
the demographic composition of the expanding wave of farmers in the Neolithic
(around 12,000 years ago): how many of them were converted hunter-gatherers, and
how many were descendants of farmers? In other words: was the spread of agriculture
more a demographic expansion of farmers or more a conversion of hunter-gatherers
to farming? Several other case studies are reviewed in Feldman and Laland (1996),
and more were carried out later. As a consequence of all this work, the evolutionary
genetics body of theory became adjusted to a whole set of new systems.
A key moment in the development of the gene-culture branch of the body of
theory was Cavalli-Sforza and Feldmans 1981 book, Cultural transmission and
evolution: a quantitative approach.8 The subject of the book is said to be the
dynamics of the changes within a population of the relative frequencies in the forms
of a cultural trait (ivi: 5). After a long and thoughtful Introduction that justifies
the approach, the book presents an impressive and perhaps unsurpassed body of
mathematical methods and results. The authors adapt techniques from all over
population genetics and combine them to study problems in the framework of
multiple transmission mechanisms. For example, they gather methods for both
discrete and continuous characters. As Panebianco (this volume) demonstrates,
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldmans adapted framework would soon be noticed by modelers
in economics, who would contribute and expand it with their mathematical skills.
Within evolutionary genetics, the introduction of cultural transmission allowed, for
example, for long-awaited new models of group selection for the origin of human
cooperation. Explaining unselfish and altruistic behaviors without infringing natural
selection once seemed to require group selection, i.e., selection of traits because
they are good for the group. But models based on genetic inheritance go against the
efficacy of group selection. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (1982, 1985, 1989)
became famous for building models with genetic and conformist cultural transmission, in which group selection became strong enough to explain the evolution of
unselfish behaviors. By doing so, they also indicated a way for evolutionary theory
to consider behavior as culturally transmitted, as opposed to genetically determined
8
Connection: Several Chapters and Sections of this book rely on the way of thinking developed
from Cavalli-Sforza and Feldmans formal approach, often mediated by some informal and inspirational books written by Cavalli-Sforza. See Sects. 7.2, 7.3, 12.4, 13.3, 13.5, 15.1, 16.1, 16.2,
16.3, 18.1, and 18.3.
193
as in sociobiology (Wilson 1975).9 Further mathematical innovations were linked to

the work on cultural transmission. An example is niche construction, with its
proposal of modifying the models of evolutionary genetics by adding selection
feedbacks mediated by environmental impact: frequencies in a locus may influence
the amount of a resource in the environment, affecting back genetic frequencies in
other loci (Odling-Smee et al. 2003). Niche construction selective loops are particularly
stimulating when they are applied to cultural traits that have a deep impact on the
environment, such as farming (Kendal et al. 2011).
11.3.2
Tinkering and Justification
A half of the process of mutual adjustment between a body of theory and a new
domain of application is thus the mathematical tinkering performed upon the body
of theory to make it more suitable to the new domain. This tinkering will likely go
through a phase of experimentation and low control, because new systems are born
in the body and new knowledge needs to be built upon them. The evolutionary
genetics body of theory is scientific wealth that can be invested in studying every
situation that happens to turn out suitable to be modeled as a Mendelian population,
or as a modified Mendelian population, or as a population of continuously varying
individuals with an underlying Mendelian basis. But the application of a body of
theory to a new domain is not automatically appropriate. It requires ad hoc definition
of the domain. In gene-culture coevolutionary theory, as Feldman and Laland (1996)
point out, culture is treated as shared ideational phenomena (ideas, beliefs, values,
knowledge) that are learned and socially transmitted between individuals (Feldman
and Laland 1996: 453, emphasis added). Treating milk use as a cultural trait may
sound strange, but here comes the second half of the mutual adjustment between
body of theory and domain: justification. A strong justification for the use of a body
of theory is the identification of fundamental questions that will thereby have more
chances to be answered. In the case of lactose persistence, the body of theory
may be employed to collect data and eventually constrain the possible courses of
population history, aiding historical reconstruction. Analogously, considering
farming as a cultural trait allows for the body of theory to provide evidence for
either one of two possible scenarios of the spread of agriculture (conversion of
hunter-gatherers vs. demographic expansion of farmers).
Since Darwin, a candidate trait in evolutionary biology is anything of which
multiple instances exist and get multiplied, and which is therefore able to be shared
among an indefinite number of units. If I mean to treat milk use or farming as
cultural traits, I need to make a case that this is not absurd according to what we
know about culture.
Boyd and Richersons gene-culture co-evolutionary theory was hailed as a welcome alternative to
sociobiology. For an overview of criticisms to sociobiology, see Driscoll (2013).
194
E. Serrelli
Sometimes justification can be carried out by collecting existing studies where

suitable definitions of the new domain may already be available. As seen in some
essays of this volume, culture is a case in point. Culture scientists are not completely
alien to the idea of cultural traits.10 Philosophers and evolutionary epistemologists,
primum Donald Campbell (1960), must be credited for early intuition and conceptual chopping, with their idea that cultural variants undergo processes of selection
and drift that are analogous to, though distinct from, those that operate among
organic forms and animal behaviors. Case studies from social psychology or archaeology are frequently brought to support the existence of cultural traits and their
trajectories.11
Besides general justifications, there are context- and scale-sensitive justifications: while treating milk use as a transmitted trait might be meaningful and
useful at the scale of population history where it appropriately summarizes some
aggregate behavior of the population milk use might be an inconsistent unit at
the scale of everyday life or over few generations.
11.3.3
The Balance between Tinkering and Justification

in Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981
According to the body of theory perspective presented here, evolutionary genetics

is an extremely precious deposit of theoretical knowledge revolving around some
mathematical systems, such as the Mendelian space. Researchers working on a
body of theory are always, by essence, at work to modify the body. Often, they are
inspired to do so and fueled by empirical findings and problems. Evolutionary
genetics is certainly a case in point, with its constant dialogue with the variety of
living beings, their reproductive systems and their ecological situations (Hartl and
Clark 2007). At the same time, any situation where populations of combinations of
traits can be identified is potentially liable to be treated by the body of theorys
mathematical methods and solutions about relevant parameters and predicted outcomes. History says why, since the 1970s, workers on the body of theory felt the
need to incorporate cultural elements into the body of theory, yielding the creation
of a specific branch named gene-culture coevolutionary theory. Subsequent
developments exemplify that a body of theory, when applied to a new domain, must
be fixed and adjusted, more than the other way around. Also, when evolutionary
genetics started to deal with matters such as dietary habits, it certainly met with
domains that had long been conceptualized by other approaches: culture studies,
anthropology, philosophy etc. When a body of theory reaches a new domain, it has
to be accepted therein, and this requires justifications. Some justifications may
10
Connection: See Chaps. 2, 3, and 13, and several other Chapters, to look for familiarity of social
sciences with notions that resemble cultural traits.
11
Connection: In this book, see Chap. 7 for psychology, and Chaps. 15, 16, and 17 for
archaeology.
195
argue for the epistemic value of the body of theory. Other justifications may leverage
on the presence of unanswered questions and unresolved competitions among
scenarios in the domain: does the frequency of the lactose absorption allele reflect
the farming history of a population? And how? Was the wave of advance of the
spread of agriculture in the Neolithic made of expanding farmer families or converted hunter-gatherer groups? The tools from the body of theory can be proposed
as solutions to long-standing debates and to open problems that cannot be solved by
other means. Another way to justification is the adoption of a working definition of
the domain that makes it suitable for the application of the body of theory. If the
working definition is a pre-existing definition, all the better. In any case, general
definitions of the domain are hardly sufficient justifications: more specific ones are
often required relative to the particular questions and scenarios at hand. For example,
concepts of various social sciences that resemble cultural traits can contribute to
justify the employment of the body of theory, but why can milk consumption be
considered a cultural trait at a particular scale? The possibility of talking about
cultural phenomena as traits is, in fact, context- and scale-sensitive.
A masterful model of theoretical justification is the long Introduction of CavalliSforza and Feldmans landmark book on evolution and cultural transmission (1981:
376), in which the authors work hard to define the domain and circumscribe it so
that the body of theory will be acceptably applicable. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman
accept as the cultural unit, or trait, the result of any cultural action (by transmission
from other individuals) that can be clearly observed or measured on a discontinuous or continuous scale (p. 73, emphasis in original). Traits can be aspects of
thought, speech, action [meaning behavior], and artifacts (ivi: 10), and their general
definition is the following:
We will use the term cultural to apply to traits that are learned by any process of nongenetic transmission, whether by imprinting, conditioning, observation, imitation, or as a
result of direct teaching. (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981: 7)
Among learned traits, the applicability of the models is further restricted to those
which are irreversibly learned by individuals:
Cultural transmission the acquisition by one individual of a trait from another individual
may involve long and complex learning processes. These processes may in practice be
wholly or partially reversible. Our models deal with traits that do not change after the
process of learning is complete. This can be accomplished by studying the population at the
same age in every generation an age at which all individuals are mature for the trait under
study. (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981: 62)
The fidelity of transmission is also important, further restricting the candidate

traits to customs. A custom is any behavioral trait that is transmitted with little
individual variation [] custom is always the absence of novelty, which is avoided
because it is disruptive and costly (ivi: 6465).
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman also proceed by showing general, perhaps unfamiliar properties of the domain that justify employing the body of theory. An example
is the issue of randomness of innovation. Since genetic innovation is the periodic
origin of new alleles by random mutation, defending the plausibility of the applica-
196
E. Serrelli
tion of genetic models to culture implies a defense of the randomness of cultural

innovation, which is counterintuitive: cultural innovation is evidently intentional to
an important extent. Here Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman appeal not only to the
frequency of literally chance cultural innovations, but also to the limited foresight
of intentional ones:
the chance that the innovations will prove truly adaptive in the long run is not 100 % [].
Because of this, and because some cultural mutation is simply copy error, a significant
proportion of new cultural mutations might be truly random without any resemblance of
adaptiveness. (ivi: 66)
Another issue in the application of the body of theory to culture is that of conceptualizing free choice in the domain. Individuals cannot choose what genes they
inherit, but they can make cultural choices. Here Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman
introduce the fundamental concept of cultural fitness, already recognized by
Campbell. In the body of theory, a cultural trait has a cultural fitness that measures
its probability of acceptance, that is the probability for each individual to choose to
get the trait. Only with 100 % probability of acceptance it might be said that
individuals have no choice. With lower probability, each individual does choose,
while the overall system remains predictable in a statistical sense.12 What is lacking,
as admitted by the authors, is variation of acceptance probability across individuals:
as a first conceptual approximation we prefer to think of cases in which it is relatively constant across individuals (p. 15). Individual differences of yet another
kind learning abilities were deferred to another whole book which apparently
was never written:
Another volume will take account of individual, inherited differences in learning abilities.
The introduction of individual differences, for instance in capacity to learn, requires a quantification of some classical genetic concepts, such as norm of reaction, and allows us to
make predictions about that elusive entity, genotype-environment covariance. (ivi: vii)
Many other considerations are made in the Introduction and in the Epilogue of
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldmans book. Its encompassing structure would be retraced,
as a blueprint, by many justificatory works that would appear over the subsequent
years to date.13 On the other hand, justification was not at all the main part of CavalliSforza and Feldmans book. The authors, firmly centered into the body of theory,
pointed out the modifications that were needed and the constraints that were in place
therein. A fundamental idea to be translated into the body of theory was that cultural
traits undergo not only vertical transmission, i.e., parents to offspring, which is
typical of genetic traits, but also horizontal and oblique transmission, involving
peers and all people beyond genealogical bonds. Further distinctions produced 11
distinct modes of transmission (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981: 5560). The
internal structure of nongenetic transmission mechanisms was crucial, not as
12
Connection: This concept of choice is fundamental to models in economics, the science of

choice, as explained in Chap. 12.
13
In fact, many major works mostly retrace Cavalli-Sforza and Feldmans (1981) Introduction, and
pile up more and more examples from the social sciences on the same blueprint.
197
much to justify the use of mathematical models as to figure out how to build them.
There were 260+ pages of mathematical studies (ivi: 77339), divided into Vertical
Transmission, Oblique and Horizontal Transmission, Multiple State Traits
(i.e., traits with more than two alternatives available in the population), and Cultural
Transmission for a Continuous Trait, with results that showed how, for example,
sometimes cultural transmission can simulate genetic transmission, making it difficult to separate them in careful analysis (ivi: 9), or that vertical transmission is
more important than anticipated (ivi: 76). Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman remarked
the importance of matching the right level of analysis to the right mathematical
method (ivi: 71), while maintaining tractability (ivi: 73). Different parts of the body
of theory were dragged into play for example, discrete traits vs. continuous traits
according to appropriateness and tractability.
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman are the best example of the complex, bi-directional
epistemological dynamics of dialogue between tradition and innovation, linking
older and more recent literature in evolutionary genetics. This dynamics, according
to the body of theory perspective presented here, is the right context in which to
understand the mathematical studies of evolutionary genetics applied to culture.
11.4
Conclusion: Minding the Balance and Recalling

the Body of Theory
The mutual adjustment process between a body of theory and a new domain is twofold: there is mathematical tinkering upon the body of theory to make it more suitable to the new domain, and there is justification, explaining why and to what extent
the body of theory can be applicable and useful in the new domain. We have seen
the balance between mathematical innovation and verbal justification in the seminal
book by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981). There, justification consists in refining
an acceptable definition of culture so that the body of theory is applicable. At the
same time, justification highlights those features that must be taken into account for
the production of new mathematical studies, and draws the boundaries of the subdomain where the mathematics can be of any help.
The relative proportion between mathematical tinkering and justification may be
a criterion to look at current cultural evolution works, too.14 We may find significant imbalance in favor of justification in some of them. These works miss the challenge of modifying the body of theory to make it suitable to answer an open,
14
I am referring here to books and papers such as Boyd and Richerson (1985), Richerson and Boyd
(2005), Mesoudi (2007, 2011), and Mesoudi et al. (2004, 2006). A flourishing literature in philosophy of biology builds arguments or dual inheritance theories to hit forms of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology that dont take cultural transmission into sufficient account. A careful
analysis is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, in light of the body of theory perspective,
I just offer one possible criterion for analyzing these texts: the criterion of the proportion between
justification and mathematical innovation.
198
E. Serrelli
pressing research question, and they just reiterate arguments for using evolutionary
genetics to analyze culture. I am not claiming that mathematical innovation is necessary per se in each and every cultural evolution work, but, with mathematical
tinkering, there goes awareness of the existence and nature of the mathematical
body of theory, its growth and dialogue with the studied domains. It is no chance
that, where justification is abundant and elaboration lacks, tools of biology are
advocated as the right ones, and culture is presented as having key Darwinian
properties; a certain definition of culture is justified, reiterated and enriched by
more and more examples, against other ways of understanding culture that are presented
as inexact and less productive (e.g., Mesoudi et al. 2006). In these cases, justification
has an utterly new rhetoric role with respect to the function it played in CavalliSforza and Feldman: it delivers a very different idea of theory, namely the idea of a
theory as the faithful and exhaustive description of a domain. There is a radical
difference between justifying the applicability of a body of theory as a possible tool
to answer open questions, and defending something like The New Theory of culture.
The body of theory perspective can be a way to describe the relationship between
evolutionary genetics and culture that more properly understands the epistemological mechanism at work, and brings evolutionary genetics into healthier dialogue
with other ways of studying culture.
Acknowledgements The author kindly acknowledges support from the John Templeton
Foundation in the framework of the 2012/2013 project Implementing the Extended Synthesis in
Evolutionary Biology into the Sociocultural Domain carried out at the Lisbon Applied
Evolutionary Epistemology Lab (grant ID 36288).
References
Ankeny, R., & Leonelli, S. (2011). Whats so special about model organisms? Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science Part A, 42, 313323.
Aoki, K. (1986). A stochastic model of gene-culture coevolution suggested by the culture historical hypothesis for the evolution of adult lactose absorption in humans. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 83, 29292933.
Aoki, K. (1987). Gene-culture waves of advance. Journal of Mathematical Biology, 25, 453464.
Aoki, K., Shida, M., & Shigesada, N. (1996). Travelling wave solutions for the spread of farmers
into a region occupied by hunter-gatherers. Theoretical Population Biology, 50(1), 117.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1982). Cultural transmission and the evolution of cooperative behavior. Human Ecology, 10, 325351.
Chicago Press.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1989). The evolution of indirect reciprocity. Social Networks, 11,
213236.
Campbell, D. T. (1960). Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other
knowledge processes. Psychological Review, 67(6), 380400.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1973). Cultural versus biological inheritance: Phenotypic
transmission from parent to children (a theory of the effect of parental phenotypes on childrens
phenotype). American Journal of Human Genetics, 25, 618637.
199
Darwin, C. R. (1859). On the origin of species (1st ed.). London: John Murray.
Driscoll, C. (2013). Sociobiology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter
2013 Edition. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/sociobiology/
Feldman, M. W., & Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. (1989). On the theory of evolution under genetic and
cultural transmission with application to the lactose absorption problem. In M. W. Feldman
(Ed.), Mathematical evolutionary theory (pp. 145173). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Feldman, M. W., & Laland, K. N. (1996). Gene-culture coevolutionary theory. Trends in Ecology
and Evolution, 11(11), 453457.
Fisher, R. A. (1918). The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance.
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 52, 399433.
Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius. New York: Meridian Books.
Galton, F. (1889). Natural inheritance. London: Macmillan.
Galton, F. (1897). The average contribution of each several ancestor to the total heritage of the
offspring. Proceedings of the Royal Society, 61, 401413.
Gerbault, P., et al. (2011). Evolution of lactase persistence: An example of human niche construction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences,
366(1566), 863877.
Hartl, D. L., & Clark, A. G. (2007). Principles of population genetics (4th ed.). Sunderland:
Sinauer Associates.
Keller, E. F. (2002). Making sense of life: Explaining biological development with models,
metaphors, and machines. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Kendal, J. R., Tehrani, J. J., & Odling-Smee, J. (Eds.) (2011). Theme issue Human niche construction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences,
366(1566), 784934.
Lewontin, R. C. (1980). Theoretical population genetics in the evolutionary synthesis. In E. Mayr
& W. B. Provine (Eds.), The evolutionary synthesis (pp. 5868). Cambridge/London: Harvard
University Press.
Mesoudi, A. (2007). A Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can promote an evolutionary synthesis for the social sciences. Biological Theory, 2(3), 263275.
Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural evolution: How darwinian theory can explain human culture and
synthesize the social sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2004). Is human cultural evolution Darwinian?
Evidence reviewed from the perspective of the Origin of Species. Evolution, 58(1), 111.
Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a unified science of cultural evolution.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(4), 329347. discussion 347383.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche construction: The neglected
process in evolution (Monographs in population biology, Vol. 37). Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Pearson, K. (1904). On a generalized theory of alternative inheritance, with special reference to
Mendels laws. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 203, 5386.
Provine, W. B. (1971). The origins of theoretical population genetics. Chicago/London: University
of Chicago Press.
Weldon, W. F. R. (1893). On certain correlated variations in Carcinus moenas. Proceedings of the
Royal Society, 54, 318329.
Weldon, W. F. R. (1895). Attempt to measure the death-rate due to the selective destruction of
Carcinus moenas with respect to a particular dimension. Proceedings of the Royal Society, 58,
360379.
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press.
Yule, G. U. (1903). Professor Johannsens experiments in heredity. New Phytologist, 2, 235242.
Chapter 12
Cultural Traits in Economic Theory

Fabrizio Panebianco
12.1
What Economics Is About?
At first sight, a non-economist may think that economics and the study of the
diffusion of cultural traits seem to belong to two very distant fields of human
knowledge to be part of a common research agenda. Then, if we think that culture may shape the way people form their demand for products and goods
determining their everyday consumption choices, or that culture also impacts
the way in which firms face their competitive environment and their production
choices, we may accept that some links between economics and cultural traits
are in place. The aim of this contribution is to show that not only do these links
exist, but also that cultural traits are at the core of the actual economic theory.
By defining economics properly as a general theory of choice, I will show that
the basic elements of any economic theory can be defined as cultural traits that
can be transmitted among agents. Moreover, in order to take into account for
the complexity of economic and social systems, economists need to model the
diffusion of these cultural traits and to understand their impact on economic
outcomes. The aim of this contribution is thus to give to non economists an
intuition on how economists approach the diffusion of cultural traits, and how
they model and use it in order to get insights into the economics of complex
societies.1
Connection: In this approach it is clear that evolution or transmission of traits does not mean in
any way a progress towards higher level of development. The relevance of this observation is
explained in the introduction of Chap. 3 (and Connection therein).
F. Panebianco (*)
Paris School of Economics, Paris, France
e-mail: fabrizio.panebianco@psemail.eu
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_12
201
202
F. Panebianco
To understand why cultural traits and economic theory are so strictly linked, it is
crucial to first accurately define what economics is. Using a very narrow and stripped
down definition used by almost all textbooks, economics is the social science that
studies the way in which goods and services are produced, how they are allocated
and distributed among agents and how they are consumed. On an aggregate level,
an economist should be interested in the way in which the production, the
distribution, and the consumption of goods and services impact unemployment,
salaries, wealth, income inequality, the growth of a country, and other economic
variables. However, these macro quantities, studied in Macroeconomics, are the
result of the interactions of millions of firms, households, producers, consumers,
sellers, buyers, institutions, and other economic actors. Thus, the great majority of
economists agree on the fact that an accurate study of these aggregate quantities can
be done only by a full understanding on how the choices of the single economic
agents are formed, in a word, by microfounding the macroeconomics. Microeconomics
is exactly the discipline that studies how the single economic agents act and how
they interact in markets, and what the result of these interactions is. With the word
market, we mean every allocative system that allows agents to exchange goods and
services by determining the demand and the supply of each good and the ratio
(price) at which goods are exchanged, this price usually being in terms of money or
in other units of measure. Consequently, this definition of market should not be
immediately assimilated to the common idea of free market, since a market can also
consist of lots of institutional constraints, dominant positions, state interventions
and so on. Moreover, we also have a market in cases in which goods are not traded
by means of monetary payments, but agents still assign a (non monetary) value
to the different elements of a choice, and the allocation of these elements is somehow derived from the interaction of the agents choosing on the basis of their values.
Think, for example, of the choice of schools by parents who have to provide a
ranking of different schools for their children in order to have a reasonably high
probability of being accepted in a relatively good school: we may refer to this as
school market.2 A similar situation happens when matching intern students and
hospitals in the US: students have to rank the preferred hospitals, while hospitals
rank the students so that a market allocates students to the different hospitals (see
Roth and Sotomayor 1990). We can argue the same for any kind of matching in
which elements of two sets have to be paired, including the mating process. In this
way, economists use the concept of market to study issues belonging to the domain
of social phenomena and analyze the choices of agents in these settings by means of
formal tools. Economics, thus, turns to be an analytical framework able to analyze
choices in different social contexts, and in the last decades economics has been
actually characterized by the methodology used by economists rather than by the
issues analyzed.
2
The quantity of literature analyzing this issue is very large and growing. As a matter of example,
refer to this set of works: Borjas (1995), Card and Rothstein (2007), Cutler and Glaeser (1997),
Cutler et al. (1999), Ross (1998), Moody (2001), Burgess et al. (2005), and Sderstrm and
Urusitalo (2010).
12
203
In what follows, I define in Sect. 12.2 what the primitives of any economic choice
models are and I show that they fit into a broad definition of cultural traits used in
economic contexts. Later sections describe how economists face the diffusion of
cultural traits, by means of models of evolutionary game theory (Sect. 12.3), cultural transmission (Sect. 12.4) and social networks (Sect. 12.5). Section 12.6
concludes.
12.2
Economic Theory and Cultural Traits
The notion of cultural trait in economics is very simple. Following Bisin and Verdier
(2001), culture in economics is defined as the set of components of preference,
social norms, and ideological attitudes which depend upon the capacity for learning
and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. A cultural trait can be each
of these components. The main element that defines a cultural trait in an economic
framework is, thus, the property of being transmitted or learnt. In this perspective, a
culture is not a property of a given group, since each agent can have her own cultural
traits distinguished from the ones of the other agents, by showing different preferences, norms, attitudes and so on. We can then speak about culture even if displayed
by a single agent.3 Thus, the focus is on the individuals with their own traits that
may change due to interactions. Moreover, while we need social interactions to
build a theory for cultural traits and their transmission, the concept of cultural trait
does not need social interaction to drive to group homogeneity in cultural traits.
Then, if more individuals happen to, or agree to, show the same trait then we would
look at shared cultural traits, thus focusing on culture in a group perspective.
Economists, however, use the individualistic perspective as a starting point moving
from the shared to the concept of culture as a shared factor as a special case.
The definition above refers to specific elements as cultural traits, namely preference, social norms, and ideological attitudes. But what exactly are these? The economic theory of choice is based on some pillars (preferences, norms and strategies)
and on the resulting behaviors. We now analyze in turn each of them and show their
relationships with the concept of cultural trait.
12.2.1
Preferences
In economic theory, agents are endowed with a preference relation that ranks the set
of all possible alternatives the agent may choose, from the most preferred to the
least preferred element of the set, with the possibility of indifference among two or
more alternatives. If the preferences are complete (the agent can compare any two
alternatives) and transitive (if alternative A is preferred to alternative B and
3
Connection: Look at Sect. 2.2 for some connections to this individualistic approach to culture.
204
F. Panebianco
alternative B is preferred to alternative C, then alternative A is preferred to alternative C) then a reasonable choice theory can be built, explaining a great part of economic phenomena. Notice that the concept of preference is very broad, and can
include a preference order over any element that can be part of a choice. Here we
provide some simple and non exhaustive examples:
If we just look at the consumption choices agents take at any given point in time,
preferences determine the type of products an agent would like to consume, the
preferred shares of products of the different types in her most preferred
consumption bundle. These preferences can be deeply culturally determined:
depending on the culture an agent belongs to, she may like some kind of food and
not others, listen to some music and so on. In this case, the corresponding cultural
trait is the relative importance agents assign to particular types of consumptions
with respect to others.
Often, choices are an inter-temporal issue: each agent knows that choices today
affect the set of available choices tomorrow. For example, if an agent buys an
apartment today, she most likely has to reduce consumption in the following
years to pay for the mortgage, which in turn reduces other kinds of consumption.
More generally, an agent can choose between spending some money to buy some
goods today, or saving the money, getting the interest rate and buying a larger
amount of goods tomorrow. The way in which an agent is willing to reduce consumption today to have a larger consumption tomorrow is related to the time
preferences: how much an agent values consumption in a future date, and how
much compensation she wants to receive in order to postpone consumption. In
this case the corresponding cultural trait is called time discount factor. If, at last,
intertemporal choices allow for a certain degree of risk about future outcomes,
each agent may show a given propensity to undertake some risk. Think of financial
investments, where higher risk is associated with higher potential gains. Then the
risk propensity is a crucial part of each agents set of preferences.
Preferences may regard not only the consumption of goods, but also the allocation, among agents, of the total output of the economy, thus having preferences
linked to some pro-social motives. Some agents may prefer, for example, to be
part of a society in which the economic interactions results in a less uneven distribution of revenues, even if this would imply giving up part of their revenue to
increase others payoff. Usually agents value, in their preferences, the consequences of their choices on the outcome of family or group members, thus
departing from an egoistic and self-centered preference framework. In all these
cases, we talk about pro-social preferences. The fact that each agent chooses to
look for what she thinks is best for her (make her more satisfied), does not mean
that she does not take into account others welfare, health or satisfaction as part
of her own satisfaction, thus influencing her own choice. Note that the case of
pro-social preferences is particularly interesting since it strictly relates to the way
in which agents perceive the societal structure and their preferences over it. In
this sense, it is very likely that this set of traits depends on some transmitted
12
205
values and on the social interaction network, and becomes a trait itself to be
transmitted to others.
As we have previously argued, economics is not only about consumption and
production choices, but also about choices in different contexts. Take, for
example, the choice of the neighborhood in which a household decides to live.
Agents may value different elements in making this choice, such as the ethnic
composition of the neighborhood, with the consequent effects in terms of segregation outcomes. It has been proven that agents display a certain level of preference for creating links and relationships with their own group agents (homophily),
and the same holds for religious or political preferences. As we will show in
Sect. 12.5, the consequences can be dramatic: in his seminal works on this topic,
Schelling (1971, 1978) shows that even if agents tolerate a large majority of
neighbors of different groups before moving, the aggregate city would results in
highly segregated neighborhoods even if the agents were not racist at all. Strictly
linked with this identity based choices, recent literature analyses the effect of
homophily on the friendship network formations (see Currarini et al. 2009, 2010,
2012). These studies are particularly important since segregation at the group
level may have strong effects on the economic performances of agents in the
different groups.
While preferences take into account a large part of the cultural traits analysis in
economics, the standard economic theory considered them as exogenous and stable,
as an a priori that cannot be explained. In fact, it is hard to infer peoples preferences, since this would almost mean interpreting agents minds and thoughts. This
fact complicates the predictive part of the economists work a lot. Nonetheless,
preferences as defined above, are a clear example of cultural traits, being transmittable between agents and susceptible of modification during this transmission process. However, only recently have economists started to question the assumption of
fixed preferences, proposing models in which preferences actually change and are
transmitted from agent to agent, with strong impacts on the models results. Even if
it is impossible to exactly determine the direction of a change of preferences for the
single agents, preference variation among agents and their change can be explained
by modeling the way in which preferences are transmitted from generation to generation or between peers or social contacts in a group, thus providing some hints on
how preferences change over time. In this sense, economists could rely on a wellestablished and recognized literature on this topic. In particular, as we will show
below, economists treated these two problems using tools derived from evolutionary
game theory, cultural transmission theory and by using social network analysis.
206
12.2.2
F. Panebianco
Social Norms
While preferences determine what each agent personally would like to choose
among a set of alternatives (taking into account or not for pro-social motives), social
norms take into account the social pressures agents are exposed to in order to choose
particular actions. Agents, in fact, act and choose in a society in which other agents
choices and opinions may influence their actual choices. In this perspective, the
study of how social norms are formed and influence agents behavior is crucial in
societies in which agents are highly interconnected. These social norms may or may
not be in line with the preferences (and pro-social preferences) agents have. For
example, an agents preference could dictate to adopt a very competitive working
ethic, but if all colleagues argue in favor of a cooperative way of behaving or actually
act more cooperatively, then the agent may be socially pressed to play cooperatively
or to think that acting cooperatively is better from a social point of view and may
partially correct her behavior. While a shared definition of social norm is lacking
(see Bicchieri and Muldoon 2013; Cialdini and Trost 1998; Cialdini and Goldstein
2004, for introductions to the topic), all scholars agree that social norms work as
non-material incentives to act and perform specific choices, as the result of what
others do or think should be done. In particular, we have a descriptive social norm
when an agent considers, as a motive to act in a certain direction, the behavior
observed among her acquaintances. On the other side, we have an injunctive social
norm when an agent is influenced by what she thinks he should do based on her
acquaintances opinions. In both cases, social norms regard what an agent thinks is
a proper choice in her social context, because others do it that way or because she
thinks others think it is a proper thing to behave in a certain way. In this sense, it has
always been natural to model social norms as cultural traits and to analyze how they
interact with agents choices. In particular, descriptive social norms are usually used
in economic models with peer effects (we discuss these models further in Sect.
12.5), so that agents incentives to perform a given behavior depend on how much
that behavior is present among her friends. As we will see in the next sections, peer
effects analysis is crucial in the study of diffusion of traits in social networks (see
Sect. 12.5). On the other side, the presence of injunctive social norms requires an
internalization process in which agents try to understand what others think it is the
right behavior. Thus, being related to the transmission of opinions on behaviors
rather than on the observation of actual behaviors, they are relatively more studied
in the intergenerational transmission of social norms (see Sect. 12.3). In both cases,
social norms change with the agents choices and opinions and, as preferences, are
transmitted among agents.
12
12.2.3
207
Strategies
As we have seen above, while preferences and social norms may take into account
for some social influences when forming choices, they still say nothing of the possibility that an agents choices may strategically change depending on each agents
counterparts choices. Said differently, while assuming that an agent is influenced
by what other agents think and, in the case of descriptive social preferences, what
other agents do, each agent take others actions as given not changing depending on
own choices. In a word, they assume that agents do not behave strategically. In contrast, the way in which an agent changes her actions depending on the choices of
people around her, assuming that her neighbors also adapt behavior to best respond
to her actions is called strategic behavior. More formally, a strategy is a plan of
action that dictates what an agent should do given the different actions other agents
can take at any point in time and given the past history. In this perspective, different
strategies may represent different ways in which agents interact among each other.
For example, they may represent different working cultures in a firm, such as, how
altruistic and cooperatively agents are. When agents performing some strategies
meet and make some choice, the final outcome depends on the specific interaction
among strategies that take place. This concept, thus, fits the idea of different cultural
traits competing in societies. The analysis of the diffusion of cultural traits intended
in this way has been largely used in evolutionary game theory (see Sect. 12.4) and
in social network analysis (see Sect. 12.5). Thus, the problem of the transmission or
imitation of strategies naturally arises.
12.2.4
Behaviors
From the economics perspective, agents behaviors are the result of the interaction
of the different agents, given their preferences, norms, strategies and the material
constraints they are subjected to. In a certain sense, behaviors are just the results of
the interaction of cultural traits with other material elements, and cannot just be
considered cultural traits in a strict sense. In fact, given the previous discussion, it
should be clear that behavior cannot be transmitted as a cultural trait, but that all the
primitives of choice can be transmitted so that similar behaviors can be observed as
a consequence. It this sense, a behavior cannot belong to the category of cultural
trait, as analyzed in any economic model. However, there is one exception to this:
the case of the above-mentioned descriptive social norms, in which behaviors are
observed by agents and are transformed into social norms. Only in that case, can the
behavior of a group of people be observed and encoded as a social norm and, in this
sense, transmitted among agents.
208
12.3
F. Panebianco
Evolutionary Game Theory and Traits Diffusion
In the previous section we have shown that the primitive elements of economic
models can be intended as cultural traits. In this section we start describing how
economists analyze the diffusion of these cultural traits in a society. Using a chronological perspective, the first set of theories analyzing this issue regards the evolution
of traits in strategic contexts. As it is clear from the discussion above, in strategic
contexts the important class of cultural traits to be analyzed is the one of strategies,
so that we now focus just on these traits. More specifically, game theory is the
standard setting used to study strategic interactions. It is then important to recall
here the definition of a strategy, this being the cultural trait we are going to focus on.
A strategy is a plan of action that dictates what an agent should do, given the different
actions other agents can take at any point in time and given the past history. Game
theory generally assumes that agents are intelligent enough to choose the strategy
they think would provide them the largest payoff, given the strategies chosen by the
other agents. Said differently, in a situation in equilibrium each agent chooses a best
reply to other agents strategies, such that no one is willing to change his strategy
unilaterally.4 This is the definition of equilibrium generally used, and we refer to it
as the Nash Equilibrium, in honor of John Nash who derived it (Nash 1950;
Rubinstein and Osborne 1994). While the existence of equilibrium strategies do not
assure that they are actually played by agents, they can give an intuition of which
situations are more likely to be observed. However, in lots of economic frameworks,
there is a multiplicity of possible situations described by equilibria, meaning that
the society can find different solutions to solve a given problem. In each of these
equilibria no agent can change her strategy unilaterally and get a higher payoff.
However, these different equilibria may differ in terms of the total output produced
or in terms of the distribution of this output among the different players, so that
some equilibria can be considered more desirable than others. This multiplicity of
equilibria, however, has the consequence of reducing the power of prediction of
such a theory, being unable to identify one situation that can be ranked as the best
outcome possible.5 In particular, once we get in a dynamic perspective, there are two
kind of problems to be solved in order get an idea of which cultural trait will be
shown in the society. The first one is to understand, among all possible equilibria,
which are the ones we can select as the most reasonable to be observed in the
society, since they are more stable against little perturbations in the conditions of the
4
More precisely, non cooperative game theory looks at equilibria in which every agent does not
have any incentive by changing, by herself, her own strategy. Cooperative game theory, instead,
allow agents to act in groups and studies the behavior of coalitions of agents. However, we refer
here only to non cooperative game theory being the branch of the discipline that produced the largest amount of testable results with respect to our issue.
5
Theorists try to solve this problem by providing many kind of refinements of the concept of Nash
equilibrium that enables to select the proper equilibrium in various situation. However, many of
these refinements are used in static contexts. As it is clear, the issue of the diffusion of cultural
traits is a dynamic one so that we do not focus on them.
12
209
environment. The second problem is how different strategies may be transmitted

between individuals or learnt by individuals so that a possible diffusion pattern can
be studied and the derived long run equilibrium determined. As it is clear, these are
dynamic problems that, in order to be solved, need an evolutionary perspective to be
added on the basis of game theory.
In this sense, evolutionary game theory (EGT) provides a way to fill this gap. In
particular, EGT uses concepts derived from evolutionary biology in order to model
competition between different strategies and analyze which strategy survives in the
long run.6 In detail, EGT is not required to deal with intelligent agents, but just with
agents programmed to play a given strategy. This can be a too simplified assumption
since agents, even if not fully rational, are used to thinking of the consequences of
different actions and reasonably choose among different options. However, keeping
the framework simple, in EGT agents are supposed to play a predetermined strategy
even if not profitable for them, thus being totally constrained, in their choices, by
their cultural trait. In the original setting, taken from evolutionary biology, the
payoff of each agent performing a given strategy (or being of a given type) is exactly
the number of offspring she gets, so that payoff and fitness of each strategy
coincide. Moreover, each child has the same trait as the parent. If we speak about
biological traits, this can be quite a good approximation of genetic transmission and
demographic evolution of different types. If we then intend this process as a metaphor of transmission of cultural traits, then it mimics just the vertical transmission
process occurring between parents and offspring. By means of this transmission
process, the demographic composition of the society changes with time depending
on the different fitness of the different groups, having some traits increasing and
other decreasing in population shares. This biological model can also be reinterpreted using an intragenerational cultural transmission framework since the same
results hold if some or all agents instead of having children of the same type, update
their strategies, mainly imitating the ones that experienced a higher payoff than
theirs or than the average. That is why, in this simplified world, payoff and fitness
again coincide since high payoff strategies are imitated by more agents and thus
display higher fitness.
Given this basic structure, EGT can then provide and answer the two issues discussed above. The first issue is about how to select, among many possible Nash
equilibria, the one that is more likely to be continuously observed in the society
because it is more stable against little shocks that may affect the society. For this
purpose, John Maynard Smith (1972) defines the concept of Evolutionary Stable
Strategy (ESS). In detail, an ESS is a strategy such that if all the agents adopt, then
it is impossible that a small fraction of invaders adopting an alternative strategy
can spread in the society. Said differently, a strategy is evolutionarily stable if it is a
cultural trait that, if widespread in the society, represents a stable cultural outcome
that cannot be modified by a small number of cultural competitors. The most important
6
A good introduction to evolutionary game theory can be found in Weibull (1995). A good introduction to evolutionary game theory based on many examples from different contexts is Gintis
(2009).
210
F. Panebianco
feature is that not all Nash equilibria are ESS, but that all ESS are Nash equilibria.
Thus the ESS concept provides a way to select among many equilibria the ones that
are stable cultural outcomes.
However, it can be the case that multiple ESS are present, so that we need to
select which ones are the most probable outcomes, understanding which is the
specific pattern the society will show. The issue of multiple ESS usually arises in the
so called coordination games. Just to give some very simple examples: in driving a
car, there are two possible strategies, keep left or keep right. In a society it is
optimal that all agents coordinate on one of the two sides avoiding driving sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, which would result in a large number
of car accidents. Another simplified example regards cooperation in a society and
approximated by the Stag Hunt game. Imagine that two agents should perform a
task like hunting to get food. They can coordinate and perform a complex action
together, as hunting a stag together, thus getting half a stag each, or they can each
go alone, thus performing a simpler action and get one hare each, smaller than half
stag. In this case it is beneficial to coordinate since, otherwise, the one that went for
the complex action (hunting a stag) alone would be unsuccessful, without any additional gain for the other agent. However, while coordination on the complex action
and on the simpler actions are both ESS, it cannot be determined, ex ante, on which
equilibrium the society will fall. Considering the driving example, in continental
Europe we drive on the right while in UK they go for the left. More specifically, the
concept of ESS, while it can be precious in selecting the stable outcome among a set
of possible equilibria, it does not provide any intuition about how that specific
equilibrium arose. Thus, an analysis of the specific process by which strategies are
imitated or transmitted enables us to study the patterns that lead to some equilibrium
and not to others.
The analysis is somehow similar to the study of ESS, with a basic difference. The
study of ESS looks at specific strategies and studies whether a population displaying
only that strategy can be invaded by alternative traits. This is an approach that looks
at local small shocks in the society. The dynamic approach, instead, studies what the
equilibrium that the society reaches is, given a particular initial situation, usually
not a Nash equilibrium. The dynamic process is simple: at each point in time agents
are matched to perform the given task. Each agent plays her strategy and gets the
corresponding payoff. Then, using an intragenerational interpretation of the
dynamics, some or all agents can update their strategy usually imitating the most
successful ones, or other similar updating protocols. In this way a strategy has more
cultural offspring the higher its payoff, and, by repeating the process, a dynamic
of the population shares of each cultural trait can be shown. Given the specific
updating protocols different dynamics are shown. The most common one is called
replicator dynamics and simply states that the more a strategys payoff is larger
(smaller) than the average payoff, the more (less) it grows in the society. In this way,
given these dynamics, it is possible to understand how societies that differ on some
specific features, can end up by showing different long run situations. This approach
is used in the presence of multiple ESS to analyze under which conditions a society
may fall into one ESS or the other, thus determining their basin of attraction. It is
12
211
used, for example, in coordination games to understand the conditions under which
one of the two ESS is selected. These conditions can be, for example, demographic
thresholds: if at least a share x of people start with strategy drive on the right, then
everyone ends up driving on the right. There can be more complex conditions,
involving constraints on agents preferences: if agents show some kind of prosocial
preferences, then it is more likely to observe a stag hunt than a hawk hunt, and so
on.
This evolutionary framework can also be used when a unique ESS exists, so that
the dynamic theoretically converges to that ESS in the long run, but we empirically
observe systematic deviations from that strategy in the data. In this respect, the most
famous and used application of EGT is the analysis of the spread of cooperative
behavior in contexts in which material incentives would provide advantage to non
cooperative strategies, such as in the Prisoners Dilemma example. In this example
the agents would receive a high payoff if everyone in the society performs a cooperative strategy. However, incentives are such that each agent would benefit from
exploiting others cooperation by performing a non cooperative strategy. This will
drive the society to non cooperative outcome even if, by cooperating, everyone
would be more satisfied. This general setting is then an important scheme for analyzing situations like contributions to public goods as paying taxes. In all these
cases non cooperation would be ESS. There exist an extremely extended literature
on this topic, trying to understand why, in fact, some kind of cooperation is actually
observed. In this context, the general approach is to insert additional elements on
preferences (prosocial preferences, reputation effects, etc.) or institutional constraints (punishments for non cooperation or prizes for cooperation), thus providing
useful insights on the interplay between cultural transmission and institutional
settings.7,8
At last, notice that in all previous cases, the fitness of each strategy coincides
with the payoff each agent gets; however this is not always the case. The Indirect
evolutionary approach (Gth and Kliemt 1998) considers the case in which agents,
endowed with some preferences, choose strategies in order to maximize their payoff. However, the success of the strategy is independent from the utility each agent
gets from own actions. In this way the dynamics is such that preferences associated
to agents choosing most successful strategies spread in the society. This approach
comes to be particularly interesting when we think that in some situations it is not
cultural traits that directly compete, but that the observed cultural traits are the one
displayed by agents who succeeded in the competition in fields potentially independent of the traits. This can be easily understood looking at its biological counterpart.
Axelrod (1984), Binmore (2006), and Gintis (2004) provide goods insights on how this issue has
been studied. For example Sacconi (2007) and Nowak (2006) study the role of reputation, while
Fehr and Fischbacher (2002, 2004), Gintis et al. (2005) focus on the role of prosocial preferences,
or Bruni et al. (2014) that study the role of social endogenous recognition for cooperative
behaviors.
8
Connection: An interesting perspective on cooperation is also given by Chap. 19, where visual
art is seen as a signal that helped humans to reach cooperative outcomes in complex societies.
212
F. Panebianco
Consider two species competing in a given environment. While each one has a
particular genes distribution, it is not genotypes that directly compete. On the contrary genotypes concur, together with other factors (epigenetics, maternal cares and
so on) to determine phenotypes that actually compete. Then the genotype of the
winning population is the one associated to the winning phenotypes. In this sense
we can talk about indirect evolution of genotypes (and preferences or generally
cultural traits in our framework).
12.4
Economics and Cultural Transmission
In this section we discuss a second wave of economic models of cultural transmission, that, differently from EGT, does not strictly focus on strategies but can be
potentially applied to any trait, and that does not restrict agents to be programmed
to play some fixed strategy, but allow them to be more intelligent and able to choose
what they think is best for them. This set of theories mainly models the transmission
of traits in an intergenerational setting, and has been originally used for all those
traits that are likely to be acquired during a socialization process in each agents
childhood, and that remain pretty fixed along lifetime. These kinds of traits are
inter-groups preferences such as attitudes for interethnic or interreligious marriages.
However, the general setting presented below has been used to model a wide range
of preferences and strategies, such as, for example, the evolution of corruption, as in
Hauk and Saez-Marti (2002). More interestingly there are some contributions about
the evolution of cooperative cultural traits in competitive environment that propose
some models merging this approach with an EGT frameworks (Bisin et al. 2004a;
Tabellini 2008; Calabuig and Olcina 2009).
The first model introducing these theories into the economic field was Bisin and
Verdier (2000, 2001), inspired by the seminal work on intergenerational transmission of cultural traits by Cavalli Sforza and Feldman (1973, 1981). In a nutshell, the
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman model considers a society composed of agents, each
endowed with a set of cultural traits. These traits are treated as numerical entities,
thus being discrete or continuous, and are transmitted to the children through a
socialization scheme composed of three components. A vertical socialization, in
which parents transmit their trait to own offspring, an oblique socialization, in
which other adults in the society may transmit their trait to all children in the
society, and an horizontal socialization in which peers influence each others. In this
way, depending on the distribution of traits in the society, a dynamic of cultural
traits is derived, having as a key variable the strength at which each socialization
process take place. However, in the original model of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman,
this set of parameters is exogenous.
Being economics is a theory of choice applied to frameworks in which agents try
to choose the best option among the set of alternatives, Bisin and Verdier (2000,
2001) proposed a model in which socialization is a purposeful choice. In particular,
parents, being interested in their childrens future outcome and cultural trait, decide
12
213
how much effort to put into transmitting their own traits to their offspring, being that
this effort is costly. In order to give an example, think of the effort as the time parents
decide to spend with own children. This time has a cost since, as an extreme case, if
parents stay all day with their own children to be sure that they learn examples from
them, they are forced not to work and this has a clear monetary cost.9 The incentives
to perform a given socialization effort are such that:
The more parents think their own trait is good for children, the higher the vertical
socialization effort chosen;
If parents judge their trait to be good for their own children, and the larger the
population share displaying their trait, the higher the probability that their
children can imitate this trait simply interacting with random agents in the society, and thus the lower the incentive to produce this socialization effort. This is
called cultural substitution hypothesis;
Parents cannot perfectly determine their own childrens future preferences over
the different cultural traits, but they act as if children have their own preferences.
This is called imperfect empathy hypothesis.
Given these simple hypotheses, it is possible to determine how much effort parents are willing to exert to socialize children. In this way it is also possible to study
the derived dynamics of traits. The main advantage of this set of models is that they
easily internalize the transmission of cultural traits in a framework in which standard economic choices can be made by (more or less) rational agents, who can
purposefully orient the socialization decisions. In this sense, these models while
being fully dynamics, are not mechanical. In particular, a change in the conditions
can alter the socialization decisions of the agents and thus change the trajectories of
the cultural traits dynamics.
Notice also that the mathematics of this models is quite similar to the one of the
intragenerational transmission of opinions as, for example, De Marzo et al. (2003).
Thus, as for the case of EGT, models of intergenerational transmission of traits can
be easily rephrased as models of intragenerational transmission of traits. In particular, agents can update their trait depending on the social interactions they experience, and the vertical socialization effort is intended as how much each agent gets
to stick to her own past cultural traits values. While the mathematics remains
unchanged, a whole new area of interpretation of these models is open. This interpretation, however, displays some additional problems. If, for example, the updated
cultural traits are preferences, the intertemporal perspectives creates strong logical
problems in the modelization: if the agent knows that the choices today are going to
influence her preference tomorrow, how does she evaluate today the outcome she
will get tomorrow? Using present or future preferences? This is the so called time
or dynamic inconsistency problem and it is still an open issue. Notice, however, that
9
Connection: A hidden hypothesis is that, once agents get a trait, they do not change it for the rest
of the time. This is similar to the socialization hypothesis in Sect. 14.2.3, and somehow different
from the scarcity hypothesis discussed at the same point in the book. Moreover the reader can find
other perspectives on the issue of cultural transmission by referring to Sect. 16.3.2 and 17.5.
214
F. Panebianco
if transmitted traits are not preferences but, for example, norms, then this problem
does not arise.
At this point, an important distinction has to be done between the analysis of
discrete and continuous cultural traits. The analysis of discrete cultural trait is relevant when the identity of the cultural groups is fixed (for example, being left wing
or right wing) and the relevant variable to be analyzed is the diffusion of the traits in
the population. On the contrary, continuous cultural traits are relevant when the trait
is an opinion susceptible of being modified depending on the social interactions (for
example the attitude towards a given group), and we are interested in the study of
the change in intensity of this trait.
The original set of models, as introduced by Bisin and Verdier (2000, 2001),
regards the analysis of discrete cultural traits. By defining a cultural group as the set
of agents displaying a given trait, the main focus of this analysis is to determine the
dynamics of the population shares of the different groups. This set of models generally assume that, in the oblique socialization process, children have a probability of
taking a given trait that is proportional to the relative representativeness of that trait
in the overall population. The main result of these models is that, if cultural substitution hypothesis holds, then we observe a stable coexistence of different cultural
traits in the society, with parents actually engaged in positive socialization effort.
This framework has been used to analyze the evolution of cultural traits mainly
involved in family related choices. This is the case of intergroup marriages
(interethnic and interreligious) or the emergence of oppositional identities among
minority groups in presence of residential segregation providing an explanation of
why oppositional identities are usually stronger in very mixed neighborhoods (Bisin
et al. 2004b, 2010, 2011).
Almost half of the original analysis in Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman regarded the
transmission of continuous cultural traits rather than discrete traits. However, as
noticed in Serrelli (this volume), very little attention has generally been devoted to
this set of traits.10 At the same time, lots of cultural traits are not fixed but change
across generations depending on the specific social contexts agents are exposed to.
For example, this is the case of opinion diffusion in social networks, such as interethnic attitudes and all those traits that can be modulated in their intensity. The
economics literature on this topic is more recent, different from the discrete traits
literature, and does not analyze the demographic distribution of types along time but
the potential homogenization of types along time. While Bisin and Topa (2003)
started introducing the issue, there are few contributions in this field. Brueckner and
Smirnov (2007, 2008) analyzed the emergence of a melting pot in a framework
without purposeful socialization, Pichler (2010a, b) thoroughly analyzed the case in
which parents choose the trait to display to their own children, and Panebianco
(2014) analyzed how the values of long run cultural traits depend on the shape of the
network of relation agents that are influenced during the oblique socialization
process. All these papers argue that a sort of homogenization of cultural traits hap10
Connection: See Chap. 11 for a presentation of the theory of Cavalli Sforza and Feldman. See,
in particular, the connection in Sect. 11.3.
12
215
pen in the long run. More precisely, in all these studies the dispersion of cultural
traits at the end of the process is less than the dispersion at the beginning. The main
idea is that, during the oblique socialization process, whatever the level of vertical
socialization, children take into account the average of the traits and update their
trait in that direction. If they look at the overall average then convergence to a single
cultural trait happens (as in Brueckener and Smirnov 2007, 2008), while if the social
network determines the subsample of the population to imitate (as in Panebianco
2014), then long run variation can still be observed, but convergence across
subgroups happens.
Now, models for the diffusion of discrete traits are very powerful in predicting
when and why multiple cultural traits can coexist, but for the time being they have
not been able to understand why, under reasonable hypothesis such as cultural substitution, unstable equilibrium arise, that is why, little changes in initial conditions
may lead to strongly different long run situations. At the same time, models for the
diffusion of continuous traits are able to explain the process of homogenization of
cultural traits experienced in various aspects of life very well, but they are not able
to take into account the possibility of an increase in heterogeneity of traits. One
possible way to explain these limits of the theory, can rely on a simplified assumption used in these models: agents cannot directly affect oblique socialization. While
this assumption makes the models tractable, they limit their explanatory variable. In
this perspective, further research on the endogenization of oblique socialization is
needed.
12.5
Cultural Traits in Social Networks
In the last decade economists have understood that it was not enough to analyze the
behavior of isolated agents, or of agents interacting in groups and not endowed with
individual specific relationships. Agents, in fact, live in complex societies, endowed
with a complex net of social relationships and the analysis of how traits diffuse
should pass by the understanding of how interactions works in complex networks.
Thus, we observed an impressive development of theories dealing with the peculiarities of specific local interactions and their effects on individual and aggregate
behavior, so that the economic models dealing with the diffusion, transmission and
evolution of cultural traits started to be extended taking into account for this network effect. One of the first models of spatial interactions inspiring the following
literature is due to the Nobel Laureate Schelling (1971, 1978). Schelling wanted to
analyze the following problem: why do we observe racially segregated neighborhood? Is this segregation due to people being very racist? He found that large neighborhood segregation can be the result of people actually willing to tolerate a large
majority of neighbors of another ethnic group. This happens since, at the beginning
of the process, only very racist people living in neighborhoods with a high share
of people of a different ethnic group move to other neighborhoods. This has the
effect of making the original neighborhood more segregated inducing, in a cascade
216
F. Panebianco
effect, less racist people to move away too. Schillers aim was to prove that, when
agents interact in complex social frameworks, aggregate effects may be very different from what is expected just by looking at the single agents preferences. This
example is important since it proves that intergroup preferences and the local structure of the society interact constantly in shaping the future social outcomes. More
generally, when we think at the interactions between the network structure and the
cultural traits we need to focus on two possible directions: how the network structure influences the dynamics of cultural traits and, conversely, how the presence of
cultural traits may shape social interaction networks. In this respect, most contributions can be classified according to these categories, even if most of the literature
regard the first effects. In what follows, we do not propose a review of all the economic modelization of network interaction, but we introduce what we think are the
most interesting directions taken by the economic analysis in dealing with these
problems. Jackson (2008) provides an extensive review of network literature covering all major contributions of network theory on economic and social sciences.
Consider, first, how the network structure influences the dynamic and diffusion
of traits. In more detail, we can analyze two aspects of this problem: how the network may impact the intensity of the traits, thus, making them change over time or
how fixed cultural traits spread in a network. This difference is based on the nature
of the traits to be studied, and is mainly based on the difference between continuous
and discrete cultural traits as described before. In particular, if we deal with continuous cultural traits, it is more interesting to analyze how the network shapes their
intensity while if we deal with fixed discrete traits it is crucial to see how they are
differently adopted by the population. As far as continuous traits are concerned,
while there exists a lot of literature regarding the diffusion in the network (see again
Jackson (2008) for a review), we have already cited the contributions that show the
links between the intergenerational transmission of cultural traits and the structure
of the local social interactions agents that are exposed to it (De Marzo et al. 2003;
Panebianco 2014). Moving to the analysis of discrete cultural traits, the key research
question is about how traits spread differently depending on the topology of the
network. The most interesting aspects of this analysis is its close relationships to the
studies of epidemiologists on the spread of diseases. In more detail, once cultural
traits are assumed to be discrete and fixed entities that can be transmitted from agent
to agent, the parallel with the spread of diseases is immediate. Vega Redondo (2007)
provides good insight into these models.11 The main advantage of this kind of setting is that there is no need to use oversimplified and stylized networks since results
can be found for complex networks actually observed in the society. In particular, it
is proven that all kinds of large networks in the real world share some common
properties. For example, the presence of few highly connected nodes and a large
number of poorly connected ones; or the so called small-world property that states
that it is possible to go from one side to the other of the network in very few steps
(as the case of the six degrees of separation). Once these properties are defined, it is
11
Connection: Look at Sect. 10.3 to have a concrete idea of the epidemiological approach to cultural transmission of traits.
12
217
then possible to provide conditions under which multiple cultural traits survive
together in a society or where just one trait wins. These conditions are generally
correlated to the way in which nodes are linked each other (the degree distribution
of the network, and the rules by which nodes get connected in the network), or the
initial share of agents displaying a given cultural trait, as usually also happens in
EGT models.
The main shortcoming of this set of models, however, is that they assign very
little importance to the way in which behavior is chosen by agents and assume
behavior as mechanically derived by the position of the agents in the network.
While the position in the network is certainly important in shaping behavior, the
way in which it forms is crucial for the economic theory. In this respect, one growing strand of literature tries to relate the behavior agents choose in a network with
their exact position. Ballester et al. (2006), in their seminal contribution, found that
if there is strategic interaction in a network and agents experience peer effects, then
under some simple assumptions over the payoffs agents get, the Nash equilibrium
can be exactly related to the Bonacich centrality index. This index measures how the
overall distance of a node is from any other in the network using any possible path
existing between them. This is an important result since it helps to create a strong
link between the way in which agents form their behavior and the topology of the
network, stating that more intense actions should be played by more central agents.
This framework has the advantage of proposing a way to identify how behavior
appears in the network. If we now remember that, in the first sections of this contribution, we identified as peer effects the way in which neighbors behaviors impact
an agents norms and incentives to behave in a given way, the importance of this
research for the analysis of the transmission of traits is crucial. This importance is
amplified if we consider that peer effects can be one motivation for the observation
of positive correlations in behavior among neighbors. There is, however, another
important phenomenon that can lead to this correlation: Homophily, that is, the
general tendency of people to link themselves with other agents similar to them.
Thus, the crucial aspect of homophily is that the network is not fixed, so that an
analysis of how a network is built up is important. Now, while there exists a large
body of literature studying the conditions for the formation of a stable social network, homophily mainly links the emergence of a given network structure with the
presence of cultural traits (preferences), explaining the observed proximity of culturally similar agents in the network . While sociological and economic works have
long tried to describe this phenomenon, also by looking at the indices that can measure how much homophily a network shows, only recently in Currarini et al. (2009,
2010, 2012) economists provide a model that links two key aspects, cultural traits
(preferences) and the mechanisms by which agents randomly meet and form a
friendship network, using real data from a US high school to test the model.
218
12.6
F. Panebianco
Conclusions
For a long time economics seemed to be very distant from the analysis of how cultural traits spread in a society, and was then unable to provide any contribution to
the emergence of some cultural diversity. Only in the last decades have economists
started to fill this gap. In this contribution, we showed how the concept of cultural
trait is strictly related to the basic elements of any economic theory, such as preferences, social norms, strategies and behavior. To understand the relationships
between the diffusion of cultural traits and economic outcomes, economists used
three main frameworks: evolutionary game theory, cultural transmission theories
and network theories. Each of them provided some insights to the issue. Today,
network analysis seems to be very promising since it can accurately mimic the processes observed in the society. Thus, the great efforts of scholars is to merge together
the contributions of these theories to provide a unified economic framework to analyze cultural traits diffusion.
Acknowledgments The author is greatful to ERC project TECTACOM - 324004 for financial
support
References
Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers.
Ballester, C., Calvo-Armengol, A., & Zenou, Y. (2006). Whos who in the networks. Econometrica,
74(5), 14031417.
Bicchieri, C. & Muldoon, R. (2013). Social norms, In E. N. Zalta (Ed.). The Stanford encyclopedia
of philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/
social-norms/
Binmore, K. (2006). Why do people cooperate? Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 5(1), 8196.
Bisin, A., & Topa, G. (2003). Empirical models of cultural transmission. Journal of the European
Economic Association, 1(23), 363375.
Bisin, A., & Verdier, T. (2000). Beyond the melting pot: Cultural transmission, marriage, and the
evolution of ethnic and religious traits. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(3), 955988.
Bisin, A., & Verdier, T. (2001). The economics of cultural transmission and the dynamics of
preferences. Journal of Economic Theory, 97(2), 298319.
Bisin, A., Topa, G., & Verdier, T. (2004a). Cooperation as a transmitted cultural trait. Rationality
and Society, 16(4), 477507.
Bisin, A., Topa, G., & Verdier, T. (2004b). Religious intermarriage and socialization in the United
States. Journal of Political Economy, 112(3), 615664.
Bisin, A., Patacchini, E., Verdier, T., & Zenou, Y. (2010). Bend it like beckham: Ethnic identityand
integration. NBER working papers 16465, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
Bisin, A., Patacchini, E., Verdier, T., & Zenou, Y. (2011). Formation and persistence of oppositional identities. European Economic Review, 55(8), 10461071.
Borjas, G. (1995). Ethnicity, neighborhoods, and human-capital externalities. American Economic
Review, 85(3), 365390.
Brueckner, J., & Smirnov, O. (2007). Workings of the melting pot: Social networks and the evolution of population attributes. Journal of Regional Science, 47(2), 209228.
Brueckner, J., & Smirnov, O. (2008). Social networks and the convergence of population attributes: A generalization. Journal of Regional Science, 48(2), 359365.
12
219
Bruni, L., Panebianco, F., & Smerilli, A. (2014). Beyond carrots and sticks: How cooperation and
its rewards evolve together. Review of Social Economy, 72(1), 5582.
Burgess, S., Wilson, D., & Lupton, R. (2005). Parallel lives? Ethnic segregation in schools and
neighbourhoods. Urban Studies, 42(7), 10271056.
Calabuig, V., & Olcina, G. (2009). Cooperation and cultural transmission in a coordination game.
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 72(1), 188201.
Card, D., & Rothstein, J. (2007). Racial segregation and the blackwhite test score gap. Journal of
Public Economics, 91(1112), 21582184.
Cavalli Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. (1973). Cultural versus biological inheritance: Phenotypic
transmission from parents to children. American Journal of Human Genetics, 25(6), 618637.
Cavalli Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual
Review of Psychology, 55, 591621.
Cialdini, R. B., & Trost, M. R. (1998). Social influence: Social norms, conformity, and compliance. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed.,
Vol. 2, pp. 151192). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Currarini, S., Jackson, M. O., & Pin, P. (2009). An economic model of friendship: Homophily,
minorities and segregation. Econometrica, 77(4), 10031045.
Currarini, S., Jackson, M. O., & Pin, P. (2010). Identifying sources of racial homophily in high
school friendship networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the U.S.A.,
107, 48574861.
Currarini, S., Bramouille, Y., Jackson, M. O., Pin, P., & Rogers, B. (2012). Homophily and long
run integration in social networks. Journal of Economic Theory Volume, 147(5), 17541786.
Cutler, D., & Glaeser, E. (1997). Are ghettos good or bad? Quarterly Journal of Economics,
112(3), 827872.
Cutler, D., Glaeser, E., & Vigdor, J. (1999). The rise and decline of the American ghetto. Journal
of Political Economy, 107(3), 455506.
DeMarzo, P., Vayanos, D., & Zwiebel, J. (2003). Persuasion bias, social influence and unidimensional opinions. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(3), 909968.
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2002). Why social preferences matter the impact of non-selfish
motives on competition, cooperation and incentives. The Economic Journal, 112, C1C33.
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Social norms and human cooperation. TRENDS in Cognitive
Sciences, 8, 185190.
Gintis, H. (2004). Modeling cooperation among self-interested agents: A critique. The Journal of
Socio-Economics, 31, 3564.
Gintis, H. (2009). Game theory evolving: A problem-centered introduction to modeling strategic
interaction (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gintis, H., Bowles, S., Boyd, R., & Fehr, E. (2005). Moral sentiments and material interests.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gth, W., & Kliemt, H. (1998). The indirect evolutionary approach: Bridging the gap between
rationality and adaptation. Rationality and Society, 10(3), 377399.
Hauk, E., & Saez-Marti, M. (2002). On the cultural transmission of corruption. Journal of
Economic Theory, 107(2), 311335.
Jackson, M. O. (2008). Social and economic networks. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Maynard Smith, J. (1972). Game theory and the evolution of fighting. On evolution. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Moody, J. (2001). Race, school integration, and friendship segregation in America. American
Journal of Sociology, 107(3), 679716.
Nash, J. (1950). Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 36(1), 4849.
Nowak, M. (2006). Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 314(5805), 15601563.
Panebianco, F. (2014). Socialization networks and the transmission of interethnic attitudes. Journal
of Economic Theory, 150, 583610.
Pichler, M. (2010a). Cultural formation of preferences and assimilation of cultural groups. Mimeo.
Pichler, M. (2010b). The economics of cultural formation of preferences. Mimeo.
220
F. Panebianco
Ross, S. (1998). Racial differences in residential and job mobility: Evidence concerning the spatial
mismatch hypothesis. Journal of Urban Economics, 43(1), 112135.
Roth, A. E., & Sotomayor, M. (1990). Two-sided matching: A study in game-theoretic modeling
and analysis (Econometric society monographs). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rubinstein, A., & Osborne, M. J. (1994). A course in game theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sacconi, L. (2007). A social contract account for csr as extended model of corporate governance
(ii): Compliance, reputation and reciprocity. Journal of Business Ethics, 75, 7796.
Schelling, T. (1971). On the ecology of micromotives. The Public Interest, 25, 6198.
Schelling, T. (1978). Micromotives and macrobehaviour. Toronto: George J. McLeod Ltd.
Sderstrm, M., & Urusitalo, R. (2010). School choice and segregation: Evidence from an admission reform. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 112(1), 5576.
Tabellini, G. (2008). The scope of cooperation: Values and incentives. Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 123(3), 905950.
Vega Redondo, F. (2007). Complex social networks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weibull, J. W. (1995). Evolutionary game theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chapter 13
International Cooperation and Cultural

Transmission
Isa Gama
13.1
Introduction
In this study, I analyze the aspect of international cooperation for development that
aims to spread knowledge throughout the world, reproducing patterns of Western
society and diffusing its cultural traits. I chose to discuss this facet because it provides interesting insights to observe the diffusion of cultural traits. In Gama (2011)
I analyzed the discourse of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) practitioners
and studied the context of Child Aid, a development project of the NGO Ajuda de
Desenvolvimento de Povo para Povo (ADPP) in Chita, a rural area in northern
Mozambique. The country is currently undergoing an intense process of socioeconomic and cultural transformation, and the stimulus from so-called international
cooperation is considerably involved with such events.
My interest in cultural encounters led me to think that cooperation for development was a suitable environment to study. Then, I decided to research in a developed
country which delivers development projects (Italy), and in a developing country
that receives considerable international aid (Mozambique). Overall, I took into consideration qualitative approaches to conduct the research. On the one hand, in Italy
I decided to use deep semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions applied
to representatives of Italian NGOs conducting development projects in Mozambique,
to understand what they thought about development issues. On the other hand, in
Mozambique, I decided to observe an international cooperation project through an
Ethnographic path with participant observation and follow its activities, to get information from direct beneficiaries to comprehend their opinions about the project.
I. Gama (*)
e-mail: isa_gama@hotmail.com
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_13
221
222
I. Gama
In Italy, I was kindly received by 14 NGOs which agreed to tell me how they
promote projects in Mozambique (by the time of the research, 2009 and 2010, there
were about 30 Italian NGOs working in Mozambique). In Mozambique, I was
hosted in the headquarters of the Child Aid Project at Chita, which allowed me to
be fully-immersed in the project and its activities. The research was divided into two
expeditions a year apart. In the first fieldwork phase (2009), I observed the project
as a whole, with expeditions in its six areas. In 2010, I carried out an ethnographic
analysis focused on four families in the community of Missuko (one of the six areas
from the project). I interviewed beneficiaries, the projects Village Action GroupCoordinators, influential headmen, and the entire projects staff (even if, in some
cases, they were informal interviews and/or conversations). Among other key actors
from Mozambique, I interviewed three local councilors of Chita, a school teacher,
four political representatives of the Tete district and three representatives of NGOs.
Doing field work in two different countries required me to use multiple qualitative methods. The most important were: participant observation and interviews
(semi-structured, non-structured and informal).
In this essay I report some of the findings and draw some reflections on the transmission of cultural traits.
I describe the situation and the impact of NGOs on the local way of life, demonstrating how knowledge and learning are embedded in cultural, historical, and social
frameworks rather than being neutral. Cooperation for development aims to mobilize
the agency of beneficiaries enabling them to act as protagonists of their own
destinies. Consequently, institutions of international cooperation try to implement a
participatory model from below, aiming at enhancing the empowerment of local
people, and transmitting cultural traits mostly regarded part of Western culture. Yet,
sometimes NGOs lack knowledge about local dynamics, which hinders the achievement of their goals. According to Hilhorst et al. (2012) it is increasingly acknowledged that aid agencies should invest in knowing how recipients perceive them in
order to improve their programmes (ivi: 1440). Consequently, issues regarding
communication are recurrent. I was able to observe that local rationale totally differs from the projects logical framework. An actor-oriented approach based on the
theories of agency influences the studies and programs of international cooperation
very much, especially within the work of NGOs at grassroots level. Practice theory
(Sahlins 1981) considers historical changes in international cooperation as the result
of local and translocal power dynamics. Central to this perspective is the relationship between subjectivity and power, in which subjectivity is defined as ways of
perceiving, thinking, desiring, and being afraid of the social subjects (or actors)
which interact in relationships among individuals and groups. In such theoretical
discussion, I introduce and explain the cultural evolution framework which is, I
argue, a good framework to understand and study the actual process of cultural
transmission.1 After that, I focus on the idea of development. The main attempt of
the research fieldwork was indeed to understand what development means today to
1
Connection: Cultural evolution is a complex and multifaceted concept. Chapters 16 and 17 apply
it to material culture, and Chaps. 11 and 12 explain evolutionary mathematical frameworks.
13
International Cooperation and Cultural Transmission
223
practitioners and recipients of international cooperation interventions. From some

discussion about my fieldwork in Italy and Mozambique I came to realize that
development is a changing concept but, coherently with the cultural evolution
framework, I choose to define development as the way human societies use and
change the environment over time (environment in its broad sense, which encompasses
physical, social, political, economical and human behavior). Finally, I use the
cultural evolution framework to describe perceptions and responses to knowledge
that cooperation projects ought to transmit.
The concept of culture in this study is intended in a broad sense, related to a
characteristic of humans associated with the practices, ideas and ways of life that
give meaning to the life itself and the practices of my interlocutors. Culture here is
not only understood as a subjectively identificational aspect, but I also take into
consideration any social environment, and its differences regarding material context, which are also part of cultures.
When I talk about cultural evolution, I mean ideas, values, and meanings, that
come from outside of the community and become part of that community, even suffering interpretations and changes by the new hosts. According to Ortner (2006),
humans are relatively open creatures (ivi:119) and culture can be understood as a
process that emphasizes the construction of meaning through the process of socialization in the world. Accordingly, the contact with different cultures implies dialectic dynamics of joining and resistance. Ortner (2006) argues that culture is important
because social transformation not only means the reorganization of institutions, but
also a culture transformation. Thus, social transformation involves cultural
transformation.
Cultures neither have an essence nor are static. Cultures are dynamic and undergo
continuous transformations. Cultural interrelationships put cultures into motion,
streamlining and transforming them, in a continuous process of cultural miscegenation. These processes promote changes and the advent of different cultural forms.
International cooperation for development not only provides projects that are apt to
change a situation in developing countries, but also unites cultures that mutually
exchange meanings, disagreements, habits, norms of behavior, etc. It is a dialectical
encounter between agreements and disagreements, and many misunderstandings. The worldview lens of a subject creates representations of the other through
this symbolic process.
13.2
Western Influence at Chita
I conducted the fieldwork at Chita, in Mozambique, in 2009 and 2010, in the

context of the Child Aid development project,2 carried out by the NGO ADPP
Mozambique. Chita is a rural district of Tete Province in Northern Mozambique.
2
The commonly used term development is here taken at face value as documents and projects
employ it. The polysemy of development and its importance are critically discussed in a further
section below.
224
I. Gama
Currently, many transformations are happening in Mozambique as well as in Chita,

especially modernization and the arrival of new projects and international NGOs,
which have relevant impact on the local way of life. Mozambique is the target of
investments for emerging economies like China and Brazil, especially in Tete
Province, where I saw a very fast changing scenario due to the recent discovery of
coal mines and other minerals: so far this province has undergone a notable transformation, and there are many ongoing impacts due to the actions of the Brazilian
company Vale do Rio Doce.
Let us point out some of the most important changes that dialogue with the issues
analyzed in this chapter, and how beneficiaries are responding to these new
arrivals.
Chita peasants know that they are in conditions of absolute poverty, in part
because they heard that from government campaigns and NGO activists. To start a
sustainable changing process, to overcome poverty, it is necessary to have suitable
conditions for that, especially the will to change, which is a fundamental factor to
unfold this process. To stimulate such will, it is important that NGOs give proven
evidences that a change in behavior will bring profitable benefits; otherwise farmers
will continue leading the life they always led, with a mode of production that has
existed for centuries. The government of Mozambique has widely promoted the
fight against absolute poverty, and its importance has increased significantly because
it became one of the Millennium Development Goals (United Nations Millennium
Development Campaign) to be met by 2015. Education is one of the strongest points
of such programs and campaigns.
Yet, due to the impact of historical events, rural communities began to undergo
changes with the arrival of missions, schools, and the current development proposals. Hence, people gradually gained awareness of other possibilities in life besides
working the land. Today, peasants perceive school as an opportunity to get a job,
something that a few years ago was almost unthinkable in Chita, thus young people
are becoming optimistic towards education. For that reason, interviews showed that
almost all parents would like to send their children to school to ensure a better future
for them, preferably as employees, so that they could help their parents. This shows
how Western values are gaining ground; consequently, people in these rural societies are gradually changing behavior. This is mainly because there are new job
opportunities such as teachers, doctors, mechanics, carpenters, employees of NGOs,
etc. Those professionals represent tangible evidence that school can be the passport
to getting a job.
In general, the arrival of a project causes euphoria because it means the arrival of
money, and many people think about the possibility of getting a job. During fieldwork, many people asked me if the project had vacancies. On the one hand, people
perceived that the project was a source of possibilities; on the other hand, due to the
fight against poverty, people began to feel really miserable and have become
accustomed to always asking for all kinds of things from a mere coin to
computers.
Besides the fact that local employees are lucky because they have a salary, they
benefit from a new status among the local community, and this is a propitious situation
13
225
to arouse envy, which is a feared feeling. The most important implication of this is
the widespread practice of witchcraft accusations. According to Gershman (2010),
in traditional agricultural communities, people usually avoid envy because it has a
destructive side which can incite inequality. Such envy-avoidance behavior reinforces emulation and discourages production.
In Chita, regarding economic status, people do not differ so much among
themselves. Most of the population are peasants, and they maintain an economic
level which almost everyone follows, even if some are a bit higher and some a bit
lower, but on average, everybody lives with subsistence agriculture and/or small
commercial activities. According to Chitas District Profile (Ministrio da
Administrao Estatal 2005), 95 % of the economically active population in Chita
are working in agriculture, fishing and forestry, and 97 % work for themselves or for
their families, while only 3 % are wage workers. Almost everyone is exposed to the
same difficulties, such as droughts, illnesses, etc. For example, infant mortality is a
harsh reality, even among those belonging to a higher social level. I was surprised
during an interview, when the Rgulo of Chita a traditional authority recognized
as a King in that locality, the most influential person of Chita told me that he had
11 children (with his first wife), of whom 10 died: 1 hit by a car, and 9 because of
diseases. This shows how vulnerable everyone is in such a society.
Usually, people condemn those who go beyond the average: if someone is
successful in improving his or her own life through hard work, the main sentiment
is that one persons gain is anothers loss. For that reason, I frequently heard phrases
like: an African does not like when others have more than him (Interviewee C05,
my translation) from local people. According to Foster (1965), peasants see their
universe as one in which the good things in life are in limited and unexpandable
quantities, and hence personal gain must be at the expense of others (Foster 1965:
297).
This rationale is also defined as the belief in life as a zero-sum game, which differs diametrically to the rationale of the win-win game diffused by development
projects, or as an image of unlimited good. Imbert (2004) argues that the difference
between these rationales has an important impact in intercultural relationships
because while the zero-sum rationale relates to dualism or a mono-cultural attitude,
the win-win belief is open to creating new opportunities and changes, and that transformations can bring new chances. I argue that in international cooperation there is
a clash of assumptions because, while development projects follow the win-win
rationale, most peasants follow the belief in the zero-sum game.
According to the outcome of the interviews, it seems that for many subjects of
international cooperation it is almost impossible to achieve Western development
standards through their own efforts. During fieldwork, peasants usually talked in
terms of black and white people, showing that there is a deep dichotomy
between them. This was their explanation of differences between cultures: white
meant the Western culture, and black referred to local, or African culture. The
belief in witchcraft is a good example of conflict between such cultural perspectives.
In Mozambique, witchcraft and superstitions related to the African tradition,
called usos e costumes (usage and customs), are widespread and, at the same
226
I. Gama
time, are in perpetual conflict with the European Modernity that emphasizes a
scientific culture based on rational thinking. Delaplace explains:
People still go a lot to the traditional doctor (Sinanga). It is not necessarily a matter of
money (it may be more expensive than the hospital). It is firstly because the medicine of
the white man cannot cure all the diseases of the black man. (Delaplace 2010: 2)
Besides, in the discourses of the projects beneficiaries, they demonstrated the

belief that blacks and whites are different because of different innate characteristics. It was common in Chita to hear that blacks are different from whites in
honesty, and blacks are a race with problems. During an interview, a Mozambican
project area leader stated:
In Africa, we like to hate each other only we, the blacks You, whites, have no problems Because we, the black people, dont like to see that someone has what others dont
have. (Interviewee C05, authors translation)
Such a phrase, reflects not only the worldview of local people in Chita, but also
low self-esteem with respect to the foreigner. My ethnographic observations evidenced that there is a reminiscent factor related to the unequal relations that dates
back to the colonial period. As Cabao (2007) argues, a large part of the rural population in Mozambique still has in mind the dominant-servant relations that characterized the colonial order. In fact, local people perceive the stranger as something
separated from their world, and from their culture. In general, peasants show respect
and admire the Western way of life, and they know that being in contact with it can
bring rewards, but they conceive it as something abnormal, something unable to
change their local dynamics. Such facts show that there is a distorted communication (Crocker 2007: 436) between those from the local community and the project
managers that are more distant from the local reality. In a distorted dialogue, the
dominant-servant rationale is in action, and the servant tends to answer with just
what the dominant wants to hear. Hence, we cannot neglect that the development
intervention is embedded in a cultural framework, and there are unequal power
relationships that influence the social groups.
If the intervention is a simple execution of pre-established formulas, they are
more likely to reflect and exacerbate cultural differences and conflict between social
groups than they are to lead to the establishment of common perceptions and shared
values (Long 2004: 31). To illustrate this statement, I report an ethnographic example of an Income Generating Activity from Child Aid. Income Generating Activities
(IGAs) were proposed to groups of people who showed an interest in starting a
small business, and group members were supposed to keep the business working
and generating profit. Therefore, IGAs meant the possibility to obtain material
goods from the project, to commercialize them, and boost the local economy.
Despite having an economical aim, it caused unexpected cultural issues. In Missuko,
a local neighborhood where the second phase of the research was conducted, there
were only 670 inhabitants. In 2009, one IGA of three persons was sponsored by the
project for the production of bread. This new activity disrupted the delicate local
social balance. To begin with, the IGA group received raw material to make bread.
This made some people in the community think that the project was finally helping
13
227
children through the production of bread, and they have interpreted the initiative as
a community bakery where kids could freely take bread. According to the testimony
of a member of this group, when the group received the flour to make bread, people
started asking why they have received that material for free. He tried to explain that
there was a condition to respect: they had to keep the business working well. Even
with such explanation, some people were suspicious. He recounted what local
people told him:
When we received that material [flour to make bread], people were saying that as we
received the flour, now the project would finally help the children. [They used to ask]: But
why dont you want to give bread for kids? (Interviewee M08, authors translation)
Here, this IGA member found himself embarrassed because he had to face
inquiries from the community, and he felt under pressure because people asked
questions that he was not able to answer. Besides, such questions led to the idea that
the project was contradictory, since it offered to help children and all community,
but seemed to help only few people. Such reasoning raised the idea that the project
was useless, and this fact seemed credible to the local community, even to himself.
One of the main doubts in this case, was the reason why he had received free flour
and children could not eat free bread.
From this example, it is possible to see that such small community local dynamics
and differing interpretations about the IGAs negatively influenced the achievement
of the projects goals.
In Chita, people expect campaigns for development to bring them the achievements of the West, such as more schools, hospitals, jobs, brick houses and especially
improvements in agriculture. Although many interviewees said that teamwork was
a challenge and that change would depend on them, in practice few believed that
they could change anything by themselves. Most people wanted to know how this
development project (Child Aid) would help them if it would not give things. One
of the most frequent questions people asked the project leaders was: how will this
project help us with ideas, if ideas to solve our problems must come from our own
community? So, why is this project here? According to this view, it was inconceivable that change would start from the community itself, because they have always
had their ideas and survived reproducing the same lifestyle. People wanted to solve
common personal problems, most related to the difficulty of buying things, but few
actually had any money to buy such things. So, in their view, the most obvious solution would be the project giving them those things, but the project would not do that
because it aimed to provide sustainable development through the mobilization of
local community to work for their own development, and transmit some Western
cultural traits, such as teamwork.
According to such observations, while local beliefs gave sense to rural life, they
were incompatible with the changes that development projects proposed. The
remarkable example was teamwork, i.e., the cooperation among people that projects
expected of them. In rural societies, where individual/family type relationships
prevail, it is difficult to propose teamwork if people do not change their cognitive
orientation. Therefore, Foster (1965) suggests that to engage peasant societies in
228
I. Gama
development, it is important to show that Western accomplishments can be real for

them, and to show actual possibilities.
When people see new chances, they realize tangible incentives to change. An
important example of successful cultural traits diffusion from development programs was the entry of cash crops, which are crops that local farmers cultivate and
sell the produce to companies or buyers in exchange for money. In the region of the
study (Northern Mozambique), tobacco and cotton represented an important entry
of cash income for some peasants, which meant an important step for local economic growth. Despite the many side effects of such new activity, like an increase
in alcohol consumption and mismanagement of money, today, in rural Mozambique,
we see many farmers who are investing in this type of farming, that allows an extra
gain. This example shows that to achieve development it is necessary to change the
production system, and show peasants its profits.
In Chita, the western way of working almost did not exist, and the way Child
Aid worked with timetables, goals, and deadlines contrasted the local peoples
way of life. One relevant disparity between the development project and the local
lifestyle thus regarded the concept of time. In Chita, time followed the crop cycle
and repeated each year, while for the project it was linear, towards the future and
was always productive.
International cooperation has a completely different cultural baggage regarding the way of organizing, structuring, and thinking things through, recommending community union and teamwork as the main means to empower people to
achieve better living conditions. Despite the fact that the development project
tried to deliver knowledge and practices to improve peoples lives, local development depends on the degree of absorption/application of such new knowledge in
the peasants lives.
However, the concepts of knowledge and learning are not neutral: they are
embedded in the cultural, historical and social framework. NGOs seem to take it
for granted that Western knowledge is a key element to achieve development,
regardless of the social context in which it is applied (McFarlane 2006). This
assumption concerns the idea that scientific knowledge goes far beyond cultural
barriers and stands as a universal truth. I think that development projects should
instead reflect upon the contents they emanate as essential for humanity, and consider that knowledge is circumstantial and associated with specific rationality and
culture. The cultural evolution framework, if devoid of several layers of incorrect
prejudices, is a good way to conceptualize cultural contact in a more objective and
neutral way.
13
13.3
13.3.1
229
The Cultural Evolution Framework for Understanding

Cultural Transmission and Change
Let Us Review the Concept of Evolution
To understand what I mean by cultural evolution, it is particularly important to elucidate the meaning of the word evolution. This concept was described by Darwin in
The Origin of Species (1859) to explain that species struggle for life, competing for
food and natural resources, and that there are variations that can be favorable, or
unfavorable, to survival (the unfavorable variations tend to disappear).3 It is a process over time, permanently oriented towards the future, but it does not mean that it
is necessarily a positive process, or that it creates only favorable variations. Evolution
means that there are living beings that might suffer variations that create new alternatives and those that survive pass on their inheritance to the next generations,
which may undergo further changes and that can be selected, or not, in the future.
The variations occur randomly, and it is natural selection that will determine the
success or failure of mutations. Therefore this process depends on the conditions of
the surrounding environment of every living being. According to Ridley (1993):
Evolution () is a directionless process that sometimes makes an animals descendants
more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all: We are so
steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept
this. (Ridley 1993: 31)
For our analysis, it is important to understand that if a species continues to exist

in the environment, this species is evolving, regardless of the fact that it has undergone a modification or not. Evolution was largely misunderstood as a progressive
process towards improvements, as a self-improvement ladder, but actually this is not
the case.4 Variations occur without any direction. Changes may be relevant or not,
or may even worsen the lives of living beings. For example, there are genetic diseases that are also variations, which tend to be eliminated over time. Thus, all sorts
of changes good, bad, neutral or even non-change constitute the evolutionary
process.
The non-progress or the stability of a species is counterintuitive because, unfortunately, the term evolution is commonly intended as a granted process of progress
and improvements. However, improvements are not an imperative for evolution to
take place. The only imperative of evolution, as cited above, is the timeline: it
always turns to the future. However, the chances of survival are random, as are
3
16.2, 18.2, 20.3 and 20.4.
4
Connection: The relevance of this observation is explained in the introduction of Chap. 3 (and
Connection therein). Additionally, consider Chaps. 12 and 18 to get an idea of how some disciplines, as economics or linguistics, dealt with cultural transmission theory avoiding any reference
to linear progressionism. Evolutionary biology itself is much more concerned with relatedness and
common descent that it is of progress (see Chap. 16).
230
I. Gama
changes. As Cavalli Sforza (2004: 42) argues, there is no identity between evolution and progress.
13.3.2
Cultural Evolution
In the evolution process in nature, gene mutations are the factor that generates
changes. For culture, analogously, there are innovations allowed by the diffusion of
ideas, the diffusion of cultural traits. As Blackmore (1999) states, ideas spread
from one place to another and from one person to another (Blackmore 1999: 24).
So, ideas are important to generate innovations to adapt to the environment, and
throughout history, each culture has found different ideas and means to survive in
different geographical environments. Actually, cultural evolution has a close relationship with the historical path. However, like genetic variations, ideas can also
impact differently depending on the interpretation one has. They can produce a
great range of outcomes in societies, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and
sometimes neutral. Cultural evolution regards the cultural innovations, or cultural
aspects selected by individuals and societies to adapt to their socio-cultural
environment.
Cavalli Sforza (2004) argues that cultural evolution is possible thanks to the
ideas. He suggests that ideas can be exchanged, and bring innovations. The author
believes that innovations are transmitted throughout life, and transformations during lifetime are also transmitted to younger generations. In this sense, the diffusion
of cultural traits is Lamarckian, because while biological evolution regards the
mutations of genes and can only be transmitted genetically, cultural traits can
change during a lifetime and changes can be transmitted to subsequent generations.
Besides that, innovations and new ideas among and between cultures work in the
same way as genetic mutations do: they are random and can be harmful, good, or
irrelevant to a species. In addition, each innovation can bring benefits, but also costs:
usually, new inventions require new procedures, behavioral changes, and frequently
imply substantial costs such as energy requirement. An example highlighted by
Cavalli Sforza (2004) is the invention of fuel motors: its inventor could not predict
air pollution or the deaths caused by cars that we experience today. More bad news
for most innovations is that they make us slaves of our creations, and any loss of
comfort [is perceived] as a source of unhappiness, even if our happiness is not actually enhanced by its acquisition (ivi: 72, authors translation). It can be argued that,
more technology makes man weaker and less able to deal with wild nature and
much more a hostage of civilized societies ruled by the clock. Likewise, the increase
in technology and comfort is not necessarily followed by an increase in happiness.
Despite it being extremely difficult to prove such a statement, many researchers and
travelers have expressed the feeling that even in poor conditions, or in other indigenous societies, people are not necessarily less happy than in wealthy Western
societies. Differences in cultural evolution do not provide the authority to despise
13
231
the value of other human groups; rather, each human group or individual has both
values and defects.
Considering such reflections, I suggest that cultural evolution should be understood in the perspective of the evolutionary theory described above, i.e. it is not
because Western culture has developed so much that it is a more evolved culture,
rather, it is one of the cultural possibilities to survive. We cannot neglect the fact that
demographical increase is an indicator of success in the evolutionary process
(Cavalli Sforza 2004), and in this sense Western culture had a tremendous demographic impact. However, this culture shows a fundamental paradox: while it dominates and transforms nature, it also destroys it continuously, and this way of living
needs more energy to continue its growth, with the risk of a collapse, or in other
words, of self-destruction (Diamond 2005). What is noticeable in Western culture is
that it has undergone more innovation in ideas (and technologies) when compared
to other cultures, and these variations have allowed it to spread its model throughout
most territories (Brody and Brody 2006), and to adapt to several environments,
often at the expense of other cultures.
But, other cultures are not less evolved only because they keep their way of life
unchanged (or with fewer changes). According to evolutionary theory, if cultures
have survived it is because they are well adapted to the environment, so they have
succeeded. In fact, the ancient life style of hunter-gatherers is a highly evolved culture since it has resisted until today as a way of surviving, and many hunter-gatherer
tribes living nowadays do not want to change to Western modernity. Historically
speaking, these groups have been winding down and replaced by the replication of
the Western model worldwide. However, even if those groups represent a few isolated cases, they have proven to be much more in line with nature than modern
culture, which keeps running towards progress through the devastation of nature.
It is remarkable to observe how Western culture is increasingly giving more
value to other cultures typically described as backward, primitive, less wise, etc. and
there are interesting initiatives flourishing which aim to radically change the direction of progress. There are several movements, rescuing traits of those cultures,
recognizing the importance of nature and simplicity of life, renouncing many technological facilities, as a desire to revive the bond between humanity and nature. For
example, Serrelli (2010) explains the rise of a new field of study called Biocultural
diversity, which was born in the 1980s, that focuses on studying cultures that have
a much deeper and mutual relationship with nature, and trying to demonstrate the
importance of this type of culture as an interesting choice to human survival, which
takes into account the fact that biodiversity and culture are inextricably connected.
Paradoxically, the speed of technological advancement and the ongoing destruction
of nature are giving birth to these new cultural trends against the disproportionate
growth. I believe that many of these countertrends regarding a critical view of
endless technological development are deeply inspired by indigenous peoples
humbler but not less effective lifestyles.
As the idea of evolution of species fascinates me, I decided to address my
research towards an evolutionary view of intercultural dynamics and development.
Evolution, as defined by Darwin, has nothing to do with classifying peoples and
232
I. Gama
cultures in classes depending on racial, religious, economic conditions, superiority

or inferiority, etc. a past misconception of the term evolution that made many
sociologists and cultural anthropologists avoid the term. Evolution is much more
concerned with explaining the conditions of species: adapting, changing (or notchanging), and evolving in the environment through their biological and cultural
inheritance. Hence, the concept of cultural evolution helps us to understand that the
differences in the world today are not the result of more or less evolved cultures;
rather, if all cultures exist, they evolved to the same degree, but differently. Being
different does not necessarily presuppose being better or worse.
This is an unusual theoretical claim in socio-anthropological studies, even for
development studies. I believe there is little literature on studying socioanthropological issues through the lens of cultural evolution, mainly due to a resistance combined with prejudices regarding that past misunderstanding highlighted
above. Authors like Stone (2008) are convinced that sociologists are positioned
specially well to contribute to the study of cultural evolution (ivi: abstract). This
study attempts to shed light on this perspective to stimulate socio-anthropological
thinking on such issues. Richerson and Boyd (2004), two important researchers on
cultural evolution, affirm that we know very little about how cultural evolution
works. When they began studying cultural evolution in the social sciences they were
struck by how isolated they [were] from one another, as well as from the natural
sciences (ivi: 245). These authors believe that one reason for such isolation is the
lack of key integrative fields (ivi: 246), and that a proper evolutionary theory of
culture should make a major contribution to the unification of the social sciences.
Not only does it allow a smooth integration of the human sciences with the rest of
biology; it also provides a framework for linking the human sciences to one another
(ivi: 246).5
Many studies on cultural transmission can give empirical foundation to the
theoretical study of cultural evolution. According to Toledo (2013), memetics,
which is the study of memes,6 lacks empirical evidence for a complete explanation
of a gene-meme co-evolution. According to the author, memetics needs more
detailed studies of culture (p. 193).
For these reasons, I bring notes from ethnography to enrich the empirical evidence that international cooperation is a suitable environment for the study of cultural transmission, and to contribute to the insertion of socio-anthropological studies
in the debates about cultural evolution. For example, in Mozambique, there is a
range of ethnic groups. Those tribes can be divided into two societies, i.e. matrilineal and patrilineal. In Chita, the majority of the population are Chewa people.
Connection: On the work of Richerson and Boyd, and on Cavalli Sforza and Feldman, see the
body of theory perspective of Chap. 11. Chapter 12 explores their influence on economics.
6
Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Dawkins 1976) applied the term meme as a postulated
unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another
through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. A meme can be part of an
idea, a language, a melody, a form, ability, a moral or aesthetic value. It can be anything able to be
commonly learned and passed on to others as a unit.
13
233
Chewa people are characterized as matrilineal: the inheritance of property, land

rights and ownership of children is in the power of the mother and her brother, the
uncle, who exercises authority over his sisters children. Besides, this society is
polygamist and men usually live with the first wife, but also spend some time with
the other wives. In case of separation, usually all property belongs to the woman and
her family, so the house, agricultural land and children follow the matrilineal lineage
(Banda 2008). However, this society is extremely sexist, and women do not have
power to decide, they are submissive to their husbands and other male family
members.
With the influences from other patrilineal cultures and the advance of capitalistic
modes of production, it is becoming more and more usual to see patrilineal practices.
Christian religions are also relevant for cultural change regarding matrilineal lineage because they preach the fathers importance in the family, emphasizing the
paternal authority and the husband as the head of the family. The introduction of
cash crops like tobacco and cotton, mostly grown by men, gave them more economic power over their wives. Although the responsibility for raising children is
still with the mother, the mothers brothers and the elder sons, currently we detect a
change in the fathers responsibility for raising children, and observation in the field
showed that some fathers feel their children as theirs, and some are helping to raise
them too.
In Chita, women in general behave according to mens rules and allowance. If
a woman does not act in accordance with the partners expectations, he may have an
unpleasant reaction. During the fieldwork, I witnessed an embarrassing scene that
revealed how gender violence is a harsh reality in Chita. My interpreter was angry
with his girlfriend. She left him and found another man because she did not accept
the fact that he had other women. Actually, he was married to another woman and
probably had other girlfriends. One day, while we were going by bicycle to Missuko
(the village where I conducted the second phase of field work), he stopped in front
of her, started discussing and then he hit her right in front of me. I got shocked, and
my reaction was to break our work agreement.
This single event is emblematic because it shows how the girl is struggling
against the traditional order, and is influenced by new ideas and cultural traits from
Western societies. She does not want to accept violence or a polygamist man. She is
receiving influences from outside rural life, and is opening her eyes to new horizons,
realizing that there are other ways of living, other possibilities.7 However, a social
change necessarily means roles conflict and dispute power, hence, she is suffering
for that in first person to open the path for other women. Probably, for future generations, gender roles will be more equal, mostly as a consequence of gender campaigns from outside.
The examples of change in matrilineal lineage and in gender roles are key issues
to understand that cultural traits from other societies are arriving in Chita and
Connection: Compare this perspective with the bicultural mind studies and theories presented
in Chap. 7.
234
I. Gama
expressively changing their way of living, giving empirical foundation to the process of cultural evolution.
13.4
Development and Cultural Evolution
In this section I want to illustrate the main ideas about development that guided me
in the observation of facts during my fieldwork and expose the main development
ideas found among the different actors of the research. Development is a key concept
in this discussion, and I assume that in the context of international cooperation it
means the way people conduct their lives, and introduce new ideas, tools, technology,
etc. (Packard and Cooper 2005). Development here is understood as the way human
societies use and change the environment overtime, through an accumulation and
transmission of acquired knowledge for future generations. The environment is not
only physical, but also social, because human interactions are responsible for innovations, the introduction of new decisions and new rules such as taboos and cultural
habits, while counter-cultural aspects account for changes in patterns.
Cooperation for development is one of the means rich countries use to transmit
the knowledge they have accumulated to less developed countries, relying mainly
on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Culture and development are closely
correlated concepts, therefore, what we observe on the field is not a consequence of
isolated aspects; rather, it is the result of a long history marked by cultural confrontation and power relations in which development has always been used as justification for people to overlap one another. As culture and development have a close
relationship, I would say that development is part of the culture, and in the context
of the Western societies, it is the result of a cultural evolution.
In his award-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond (1997) illustrated
how human societies developed differently in different geographical regions. With
irrefutable proofs, he argued that by 1500 Europeans were able to colonize other
parts of the Earth not by biological innate features of races, or ethnics, but because
they had developed differently in respect to other societies. Europe had complex
societies with high technological accomplishment to achieve a military supremacy,
germ resistance, political competition among kingdoms, and strong religious beliefs
that led it to dominate the majority of the other people in the world. Such developments were an adaptive response to the environment in which the European population lived, and environment here includes not only the natural physical aspects, but
also the human social-cultural environment. After 1500, with the discovery of the
New World, the world became interconnected and, the development of the so called
developed societies was achieved through a process of knowledge accumulation,
better techniques for using and processing natural resources, human competitiveness and great migrations. However, Diamond (1997) suggests that being more
technologically developed does not mean being better, or having innate superiority
compared to other people from less developed societies.
13
235
If we consider development as a result not only of geographical and environmental aspects, but also of social-cultural aspects, I believe it is useful to analyze the
development process under the lens of cultural evolution. Most aspects of human
development are related to the ways people socialize among their own group and
exchange with other groups. Features such as language, development of tools,
development of agriculture, etc., are cultural aspects that each human group evolved
throughout its history, and that was possible thanks to the inventiveness that human
groups used to live in any given environment. For this reason, I suggest that human
development was to a large extent a historical result of cultural evolution.
13.4.1
Main Development Ideas in the Fieldwork
In this section I shall delineate the most recurrent ideas of development found in the
field work (Gama 2011), both from project beneficiaries in Chita and from Italian
NGOs.
13.4.1.1
Development Ideas in Chita
Broadly, according to fieldwork analysis, there were two major lines of thought
about development stressed by beneficiaries: one closest to the projects proposal,
regarding a bottom-up approach that highlighted the importance of local teamwork
to trigger development; the other, related to a generic local view about development
which reflected a top-down approach to achieve development, since it is expected
that development will come due to the actions of macro institutions.
In general, in Chita, most respondents exposed an idea of development related
to a change of condition to a better situation. This better situation would probably
be close to what they know about Western living standards. According to a beneficiary,
development is when the community changes from one state to another, while a not
developed community does not change its initial state (Interviewee EA10, authors
translation). Despite changes coming quickly in the district headquarters, in more
distant areas, life has not changed that much. The district headquarters changes are
visible to all, regarding things that did not exist in the community before, and only
recently arrived, i.e., schools, hospitals, brick houses, electric energy, antennas for
mobile phones, etc. Such things come from outside, and could not exist traditionally
because they are the achievements of Western societies. Beneficiaries cited many
aspects regarding the appearance of things that, in their view, promote development.
They are listed below:
Access to more infrastructures: water pumps, paved roads, hospital, electric
energy, schools, etc.
Improvement in Agriculture, to allow people to sell surpluses. In order to do that,
they need material things such as: hoes, seeds, water access, pesticides, etc.
236
I. Gama
School will change their future: studying to become a doctor, a teacher, etc.
Capitalist improvements: industries and jobs. The agricultural industry has
become an important source of income to many peasants that now produce not
only for subsistence.
The arrival of NGOs promotes development. NGOs help in many aspects: access
to infrastructures, training of local people, distribution of things such as oxen,
plows, goats, money, food, etc.
Increase local market: Money is scarce, and industrialized goods are very expensive to them. Hence, many people ask for products with low prices, to allow more
people to buy them.
Changes in traditional culture: in order to develop, people should switch from a
subsistence economy to an income generating economy, and that would surely
change traditional culture.
All such ideas reflect, on the one hand, the current changes in Chita, and, on the
other hand, reflect a development model based on Western achievements that will
probably guide local community to a complete change in social structure.
Another line of thought about development in Chita regarded those beneficiaries
who were more closely related to the project. For those respondents, development
can be fostered through community work. People who have seen or experienced
project activities that had positive outcomes, realized that community work can
accomplish tasks that no individual can do alone (or finds difficult). These experiences show that the individual/familiar work is not as fruitful as organized groups,
hence it seems to go against traditional practices. The main ideas related to a
bottom-up approach are listed below:
Community participation in activities promoted by NGOs or government:
organizations provide the initial input such as knowledge; then, the communities
have to carry on alone;
A developed community is the one that does the work together: teamwork and
collaboration between people is essential;
Thoughts foster development: if it is knowledge that makes you think, then
education is a strength for development;
NGOs help in organization and mobilization of community: communities where
there is an operating NGO are more developed;
Copying mechanism: when someone sees the achievement of another they are
motivated to copy. It is already happening in Chita, where people started building
latrines, garbage pits and firewood saving stoves;
Sustainable development: if the project can bring permanent improvements, it is
not mere transient aid.
Those items show an approach to development considering local people as
agents capable of carrying out actions to improve their own lives.
13
13.4.1.2
237
NGOs Ideas of Development
According to the interviewees from Italian NGOs (Gama 2011), broadly speaking,
the concept of development falls under three main headings: education, community
participation, and opportunities to improve the life of poor. Such headings reflect a
development departing from the basis, through the mobilization of the local community to drive changes through existing assets. The NGOs work would aim to
strengthen local resources usually human by providing education to multiply its
power and effectiveness. For that reason, education is the key factor for development of human capacities, and all NGOs work through training aimed at building
the abilities of the local population.
According to interviewees, it is possible to identify two broadly different orientations in implementing development projects. The first is more related to knowledge
and resource transfer, while the other is to foster development processes already in
the field. In some NGOs these orientations intertwine because some things are
transferred while others are built locally.
Another way NGOs define development regards the idea of improvement that
not only changes the community positively but is also durable and sustainable. In
order to do that, all NGOs are aware of the fact that giving money does not solve any
problem; rather, it creates more dependence. Therefore, NGOs are concerned with
providing aid in the areas that local people recognize as a priority. In this sense, the
role of the local partners is fundamental to identify the major issues the local people
are interested in as well. Thus, the program has to be discussed with the local
partners, and things have to be done only under local peoples approval: the NGO is
not the only one who determines what has to be done.
According to this view, the project offers opportunities, but it is crucial that local
people get involved with the desire to transform a situation, and to improve their
own community. If local people do not show interest in the project, it will surely
fail. The concern with scarce beneficiaries participation is a source of frustration
for practitioners. As Chinsinga (2003) states, when the participation is viewed as
transformational, the non-participation of the beneficiaries is a structural barrier
(Chinsinga 2003: 133). Therefore, people must join the project actively; otherwise
the process of development does not start-up. This is feasible only if people perceive
the benefits the project can bring. This conception is based on the fact that if everyone cooperates and works towards a common goal, the result exceeds the sum of its
parts. This is what is called, in socio-economic jargon, the positive-sum game.
Accordingly, instead of a zero-sum game, in which any person is self-centered and
in competition with each other, the ideal situation is when everyone can benefit from
the profits of cooperative work.8
In the next section I will discuss the challenges of carrying out development
projects mainly discussing the idea of development as a dialectical process of
knowledge and cultural transmission.
Connection: Game theory and its relevance for cultural traits dynamics are discussed in Chap. 12.
238
13.5
I. Gama
International Cooperation and the Challenge

of Cultural Transmission
According to Balkin (1998), the most remarkable result of human evolution is that
it is in our nature to be cultural (Bennell 1999). Culture has a cumulative power,
and it can be considered as an extraordinarily efficient mechanism of adaptation to
the environment (Cavalli Sforza 2004). Each of us is capable of absorbing and communicating previously developed knowledge, and we carry and transmit a cultural
know-how. Since humans began articulating their values, they developed culture,
and consequently they made their history. Human beings are made of knowledge:
we embody information about our genes, our culture, and our immune systems
(Balkin 1998). In such context, ideas and cultural traits are constantly being communicated and changed, and they can acquire huge proportions and impact significantly in our lives. When we submit ourselves to ideas that pervade our minds,
sometimes we can take them so seriously that they become even more important
than our own lives (Dennet 2008).
Cultural transmission is one of the vocations of international cooperation.
However, cultural transmission works only if there is the will to accept or acquire a
new culture, because the transmission of an idea does not guarantee that the host
will accept it or submit itself smoothly to it.9 Here we observe how difficult it is for
practitioners of international cooperation to obtain sustainable results in their projects, because it is not an automatic outcome that poor people will change behavior
immediately. Wallace (2007) conducted an interesting study of rural education and
training systems in sub-Saharan Africa and remarked that one of the interventions
weaknesses was the fact that local people thought they had to wait for outside help
to succeed. In Chita too, I noticed the same trend reflecting that local people did
not feel self-reliant or empowered to conduct a revitalization process on their own.
Thus, the new ideas cooperation for development tries to introduce in poor
communities, such as the idea of sustainable development from below, face many
cultural hindrances. Hanlon and Smart (2008) sustain that international cooperation
created a myth that foreigners can bring the solution to the poverty problems, and
unfortunately many Mozambicans believe in this invention. The word idea is really
emblematic for this research because in my case study (the Child Aid project) it was
used as a motto for the projects actions: it perfectly captures cultural evolution
intended as cultural transmission through the introduction of innovations (or ideas)
from Western culture.
The changes proposed by most NGOs working with peasant societies envisage a
change in behavior, or adoption of new habits: the moment the new knowledge is
embedded in the society, a sustainable development has become true. In African
rural societies, most knowledge is still transmitted through ancient social learning
9
Connection: Strictly related to this, it is the idea that cultural transmission does not involve necessarily a progress towards better ideas. Refer, for example, to the Connection in the introduction
to Chap. 3.
13
239
rules: most people know what their old relatives tell them, and in Chita, for example, in the more distant villages, people behave in the same way as they did centuries
ago. On the contrary, people who have experienced new things, who have travelled
or have otherwise been in contact with other realities and have already seen examples of other NGO projects, understand better the Child Aid proposals and attach
great importance to them, because they know and believe in the transformations
NGOs can bring. However, they are few, and they know that is not easy to persuade
others that a change in their behavior can bring benefits.
Lets us now describe how this research perceived the process of knowledge
transmission in the case studied. This essay analyzes four possibilities detected in
the fieldwork that reflect the relation between knowledge and action (intended as the
action generated by the information/knowledge received). Such responses to a new
knowledge are useful to understand how people perceive the projects arrival. Here,
it is particularly important to stress that these inter-relations are what I call intercultural dynamics or the diffusion of cultural traits, which foster a dialectical process
of cultural evolution. The core of a development project is the transmission of
knowledge. Knowledge here is not dichotomized as everyday knowledge and
scientific knowledge (Bauman 1999), but it is conceived as a social representation
of reality that carries cultural values that are historically well-established. In such a
sphere, the interpretations that different culturally embedded persons give to the
meaning of right and wrong may vary considerably.
When a peasant receives information from a development project he may react in
different ways, and this reaction demonstrates the relationship between the person
and the project. During the exchange of knowledge, there are several possibilities of
response. The project may pass the information in an inappropriate manner, so the
person does not receive the necessary input to change behavior. Or, the person may
not change behavior because of other factors that impede change, such as cultural
matters.
Cultural factors often cause resistance to new knowledge. For example, it is
much more difficult to change an adults habit than teaching a habit to a child,
because adults have well-established habits and mind sets, while a child is still shaping them. The difficulty in changing is usually related to a social pressure: one
person alone seldom dares to change their behavior for fear of reprisal from others.
The fact that most people opt for (or adopt) a conformist position is attributable to
the human tendency to imitate the dominant trend. Henrich and Boyd (1998) suggest that an adaptive cultural behavior proved to be adequate to guarantee survival,
and according to an evolutionist perspective there is a tendency to acquire the most
common behavior exhibited in a society (ivi: 215). This conformist factor is even
stronger in rural communities, in which there is higher coercion that forces the individuals to obey the rules imposed by the social context.
The Agadjanian (2001) study shows the behavioral difference between urban
and rural areas of Mozambique. He observed that social cohesion in rural areas is
more prominent because social ties are stronger and more stable, while in urban
areas social bonds are weaker and contacts with different people are stronger: hence,
in urban areas it is easier to find more open-minded people. These factors favor
240
I. Gama
behavioral change in urban areas, while in rural areas it is harder to change peoples
consciousness. In deprived rural societies, equality among people is almost a must;
the prevailing rule is behaving like the others, so it is very difficult to introduce
changes.
During fieldwork I noticed some responses to knowledge introduced by the
Child Aid project. I consider it relevant to analyze their implications in the intercultural relations. Below I list the four most prominent responses to knowledge inputs
I observed.
13.5.1
Information Does Not Reach Target Group
Although the project spreads information to the population through many ways,
such as meetings, events, and many kinds of training, some people may not receive
the information. For example, the project spread the idea that washing hands can
prevent diseases, but many people from the target group still did not know that at the
end of the project.
13.5.2
Misinterpretations
This category includes those people who might receive or interpret information
incorrectly. The information can even be distorted due to the passages it undergoes
before reaching the person. In this response category, if people change behavior
after having received the information, they will probably act according to misconceptions. In this second response category to a new knowledge, the person receives
wrong or distorted information, therefore does not respond according to the projects
expectation. For instance, many people believe that washing their hands in the same
washbasin used by other people is enough to prevent diseases. Actually, the best
way to prevent illness is washing hands under running water. Consequently, a
misunderstanding can be harmful to a social context (or does not solve a problem).
The example above is very trivial, but misunderstandings can produce more drastic
results. This is one of the major problems faced by NGOs that fail to spread correct
and credible knowledge to everybody in the same way.
A good example of this phenomenon comes from my fieldwork. In Chita, the
idea that men are superior and women must respect them is a predominant social
rule. With the new gender campaigns, women are becoming aware that they also
have rights, and must not accept violence. In 2009, a campaign about violence
against women conducted in Chita had a curious result: instead of reducing violence against women, it increased violence against men beaten by their own wives.
The campaign aimed to report on gender equality, but its message was taken literally, and many women felt that if rights were equal, then women could also hit men.
The violence was not seen as something undesirable, but as a form of fighting for
13
241
equal rights. For that reason, such campaigns must take into consideration many
aspects regarding how to inform people about their rights to avoid a
misinterpretation.
Actually, many studies regarding international cooperation (Freedman 1998;
Bennell 1999; Peterson 2004) show that well transmitted information is crucial to
the success of a project. When messages are partially delivered, or provide several
pieces of information, they give rise to speculations and generate many doubts and
suspicions among people. Thus, if most people have a partial knowledge of the
project proposals, it will be difficult to put the new knowledge into practice, and this
can foster conflicts too.
13.5.3
Resistance
People receive the complete and correct information, without misinterpretations,

but still do not assimilate it. In this case, people gain a new knowledge but neither
introspect nor practice it. They might not understand what the advantages a new
knowledge implies are or do not trust the NGO information. For example, many
people received the information that is important to make latrines to prevent disease.
Some people believe that the latrine transmits diseases: in this case, people may
believe the NGO and go build a latrine, or may not believe in the NGO because
previous knowledge is more reliable to them. Alternatively, they do not build the
latrine simply because they have done their business in the bush for their whole life,
so they dont agree that they need to build a latrine. These are difficult issues to deal
with. One is related to habits. Another is related to the projects credibility, which
takes time to be built. There is great difficulty in getting peoples confidence as the
project comes to change their lives without the time needed to win their trust: the
project has a strict schedule that must be followed to ensure that objectives will be
met in a certain time.
Here, people act according to forms of resistance. I consider Scott and Kerkvliets
(1986) concept of resistance a consistent representation to analyze the dialogue
issue in international cooperation. The authors discuss the subtle, but powerful,
forms of resistance of the weak, mainly from the poor peasants perspective. They
argue that the powerless groups use everyday forms of resistance, usually nonconfrontational, sometimes invisible or imperceptible; and ordinary weapons that
hinder powerful groups projects. According to those authors, peasants use those
forms of resistance in their ordinary life: a constant struggle between the peasantry
and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them
(p. 6). Peasantry resistance can even have unintended consequences (p. 6). It is a
passive resistance. In general, peasants are very suspicious of the real interests of
the NGO, and are not convinced by its selfless purposes. Thus, they usually make
broad use of resistance mechanisms which Scott and Kerkvliet (1986) call the
weapons of the weak: foot-dragging, dissimulation, false-compliance, pilfering,
242
I. Gama
feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth (Scott and Kerkvliet
1986: 6).
These forms of resistance were observed among the dynamics between the Child
Aid project and local people from Chita.
In my case study, the NGO thought that it was providing a service for peasants
without asking much in return. In the IGA program made especially for women, we
have a case that had no success. The women in this group (three in total) were called
to attend a training course on economics and had to walk about five kilometers to
reach the meeting place. They began to say that the Development Instructor (DI, a
foreigner volunteer from the project) was making them suffer to go to the training. The DI was very surprised by this comment because she was doing her best to
help women to start a small business. Then, one of them said that she would go with
the DI to the city to buy the material to start her business, but actually she did not
go. Despite these signs of resistance, the DI gave them another chance because they
used to say they really wanted to start the business. Then, they bought the codfish,
but there has been no profit at all. In this example we can identify mechanisms of
resistance because the IGA interfered in local culture which has established social
customs such as gender relations, kinship and local power dynamics that hindered
the achievement of the projects goals.
Therefore, resistance here is conceived as a barrier to absorb the new inputs that
development projects propose. The cause of resistance can be cultural, i.e. when
acquired cultural habits prevail over new habits, or cultural beliefs are stronger than
new ideas.
In Chita, apparently, people were compliant to the project. As time went by,
despite the fact most people stopped following the projects instructions, many of
them still wanted the project but at the same time, they did not want to do what the
project was proposing. Even when they had understood the contents of trainings,
they put these subtle forms of resistance into action: everything was apparently fine,
while actually not much was done. In practice, resistance hinders the accomplishment of the new inputs. I argue that people acted accordingly because there were
internal power relationships that became unbalanced, and also because they were
not fully motivated to do what the NGO proposed, mainly because they did not see
it as advantageous for their situation.
13.5.4
New Knowledge Assimilated
Finally, when people understand the reasons for a change or observe the result of it
in the neighborhood, they consider what could be better for them, then they change
as well. This is the most positive response to new knowledge, when people receive
the correct information and put it into practice. According to this response category,
the project reaches its mission and the diffusion of new cultural traits takes place.
Within the Child Aid project, much of the knowledge delivered was new, whilst
some contents were already known, but few people had put them into practice. The
13
243
ethnography allowed me to observe changes when there were favorable conditions

for it. For example, in another community called Nhambira, the IGAs had a great
success. Indeed, one of the most visible impacts of the project was related to IGAs
made for women, because they were really happy to participate, and felt empowered. Compared to the IGA cases explained above that had no success, in Nhambira,
it was different because people were much more used to commercial activities.
Also, when the project started the program, the womens groups showed a strong
will to cooperate, and all groups were mutually stimulating to continue: there was a
relatively higher openness in gender relations, in which women were authorized to
work independently and some husbands helped to accomplish the projects conditions
(i.e. building latrines, etc.). Besides, this community was situated on the border of
the main road of Chita, a positive factor to enhance commercial activities. For
those reasons, in Nhambira I could observe the interesting phenomenon related to
copy and competition: the project put in place some conditions to achieve the credit,
such as the building of latrines, garbage pits, and shelves. This caused a chain
reaction, with a multiplier effect. As the first groups began to meet those conditions,
other groups copied it, and other community members also followed suit. This
example shows how it was possible to trigger the development process where there
was a favorable scenario. Here it is easy to identify significant Western cultural
traits that were already present in that community, such as more open gender relations, that helped to unfold the success of IGAs.
Therefore, new knowledge can have different responses, and it is not certain that
the person who receives knowledge will put it into practice immediately. This happens in all societies, but in this study the dialogue takes place between two totally
different societies: a traditional rural culture with an oral transmission of knowledge, and a project based in the Western mold of development. According to the
possibilities of interaction between knowledge and action, we realize that the
chances for knowledge to be successfully delivered by a project are not many. A
project needs a certain time to succeed, because usually people show a lot of resistance to change, at least in the first years of a project. This gives us a good idea of
the difficulty faced by the projects, and we realize that it is not so obvious that
disclosed information will surely change the behavior of others. Rather, it will probably find many hindrances.
13.5.5
The Communication Gap
Besides the difficulties in transmitting knowledge to beneficiaries, there are also

some communication gaps among practitioners of development projects, especially
when the messages from below are not assimilated. The fact that many farmers
used to say that they were not able to work as a team was never taken into consideration by the project team. Consequently, the project did not make any effort to find
alternative ways to work with people, since all its framework is based on cooperative work, and all activities are planned for groups of people. The assumption of the
244
I. Gama
project is that if people work as a team they will be strengthened, and it does not
matter whether they are used to working as such or not.
NGOs aim to reinforce local resources, starting from the idea that peoples
abilities can be amplified. However, despite their emphasis on listening to the people, the interventions only work if there are enlightened experts who make use of
peoples science and local intermediate organizations to promote development
from below (Long 2004: 31). This excerpt shows the incongruity of a projects
discourse, since it proposes starting development from the community, while power
is being introduced artificially by foreign institutions to empower local people.
Such an idea is confusing, not only for beneficiaries, but also for NGOs workers,
who advocate the enhancement of agencies, while in practice the NGOs dictate
actions and propose actions framed on a model of Western ideology. Long highlights
this point stating that:
Such formulations, however, do not escape the managerialist and interventionist undertones
inherent in the idea of development. That is, they tend to evoke the image of more knowledgeable and powerful outsiders helping the powerless and less discerning local folk. ()
No matter how firm the commitment to good intentions, the notion of powerful outsiders
assisting powerless insiders is constantly smuggled in. (Long 2004: 32)
Hence, it is not possible to neglect that the project framework, besides many
adjustments to adapt to local situations, is rooted in a Western idea of productivity
based on teamwork, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore,
the lack of listening to local demands constituted a gap that impacted negatively in
the outcomes of the project, and reflected an unbalanced relationship between the
project and its beneficiaries.
13.6
Conclusions
In this chapter I analyzed intercultural dynamics in the process of knowledge transmission within the Child Aid project and its beneficiaries. Here, the aim was to
highlight the more pervasive forms of communication that are underpinned by two
distinct culturally embedded contexts that attempt dialogue. I pointed out some of
the cultural dynamics that intermediate this channel of communication. Ethographic
observations allowed an understanding that implicit conceptions of knowledge
transmission are embedded in different cosmological cultural webs, and that dialogue
is not always able to achieve the projects objective, sometimes causing failures and
frustrations.
International cooperation fosters a dialectical process of knowledge and cultural
transmission. From the beneficiaries perspective, that means imbalance and transformation of the traditional way of life, since adopting new habits means acquiring
new cultural traits. Between hits and misses, NGOs create several initiatives that
aim to achieve a different world. In this process, in which the cooperation is implemented at the roots, with the poor, on a micro scale, the diffusion of cultural traits
13
245
fosters ideas from below, shapes activities based on education and strengthens local
people to overcome poverty. Although most NGOs propose a bottom-up approach
to development, projects usually start from the top, and they face many difficulties
to stimulate the will (or the agency) to change from below. Actually, it is difficult to
show the benefits of changing a peasants ancient habits for an uncertain something that farmers are not sure will work. Therefore, the proposed changes are
hindered by peasants entrenched cultural traditions and cognitive orientation, and
it is very difficult to go against these traditions if proven evidence of fruitful profits
is not given.
So far, the cultural evolution process led the West to become a successful
development model is spreading its culture across the planet. The consequence was
important because, in general, it has forced other cultures to succumb to it or to try
to imitate it to achieve competitiveness. Nevertheless, as argued earlier, development cannot be considered as the best cultural process of humanity. The strength of
Western culture was technological advancement, which was the result of a specific
historical, geographical and environmental background. But no one can argue that
this technological superiority was the result of Europeans innate superiority.
Therefore, we can talk about cultural evolution, but we cannot talk about delayed
cultures. As we have seen above, it is not possible to talk about cultures being ahead
of or behind others: there are only different cultures with different technological and
cultural evolutions.
Unquestionably, international cooperation for development has a key role in the
independent Mozambique. Today, the most common opposition of rich and poor
countries is identified as developed and developing countries, measured through
sophisticated socio-economic indexes, such as the Human Development Index
(UNDP 1990). This representation outlines that while some nations (and groups
within nations) are ahead, others are left behind. The aim of international cooperation, at least rhetorically, is to undermine the disparities in such a scale. The
structure of thought that supports the rationale for cooperation is still based on a
hierarchical dichotomy of developed and underdeveloped, and carries the
idea that the most developed countries have the ability to help those which are less
developed. Likewise, the dichotomy expert versus lay (Long 2004: 30) seems
to respect the relationship between NGOs and local community.
The encounter between cultures of Italy and Mozambique in international
cooperation is publicized by the official reports of international cooperation as a
metric relationship proposed by well-defined projects, with visible quantitative
outcomes. However, this relationship is deep, with dialectical processes which cross
individuals identities in a continuous comparison with personal values, customs,
failures, lack of mutual understanding, and changes in individuals worldviews.
Sometimes it is difficult to realize those features, because they often remain
concealed, tacit, implicit or invisible. As a consequence, my research followed a
qualitative methodology, in order to capture these deeper aspects of intercultural
dynamics.
Finally, I conclude that international cooperation is an important vector of
cultural miscegenation and a facilitator of the diffusion of cultural traits between
246
I. Gama
different geographical spaces. Not only a projects beneficiaries are subject to cultural
transformation. The international cooperation carried out by NGOs is also continuously changing, especially due to contact with different cultures, living with them,
and understanding local realities. It is an important environment of cultural encounter, in which new cultural traits are acquired, interpreted and influence people to
review their way of life, often elaborating new strategies and alternatives to face
problems. Hence, this is a two-way process of transformation, contributing to the
debates about cultural evolution.
References
Agadjanian, V. (2001). Religion, social milieu, and the contraceptive revolution. Population
Studies, 55(2), 135148.
Balkin, J. M. (1998). Cultural software: A theory of ideology. London: Yale University Press.
Banda, D. (2008). Education for all (EFA) and the indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS): The
African Case of the Chewa People of Zambia. Dissertation, University of Nottingham.
Bauman, P. (1999). Information and power: Implications for process monitoring. A review of the
literature. Working paper 120 Overseas Development Institute. Portland House: Stag Place.
Bennell, P. (1999). Learning to change: Skills development among the economically vulnerable
and socially excluded in developing countries (Employment and training papers, Vol. 43).
Geneva: ILO.
Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Brody, D. E., & Brody, A. R. (2006). As Sete Maiores Descobertas Cientficas da Histria. So
Paulo: Editora Schwartz.
Cabao, J. L. (2007). Moambique: Identidades, Colonialismo e Libertao. Dissertation,
Universidade de So Paulo.
Cavalli Sforza, L. L. (2004). LEvoluzione della Cultura. Torino: Codice edizioni.
Chinsinga, B. (2003). The participatory development approach under a microscope: The case of
the poverty alleviation programme in Malawi. Journal of Social Development in Africa, 18(1),
129144.
Crocker, D. A. (2007). Deliberative participation in local development. Journal of Human
Development, 8(3), 431455.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish genes. London: Oxford University Press.
Delaplace, D. (2010). Chewa culture and development work: Cultural traits of importance for a
development project. Inter Aide, Chiseka Water & Sanitation Project. Available via: www.
interaide.org/pratiques/node/75?language=pt-br. Accessed 25 May 2014.
Dennett D (2008) Daniel Dennett: Darwins dangerous idea. Free University in Internet, http://
video.google.de/videoplay?docid=1761557919989534017#. Accessed 1 Nov 2010.
Diamond, J. (1997). Guns germs and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: Norton and
Company.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Penguin.
Foster, G. M. (1965). Peasant society and the image of limited good. American Anthropologist, 67,
293315.
Freedman, J. (1998). Simplicities and complexities of participatory evaluation. In E. T. Jackson &
Y. Kassam (Eds.), Knowledge shared: Participatory evaluation in development cooperation
(pp. 2335). West Hartford: Kumarian Press and IDRC. Available via http://www.idrc.ca/en/
ev-88059-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html. Accessed 20 Oct 2010.
13
247
Gama, I. (2011). Intercultural dynamics and development: Mozambique and Italian International
Cooperation. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing.
Gershman, B. (2010). The two sides of envy. MPRA paper 25422,University Library of Munich.
Available via http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/25422/1/MPRA_paper_25422.pdf. Accessed
30 May 2012.
Hanlon, J., & Smart, T. (2008). H mais Bicicletas, mas H Desenvolvimento? Maputo: CIEDIMA.
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (1998). The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of
between-group differences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 215242.
Hilhorst, D., Weijers, L., & van Wessel, M. (2012). Aid relations and aid legitimacy: Mutual imaging of aid workers and recipients in nepal. Third World Quarterly, 33(8), 14391457. doi:10.1
080/01436597.2012.698126.
Imbert, P. (2004). The belief in life as a zero-sum game and the belief in life as a win-win
game and intercultural relationships. Paper presented at the 2nd Global Conference:
Interculturalism: Exploring critical issues, Wien, 24 Dec 2004.
Long, N. (2004). Actors, interfaces and development intervention: Meanings, purposes and powers. In T. Kontinen (Ed.), Development intervention: Actor and activity perspectives
(pp. 1436). Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
McFarlane, C. (2006). Knowledge, learning and development: A post-rationalist approach.
Progress in Development Studies, 6(4), 287305.
Ministrio da Adminstrao Estatal. (2005). Perfil do Distrito de Chiuta Provncia de Tete. Srie:
Perfis Distritais, ed. Ministro da Administrao Estatal da Repblica de Moambique.
Available via www.undp.org.mz/en/content/download/568/2564/file/Chiuta.pdf. Accessed 25
May 2014.
Ortner, S. B. (2006). Anthropology and social theory: Culture, power, and the acting subject.
Durham: Duke University Press. 188 p.
Packard, R., & Cooper, F. (2005). History and politics of development knowledge. In M. Edelman
& A. Haugerud (Eds.), The anthropology of development and globalization: From classical
political economy to contemporary neoliberalism (pp. 126139). Malden: Blackwell.
Peterson, B. (2004). Cultural intelligence: A guide to working with people from other cultures.
Boston: Intercultural Press.
Ridley, M. (1993). The red queen: Sex and the evolution of human nature. New York: HarperCollins.
Sahlins, M. (1981). Historical metaphors and mythical realities: Structure in the early history of
the sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Scott, J. C., & Kerkvliet, B. J. T. (Eds.). (1986). Everyday forms of peasant resistance in Southeast
Asia. London: Frank Cass.
Serrelli, E. (2010). Diversit Bioculturale. In N. Eldredge & T. Pievani (Eds.), Ecosphera. Il Futuro
della Terra. Atlante vol. 1 (A-L) (pp. 143148). Torino: UTET-DeAgostini.
Stone, B. L. (2008). The evolution of culture and sociology. The American Sociologist, 39(1),
6885.
Toledo, G. L. (2013). A criticism of Susan Blackmores memetics. Revista de Filosofia: Aurora,
25(36), 179195. doi:10.7213/revistadefilosofiaaurora.7770.
UNDP. (1990). Human develoment report. New York: United Nations Development Program.
Wallace, I. (2007). A framework for revitalisation of rural education and training systems in
sub-Saharan Africa: Strengthening the human resource base for food security and sustainable
livelihoods. International Journal of Educational Development, 27(5), 581590.
Chapter 14
Rethinking Organizational Culture: The Role

of Generational Subcultures
Alessandra Lazazzara
14.1
Organizational Culture Traits and Emerging Issues
Googles corporate culture can absolutely be defined as a strong culture possessing

distinctive traits. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were 25 years old when they created
Google in September 1998. They founded the company upon the idea that work
should be challenging and fun, and their role in setting up core values and cultural
norms is undeniable. Since the day the founders established their company in a
garage, it has become known as one of the worlds most successful businesses and
the Fortune magazines list of 100 Best Companies to Work For awarded Google
the number one spot in 2012 and 2013. The two computer science PhD students at
Stanford University established an informal culture from the very beginning and
Googles organizational culture has been described and discussed in many management magazines, business consultancy publications and newspapers in recent years.
Despite its amazing growth, Google tries to maintain an open culture that inspires
collaboration and innovation not only through its workspace design each location
in the world is unique for its murals and decorations and includes play areas with
video games, pool tables and pianos; cafes, coffee bars and open kitchens; cafeterias
that serve free breakfast, lunch and dinner; conversation and brainstorming areas
but also thanks to its casual and informal atmosphere. Many efforts are oriented
toward these goals and, in order to do so, peer to peer interactions and team achievements are encouraged, work-life balance and fun are promoted, diversity and different backgrounds within the workplace are enhanced, and sharing ideas and opinions
is supported. Moreover, one of the company principles is You can be serious without a suit and all the employees Googlers can ask questions about any company
issues directly to Larry, Sergey and other members of the top management team
A. Lazazzara (*)
e-mail: alessandra.lazazzara@unimib.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_14
249
250
A. Lazazzara
during the weekly all-hands (TGIF Thanks God its Friday) meetings. There is
definitely a cultural aversion to top-down management and people prefer being
mentored rather than managed and finding the right way to accomplish tasks on
their own instead of following strict procedures (Groysberg et al. 2011). All company core values are embedded in human resource practices and management strategies. People are hired if they are smart and determined, and ability is favored over
experience, but the most important criteria is the cultural fit with the organization.
Indeed, the informal corporate culture that is so typical in high tech companies, is a
form of normative control (Kunda 1992). Its a way to elicit and direct employees
efforts that is based on the control of their inner thoughts, experiences and feelings,
so that their actions will be fully oriented to corporate interests thanks to an internal
commitment and a strong identification with company goals. There is a commonly
hypothesized link suggesting that a strong organizational culture possessing distinctive traits influences performance positively. Moreover, its expected that the stronger the manifestation of positive cultural traits such as particular values, beliefs, and
shared behavior patterns, the better the firms performance will be (Saffold 1988).
This explanation of the relationship between culture and performance is known as
strong culture hypothesis (Dennison 1984). However, this hypothesis has been
strongly criticized especially because it considers only one single, unitary organizational culture without taking into account several subcultures that can coexist and
simultaneously influence organizational outcomes (Saffold 1988). Organizations
can have many subcultures and its not appropriate to consider organizational culture as a unique or universal feature. Therefore, since culture operates at multiple
levels of analysis, is it possible to affirm that the features just described represent
Googles unique cultural traits or, on the contrary, are they the results of other cultural influences? Furthermore, what is the impact of the founders values and the
role of the specific national context on the overall company culture? Does the generational identity of the companys founders influence the overall company culture?
It is possible to distinguish several cultural layers coexisting simultaneously within
Google. The inner level is given by the company culture Shared values (what is
important) and beliefs (how things work) that interact with an organizations structures and control systems to produce behavioral norms (the way we do things around
here) (Uttal 1983: 67) which is considered one of the key reasons for its amazing
success around the world. But Googles culture embodied the founders beliefs,
values and assumptions too, and they have modeled their ideas about how the company should be structured and should function according to these antecedents
(Schein 1983). Given that both of them grew up in the United States and are part of
that group of individuals born between 1961 and 1981 labeled generation X, its not
accidental that Googles core values are so overlapped with those of this subculture.
Actually, the same values and norms that seem to describe Googles corporate culture are usually applied to depict generation X. People belonging to this group are
usually described as aspiring to achieve a good work-life balance, considering abilities more important than seniority, preferring flexibilities and enjoying life, questioning authority and looking for mentoring rather than being managed and
appreciating diversity within the workplace (OBannon 2001; Hart 2006; Gursoy
14
Rethinking Organizational Culture: The Role of Generational Subcultures
251
et al. 2008; Tolbize 2008), and all these characteristics can be found in Googles
corporate culture too. Therefore, organizational culture is influenced not only by the
more external national culture, but also specifically, by the generation subculture(s)
to which the founders and the employees belong to.1
Culture is not static and reflects the stages of company development. According
to Schein (1983) The ultimate organizational culture will always reflect the complex interaction between (1) the assumptions and theories that founders bring to
group initially and (2) what the group learns subsequently from its own experiences (ivi: 14). In addition, any collectivity with shared history and experiences
can have a culture and in a company many units or groups can coexist. There can be
therefore many subcultures within any organization, that can be independent or in
conflict with each other (Schein 1990). The simultaneous presence of these cultural
groups has an impact on subsequent behaviors of firm members, given that expectations and patterns of appropriate behaviors can be different according to their own
culture. Moreover, when previously under-represented groups enter extensively into
the company or start obtaining leadership positions, their peculiar cultural traits can
have an impact on the overall corporate culture.2
This is the case which is currently challenging companies because of the physicological entry to the labor market of a new generation of workers and especially of
the prolonged working life and postponed retirement that will lead to three generations working together for longer than in the past (Fig. 14.1).
For the first time, employees from many different generations are working in the
same places both with people that are as young as their children and as old as their
parents (Zemke et al. 2000). What is more, it appears that many generational differences among employees can lead to generational and cultural clashes. New generations in fact, bring with them new value-systems that can, in turn, influence the core
set of organizational values and beliefs and foster an organizational culture change
due to the disconfirm of old assumptions (Smola and Sutton 2002; Judge and Bretz
1992; Schein 2004).
14.2
Conceptualizing Organizational Culture
Many theories and theorists have tried to provide a universally accepted definition
of culture. In 1952 the American anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952)
compiled a list of more than 160 different definitions. Nevertheless, since then the
Connection: Compare all this layers of collective culture with, on the one hand, the toolkit
view of culture defined in Sect. 2.4 (see Connection therein). The focus on single agents rather
than on groups can be seen in economics (Sect. 12.2), educational studies (Chap. 5), and psychology of multicultural minds (Chap. 7). On the other hand, Sect. 10.3 defines culture and cultural
traits emphasizing a collective point of view.
2
Connection: Mathematical models predicting the likelihood and effects of a trait invading and
organization are possible. For some approaches, see Chaps. 11 and 12.
Employment rate 15-24
France
Spain
Ireland
Finland
Sweden
Italy
Spain
Ireland
2011
France
2000
Finland
Sweden
Italy
Fig. 14.1 Employment rate by age groups (Source: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2012)
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Italy
Belgium
Luxembourg
Greece
Austria
Portugal
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Denmark
Germany
United States
Belgium
Luxembourg
Greece
Austria
Portugal
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Denmark
Germany
United States
Belgium
Luxembourg
Greece
France
Austria
Spain
Portugal
Ireland
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Finland
Denmark
Germany
Sweden
United States
252
A. Lazazzara
14
253
definition of culture has long been a source of debate among anthropologists and
cross-cultural psychologists and there is still no agreement among culture
researchers.
Drawing from managerial literature, culture can be described as the programming of the mind which distinguishes the member of one human group from
another (Hofstede 1980: 25). The concept of culture as mental programming or
software of the mind (Hofstede 1991) is deeply-rooted in the idea that societies
are based on patterns of behavior that are to some extent predictable because they
are inherited or learned after birth. Therefore, people belonging to the same group
will show more or less the same behavior in similar contexts, and when observing
behaviors we can infer the underlying collective values and beliefs of that society.
A society is a social system characterized by the highest level of self-sufficiency
in relation to its environments (Parsons 1977: 6). The notion of culture cannot be
referred only to nations or ethnic groups, but to any human collectivity or category.
Organizations, that are (a) social entities that are (b) goal-directed, (c) designed as
deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and (d) are linked to the
external environment (Daft et al. 2010: 10), provide an example of these categories. They influence and are influenced by the external environment in which they
are embedded and, when talking about organizations, it is possible to distinguish
several environmental layers. The internal environment is given by what happens
within the boundaries of the organizations (e.g. relationship with colleagues, management processes, corporate culture, etc.). The most external layer instead, consists of the contextual environment that is the larger national culture in which
companies operate.
In Scheins view Culture is what a group learns over a period of time as that
group solves its problems of survival in an external environment and its problem of
internal integration. Such learning is simultaneously a behavioral, cognitive and an
emotional process (1990: 111). Culture allows systems to tend toward equilibrium
and to reduce dissonance and find integration and consistency within them (Durkin
1981; Festinger 1957; Hirschhorn 1987; Lewin 1952). However, any system contains subsystems just as any organization contains groups and units and is influenced by internal and external forces. Therefore, there can be many national cultures
and subcultures within any organization, and these subcultures can coexist independently or can be in conflict with each other (Schein 1990). While cross-cultural
differences have been extensively studied in managerial studies (Inglehart 1997;
Schwartz 1997) there has been little research on national subcultures such as generations and their impact on organizational culture (Smith and Schwartz 1997).
Demographic changes such as increased average age, lower fertility rates and
the ageing process of a population, as well as changes in the welfare systems that
are increasing retirement criteria and lengthening working life, are testing the
capacity of organizations to manage changes in the composition of the workforce.
It is expected that, from 2000 to 2050, the ratio of people aged 65 or over to those
of working age will grow from 6 per hundred to 11 per hundred in Africa, from 9
to 26 in both Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, from 15 to 29 in Oceania,
from 19 to 35 in Northern America and from 22 to 51 in Europe (UN 2002 ).
254
A. Lazazzara
As a consequence, for the first time, employees from many different generations
are working together (Zemke et al. 2000) and managers are realizing that generations differ in terms of work values, attitudes, behaviors and, in sum, culture.
Moreover, their ability and flexibility in managing generational differences in
values can improve organizational effectiveness and well-being (Kupperschmidt
2000).
The following sections present the most important theoretical frameworks that
have boosted the development of cultural research in the field of organization studies. The models described below organizational culture, national culture and the
understudied construct of generation culture have been largely limited to Western
countries and post-industrial organizations, therefore, cannot be generalized to the
global scope.
14.2.1
The Layers of Organizational Culture
In the last two decades the concept of organizational culture has emerged as an
important variable due to its influence on many facets of organizational life and is
receiving growing attention. Many disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and
psychology have directed their efforts towards understanding what organizational
culture is and to describe it, each of them applying their own methodology and theoretical framework when investigating the concept (Ostroff et al. 2003). As a consequence, there are countless definitions of organizational culture and a great level of
ambiguity around the construct. However, in an effort to understand and organize
the full complexity of organizational culture research, instead of emphasizing differences among cultural theories, Hofstede et al. (1990) conclude that the different
definitions of organizational culture share some common aspects. Such commonalities include the idea that organizational culture is structured in multiple layers
(Schein 1992) and involves multiple aspects of an organizational context (Mohan
1993), that it is a socially constructed phenomenon shaped by historical events and
is geographically situated (Rowlinson and Procter 1999; Schein 2000) and that the
notion of shared meaning is central to any conceptualization of organizational
culture (Ostroff et al. 2003).
One of the most commonly cited approaches to understanding the concept of
organizational culture described as a set of psychological predispositions is proposed by Schein (1985a). According to his definition, organizational culture is a
pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group
as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be
taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to
those problems (Schein 1985b: 9). In his model, Schein (1985a, b) identifies three
fundamental levels at which culture manifests itself: (a) observable artifacts, (b)
values and (c) basic underlying assumptions (Fig. 14.2).
14
255
Fig. 14.2 The three levels of the organizational culture model (Source: Schein, 1985b, 1992)
Observable artifacts represent the most visible and often tangible component
of culture and the first dimension one meets when entering an organization. Its not
so difficult to understand if a company is formal or casual by simply looking at the
dress code, the physical layout or the way in which people address each other, but
this doesnt tell us why they are so or the cultural meanings associated with them.
For this reason, observable artifacts such as art, technology, language, rituals and
ceremony are extremely important because they allow employees to feel like members of an organizational culture but are also hard to interpret in terms of underlying
cultural meanings.
The second level of the model is given by values which represent the most studied dimension of culture, given that the previous level (observable artifacts) is visible but difficult to decipher, while the next (basic underlying assumptions) is
invisible and preconscious. Values reflect underlying cultural assumptions and represent beliefs that are important to a particular group. They reflect the inner idea of
a group about what ought to be instead of what really is. Values gradually start a
process of cognitive transformation by which as the values begin to be taken for
granted, they gradually become beliefs and assumptions and drop out of consciousness, just as habits become unconscious and automatic (Schein 1985b: 16).
Basic assumptions constitute the core element of organizational culture and are
unobservable. They represent the belief system that individuals have towards human
behaviors, relationships, reality and truth and are rarely confronted or debated. Its
extremely difficult to change basic assumptions because they guarantee security by
indicating what employees should pay attention to, how they should react emotionally and what actions should be taken. Basic assumptions are indeed strongly held
in a group and people belonging to the same social unit would find any behavior not
based on the same principles intolerable (Schein 1985b, 1992).
According to George et al. (1999) and to Schein (1983), a founders values and
senior leaders vision and behaviors are the key antecedents of an organizational
culture. The process of culture formation starts with the founding of the group and
founders bring with them their own assumptions and theories about how to succeed
that are based on their experience within the culture in which they grow up (Schein
256
A. Lazazzara
1983). But organizational culture evolves through a multi-stage process and is transmitted to all employees by the members of top management teams that act as role
models (George et al. 1999). Therefore, the leaders values are internalized by the
employees and become the basic assumptions of the organizational culture that, in
this way, perpetuates and reproduces itself.3 The primary mechanisms by which key
leaders embed their own assumptions are: (a) what leaders pay attention to, measure
and control; (b) how leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crisis; (c)
deliberate role modeling and coaching; (d) operational criteria for the allocation of
rewards and status and; (e) operational criteria for recruitment, selection, promotion, and excommunication (the implicit criteria leaders use to determine who fits
the culture of the organization). In addition, secondary articulation and reinforcement mechanisms are: (a) the organization design and structure; (b) organizational
systems and procedures; (c) the design of physical space, facades and buildings; (d)
stories, legends, myths and symbols and; (e) formal statements of organizational
philosophy, creeds and charters (Schein 1983, 1990).
In a dynamic perspective, despite many efforts at integration and congruency,
culture is not immutable and evolves over time, differentiating itself in a number of
subcultures and changing the priority of values and beliefs. In the case in which a
company expands geographically or the percentage of members of a generation not
previously represented increases, its total culture increasingly becomes a negotiated outcome of the interactions of its subgroups (Schein 1990: 117).
Due to the way in which organizational culture has been conceptualized it is
analogous to the construct of national culture, since both national culture and
organizational culture are based on shared beliefs, values, and norms. Moreover,
it is no coincidence that the same typologies applied to describe national cultural
traits have been applied to study organizational culture. But if its true that national
culture and cross-cultural research is focused on defining and comparing the value
system that distinguishes one group from another at a wider level, organizational
culture research is restricted to a narrower scope. However, given that organizations
are social systems that are part of an external environment that greatly influence
them and that the deeply personal values of organizational members result from the
specific cultural contexts in which they have grown up, in order to identify dominant
values guiding organizational behaviors the two research streams national culture
and organizational culture have recently been overlapped (Leidner and Kayworth
2006).
Connection: This role of leaders in organizational culture can perhaps be dialectically connected
with the psychoanalytic process of identification, in which we find a different concept of trait
(Chap. 6).
14
14.2.2
257
The Influence of National Culture on Organization
The interest in how national culture influences various aspects of organizational

behaviors is rooted in the new socio-economical trends that are affecting organizations which promote stronger connections between different cultures.4 Increasing
globalization, fostered by the availability of advanced telecommunication and transportation systems, results in widespread business activity across national borders
and the presence of multiple national units within a single organization. Moreover,
the flow of qualified professional migrants to industrialized countries increases the
number of national cultures present even in those organizations which have not
extended beyond their national borders. Therefore, in order to survive in this variegated competitive environment, understanding and appreciating cultural traits, values and practices is a crucial managerial challenge and managers are required to be
flexible and respond and adapt to those differences (House et al. 2001).
Cross-cultural studies have a short research history but in the last two decades
have started to receive growing attention. In particular, the emergence of Hofstedes
(1980) cultural typology has provided a more reliable theoretical basis for cultural
analysis and has increased the focus on national culture research in the organizational behavior field. Later, new taxonomies of cultural values (Trompenaars and
Hampden-Turner 1993; Schwartz 1994) arose, providing a useful contribution to
the development of the research stream.
The Hofstede model: The framework proposed by social psychologist Geert
Hofstede (1980) is one of the most famous conceptualizations of national culture. The study he carried out, between 1967 and 1973 collecting 117,000 questionnaires about work-related values in a large American-owned multinational
company (IBM), led to a taxonomy by which culture can be described in terms
of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism and
masculinity-femininity. According to Hofstede (1980): (a) power distance is
the extent to which the less powerful person in a society accepts inequality in
power and considers it as normal (ivi: 390); (b) uncertainty avoidance is related
to the extent to which people in a culture are comfortable in unstructured, unclear
and unpredictable situations and try to avoid such situations by applying strict
rules and codes of behavior; (c) individualistic culture assumes that people are
mostly concerned with personal interests while collectivistic culture assumes
that individuals are part of a group and are mostly concerned with group interests
and; (d) masculine culture recognizes different social roles for men and women
men are ambitious and competitive and women are obliging and take care of
others while in feminine cultures social roles for the sexes are overlapped. The
first study involved 40 nations, but later the analysis was extended to 53 cultures
(Hofstede 1983). Despite some methodological criticisms related to sample
composition and the insufficient number of values involved (Smith et al. 1996),
4
Connection: For a discussion of national identities, see Chap. 3. For an analysis of the encounter
between different cultural syndromes see Chap. 7.
258
A. Lazazzara
Hofstedes model has been extensively applied to explain cross-cultural differences. Later, Hofstede (1991) added a new cultural dimension that was not originally found in the IBM data due to the Western-centric approach to values and
culture. The new dimension, that is long-term versus short-term orientation,
arose in a sample of students who had answered a questionnaire, the Chinese
Value Survey (CVS), developed by Michal Harris Bond in Hong Kong. The CVS
included values proposed by Eastern people, and the time perspective reflects
aspects of Confucian thinking. In fact, Long Term Orientation stands for the
fostering of virtues oriented towards future rewards, in particular perseverance
and thrift. Its opposite pole, Short Term Orientation, stands for the fostering of
virtues related to the past and present, in particular, respect for tradition, preservation of face and fulfilling social obligations (Hofstede 2001: 359).
The Trompenaars model: Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1993; Trompenaars
1996) also identify polar opposites to describe national cultures. The Trompenaars
model is based upon the Parsons and Shils (1951) identification of cultural and
personal pattern variables or value dilemmas. According to this conceptualization every culture distinguishes itself from others by the specific solutions it
chooses to certain problems which reveal themselves as dilemmas (Trompenaars
and Hampden-Turner 1993: 8). In order to elicit seven dimensions of cultural
valuing, a questionnaire measures values by presenting a series of briefly
described imaginary situations and asking the subjects how they would act, or
forcing them to choose between two value statements related to organizational
behavior or to a more general context. The first five value oppositions, that are
drawn directly from Parsons and Shils (1951), are: universalism-particularism
(in a universalistic society rules apply equally to everybody while in a predominantly particularistic society some circumstances, like friendship, are more
important than rules), achievement-ascription (in achievement oriented society
social status results from the individual efforts to improve ones own life while in
ascription oriented societies social status depends on ones descent or other
external circumstances), individualism-collectivism (in individualistic societies
people believe that they should take care only of themselves and their close family while in communitarian societies people are more integrated into groups and
pursue the interests of the groups they belong to), affectivity-neutrality (affective
people show their feelings and act accordingly while neutral people are reluctant
to express their emotions) and specificity-diffuseness (people with specific orientation are oriented toward having holistic relationships with others while
people with diffuse orientation try to keep separate private and public spheres of
their lives) (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1993; Trompenaars 1996). The
remaining dimensions and their measurements have been influenced by
Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) and Rotter (1966) for internal-external control
and Cottle (1968) for time perspective. In a society characterized by internal
control people are seen as influencing and controlling their environment, while
in a society with external control there is an organic view of the environment and
nature and the causes of events are considered external and cannot be determined
in advance. Lastly, time orientation implies that culture can have a past, present
14
259
or future orientation and that time can be structured sequentially (to do one thing
at a time) or synchronically (to do several things at the same time) (Trompenaars
and Hampden-Turner 1993; Trompenaars 1996).
Schwartz Theory of Basic Values: In the 1990s Shalom H. Schwartz (1992, 1994)
developed another model for cultural analysis based on values that has been
extensively used in cross-cultural research. The first instrument to measure values based on Schwartzs theory is the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS; Schwartz
1992). The cultural model, as well as the SVS, have been cross-culturally validated using data from hundreds of samples in 82 countries around the world
representative of geographic, cultural, linguistic, religious, age, gender, and professional differences (Bilsky et al. 2011; Davidov et al. 2008; Schwartz 2006).
The Schwartz Value Survey identifies ten basic values recognized across cultures
that are organized into a culturally universal circular structure which reflects
identical patterns of associations among values that can be summarized in terms
of two bipolar dimensions (Fig. 14.3). The first bipolarity is called openness to
change versus conservation and represents the conflict between; the cluster of
values related to personal autonomy, readiness to change and independence of
thought, action and feelings (stimulation and self-direction) and that including
values that emphasize preservation of the past and resistance to change, order,
safety and stability (conformity, security and tradition). The second contraposition is self-enhancement versus self-transcendence and refers to the conflict
between values oriented toward the concern for welfare and the well-being of
Fig. 14.3 Schwartzs model of universal human values (Source: Schwartz, 1992).
260
A. Lazazzara
others (universalism and benevolence) and values oriented toward personal success, social status and prestige (achievement and power). Hedonism includes
elements of both openness to change and self-enhancement (Schwartz 1992,
1994). These value types have been correlated with country score on Hofstedes
(1980) dimensions revealing a major concordance between power distance and
individualism-collectivism in the Hofstede typology and the openness to change
versus conservation in the Schwartz model (Schwartz 1994b).
Despite many methodological criticisms regarding the described models, they
have contributed significantly to the development of the research field and have
provided an answer to the compelling request to further disentangle the mutual
influence between national and organizational culture in Western societies by
enabling the differentiation of post-industrial organizations along the lines of dominant values guiding organizational behaviors (Leidner and Kayworth 2006).
Anyway, given that any subgroup in a nation may be characterized by a distinct
cultural value pattern, profile or cultural standard (Schwartz 1994), many national
subcultures can be represented within the same company. An understudied national
subculture, especially with regard to cross-cultural differences (Smith and Schwartz
1997), is that of generations. Nevertheless, the growing attention on generations
living longer together at work due to demographic trends has increased the interest
being paid by practitioners and academics to generational differences in terms of
work values and attitudes (Parry and Urwin 2011).
14.2.3
The Influence of Generation (Sub)Culture

on Organization
A new generation of workers is entering the workforce, receiving growing attention

due the potential impact on organizational culture. This generation, in fact, holds a
new set of values and assumptions that disconfirm those held and accepted by the
oldest generations still working and therefore trigger discomfort and disequilibrium
while the organizational culture evolves (Schein 2004).
The concept of generation has its early origins in the seminal work of sociologist
Karl Mannheim (1952). According to Mannheim, a generation consists of people
who were born in the same period and who share a common generational identity
because they experienced the same historical events in their formative years. The
social and historical location, being part of the same societal group and sharing
the same years of birth, are particularly important in defining a generation, which
can be considered a type of national subculture that reflects the value priorities
emphasized during a particular historical period of a country. Considering generations as national subcultures implies that significant macrolevel social, political and
economic events that occurred during a birth cohorts preadult years (e.g. childhood
and adolescence) result in a generational identity comprised of a distinctive set of
values, beliefs, expectations, and behaviors that remain relatively stable throughout
14
261
a generations lifetime (Inglehart 1997; Strauss and Howe 1991). Collective memories generated in a group of people which experienced the same historical events
in its youth represent a generational imprinting that will affect future attitude,
preferences and behavior (Holdbrook and Schindler 1989, 1994; Schuman and
Scott 1989).
Strauss and Howe (1991), in their review of American social history, identified
three generations that are still represented not only in society but also in the workforce, namely Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y. Baby Boomers are
those who were born between 1943 and 1960 and are the largest generational group.
They grew up during the prosperous period following World War II and are usually
described as very individualistic and competitive and highly oriented toward selffulfillment through career advancements (Parker and Chusmir 1990). Generation X
(born between 1961 and 1981) experienced the early 1980s recession and downsizing and changes in family structure during their formative years (Kupperschmidt
2000) that led them to be more conservative in family values (Craig and Bennett
1997). Lastly, Generation Y (born between 1982 and 2003), also known as
Millennials, is still entering the labour market and is the smallest. Even if there is no
total agreement in terms of years of birth and the way in which generations are
labeled and defined, the taxonomy proposed by Strauss and Howe (1991) is one of
the most commonly cited in managerial literature (Parry and Urwin 2011).
Generation cohorts are societal subcultures and, in the view of Ingleharts (1997,
2000) theory of intergenerational value change, there have been systematic changes
in values and motivations of different generations that reflect economical and technological changes that have affected several societies around the world. The theory
of intergenerational value change is based on two hypotheses: the socialization
hypothesis and the scarcity hypothesis. According to the first hypothesis, a persons
basic values reflect the socioeconomic conditions of their pre-adult stage (childhood and adolescence) and this value orientation remains relatively stable throughout their lifetime, although it may vary in terms of importance and predominance
depending on the contextual situation. Thus, the socialization hypothesis implies
that values are stable and hard to change during a lifetime.5 The scarcity hypothesis
instead, claims that people consider values related to those aspects that were inadequate during a generations youth more important. From this assumption the transition from modernist to post-modernist values in industrialized societies is derived.
That means that generations which grew up during periods of socioeconomic and
physical insecurity learn modernist survival values (e.g., economic determinism,
rationality, materialism, conformity, and respect for authority) which are typical of
the Baby Boomer generation, while those who grew up during periods of socioeconomic security learn postmodernist values (e.g., egalitarianism, individualism,
interpersonal trust, tolerance of diversity, self-transcendence) as is the case for
Generation X and Generation Y (Inglehart 1997, 2000; Inglehart and Welzel 2005).
By comparing personal values in generational cohorts, Egri and Ralston (2004)
5
Connection: This stability is also a hypothesis of the socialization processes in economic theories
of cultural transmission, as in Sect. 12.4.
262
A. Lazazzara
suggest a cultural cross convergence in value orientation between Chinese and US

managers and professionals, confirming Ingleharts (1997) hypothesis of the higher
level of post materialism in prosperous and industrialized postmodern societies and
thus advancing previous cross-cultural studies that have considered country culture
as the primary predictor of value orientation (Smith and Schwartz 1997; Smith et al.
1996).
The succession of generations, therefore, provide proof of the evolutionary
dynamics of culture. Culture in fact is not static but evolves over time and the transition from one generation to another reflects the nature of culture change that has
taken place in a country. Moreover, when people who share a generations value
orientation, that was previously under-represented, obtain societal positions of
power and influence, it becomes more pervasive in the national context (Inglehart
1997).
The idea that generations have their own set of values and beliefs and the consequences of the transition from one generation to the next in top leadership positions
is particularly intriguing if we move our focus to managerial and organizational
implications.
14.3
Values, Work Values, and Organizational Values
Among beliefs, symbols, rituals, norms, philosophies and other organizational culture traits, values have been the most analyzed category in organization studies. The
prevalence of a conceptualization of culture in terms of value systems is quite clear
in the case of both national and generational culture. Therefore, a value based
approach is particularly important in order to develop an organizational culture
theory and to look at the reciprocal influences that may occur across different
levels.
Values are intrinsic and enduring viewpoints of what is fundamentally right or
wrong (Rokeach 1973). They basically define what people believe to be right or
wrong in their social setting and, when shifting to a work setting, they can be defined
as work values (Smola and Sutton 2002). More specifically, Dose (1997) proposes
a comprehensive definition of work values as evaluative standards relating to work
or the work environment by which individuals discern what is right or assess the
importance of preferences (ivi: 227228).
In a longitudinal study, Smola and Sutton (2002) found support for the hypothesis that work values are influenced by generational experiences and that they have
shifted from the consideration of a persons job as indicative of his or her worth to
a greater attention toward work-life balance and flexibility. We shall analyze in
more detail how work values differ across generations and what the effects on organizational culture are.
14
14.3.1
263
Generational Differences in Work-Values
Baby Boomers are characterized by a strong work ethic and high job involvement,
which has led to economic security, career success and social status, although often
their personal lives have suffered from their workaholism (Kupperschmidt 2000).
They agree that work should be one of the most important parts of everyones life
(Smola and Sutton 2002), and are extremely competitive and very concerned with
their own self-interest (Westerman and Yamamura 2007) and personal gratification
(Leschinsky and Michael 2004). But they follow and respect authority and hierarchy (Crumpacker and Crumpacker 2007) and want to be respected themselves
because of their experience and seniority (Tolbize 2008). This generations members are often associated with optimism and team orientation (Leschinsky and
Michael 2004) and are extremely loyal toward their employers (Tolbize 2008).
Generation X is likely to value personal freedom and challenging work more
than job security and status, and is more oriented toward a balance between work
and personal life style (Kupperschmidt 2000). This generation is usually described
as skeptical of authority (Crumpacker and Crumpacker 2007), is characterized by
cynicism, pessimism and individualism (Kupperschmidt 2000; Smola and Sutton
2002) and is more independent, autonomous and self-reliant than the previous generation (Zemke et al. 2000). People belonging to this generation are less loyal
toward their employers (Tolbize 2008), place more importance on work-related
goals than their personal goals and are comfortable with change and diversity (Wong
et al. 2008).
As the previous generation, the youngest generational group Generation Y is
oriented toward work-life balance and informality but, like Baby Boomers, despite
the current socio-economic situation, is characterized by optimistic values (Huntley
2006; Smola and Sutton 2002). The dimension that mostly characterizes this group
is technology. They have grown up in a highly technological world and technology
is a very important part of their lives (Wong et al. 2008). They are comfortable with
change and neither job security nor extrinsic rewards are important factors in their
working life (Hart 2006). Actually, Generation Y is intrinsically motivated by work
content variables and prefers receiving new challenges and growing opportunities
than external rewards such as money or other benefits (Lancaster and Stillman
2003).
Because of these differences in work values, generations also differ in terms of
their own communication, feedback, leadership, authority, work ethic and rewarding models (Crumpacker and Crumpacker 2007). These differences, as well as those
related to approach and attitude towards work, can have an impact on organizational
culture and generate hard-to-manage intergenerational conflicts (McGuire et al.
2007), that have negative consequences not only on the ability to meet organizational
goals but also on innovation potential, organizational citizenship and retention
(Kupperschmidt 2000; Westerman and Yamamura 2007).
264
14.3.2
A. Lazazzara
Generational Differences and Organizational Culture
The consequences on organizational culture of the challenging generational mix

that many organizations are facing has not been fully explored yet. However, the
shift in the predominant set of values, due to the entrance in the labor market of new
and previously underrepresented generations, has massive implications for organizations and can affect organizational culture in at least three ways.
The first domain is related to the natural evolution and dynamism that occur in
any culture. Organizations are open systems embedded in an external environment.
When the characteristics of the external environment change, this trend reaches the
internal group, forcing new learning and adaptation among its members. Changes in
the external workforce composition, with the entry of a new generation which was
not previously represented, bring with them the passage to a new set of values that
will influence the internal group. New members belonging to a different generation
will carry new beliefs and assumptions that, in some case, could be discouraged in
prior generations but are recognized as fundamental in the entering generational
group. The new cultural traits introduced into the company can, to some extent,
influence the currently held assumptions and force the current organizational culture to evolve (Schein 1990).
This change dynamic is further reinforced when new generations reach top leadership positions (Smola and Sutton 2002). Schein (1992) suggests that the values of
an organizations influential members tend to represent the culture of the organization: given that the generations currently holding the most influential positions are
the eldest, their values are more represented within the companies than younger
generations values. The situation is slightly different if we analyze country by
country Generation Y, Generation X and Baby Boomers account respectively for
25 %, 32 % and 38 % of the U.S. labor force (AARP 2007) and for 14 %, 72 % and
14 % of the Italian labor force (ISTAT 2012) as, if Generation Y is now entering
the workforce, Generation X is poised to move into the leadership positions and
roles of authority, that are currently held mainly by Baby Boomers, in the coming
years. A shift in organizational values from status related values (e.g. having influence and responsibility) to freedom-related values (e.g. work life balance), or from
extrinsic values (e.g. pay and benefit) to intrinsic values (e.g. meaningful work), can
be expected as new managers who were not part of the founding group enter the top
management team. However, given the importance of cultural context when dealing
with generations, it is not possible to generalize because each expectation should be
nationally contextualized, and should consider some methodological issues (see
Parry and Urwin 2011). Cennamo and Gardner (2008), for instance, found partial
support for this hypothesis, confirming a shift only in work-values involving status
and freedom, but the study covered only New Zealand employees. The US-centric
Smola and Sutton (2002) longitudinal study found evidence of generational differences, like a more idealistic view toward work among younger generations as well
as more individualism and less loyalty to the company. A recent Italian study
(Lazazzara 2013), instead, revealed that younger generations are more open to
14
265
change and diversity than older generations, and that differences exist in terms of
preferred training style across generations, but also reported a high level of workvalue heterogeneity within generations, especially in relation to organizational characteristics such as company size, age, sector and geographic location. These features
will differentiate the cultural mechanism of cultural change and transition.
The second domain concerns the view of organizational culture as the result of
individual perceptions. The values of organizational culture have recently been
questioned by Stackman et al. (2000), who emphasize that while organizational culture and values are often used at an aggregate level, the construct of value is an
individual-level variable. Aggregated measures of individual values are usually
used as proxies for organizational values. Therefore, even if organizational culture
perpetuates and reproduces itself through socialization of new members (Schein
1990), this is unlikely to alter the basic individual value structure (Lusk and Oliver
1974) that is applied to interpreting and understanding organizational culture itself.
In this perspective the construct of organizational culture relates also to how organizational members interpret and understand their work-related experiences and
how these interpretations and understandings are related to action (Van Muijen
et al. 1999: 553). The interpretations can vary because of differences in interpretation patterns that may exist among groups (Martin 1992). Generational groups are
particularly important in this regard given that people who share the same values
and attitudes towards work, such as those belonging to the same generation, will
identify with a certain group and will tend to apply the distinction between us and
them and influence each other when making sense of their work experiences (Ely
1994; Ericksen 2002). These differences could be a source of conflict and power
struggle (Martin 1992), because generations can differ in terms of their perceptions
of current and desired organizational culture too (Hooijberg and Petrock 1993). If
employees believe that the values held by members of their organization are inappropriate to accomplish their goals or organizational success, they may attempt to
modify those values in order to reach the desired organizational culture, thus triggering a cultural change (Graham 1986).
Lastly, organizational values have an important influence on job selection and on
the person-organization fit (Judge and Bretz 1992). People belonging to the same
generational group can perceive an organization which shows values that match their
preferences as being more attractive. Generally speaking, organizational values
related to salary and promotional opportunities can exert more influence on older
generations while work-life balance, informality and concern for others will attract
younger generations. This implies, from one side, that organizations that are not considered particularly attractive by some generations can meet demographic composition problems in the future due to underrepresentation of some cohorts and the
resulting risk of workforce and skills shortages. On the other side, it raises the issue
of the importance of the way in which organizational values are communicated outside. Values are, in fact, an important determinant of person-organization fit and
employees who match organizational values to their own are more likely to intrinsically enjoy their work and less likely to leave the organization (Judge and Bretz 1992;
Westerman and Yamamura 2007). This is especially true for younger generations,
266
A. Lazazzara
whose psychological contract with the employer is based more on short-term and
utilitarianism due to internal and external changes in organizations and their environments (Atkinson 2002). Furthermore, due to the recursive adaptive relationship
between organizations and their environment, organizations should properly manage
their external image, which is the way organization members believe others see the
organization and judge it, in order to be fully attractive and increase the collective
self-esteem derivable from organizational membership (Dutton et al. 1994).
14.3.3
Intergenerational Conflict and Cultural Change
The differences in values and attitudes of generational work groups influence the
organizational culture in the ways described above that, in turn, can lead to two
important consequences: intergenerational conflict and cultural change.
In the perspective of social identity theory (Tajfel 1981; Turner 1985) people
tend to classify themselves, and others, as belonging to one of several social categories based on the prototypical characteristics of its members. Above all, people
belonging to the same generation, who shared important collective experiences during pre-adulthood, identify themselves as a social group and tend to perpetuate their
group image by identifying boundaries that allow the distinction between in-group
and out-of-group (Ely 1994; Ericksen 2002). Conflicts arise because an individual
or group perceives differences and opposition between itself and another individual
or group about interests and resources, beliefs, values, or practices that matter to
them (De Dreu and Gelfand 2008: 6). Intergenerational conflict is an example of
group conflict that may result from differences in approaches and attitudes to work
and can negatively affect organizational performance, innovation, corporate citizenship and turnover (Westerman and Yamamura 2007; Kupperschmidt 2000).
However, conflict is not always dysfunctional as it can be a functional way to stimulate learning and change within organizations by applying leverage to differences
(Legge 1995).
The question here is: should cultural change be managed and guided or should it
be left to occur naturally? In some cases, leaders, who are aware of their cultural
biases, can perceive the need to adapt to changing conditions in the environment and
undertake actions that aim to produce the desired cultural change. Cultural change
initiatives would be, for example, setting new directions and providing new role
models, rewarding the adoption of new behaviors that are more consistent with new
assumptions, drawing new leaders from the subculture that better represent the new
trajectory (Schein 1990). However, a deliberated cultural change is most likely to
encounter great resistance by organizational members (Schein 2000) and some
scholars argue that cultural change can only occur naturally (Ogbonna 1993).
14
14.4
267
Conclusion
The concept of organizational culture is ambiguous, often controversial and not

fully representative of the complex cultural dynamics that exist in contemporary
organizations. Organizational culture researchers have been more focused on interpreting culture as a unique feature and on the socialization process by which new
members acquire dominant cultural traits and organizational culture is perpetuated,
than on disentangling the complexity of the phenomenon. At the same time, the
field doesnt provide an explicit definition of cultural traits that are considered to be
a set of building blocks such as values, beliefs, symbols, rituals, norms, philosophies and stories.
In as much as organizations are social entities characterized by a number of subcultures that can arise at individual, group, and organizational level, there is a need
for synergy among cultural perspectives in order to depict a more comprehensive
view. Not all subcultures are countercultures holding discordant values which
oppose the core elements of the larger culture (Boisnier and Chatman 2002) and the
effects of subcultures depend mainly on the extent to which they are contradictory
or in opposition to each other, or on the extent to which they complement one
another and potentially form a complementarity (Ostroff et al. 2003). In addition,
subcultures can constitute a competitive advantage, especially in dynamic environments, given that allowing certain types of subculture to emerge may generate varied responses to the environment without necessarily destroying its internal
coherence (Boisnier and Chatman 2002). Therefore, fostering an inclusive and
empowering organizational culture, which respects and enhances differences, is the
first step towards ensuring the organizations ability to adapt to external changes and
to achieve the right balance between change and stability.
Paying greater attention to generational diversity in organizations and creating a
harmonious and empowering workplace by sharing knowledge about differences
among generational groups can lead to companies allowing generational subcultures to emerge. In this way, they will gain a competitive advantage and will respond
more quickly to external changes and the challenges that are provided by this new
and unique generational mix.
References
AARP. (2007). Leading a multigenerational workforce. Washington, DC: AARP.
Atkinson, C. (2002). Career management and the changing psychological contract. Career
Development International, 7(1), 1423.
Bilsky, W., Janik, M., & Schwartz, S. H. (2011). The structural organization of human values
Evidence from three rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). Journal of Cross-Cultural
Psychology, 42, 759776.
Boisnier, A., & Chatman, J. A. (2002). The role of subcultures in agile organizations. In S. Randall,
R. Petersen, & E. Mannix (Eds.), Leading and managing people in dynamic organizations.
Mahwah: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.
268
A. Lazazzara
Cennamo, L., & Gardner, D. (2008). Generational differences in work values, outcomes and
person-organisation values fit. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 23(8), 891906.
Cottle, T. J. (1968). The location of experience: A manifest time orientation. Acta Psychologica,
28, 129149.
Craig, S. C., & Bennett, S. E. (Eds.). (1997). After the boom: The politics of generation X.
New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Crumpacker, M., & Crumpacker, J. M. (2007). Succession planning and generational stereotypes:
Should HR consider age-based values and attitudes a relevant factor or a passing fad? Public
Personnel Management, 36(4), 349369.
Daft, R. L., Murphy, J., & Willmott, H. (2010). Organization theory and design. Hampshire:
Cengage Learning EMEA.
Davidov, E., Schmidt, P., & Schwartz, S. H. (2008). Bringing values back in: The adequacy of the
European Social Survey to measure values in 20 countries. Public Opinion Quarterly, 72,
420445.
De Dreu, C. K. W., & Gelfand, M. J. (2008). Conflict in the workplace: Sources, functions and
dynamics across multiple levels of analysis. In C. K. W. De Dreu & M. J. Gelfand (Eds.), The
psychology of conflict and conflict management in organizations (pp. 354). New York:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dennison, D. (1984). Bringing corporate culture to the bottom line. Organizational Dynamics,
13(2), 522.
Dose, J. J. (1997). Work values: An integrative framework and illustrative application to organizational socialization. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 70(3),
219240.
Durkin, J. E. (1981). Living groups: Group psychotherapy and general systems theory. New York:
Brunner/Mazel.
Dutton, J. E., Dukerich, J. M., & Harquail, C. V. (1994). Organizational images and members identification. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39, 239263.
Egri, C. P., & Ralston, D. A. (2004). Generation cohorts and personal values: A comparison of
China and the United States. Organization Science, 15, 210220.
Ely, R. J. (1994). The effects of organisational demographics and social identity on relationships
among professional women. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39, 203238.
Eriksen, T. Y. (2002). Ethnicity and nationalism: Anthropological perspectives. New York: Pluto
Press.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. New York: Harper & Row.
George, G., Sleeth, R. G., & Siders, M. A. (1999). Organizing culture: Leader roles, behaviors, and
reinforcement mechanisms. Journal of Business and Psychology, 13(4), 545560.
Graham, J. W. (1986). Principled organizational dissent: A theoretical essay. In B. M. Staw & L. L.
Cummings (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 8, pp. 152). Greenwich: JAI
Press.
Groysberg, B., Thomas, D. A., & Wagonfeld, A. B. (2011). Keeping google Googley. HBS
report no. 9-409-039. Boston: HBS Publishing.
Gursoy, D., Maier, A., & Chi, C. (2008). Generational differences: An examination of work values
and generational gaps in the hospitality workforce. International Journal of Hospitality
Management, 27, 448458.
Hart, K. (2006). Generations in the workplace: Finding common ground. Medical Laboratory
Observer, 38, 2627.
Hirschhorn, L. (1987). The workplace within. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hofstede, G. (1980). Cultures consequences: International differences in work-related values.
London: Sage Publications.
Hofstede, G. (1983). Dimensions of national culture in fifty countries and three regions. In J. B.
Deregowski, S. Dziurawiec, & R. C. Annios (Eds.), Expiscations in cross-cultural psychology
(pp. 335355). Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger.
Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. London: McGraw-Hill.
14
269
Hofstede, G. (2001). Cultures consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Hofstede, G., Neuijen, B., Ohayv, D. D., & Sanders, G. (1990). Measuring organizational cultures:
A qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35,
286316.
Holdbrook, M. B., & Schindler, R. M. (1989). Some exploratory findings on the development of
musical tastes. Journal of Consumer Research, 16, 119124.
Holdbrook, M. B., & Schindler, R. M. (1994). Age, sex and attitude toward the past as predictors
of consumers aesthetic tastes for cultural products. Journal of Marketing Research, 31,
412422.
Hooijberg, R., & Petrock, F. (1993). On cultural change: Using the competing values framework
to help leaders execute a transformational strategy. Human Resource Management, 32(1),
2950.
House, R., Javidan, M., & Dorfman, P. (2001). Project GLOBE: An introduction. Applied
Psychology, 50(4), 489505.
Huntley, R. (2006). The world according to Y: Inside the new adult generation. Sidney: Allen &
Unwin.
Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political
change in 43 societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Inglehart, R. (2000). Globalization and postmodern values. The Washington Quarterly, 23(1),
215228.
Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, cultural change and democracy: The human
development sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISTAT. (2012). Rilevazione sulle forze di lavoro: Media 2011. Roma: ISTAT.
Judge, T. A., & Bretz, R. D. (1992). Effects of work values on job choice decisions. Journal of
Applied Psychology, 77, 261271.
Kluckhohn, F. R., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1961). Variations in value orientations. Evanston: Row,
Peterson.
Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions.
Papers. Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,
47(1), viii223
Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture: Control and commitment in a high-tech corporation.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kupperschmidt, B. R. (2000). Multigenerational employees: Strategies for effective management.
The Health Care Manager, 19, 6576.
Lancaster, L. C., & Stillman, D. (2003). When generations collide: Who they are. Why they clash.
How to solve the generational puzzle at work. New York: HarperCollins.
Lazazzara, A. (2013). Quanto contano i valori in azienda? Differenze e analogie nei valori e negli
atteggiamenti delle generazioni verso il Lavoro. In M. C. Bombelli (Ed.), Generazioni in
azienda (pp. 111136). Milano: Guerini e Associati.
Legge, K. (1995). Human resource management: Rhetorics and realities. London: Macmillan.
Leidner, D. E., & Kayworth, T. (2006). Review: A review of culture in information systems
researches: Toward a theory of information technology culture conflict. MIS Quarterly, 30(2),
357399.
Leschinsky, R. M., & Michael, J. H. (2004). Motivators and desired company values of wood
products industry employees: Investigating generational differences. Forest Products Journal,
54(1), 3439.
Lewin, K. (1952). Group decision and social change. In G. E. Swanson, T. M. Newcomb, & E. L.
Hartley (Eds.), Readings in social psychology (pp. 459473). New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
Lusk, E. J., & Oliver, B. L. (1974). American managers personal value systems revisited. Academy
of Management Journal, 17, 549554.
270
A. Lazazzara
Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of generations. In K. Mannheim (Ed.), Essays on the sociology of knowledge (pp. 276322). London: Routledge.
Martin, J. (1992). Cultures in organizations: Three perspectives. New York: Oxford University
Press.
McGuire, D., By, R. T., & Hutchings, K. (2007). Towards a model of human resource solutions of
achieving intergenerational interaction in organizations. Journal of European Industrial
Training, 31(8), 592608.
Mohan, M. L. (1993). Organizational communication and cultural vision: Approaches for analysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.
OBannon, G. (2001). Managing our future: The generation X factor. Public Personnel
Management, 30, 95109.
Ogbonna, E. (1993). Managing organizational culture: Fantasy o reality? Human Resource
Management Journal, 3, 4254.
Ostroff, C., Kinicki, A. J., & Tamkins, M. M. (2003). Organizational culture and climate. In W. C.
Borman, D. R. Ilgen, R. J. Klimoski, & I. Weiner (Eds.), Handbook of psychology (Vol. 12,
pp. 565593). Hoboken: Wiley.
Parker, B., & Chusmir, L. (1990). A generational and sex-based view of managerial work values.
Psychological Reports, 66, 947950.
Parry, E., & Urwin, P. (2011). Generational differences in work values: A review of theory and
evidence. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13, 7996.
Parsons, T. (1977). The evolution of societies. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Parsons, T., & Shils, E. A. (Eds.). (1951). Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge, MA:
Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York: Free Press.
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement.
Psychological Monographs, 80(609), 128.
Rowlinson, M., & Procter, S. (1999). Organizational culture and business history. Organization
Studies, 20, 369396.
Saffold, G. (1988). Culture traits, strength, and organizational performance: Moving beyond
strong culture. Academy of Management Review, 13(4), 546558.
Schein, E. H. (1983). The role of founder in creating organizational culture. Organizational
Dynamics, 12, 1328.
Schein, E. H. (1985a). How culture forms, develops and changes. In R. Kilmann, M. Saxton, &
R. Serpa (Eds.), Gaining control of the corporate culture (pp. 1743). San Francisco: Jossey
Bass.
Schein, E. H. (1985b). Organisational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Schein, E. H. (1990). Organisational culture. American Psychologist, 45(2), 109119.
Schein, E. H. (1992). Organisational culture and leadership: A dynamic view. San Francisco:
Jossey Bass.
Schein, E. H. (2000). Commentary: Sense and nonsense about culture and climate. In N. M.
Ashkanasy, C. P. M. Wilderom, & M. F. Peterson (Eds.), Handbook of organizational culture
& climate (pp. xxiiixxx). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Schein, E. H. (2004). Organizational culture and leadership (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Schuman, H., & Scott, J. (1989). Generations and collective memories. American Sociological
Review, 54, 359381.
Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theory and empirical
tests in 20 countries. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 25,
pp. 165). New York: Academic.
Schwartz, S. H. (1994a). Are there universal aspects in the content and structure of values? Journal
of Social Issues, 50, 1945.
Schwartz, S. H. (1994b). Cultural dimensions of values: Towards an understanding of national
differences. In U. Kim, H. C. Triandis, C. Kagitcibasi, S. C. Choi, & G. Yoon (Eds.),
14
271
Individualism and collectivism: Theoretical and methodological issue (pp. 85119). Thousand
Oaks: Sage.
Schwartz, S. H. (1997). Values and culture. In D. Munro, S. Carr, & J. F. Schumaker (Eds.),
Motivation and culture (pp. 6984). New York: Routledge.
Schwartz, S. H. (2006). Value orientations: Measurement, antecedents and consequences across
nations. In R. Jowell, C. Roberts, R. Fitzgerald, & G. Eva (Eds.), Measuring attitudes crossnationally Lessons from the European Social Survey (pp. 169203). London: Sage.
Smith, P. B., & Schwartz, S. H. (1997). Values. In C. Kagitcibasi & M. H. Segall (Eds.), Handbook
of cross-cultural psychology (pp. 77118). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Smith, P. B., Dugan, S., & Trompenaars, F. (1996). National culture and the values of organizational employees: A dimensional analysis across 43 nations. Journal of Cross-Cultural
Psychology, 27, 231264.
Smola, K. W., & Sutton, C. D. (2002). Generational differences: Revisiting generational work values for the new millennium. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23, 363382.
Stackman, R. W., Pinder, C. C., & Connor, P. E. (2000). Values lost: Redirecting research on values
in the workplace. In N. Ashkanasy, C. P. M. Wilderom, & M. F. Peterson (Eds.), Handbook of
organizational culture & climate (pp. 3754). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Strauss, W., & Howe, N. (1991). Generations: The history of Americas future, 15842089.
New York: Quill William Morrow.
Tajfel, H. (1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology. Cambridge:
Tolbize, A. (2008). Generational differences in the workplace. Research and Training Center on
Community Living. Minnesota: University of Minnesota.
Trompenaars, F. (1996). Resolving international conflict: Culture and business strategy. Business
Strategy Review, 7(3), 5168.
Trompenaars, F., & Hampden-Turner, C. (1993). Riding the waves of culture. London: Brealey.
Turner, J. C. (1985). Social categorization and the self-concept: A social cognitive theory of group
behavior. In E. J. Lawler (Ed.), Advances in group processes (Vol. 2, pp. 77122). Greenwich:
JAI Press.
UN. (2002). World population ageing: 19502050. New York: Department of Economic and
Social Affairs, Population Division, United Nations.
Uttal, B. (1983). The corporate culture vultures. Fortune October 17, 6672.
Van Muijen, J., Koopman, P., De Witte, K., et al. (1999). Organizational culture: The focus questionnaire. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 8(4), 551568.
Westerman, J. W., & Yamamura, J. H. (2007). Generational preferences for work environment fit:
Effects on employee outcomes. Career Development International, 12(2), 150161.
Wong, M., Gardiner, E., Lang, W., & Coulon, L. (2008). Generational differences in personality
and motivation. Do they exist and what are the implications for the workplace? Journal of
Managerial Psychology, 23(8), 878890.
Zemke, R., Raines, C., & Filipczak, B. (2000). Generations at work: Managing the clash of veterans, boomers, Xers, and nexters in your workplace. New York: AMACON.
Chapter 15
From Material Remains to Culture:

The Possibilities and Limits of Archaeology
in Reconstructing Ancient People
Viviana Ardesia
15.1
Introduction
Archaeology1 is the subject that recovers, describes and studies the cultures of the
past. These cultures reach archaeologists in a fragmentary way, due to erosion
over time, in the form of discontinuous traces that require lengthy analysis and
comparison before they can be interpreted. This is why, in an archaeological context, the best definition of culture continues to be that devised by Childe, who writes:
We find certain types of remains pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites, house
forms constantly recurring together. Such a complex of regularly associated traits
we shall term a cultural group or just a culture (Childe 1929).
The types of remains Childe speaks of are real cultural traits and the definition
of culture in archaeology coincides with that of material culture, that is to say all
the artifacts that embody the technology of a wider and more complex system (Binford 1990). This system appears evident in the anthropological definition
of culture, understood as the global accumulation of knowledge and innovation
deriving from the sum of individual contributions handed down across the generations and spread to our social group, which influences and constantly changes our
life (Cavalli Sforza 2004).2
A comparison of the archaeological and the anthropological definitions of culture shows that the former only represents one piece of an organized structure that
1
Connection: While this Chapter provides a theoretical background on archeological methodologies, the reader can find useful examples applied to cultural traits in Chaps. 17 and 19.
2
Connection: For a more complete idea of culture as understood in cultural anthropology, see
Chaps. 2 and 3. Chapters 11 and 13 deepen Cavalli Sforzas approach to culture, respectively from
the theoretical and the empirical points of view.
V. Ardesia (*)
e-mail: viviana_it@yahoo.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_15
273
274
V. Ardesia
integrates archaeological, or material, culture with social (hierarchical networks of

personal relations), religious (structures of beliefs connected with the supernatural)
and economic (strategy of subsistence) sub-systems.
All of the above sub-systems are in turn inserted and determined by two dynamic
and continuous flows: the environment (space) and the period (time) in which a
culture appears (Clarke 1968, Fig. 15.1).
These two aspects play a decisive role in the birth, development and superseding
of human cultures: it is sufficient to think how cultures with similar environmental
conditions which developed in the same periods of time are capable of showing a
good number of common traits. The behavior patterns through which cultures are
expressed are suggested and at times imposed on man by external natural conditions, or are suitable adaptations to ensure survival in a particular environment at a
particular time.
It therefore follows that material culture is part of a culture which once was completely equipped for and operated in an ecological-temporal context, of which we
possess only fragments today.
The challenge for archaeology is precisely to reconstruct, from simple artifacts,
the preferential object of the archaeologists observation, aspects of a behavioral
type and/or meanings even of a superstructural nature: using the remains of homes,
tombs and objects of everyday use to reconstruct ways of life, beliefs, social, playful
and economic activities etc.
Fig. 15.1 Model of a socio-cultural system (From Clarke 1968)
15 From Material Remains to Culture: The Possibilities and Limits of Archaeology
275
This is possible as every artifact is the product of a set of actions: it embodies the
behavior required for it to have been made and the behavior implied by its
use (Lerhoi-Gourhan 1943, 1965, 1988). We could define an artifact as solid
behavior and a set of artifacts as the equivalent of whole patterns of behavior.
Archaeology thus studies moments of the behavior of man, through the fossilized
results of his actions imprisoned in ancient artifacts. Culture becomes the set of
learned behavior which increases the instinctive behavior of man, and is investigated through its material manifestations, objects handed on socially from one individual and/or society to another (Anati 1992).
The archaeologists work is therefore to collect objects which are often fragmentary in the form and/or context where they are found, associate them and try to
obtain from this association greater and more complex information on the culture
that produced these objects in a given place and at a given time (Fig. 15.2).3
Is it really possible, though, to analyze such a complex system when it can be
observed in such an incomplete way? Archaeology says it is, thanks to a long and
scrupulous investigative procedure, which includes organizing and labelling the
artifacts that are found, their associations and the visible transformations they have
undergone in time and space.
Fig. 15.2 In the triangle of material culture (From Clarke 1968), all parts are connected. Moving
from a study of artifacts, archaeologists may address both processual issues connected to behaviors and concrete usages, and preprocessual symbolic issues concerning meaning
3
Connection: Some of the implications of this complexity for phylogenetic analysis of artifacts
are addressed in Chap. 16.
276
15.2
V. Ardesia
Typological Classification
It is necessary to start from the assumption, which can be clearly observed in anthropology, that man at any time and in any space feels the need to introduce a degree
of order into what surrounds him. This order concerns not only the material world
(objects and similar) but also goes as far as the intangible realms of thought (from
the religious pantheon to philosophical categories). This order is proposed once
again and fossilized in his artifacts and is the key for the archaeologist to interpret
the material culture of ancient societies: in the fossilized actions of man (artifacts),
the conjunction of properties is anything but constant but much more than casual,
allowing the identification of probabilistic laws which are certainly more difficult to
isolate and more uncertain than the laws devised for the physical world but which
can be formulated.
To allow reconstruction of this order, the artifacts must be described, classified
and serialized, i.e. they must be the object of typological classification. Classification
is organization of reality, from which the following concept originates:
Class: a functional grouping on the basis of qualitative-morphological parameters (form
and technology used to produce the artifact) and quantitative aspects of the dimensional
type, understood both as relations between the parts and absolute dimensions.
Typology is, instead, an attempt to identify the model, or the type:

Type: association of specific characteristics or attributes, recurring in a certain number of
examples, generally within a given field of variability; this corresponds to the mental model
to which reference was made in the production of an artifact.
An archaeological assemblage is an associated nucleus of types of contemporary

artifacts and a type is a homogeneous population of artifacts which share a recurring
range of attributes identified on an intuitive basis which bases resemblance of
attributes on a supposed common pattern of use, but different types share a common
use and the same types can be multifunctional.
The types are constructed according to assemblages of resemblances such that
the degree of resemblance between artifacts of one type is greater than any resemblance between artifacts of different types, even though the artifacts of the same
type may vary from one to the next (Fig. 15.3).
15.3
How a Type Comes into Being
The birth of a type, i.e. the appearance of a new model that lasts in time and in
space, takes place on the basis of precise mechanisms which are:
Transformation: a type that already exists is transformed by adding new attributes. The new attributes can be of a formal type and in this case act on the
structure of the type modifying how it is used and/or its function in daily life, but
they can also be of a symbolic type, for example the addition of decorations or
277
Fig. 15.3 Example of typological classification. A functional difference corresponds to the formal
difference: the two distinct shapes can be used to hold different things (e.g. liquids or solid foodstuffs). On the other hand, the two types may correspond to two different uses: the horizontal
handles are more practical for lifting the olla (a jar to contain in loco) while the vertical ones are
more practical to attach the jar to the back of a donkey (a jar for transport)
the use of different materials for its production, which modify the perception of
the object, and as a consequence its functionality.
Replacement: a model that is no longer satisfactory is completely modified and
replaced by a new alternative. Very often, the replacement follows either an
encounter with another culture or a substantial modification in the daily life of a
community which, as a consequence, requires new models.
Termination without replacement: this can take place when in a community two
models, which can satisfy the same functional requirements, co-exist and therefore one of the two is abandoned at a certain stage because it is redundant.
Redundancy occurs, for example, after the transformation of a type which normally, before being accepted, has a period of co-existence with the previous
model.
The birth and the end of a type cannot take place without the fundamental processes of acceptance and integration and are preceded and followed by phases of
lingering/precession.
Acceptance depends on the suitability of the element within the socio-cultural
system and on how it is presented as a new, alternative, contradictory or redundant
variety. The foundation for acceptance is need: if I create something innovative
from the structural or functional point of view, but this object is not reproduced, it
stays what in archaeology we classify as unicum, something that exists but which,
278
V. Ardesia
not satisfying any need, is not reproduced, or in cultural terms, is not transmitted as
a model.4
Integration depends on the capacity of the system to reconcile the new variety
with the assemblage of pre-existing types.
Precession is the phase during which the old model begins to be proposed with
variants; lingering is the phase in which the new model exists side by side with the
one that it will replace.
Summarizing, to reconstruct the order existing within the cultures of the past,
archaeological research must proceed through two phases, shown, respectively, in
Tables 15.1 and 15.2.
Comparing artifacts means, in the first place, comparing their attributes, but it is
not a simple question of presence/absence.
Every archaeological attribute has two aspects, one expresses the functional constraints, due to the use of a specific raw material and the functionality that was
intended for the artifact, and the other expresses the range of possible varieties, due
to local customs and the singularity and creativity of craftsmen (e.g. a bronze axe to
clear woodland must have certain dimensions and weight but it can vary extensively
from the morphological point of view).
When we compare two artifacts, we therefore have to check whether the elements are similar only insofar as this is imposed by their functional and technological characteristics or whether this similarity underlies a common model. This is
possible by analyzing: (1) whether the artifacts recur in numerically large aggregates; (2) whether they are contemporary.
Conversely, the quantitative oscillation of the types may represent an adjustment
or a change in a cultural strategy which in time can lead to the birth of a new type or
to the end of a type that is now obsolete.
However, it is not always easy to observe what has just been described: we must
not forget that no site ever contains, or has ever contained, all the types of artifacts
produced.
It therefore follows, for example, that the oscillation mentioned above could be
due to the lack of research, to the ample chronological layering linked to a someTable 15.1 Definition of the fundamental entities that are to be identified and analyzed and of the
processes of variation, invention, development and diffusion that operate on them in space and in
time. There are four fundamental archaeological entities: attribute, artifact, type, culture (From
Renfrew and Bahn (1991))
Attribute
Descriptive
variable of the
artifact
Artifact
Solid
behavior
Type
Homogeneous population
of artifacts that share a
recurring range of attributes
Culture
Articulated and complex group
of types in a limited
geographical area and in a
defined period of time
Connection: Chapter 17 offers an articulated analysis of the process of innovation, particularly

technological innovation.
279
Table 15.2 Search for repeated resemblances and regularities in forms, functions and associations
between the entities in given environments (distribution) and periods (succession)
Resemblance
Assess whether two or
more chronologically
close artifacts have
sufficient affinities to
be able to be
assimilated (by
cultural aspect)
Association
Decide whether a set of
objects has been in
contemporary use in an
archaeological site or
whether they are objects
that are present at the
same time for other
reasons
Distribution
Identify the
area of
diffusion of
given artifacts
Succession
Define the relative
position of the artifacts
in a sequence, on the
basis of their presence
in stratified contexts or
through techniques of
serialization that take
into account the
association between
groups of objects
what crude scanning of time, or to particular phenomena such as the process of

acculturation or the presence of boundaries.
There exist various kinds of interference that can intervene and must be
assessed in the analysis phase of a typological association:
Regional sub-cultures: manufacturing specialization due to isolation, to a particular ecological niche, to cyclical seasonal variations;
Occupational sub-cultures: over-representation of a category of types, e.g. for
hunting, for slaughtering, for food preparation;
Social and/or sexual sub-cultures: over-representation of lites or objects linked
to one gender such as weapons for men, or textile elements for women this type
of sub-culture can easily be observed in funerary contexts.
The consequence of this interference is that all the contemporary artifacts of a
contemporary culture do not have the same identical distribution: however, a regularity in distribution can normally be observed, which tends to lessen towards the
boundaries of the area of dispersion.5
This allows the identification of the cultural area, understood as the central area
in which the affinity between the sets is high (Fig. 15.4).
Recapitulating, classification applied to all the objects found in one site allows
reconstructing an assemblage of artifacts that describes the craft and social traditions of a community.
Naturally, a community is not a culture: to be able to speak about culture, the
presence of the same association in a certain geographical area for a certain period
has to be ascertained, obviously contemplating the possible diachronic (chronological) or synchronic (the cultural groups) variants.
Connection: Chapter 9 considers boundaries from a cultural point of view, as cultural constructions that, nonetheless, may count among real constraints to the distribution of people, goods and
artifacts.
280
V. Ardesia
Fig. 15.4 A graphical representation by Clarke (1968, Fig. 3, p. 204) of a cultural area, understood as the central area in which the affinity between the sets is high
This is why the typological classification which reconstructs the material culture
of a community must be followed by the analysis of the associations and distributions
of the classified manufacturing set.
In the first case, significant cultural elements can be taken and their numerical
dispersion verified; in the second case, the manufacturing association we have
identified is taken and where it is reproduced is verified.
This is still not enough. After having checked the hypothetical internal coherence,
we have to ascertain that our association truly differs from what surrounds it both in
a diachronic (comparison with the preceding and subsequent associations, also for
the purpose of investigating origins and developments of this association, or the
trajectory in time) and synchronic (comparison with coeval cultures and any
trajectory in geographical space through chrono-typological study) sense.
A proposal of cultural aggregations can derive from this study.
15.4
Why a Culture Changes
Culture is by definition conservative. However, this is not because of inertia, a

concept that underlines a negative meaning, but due more to a sort of better use of
energy: if a thing works, there is no reason to change it, with the consequent
281
individual and collective effort that the introduction of a new model and a new
practice entails.6
However, cultures are constantly modified along a spatial-temporal trajectory,
under autochthonous and allogeneic impulses that constantly determine the invention
and the loss of cultural traits.
The processes that determine these modifications can be classified and described
as follows (Clarke 1968):
Remodeling of the techno-complex: periodic remodeling of the techno-complex
due to strategic requirements;
Remodeling of the cultural group: remodeling due to the spread of an extraneous
culture around the pre-existing network of connected cultures;
Cultural intrusion/replacement: the shift of one culture caused by another
through military conquest or mass emigration;
Acculturation: the growing resemblance of cultures due to organized intercommunication caused, for example, by trade;
Cultural assimilation: when a culture assimilates another that survives within
it as an incorporated sub-culture;
Sub-cultural intrusion/replacement: the shift of a sub-culture and its complex of
types by another with a similar role. This occurs when, for example, a military,
aristocratic or religious class is replaced by another;
Sub-cultural intrusion/insertion: addition from the exterior of a cultural segment
to an existing social structure, for example with the introduction of slaves,
mercenaries etc.;
Diffusion of stimuli: the similar response to similar needs by observation or
transfer of knowledge;
Primary diffusion: deriving from contact between persons of the same culture
(for example craftsmen from different workshops);
Secondary diffusion: deriving from contact between persons of different cultures
(generally fostered by particular circumstances, such as marriage, war, slavery,
or the exchange of gifts between chiefs);
Invention: introduction of a new variety by experiment and research;
Loss: abandonment of a variety by redundancy or lack of raw materials.
15.5
Case Study: The Culture of Rod-Tindari-Vallelunga

in the Context of the Sicilian Bronze Age
The case study described in the title has the purpose of illustrating, in a practical
way, the stages that archaeological research must follow in order to be able to recognize a culture in a given spatial context, in this case Sicily, and temporal context,
6
Connection: A similar argument is applied in Chap. 19 with reference to visual art as costly
signaling behavior.
282
V. Ardesia
Fig. 15.5 Map of the distribution of RTV culture (by the author)
in this case the Early Bronze Age, i.e. the period between the tenth and the fifteenth
centuries BC (Ardesia 2008; Ardesia and Cattani 2006).
The culture of Castelluccio in Sicily in the Early Bronze Age is well recognized
and accepted by scholars, whereas extensive debate is under way on the recognition
of the culture of Rod-Tindari-Vallelunga. This study started with the bibliographical
collection of all the sites and relative positioning classified as belonging to RTV
culture, in order to observe its distribution in the territory.
Figure 15.5, as a first representation, already shows a certain distributive regularity on the northern and western coast of the island. If we then include on this map
the distribution of coeval sites of Castelluccio (Fig. 15.6), we realize that there is a
real division of the island, with rare intrusions in the respective territories, and a
certain osmosis along what could be a border represented by the course of the river
Platani.
In order to be able to really speak about two distinct cultural groups, as we have
seen, we have to classify the material culture of the sites pertinent to the same
culture and then compare it with that of the coeval sites pertinent to the other culture
to verify internal affinities and external divergences.
In particular, to carry out this study, the ceramic set was chosen for study, for
three main reasons:
The abundance of finds which make a study of the ceramic set statistically
significant;
283
Fig. 15.6 Map of the distribution of RTV and Castelluccio cultures (by the author)
The awareness that ceramics also represented an indicator of cultural identity for
the ancients;
The variety of information they contain relative to cultural aspects such as the
storage, cooking and consumption of food, as well as the transportation of objects
and the performance of certain rituals (e.g. funeral libations).
The ceramic finds from excavations at the various RTV sites have therefore been
the object of typological classification on the basis of three levels (class, shape and
type) with the aim of identifying the methods of production and the functionalities
for each object. When this activity was completed, the recurrence of given associations on both the qualitative and quantitative levels was identified, through the
production of distribution maps which showed both the ceramic sets of each site and
the recurrence of shapes which were deemed particular.
From the maps, it can be observed how the distribution of the complete ceramic
set concerns only the sites which fall within the RTV area exclusively (Fig. 15.7),
whilst the particular ceramic shapes clearly travel more, as they are recognized as
exotic and are also clearly attested in the area pertinent to the culture of Castelluccio.
At this stage, the comparison between the RTV ceramic set and the Castelluccio
one, characterized by objects with very different shapes and decorations, allowed
raising the former to the status of cultural group: RTV has shown that it has an association of types which presents a clearly circumscribable distribution in area and
time.
284
V. Ardesia
classe
ansa a corna
ansa ad ascia
boccale
decorazione applicata (bugna)
decorazione in cisa
dolio ovoidale
maniglia a manubrio
olla globulare
olla ov oidale
scodella emisferica
scodella troncoconica
teglia
Fig. 15.7 The distribution of the complete ceramic set concerns only the RTV area (elaboration
by the author)
15.6
Conclusion
Archaeology is the human science that has as its reason of study the reconstruction
of the cultures of the past, through the collection and analysis of a specific typology
of cultural traits: material culture.
This is represented by artifacts, objects produced by man, which represent the
manual concretization of his ideas and his thought.
For this reason, by adequately interrogating these objects, after an attentive
examination which includes classifying and creating types that pigeon-hole the artifacts on the bases of parameters such as the material, the method of production and
the use, the archaeologist can also reconstruct the missing parts of ancient cultures,
such as the social, economic and religious aspects.
References
Anati, E. (1992). Le radici della cultura. Milano: Jaca Book.
Ardesia, V. (2008). La cultura di Rod-Tindari-Vallelunga tra Pantelleria e la Sicilia nel quadro
del Bronzo Antico siciliano. PhD thesis in Archaeology, University of Udine.
Ardesia, V., & Cattani, M. (2006). Tipologia ceramica e caratteristiche culturali della facies RTV.
Proceedings Atti LXI Riunione Scientifica dellIstituto Italiano di Preistoria e Protostoria,
Palermo, 1619 November 2006.
Binford, L. R. (1990). In pursuit of the past. Decoding the archaeological record. London: Thames
and Hudson.
285
Cavalli Sforza, L. L. (2004). Levoluzione della cultura. Torino: Codice Edizioni.

Childe, V. G. (1929). The Danube in prehistory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Childe, V. G. (1956). Piecing together the past: The interpretation of archaeological data. London:
Routledge & K. Paul.
Clarke, D. L. (1968). Analytical archaeology. London: Methuen and Co.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1943). Lhomme et la matire. Paris: Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1965). Le geste et la parole (Vol. I et II). Paris: Albin Michel. Eng. transl.
Gesture and speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1988). Dictionnaire de la prhistoire (Vol. I et II). Paris: PUF.
Renfrew, C., & Bahn, P. (1991). Archaeology. Theories, methods and practice. London: Thames
and Hudson.
Chapter 16
Homology and Phylogenetic Inference

in Biological and Material Cultural Evolution
Ilya Tmkin
16.1
Introduction
In a broad sense, evolution is a fate of heritable information governed by processes

that channel, alter, or interrupt its flow between generations. Such generalization of
the Darwinian descent with modification does not limit evolution to living systems and includes many aspects of change in human culture. The application of the
logic of evolutionary theory has been instrumental in establishing a unified theoretical framework for understanding in sociocultural sciences across disciplines,
including linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and economics (Blute
2010; Mesoudi 2011; Steele et al. 2010).
However disparate the dynamics of certain aspects of information transmission
and processing between biological and sociocultural systems may be, evolution produces a historical footprint of descent with modification that can be represented in
the form of genealogical trees and networks. Whereas the genealogical worldview,
or tree thinking (OHara 1988), was incipient in evolutionary theory from its
origins,1 not until the end of the twentieth century did it come to the forefront of
evolutionary research. Rapid advances in theory and practice of phylogenetic
systematics, the field of biology devoted to estimating evolutionary relationships
among living organisms, rekindled the interest in rigorous testing of cultural historical
hypotheses and inspired the adaptation of biological approaches for reconstructing
cultural histories. Recently, cultural phylogenetics has become one of the most
rapidly developing and promising fields in sociocultural sciences, transcending
1
Connection: Chap. 18 tells the story of how linguists, in the nineteenth century and earlier, were
precursors of tree thinking and of many other aspects of evolutionary theory.
I. Tmkin (*)
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA
Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, VA, USA
e-mail: TemkinI@si.edu
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_16
287
288
I. Tmkin
boundaries of historical linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and social sciences

(Gray et al. 2007; Howe and Windram 2011; Mace and Holden 2005; Tmkin and
Eldredge 2007).2 Grounded in the population-genetics inspired theory of cultural
transmission on the one hand (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldman 1981)3 and in contemporary evolutionary theory on the other, cultural
phylogenetics is an interdisciplinary enterprise with a common core of methodological approaches to rigorous testing of hypotheses of long-standing dilemmas of
sociocultural evolution based on real-world empirical data sets.
Here, I examine the concepts of character and homologycentral to any phylogenetic investigationas they are used in historical inference in biological and
material cultural evolution in an attempt to emphasize important ontological conundrums that have direct bearings upon the choice of appropriate phylogenetic methods. Establishing clarity in a theory is not an issue of semantics or a matter of
emphasis, but is a requirement for future success and the development of evolutionarily studies of human culture. The underlying premise of this contribution is that
theoretical concepts matter. A sound theory is the basis of valid scientific discovery
and consistent inference, and is a key for preventing potential pitfalls of misapplying theory to practice, as amply documented by the history of evolutionism in sociology and anthropology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Sanderson
2007).4
To question the validity and applicability of basic assumptions of phylogenetic
inference is particularly timely due to the recent explosion in empirical studies of
human cultural evolution. The spectrum of cultural entities analyzed phylogenetically is rapidly growing, comprising languages, texts, artifacts, concepts, social
institutions, and entire cultures. Despite the fact that this work focuses on phylogenetics of man-made objects, the reasoning developed here applies to broader issues
of cultural evolution in general. I believe that the progress in the much-promising
application of phylogenetics to cultural evolution requires conceptual reframing and
development of new empirical approaches in light of the hierarchical expansion of
evolutionary theory to culture, a new synthesis yet to emerge.5
2
Connection: For cultural anthropology, see Chaps. 2 and 3. For social sciences, see Chaps. 12
and 13. For archaeology, see Chaps. 15 and 17.
3
Connection: See Chap. 11 for a presentation and commentary of the theory of Cavalli Sforza and
Feldman. For further links, see, the Connection in Sect. 11.3.
4
Connection: The relevance of this observation is explained in the introduction of Chap. 3 (and
Connection therein).
5
Connection: The reader can refer to Sect. 18.3.5 to have an example of how phylogenetic analysis is applied to the study of language.
16 Homology and Phylogenetic Inference in Biological and Material Cultural Evolution
16.2
289
Characters
Characters are central to any systematic enterprise and underscore the praxis of
phylogenetic inference. Most generally, characters are variable, quasi-independent
(semi-autonomous) intrinsic attributes of form, structure, or composition that are
the basis for comparison among entities that possess them. It is the notion of comparability based on correspondence of similarities that allows for identifying and
designating particular traits and properties as characters. Being the loci of differences and identities, characters are identified, ostensively through a direct comparison of specimens or their representations. Rather than being mere observations of
organismal properties, characters are a product of the empirical analysis, where the
organism is decomposed into quasi-independent, discrete elements (formalized as
the factorization procedure sensu Wagner and Stadler 2003). Thus, the character
is a theory-laden concept (Popper 1959). The philosopher Michel Foucault argued
that the theory of the character permeated the eighteenth-century epistemology
across disciplines, when character analysis became a universal approach to classification practice in both sociocultural and life sciences (Foucault 1966).6
16.2.1
Characters in Biology
A bewildering plethora of meanings surrounds the concept of character in biology

(Colless 1985; Wagner 2001). Prior to the advent of evolutionary thinking, the
observation that different organisms possess similar parts in similar places led to the
recognition of comparable characters. The magnitude of a perceived difference
among such characters provided the basis for classification. Devoid of sound and
explicit theoretical grounds, early classifications were based on artificial characters, conceptualized as immutable organismal properties that were selected for their
taxonomic utility based on pragmatic considerations, such as a sufficient amount of
variation, and the ease of observation and description. This practice prevented the
emergence of a unified classification, resulting in multiple competing taxonomies.
The identity of the natural characters, the analysis of which would reveal the true
and unique, or natural, system (conceived as the manifestation of the divine plan
for the creation), remained moot or was regarded unknowable.
Upon the general acceptance of Darwins descent with modification, the concept
of natural character was radically modified to signify those characters that bear
resemblance due to shared ancestry.7 Thus, the ontological status of characters
shifted from that of universal classes, identified by common properties, to historical
6
Connection: Foucaults genealogical analysis of deep and pervasive ideas and theories is also
referred to in Chaps. 5 and 10.
7
Connection: The relationship between Darwin and the character notion is also referred to in Sect.
11.2. Darwins thoughts, as expressed in his writings, are protagonist also of Sects. 13.3, 18.2,
20.3, and 20.4.
290
I. Tmkin
individuals amenable to change. The principal objective of biological systematics

became the construction of classifications informed by phylogeny and a new
research program emerged to test hypotheses of character evolution in a rigorous,
deductive manner. Darwin succinctly expressed the new paradigm in On the Origin
of Species:
All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not
greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with
modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between
any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and,
in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden
bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of
creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike. (Darwin 1859: 420)
Phylogenetic inference in contemporary biological systematics focuses on

intrinsic and heritable characters that span the nested compositional hierarchy of
biological organization from the molecular to the organismal level. Intrinsic characters
can be either genotypic or phenotypic. Insofar as DNA replication is the physical
basis of heredity, genotypic characters (e.g., nucleotide and amino acid sequences,
gene order, and chromosome number) are the most appropriate sources of comparative variation. Genotypic character data are frequently supplemented by characters
pertaining to various aspects of the phenotype, such as anatomy, behavior, physiology,
development, and biochemistry. Phylogenetic analyses are often conducted solely
on phenotypic data when genotypic character data are not available, as in the analysis of extinct taxa or specimens with genetic material corrupted by age or method of
preservation. Phenotypic characters are viewed either as a direct manifestation of an
organisms genotype or as nongenomically encoded traits that are transmitted
epigenetically, both kinds of data providing important sources of historical markers
for phylogenetic reconstruction (Freudenstein et al. 2003).
Extrinsic features, such as geographic location and ecological attributes, are not
organismal properties and inherently non-assessable from examination of specimens
themselves. With few exceptions (e.g., obligate feeding on a specific host or highly
specific symbiotic relationship), such characters are rarely used in phylogenetic
reconstruction, but often mapped onto phylogenetic trees a posteriori.
16.2.2
Characters in Material Culture
The concept of character in material culture has received the most attention and
theoretical development in archaeology.8 Characters are constructed from intrinsic
physical properties of artifacts (such as aspects of form, dimension, and proportion,
as well as physical and chemical properties of the materials) by postulatingif only
implicitlytheir cultural meaning to establish the basis for their comparability
8
Connection: See Chap. 15 for a more comprehensive analysis.
291
across different artifacts. Commonly recognized categories of characters include

mechanical (attributed to the same function), constructional (mechanically alternative solutions to the same functional problem), semiotic (signifying ideological or
other meanings), and design (ornamental, decorative, or entirely aesthetic) (Lebedev
1979). However, many characters can be attributed to multiple categories: for
instance, a functional feature can have a symbolic significance. The lack of formal
criteria for demarcating character categories and recognizing scalar differences
between them, precluded establishment of a unified classificatory hierarchy comparable to that of biological systems, resulting in multiple proposals of competing
hierarchical systems (e.g., Malmer 1962).
The transition from the notion of character as a unit of descriptive comparative
analysis to that of a phylogenetic character was accomplished through the notion of
archaeological type, most generally conceived in archaeology as collection of
objects similar in form, material, and function (Gifford 1960; Gorodtsov 1908,
1927), identified by a temporally persistent, stable configuration of characters
(Rouse 1972; Spaulding 1953, 1960). Typological similarity among artifacts came
to be viewed as an indication of cultural relatedness (Willey 1953). The supposition
implicitly rested on the notion of hereditary continuity and foreshadowed the development of cultural transmission theories (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Cavalli-Sforza
and Feldman 1981). For a thorough theoretical discussion of the concept of typology
in archaeology, see reviews by Adams and Adams (1991) and Klejn (1991).
In practice, characters are identified intuitively (Sher 1970; Watson et al. 1971).
In current studies of material cultural evolution, an investigators intuition is
supplemented by prior knowledge of a characters potential phylogenetic utility. In
archaeology, the process of character choice is regarded as a classic case of trial
and error, with a good measure of inductive reasoning thrown in, where only those
characters that are suspected to be analytically important and that give the strongest
phylogenetic signals, irrespective of their precise nature, are selected for phylogenetic analysis (OBrien et al. 2003: 140, 144).
16.2.3
Character States Matrices
Traditionally, a distinction is made between characters, which are comparable

among entities, and character states, which are mutually exclusive, variant forms of
a characters expression. The distinction between characters and character states in
biological systems is relative and context-dependent, because these terms refer to
similarities at different levels of organization, producing a hierarchy of increasingly
restricted characters, rather than a division of characters into alternate states (Bock
1973; Eldredge and Cracraft 1980; Platnick 1978). For example, the character
feathers is a common feature of all birds, whereas specific character states of the
character feathers (e.g., variation in plumage color, texture, and pattern) would be
similarities common to various groups of birds. At the same time, the character
feathers could be considered a character state within the vertebrates, as a character
292
I. Tmkin
state of the character integument. An analogous character/state distinction is

occasionally made in archaeology: characters are regarded as recurring elementary
quantitative or qualitative characteristics, where modifications refer to variants of
characters that were conceptualized and planned by ancient makers and that had
some cultural meaning, reflected in the objects purpose, design, and style (Rouse
1960).
Despite the fluidity of the distinction between characters and character states, it
becomes critical when selected observations are coded as characters in a context of
a given phylogenetic analysis. The fundamental activity in phylogenetic systematics, character analysis is a process in which characters and states are hypothesized,
tested, and refined in a reciprocal manner, in concert with the establishment of
entities (terminal units) that are being compared in terms of their collective character state correspondence, as part of the development of a data matrix (Neff 1986).
Empirically, the outcome of a character coding procedure is a character state matrix,
a rectangular array in which rows denote terminal units, columns denote characters,
and individual entries (cells) within a column denote character states. The assembly
of a character state matrix is a logically pre-eminent phase in an inherently two-step
phylogenetic analysis, preceding the inference of a phylogenetic tree from that
matrix (Mishler 2005).
In biological data sets, terminal units (often referred to as operational taxonomic
units, or OTUs) represent the semaphoront, an instantaneous time slice of an
individual organism at some point in its individual development (Hennig 1966). In
contemporary systematic practice, character data are gathered from individual specimens that are viewed as exemplars for species they represent. Operationally, in the
analyses based on genotypic data, individual organisms usually constitute the terminal
units, whereas in the analyses based on phenotypic data, characters are frequently
summarized from multiple individuals to accommodate the differences due to
sexual dimorphism, growth stages among conspecific individuals, and state of preservation (Frost and Kluge 1994; Prendini 2001). As a result, terminal units are
assemblages of semaphoronts, which are homogeneous in their informative character states for the chosen level of analysis, and represent time slices of lineages, the
relationships among which are being evaluated (Mishler 2005).
Terminal units in material cultural data sets are either individual artifacts or
classes of artifacts represented by composite entities with data summarized from
multiple individuals to accommodate differences in preservation. To avoid biological connotations of the term taxon, generality of the term object, and singularity
of the term artifact, the term archaeogram was proposed to designate artifacts in
a broader sense (Moberg 1970), but it was not widely adopted. At present, it appears
to be uniquely suitable for designating terminal units in phylogenetic analysis of
material culture.
Most current analytical methods estimate the hierarchical structures of the
relationship among terminal units (taxa or semaphoront assemblages in biology and
artifacts/archaeograms in material culture) from a given data set by evaluating
the frequency of character state distributions for alternative topologies given an
optimality criterion. In these analyses, each character (column) is evaluated
293
autonomously and provides independent evidence for informing phylogenetic relationships. Therefore, to achieve a robust estimate, it is desirable to include as many
characters as possible. To be informative of groupings, a character must have a
minimum of two states (binary variables). Many characters have more than two
states (multistate variables). Character states for a given character may be treated as
additive (or ordered; Farris 1970), non-additive (or unordered; Fitch 1971), or
matrix characters (Sankoff and Rousseau 1975) that differ in the way the costs of
character state changes are specified. For non-additive characters, the costs of character
state changes are constant between all state pairs. For additive characters, the states
are linearly ordered, with the costs of state change determined by the difference in
their placement in the sequence. For matrix characters, the costs of character state
changes are defined arbitrarily.
Even though the terms character and character state are frequently used
interchangeably or indiscriminately in different contexts, the distinction between
the two concepts is maintained here for clarity and consistency in the subsequent
discussion.
16.3
Character Analysis and Evolution
The procedures for character selection, coding, and formal analyses are neutral with
respect to the process responsible for their origin and development, and do not
require evolution as an explanation (Nelson and Platnick 1981; Platnick 1979;
reviewed by Brower 2000; Scott-Ram 1990). Formal methodologies allow for
grouping any kind of entities into hierarchical sets: analyses of most character state
matrices produce tree-like diagrams, or acyclical graphs. Resulting hierarchies
provide no assurance that the objects under investigation share a common history
and were generated through an evolutionary process; they simply represent a pattern
of similarity based on optimal distribution of characters under a chosen optimality
criterion. However, inasmuch as the objective of phylogenetic reconstruction in
biological and human sociocultural studies is the inference of history, the interpretation of the hierarchical pattern as a phylogeny requires the assumption of evolution
as the cause underlying the pattern.
16.3.1
Defining Evolution
Evolution is a specific type of historical change in which heritable and mutable

information is transmitted from ancestors to descendants. Such a definition does not
limit evolution to processes at a particular phenomenological level; it encompasses
phenomena that directly or indirectly channel, alter, or interrupt the flow of information
across spatial and temporal scales. Such generalization of the Darwinian descent
with modification does not limit evolution to living systems, encompassing various
294
I. Tmkin
aspects of historical change in human culture. Most generally, evolving entities

minimally must be spatiotemporally bounded individuals capable of storing,
replicating, and transmitting information from one generation to the next. Replication
results in proliferation of variation in heritable attributes among descendants, providing the possibility of their sorting. The synergetic effect of sorting of variants, a
totality of processes that result in differential persistence and demise of evolving
entities across levels of organization, drives evolutionary dynamics that ultimately
results in historical patterns of diversity.
16.3.2
Biological Evolution
In biological systems, transmission of information is restricted to the nested

compositional hierarchy of genealogical entities (Tmkin and Eldredge 2015). The
individuals of the genealogical hierarchy are characterized by their ability to
reproduce, or replicate, their structure to pass it on through successive generations.
Information in biological systems manifests in the physical structure of a replicator
at a given level, such as a nucleotide sequence of a DNA molecule, composition and
spatial configuration of morphological characters in an organism, or a topology of a
demic network in a species. Even though the physical basis of information transfer
is the replication of nucleic acids, the historical fate of this information is contingent
upon replication processes of genealogical individuals at higher levels: genealogical
entities can successfully replicate only as parts of the more inclusive individuals.
The hierarchy of biological replicators extends from the molecular level, with the
minimal evolving unit being a nucleotide sequence, to the level of the species.
Higher-level genealogical entities (monophyletic taxa) do show patterns of differential
survival, but lack the capacity to replicate, so that evolution above species level is an
epiphenomenon resulting from processes that occur at lower levels. Replicators are
causally relateddirectly or indirectlyto interactors, entities in the biological
economic hierarchy that are involved in the energy and matter exchange with their
environment in such a way that makes the propagation of replicators differential
(Hull 1980). Differential survival and proliferation of replicators, resulting from
their relationship with interactors, are the basis of sorting that can take different
forms, depending on its locus in the hierarchy (for example, natural selection and
genetic drift at the organismal level). It is important to note, that there is no exact
one-to-one correspondence of entities between the ecological and genealogical
hierarchies in biology and while some levels are fully or partially congruent between
them (containing the same or overlapping classes of individuals), others do not. For
reviews of the hierarchy theory of evolution see Eldredge and Salthe (1984), Salthe
(1985), Eldredge (2002), and Tmkin and Eldredge (2015).
16.3.3
295
Material Cultural Evolution
Currently, there is no an agreed-upon general theory of cultural transmission that

takes into account the ontology of replicator-interactor systems of sociocultural
organization in the context of scale.9 At the most basic level, cultural transmission
rests upon information that is passed on through generations of individual organisms through social learning (i.e., teaching, imitation, or language; Richerson and
Boyd 2005). Culturally transmitted information is a heterogeneous assemblage of
knowledge, norms, beliefs, and skills encoded as patterns of neural networks, but
the physical basis of how this information is represented and distributed in the brain
remains largely unknown.10 Cultural information can also be stored non- or extrasomatically, in the form of written language, graphical representations, computer
code, and artifacts. Such codes represent static storage of hereditary information
that have no effect until cognitively processedreplicated, transcribed or decoded
by individuals. Culturally acquired information, which is integrated and expressed
in the form of behavior, speech, artifacts, and institutions, potentially has an affect
on the historical fate of individuals.
Due to the fact that the physical nature of cultural information remains an empirical
problem, there is no consensus on whether the basic units of cultural transmission
are inherited as discrete units [e.g., memes of Dawkins (1976) or culturgen or
Lumsden and Wilson (2005)] or continuous traits (e.g., Bloch 2000). Nevertheless,
many cultural traits can be reasonably modeled as discrete characters with a finite
number of mutually exclusive character states (Boyd and Richerson 1985; CavalliSforza and Feldman 1981).11 Analogous to a genealogical hierarchy of biological
systems, the elements of cultural transmission (individual words, motifs of folk
stories, or particular technological innovations) comprise increasingly more
inclusive entities (morphology, mythology, or technology) that characterize human
groups on different scales (kin group, ethnic group, nation) (Boyd et al. 1997). Even
though different forms of cultural expressions, such as speech, artifacts, and beliefs,
are frequently regarded as cultural equivalents of the phenotype, or extended phenotype (Mesoudi 2011; Neff 2001; OBrien et al. 2003; OBrien et al. 1998), this
simplified view is not logically consistent in light of a hierarchical perspective: the
phenotype in biology is a property restricted to the organismal level of organization,
characterized by interactions specific to this level. Given the lack of a unified,
explicit, theoretical, hierarchical framework in sociocultural disciplines, it is not
certain whether cultural entities undergo stereotypic processes that are isomorphic
across levels. Furthermore, it is not clear whether various behavioral expressions of
9
Connection: There are, however, bodies of theory sensu Chap. 11.

Connection: See Chap. 7 for some neuroscientific evidence concerning the evocation of cultural syndromes. Chapters 2, 20, and 21 problematize the relationship between brain and
culture.
11
Connection: The reader can see Sect. 12.4 to have an idea of how this issue is treated in the
specific field of economics, or to Sect. 17.5 to see how this perspective is used for the analysis of
technological changes.
10
296
I. Tmkin
culturally transmitted information can be accommodated by a single hierarchy of

cultural transmission.
16.3.4
Evolution and Units of Phylogenetic Analysis
Variational evolution (i.e., evolution in a Darwinian sense) is a consequence of two

interlocking processes: proliferative replication of variation and its sorting. In
phylogenetic studies, an equivalent treatment of terminal units in biological and
material cultural data sets ignores a profound difference between semaphoronts and
archaeograms. Individual living organisms replicate through sexual and asexual
modes of reproduction, so that the resulting variants are sorted by natural selection
or drift based upon economic success of the soma in the context of an individual
organisms life. Although transformations are manifested at the organismal level, it
is the individual characters that undergo transformation, which justifies decomposing
organisms into quasi-independent, variable character-states. In most multicellular
organisms, only the germline and associated tissues and organs are technically a
part of the genealogical, or evolutionary, hierarchy at the organismal level.
In material cultural evolution, the processes of sorting and replication are
decoupled and occur at different levels: cultural artifacts do show differential persistence through time as a consequence of some sorting process, but their replication
is rooted in the behavior, and, ultimately, cognitive processes of individuals who
design and create them. As artifacts can be meaningfully regarded as interactors in
an evolutionary sense (Neff 2001), their lack of replicative capacity relegates their
role in culture exclusively to the economic, or ecological, side of things. As the
influential anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lvi-Strauss noted, an axe does
not give birth to an axe in the physical sense that an animal gives birth to an animal.
Therefore, to say that an axe has developed out of another axe is to speak metaphorically and with a rough approximation to truth, but without the scientific exactitude
which a similar expression has in biological parlance (Lvi-Strauss 1952: 14). The
tenuous connection between the function of an artifact and their replication by
human agency renders the biological concept of fitness, the statistical correlation
between reproductive and economic success in a population, inapplicable to the
material cultural realm.
The actual evolving entities are concepts and ideas that are materialized at different points along their history (trajectory sensu Clarke 1968) as cultural artifacts.
As a form of outward physical expression of culturally transmitted information,
artifacts serve as archives of mental constructs (or their elements) and records of
their change over time, providing the means of reconstructing their history by
decoding elements of their design. Extrinsic properties, such as ecological or
geographic attributes that cannot be deduced from organisms, are generally not
utilized in phylogenetics. However, in this regard material culture presents an exception because artifacts, while being extrinsic and static relative to culture-transmitting
genealogical entities, do possess cultural information imprinted by their creators.
297
As artifacts show differences in their design through time, it does seem meaningful
to talk about evolution of man-made objects, but it should be remembered that
artifacts evolve only in the metaphorical sense: the actual loci of cultural evolutionary transformation are mental representations stored and, either consciously or
unconsciously, transmitted through various forms of cultural learning. In a sense,
evolution of artifacts is a record of the history of conceptual innovations.12
16.4
Homology
Homology is the foundational concept of comparative biology and systematics that

links evolutionary processes with hierarchical patterns of character state distribution.
Characters convey no historical information until we postulate homology by
recognizing correspondence of character states in other organisms. In an evolutionary context, characters are complex, theory-laden hypotheses of historical identity,
rather than mere observational statements. Postulating homology establishes
hypotheses about character states which, in turn, leads to hypotheses about ancestry
and historical groups, or phylogenetic hierarchy. Much of the literature on material
cultural phylogenetics assumes a deep analogy to the biological concept of homology.
16.4.1
Homology in Biology
16.4.1.1
Defining Homology
In its original formulation, homology implied sameness, or formal resemblance of

unspecified degree in organismal physical properties, perceived under every variety
of form and function (Owen 1843). Analogy, on the other hand, displayed a superficial and, therefore, misleading resemblance in characters of the same function.
Owens classical non-evolutionary formulation of homology has been subsequently
cast in evolutionary terms as similarity due to shared ancestry (homogeny sensu
Lankester 1870b) and distinguished from homoplasy, where similarity was due to
convergence (Lankester 1870a). Parallel changes and reversals were later included
under the umbrella term homoplasy. The modern view emphasizes that the only
requirement for homology is a common origin, irrespective of any particular kind of
similarity or functional considerations: if aspects of compared organisms have a
single origin, they are homologous (forming a character-state transformation series);
if notthey are homoplastic (being distinct characters). Thus, homologous characters are homeostatic organismal attributes that retain their identity during (most)
evolutionary transformations (Wagner 1999).
12
Connection: Some of the implications of this complexity for archeological methodology are
presented in Chap. 15.
298
I. Tmkin
Homology refers only to the historical identity of parts related through a transformation series that results from fixation of character states through speciation
(Goldstein and DeSalle 2000; Hennig 1966). Even though the concept of homology
emerged in the context of comparison of organism-level characters among species,
in contemporary biology it is applied to all levels of biological organization where
evolution takes place. Because homology is defined by shared history, the homologous character states are parts of the same historical individual (Kluge 2003a, b).
Given the hierarchical nature of individuals in the biological realm, a set of traits
may be regarded homologous in one context, but not another. Therefore, a particular
statement of historical identity must refer to entities at a specific hierarchical level
and a relevant transformation event. For example, the wings of birds and bats are
homologous as tetrapod forelimbs (which refers to a single transformation event),
but not as wings (which refers to independent transformation events) (Grant and
Kluge 2004).
Identifying homology and distinguishing it from homoplasy are the greatest
challenges of evolutionary biology. Homology cannot be logically tied into any
definitions of similarity (Smith 1967), because homologous character states can be
dramatically dissimilar, whereas homoplastic characters can be very alike and,
occasionally, indistinguishable in practice. Nevertheless, its similarity at some level
makes it possible to postulate homology in the first place (Cracraft 1981). Because
character is the locus of similarity, the establishment of characters is the primary
step in postulating homology (de Pinna 1991; Patterson 1982).
A number of criteria were proposed for recognizing homology. For example,
Remane (1952) proposed three principal criteria, namely the topological identity,
the structural complexity, and the presence of transitional conditions. He supplemented his criteria with three auxiliary conjunctions: (1) the general conjunction, or
the widespread presence of shared character state by closely related species;
(2) the special conjunction, or the co-occurrence (congruent distribution) of character
states of non-homologous characters among closely similar species, and (3) the negative conjunction that states that the widespread occurrence of a character among
distantly related species decreases the probability of its homology. Patterson (1982,
1988) reconceptualized these relations as three tests of homology: congruence
(agreement with other characters), similarity (likeness in form), and conjunction.
De Pinna (1991) pointed out that the only real empirical test of the initial hypothesis
of homology was that of congruence with other characters in which the initial
hypothesis was refined into synapomorphy through phylogenetic analysis and modifications of the initial hypothesis. If the weight of evidence were to support an
alternate scheme, where members of the group possessing the feature were not
monophyletic, the hypothesis of homology would be falsified.
16.4.1.2
Character Transformation Series in Biology
In biological systems, homology is a footprint of evolutionary process manifested in

character state transformation series:
299
Different characters that are to be regarded as transformation stages of the same original
character are generally called homologous. Transformation naturally refers to real historical
processes of evolution, and not to the possibility of formally deriving characters from one
another in the sense of idealistic morphology. (Hennig 1966: 93)
In other words, Hennigs transformation series is a statement of homology, where

mutually exclusive states have a fixed order of evolution, such that each state is
derived directly from another state, and there is a unique ancestral state from which
every other is ultimately derived (Farris et al. 1970; Wiley 1975). The notion of
homology in a specified hierarchical context gives a specific meaning to the distinction between the notions of character and character state: characters that can be
compared are basically only character conditions that the real process of evolution
produced by transformation of an original condition (Hennig 1966: 89). Once
homology is postulated, character states are arranged in a transformation series that
are subsequently tested by additional hypotheses about the mechanisms of evolutionary change (Bock 1977). Even though many characters are interdependent
due to functional, constructional, or historical constraints, they are individuated on
the basis of historical independence of character state transformations. An interpretation of character states as homologies implies that changes in their relative frequencies within the population is a consequence of character evolution, where
ancestral character states transform into derived states by some physical process.
For instance, at the genotype level, evolutionary transformation mechanisms range
from point mutations to large-scale chromosome rearrangement or duplication
events, and at the phenotypic level they include epigenetic effects of morphogenetic
processes, resulting in a modification of a phenotypic character. Thus, the entire
spectrum of heritable variation can be conceptualized as increasingly inclusive historical individuals linked by a series of transformation events (Grant and Kluge
2004). The failure to recognize the transformative nature of evolution and to reduce
its meaning to change in allele frequencies or relative frequencies of character state
changes within the population, grossly overlooks many fundamental aspects of evolutionary change.
16.4.1.3
Homology and Phylogenetic Reconstruction
In phylogenetic reconstruction, historical transformation events are the evidence of

phylogenetic affinity, so that hypotheses of evolutionary relationships are evaluated
on the basis of the number of independent transformation events required by the
competing propositions (Farris 1967, 1970). The transformative nature of evolution
is implicit in the structure of character-state matrices, where columns correspond to
transformation series of homologous character states. External a priori information
about the mechanisms of transformation provide the basis for differential treatment
of individual characters as additive, non-additive, or matrix characters in a context
of an actual analysis.
The concept of homology implies the reference to a cladogram, where the origins of homologous character states can be traced to a unique transformation on the
300
I. Tmkin
branch of a cladogram leading to their most recent common ancestor. This led some
workers to equate the notions of synapomorphy and homology (Brower 2000;
Brower and Schawaroch 1996; de Pinna 1991; Nelson and Platnick 1981; Patterson
1982). In their view, synapomorphy has the same empirical basis as homology; both
concepts are interdependent, and may be considered without reference to evolution,
although an evolutionary interpretation may be applied to them without necessarily
changing their empirical basis. Both homology and synapomorphy are the same; in
the sense of specifying a hypothesis of a set, homology implies generality, while
synapomorphy implies relative or restricted generality (Scott-Ram 1990).
It has been shown, however, that such an assumption logically precludes homology as an explanation of synapomorphy (Grant and Kluge 2004). Synapomorphy is
a character state that is shared by two or more taxa and inferred to have originated
in their most recent common ancestor. The difference here is the explicit reference
to a specific branch of a specific tree topology. Therefore, the tree, the transformation, and the synapomorphy are all components of homology. Synapomorphy, in
contrast, refers to a shared occurrence of a derived (apomorphic) character-state,
whether or not that shared occurrence resulted from the same transformation event
(homology) or different transformation events. In other words, at a given level of
generality, synapomorphies that optimize to different nodes of the most optimal tree
topology from different transformation events are considered non-homologous,
irrespective of their homology as independent parts of a more inclusive historical
individual (Farris 1970; Grant and Kluge 2004).
16.4.2
Homology in Material Culture
16.4.2.1
Style and Function
The homology/homoplasy distinction in biology was transplanted into sociocultural

sciences as the style/function opposition in artifact design, a fundamental dichotomy in evolutionary archaeology (Dunnell 1978: 193). With its roots in cultural
evolutionary anthropology (Kroeber 1909, 1919, 1957; Neustupn 1958), the concept was greatly developed and articulated by American archaeologists in the second half of the twentieth century (Binford 1962, 1965; Dunnell 1978; Hurt and
Rakita 2001; Jelinek 1976; Sackett 1973). Style is regarded as a stable pattern of
non-functional characters defined by cultural transmission, contingency, or random
choice.13 Typically, stylistic characters are identified with aspects of decoration and
ornamentation that have semantic or purely aesthetic significance inherited over
generations through social learning in a given temporal and geographical setting.
Devoid of physical, mechanical, and constructional constraints, stylistic characters
are perceived to be conserved over extensive time periods and, therefore, to reflect
13
Connection: For more reflections on the concept of style see Chaps. 10 and 19.
301
the history of artifacts more accurately than characters that are continuously and
consciously optimized for their function (Chang 1967).
Dunnell explicitly cast the relationship between style and function in terms of
mechanisms of biological evolution: Style denotes those forms that do not have
detectable selective values. Function is manifest as those forms that directly affect
the Darwinian fitness of the populations in which they occur (Dunnell 1978: 199).
Thus, cultural transmission and innovation were the processes that lead to stochastic
variation perceived as style, whereas natural selection was considered the deterministic process leading to directional variation associated with function. He then
equated style with homology (Stylistic similarity is homologous similarity,
Dunnell 1978: 199) and suggested the utility of stylistic features as selectively
neutral markers for historical inference in the archaeological record. Subsequent
generations of workers accepted this notion of cultural homology expressed by
selectively neutral, non-adaptive characters as a critical step in reconstruction of
past cultures (Lipo 2006; Lipo and Madsen 2001). For example, Vansina (1990:
261) stated that one seeks out homologies first when inferring cultural histories.
In a similar vein, Boyd and colleagues remarked that only by identifying genuine
cultural homologies can one establish the nature of the initial ideational system that
was later transformed by historical processes (Boyd et al. 1997, 2005 ed.: 326).
How are characters of style identified empirically? Kroeber attempted to define
cultural homologies, however implicitly and broadly (not limiting them to physical
artifacts), as the basic patterns, the nexuses of culture traits which have assumed
a definite and coherent structure, which functions successfully, and which acquire
major historic weight and persistence (Kroeber 1943: 112). The notion of the basic
pattern emphasized character interdependence and implied the criterion of uniqueness (often expressed as complexity) or quality of the cultural trait as evidence
for common ancestry in culture, as advocated by Steward (1929). These criteria
invoked Remanes structural complexity and Pattersons congruence criteria in
identifying homology in biology. That is what was possibly implied by Pocklington
(2006: 25), who stated that a cultural object, when it passes within social arenas,
maintains sufficient coherency that it can be recognized as clearly homologous.
Kroeber (1931, 1943) assumed the procedure for distinguishing between homologous
and analogous structures to be the same for both anthropology and evolutionary
biology (Lyman 2001), but it had neither been formalized, nor consistently applied
in practice.
Hypotheses of stylistic similarity are ultimately inferred from typological and
geographical congruence (as in horizon styles) or temporal propinquity (persistence, tradition) (Lyman 2001). In current practice, homologous similarity in
cultural artifacts is demonstrated by frequency seriations, in which all seriated types
display unimodal frequency distributions [successful seriation in Lyman (2001)].
Each artifact, identified as a member of a particular class, is related phyletically to
every other specimen within that class, given their common properties (typological
resemblance) and spatiotemporal propinquity. Building on population genetics
models, Lipo and Madsen (2001) developed statistical approaches, based on
302
I. Tmkin
functional equivalence and stochastic changes, to assess whether variation in artifacts attributes is due to selection or random sampling.
16.4.3
Style = Homology?
16.4.3.1
Function and Neutrality
In biology, homology is defined as similarity due to common descent, irrespective

of any particular form of resemblance or function. Consequently, homologous
character states might or might not be subject to selection. However, more often
than not, function and common origin coincide at all levels of biological organization.
For instance, wings in birds are used for flying and the engrailed gene plays a role
in segment polarization across arthropods. When they do not coincide, alternative
character states are associated with different functions: within birds, penguins use
wings for swimming, steamer ducksfor paddling, and rheasas rudders.
Style, on the other hand, is defined exclusively with respect to function, or rather,
the lack of it. In this regard, stylistic characters are most adequately compared to
vestigial organs, organismal traits that have apparently lost most or all of their
ancestral function in a given species, or junk DNA, a presumably non-adaptive
portion of a genome sequence for which no discernible function has been identified
and that appears under no functional constraint. What does warrant the use of
stylistic characters as non-adaptive traits is their role as signs that convey a system
of organized meanings, rather than the meanings themselves (Boyd et al. 1997). In
semiotics, the relationship between the sign (the signifier) and its meaning (the
signified) is essentially arbitrary, allowing for alternative coding schemes.
In the absence of a sound theoretical framework linking the concept of style in
material culture to semiotics and cognitive sciences, there are no formal criteria for
distinguishing style and function based on intrinsic characters of artifacts alone.
Therefore, the concept of style in current usage conflates a theoretical category
defined by processes with an empirical category identified by a set of observable
diagnostic characters. Recognizing elements of style necessitates a test of
their selective neutrality, which is difficult to apply in practice, particularly when
interpreting archaeological data unaccompanied by the knowledge of sociocultural
historical context.
Moreover, the boundary between style and function can be blurred when a
stylistic feature becomes functional or vice versa, which is a real possibility in the
history of a single kind of artifact. For example, the shape of the soundhole (rosette)
in the Baltic psaltery, a traditional plucked stringed instrument of the Baltic States,
Finland, and northwestern Russia, is generally regarded as a purely stylistic feature
that correlates with the geographic distribution of ethnic groups that play it (Tmkin
303
2004).14 However, the soundhole design was strongly associated with significant
motifs related to the worship of nature spirits and rites of passage, and was indicative of the instruments ritualistic function, that has been subsequently lost. Another
example involves extra strings that village players began to affix to their psalteries
at the end of the nineteenth century. Strings are a typical functional feature in a
musical instrument, but these additional strings were not employed for producing
soundthey were added purely for aesthetic reasons to give a more sophisticated
look to the home-made psalteries in attempt to imitate then-fashionable German
zithers that gained popularity in urban settings (Rahkonen 1989; Tnurist 1977).
The lack of function of these strings would be difficult to infer from the artifacts
themselves.
It is very plausible that some selectively neutral characters are not necessarily
stylistic: individual preferences of the makers and contingent factors can play a role.
Even though such characters might not be as significant as they might not be
congruent with other stylistic characters, in some cultural contextswhere
individual expression is less constrained or cross-cultural exchange is extensive
the historical signal in such characters can be greatly diminished.
In summary, because the notions of style and function refer to evolutionary
processes of drift and selection, respectively, they cannot be made into a priori
descriptors of artifact characters. Different attributes are not inherently stylistic or
functional as only the pattern of variation resulting from evolutionary processes can
be explained as stylistic or functional. As explanatory labels, stylistic and functional
may be applicable to different artifact classes depending on time, place, and analytical
scale (Cochrane 2001).
16.4.3.2
Character Congruence
Character congruence in biology is a consequence of a continuous evolutionary

process linking all life forms and mirrored by the tree of life, a common phylogeny
extending back to the most common recent ancestor. The topology of the phylogeny
is approximated by the nested hierarchy of increasingly restricted characters
(heterobathmy; Hennig 1965) that represent the history of transformations, which
are, in turn, shaped by functional, historical, and constructional constraints.
Given the fact that cultural artifacts lack the level of character integration
characteristic of organic systems, why do stylistic characters cohere to form a stable, congruent core of character states that make a given style recognizable? The
congruence of stylistic characters does not logically follow from assumptions of
character independence and non-adaptiveness of stylistic characters and cannot be
explained by common ancestry for functionally distinct types of artifacts. The coexistence of a stable core of character states that make a style uniquely identifiable is
14
Connection: Sect. 10.2 articulates, from a philosophical point of view, the non-separability of
cultural objects from the cultural spaces and power relations that are the source of their value. In
Chap. 3 we also learn that artifacts can be involved in cultural processes of identity production.
304
I. Tmkin
rooted in the history of its formation that was informed by socio-economic,

geographical, and even biological (such as temperament and skin color reflected in
a choice of clothing color) factors indirectly through social psychology (Klejn
1991). Possibly, the cause of stylistic character congruence can be sought in typically
unconscious sociocultural motivations of their creators that include social norms,
ideology, ethical and aesthetic imperatives.
16.4.3.3
Extensiveness of Style
Because stylistic characters are defined irrespective of functional considerations, a

style necessarily transcends the limits of a type of comparable artifacts. For example,
the same ornamental motifs can be found in artifacts that perform entirely different
functions (i.e., clothing and buildings), which indicates broader-scale cultural
continuity, but certainly does not imply that artifacts from different functional
categories are related through descent with modification. If constrained to a particular functional category of artifacts, stylistic characters might behave as appropriate
indicators of historical relationships, but their delimitation in this more restricted
context is contingent upon recognizing their relation to functional characters. A
style as a whole (as a combination of stylistic characters) can be informative when
comparing larger-level entities (such as entire cultures). Such a dual role of stylistic
characters is inconsistent with the mode of action of biological homology due to a
single origin of life (holophyly), but is in accordance with the supposition advanced
in the previous section that style is an expression of social psychology that is not
limited to a particular functional category of artifacts. Thus, historical trajectory can
only be found among functionally related items: pots are not replaced with knives,
but are replaced with pots of a different construction or ornament.
16.4.3.4
Character State Relationship
In biology, homology emerges through a physical process by which the ancestral

character state gives rise to the derived character state. Even though a specific mechanism of the transformation might not be known, in light of the concept of homology, the transformation series is regarded as a record of the evolutionary process.
Style and function have been defined with reference to selection and adaptation.
As has been argued earlier, artifacts show patterns of differential persistence, but are
unable to replicate on their own. Artifact evolution is an epiphenomenon and the
mechanistic notion of adaptation cannot be applied to material culture in principle.
So, what do character state series represent in data matrices of cultural artifacts? In
material cultural evolution, character states correspond to alternative solutions
frequently having their own independent pedigreesto the same design problem,
rather than progressive modification of pre-existing states through some
305
transformative mechanism (the Hannah Principle; Eldredge 2006).15 For example, the replacement of the Stlzel to the Prinet valve was an important transition
in the history of the cornet, a brasswind instrument that was developed in 1820s and
enjoyed popularity for over a century. Even though both types of piston valves serve
precisely the same purpose and are placed in identical places on the instrument, the
supposedly more advanced Prinet valve is not in any meaningful sense a descendent (derivative or modification) of an earlier Stlzel valve. As attested by Prinets
patent, it represents an alternative solution to overcome some physical constraints to
the airflow thought to be deficiencies in the older design (Eldredge 2009; Tmkin
and Eldredge 2007).
16.5
16.5.1
Conclusions
Character Ontology
Biological organisms and cultural artifacts can be decomposed into quasiindependent, discrete characters and configured into character state matrices amenable to phylogenetic analysis. However, the meanings of characters and character
state transformation series, implied by the structure of the data matrix, are radically
different between the two realms. In biological systems, the concept of character is
ideographic: characters undergo evolutionary transformation due to the integration
of variation-generating processes at and below organismal level (including, for
example, origins of genetic variation by mutations and alteration of ontogenetic
pathways), and the spread and fixation of novel character states by sorting processes
at the level of populations. Character state transformation series are the record of
a dynamic, physical process of modification from an ancestral to a derived
condition.
In material culture, characters are typological units. They are static physical representations of evolution of human concepts and ideas, incapable of replicating but
carrying an imprint of cognitive processes of their makers. Consequently, artifacts
represent an indirect byproduct of cultural transmission and a physical projection of
the history of conceptual innovations. Character state transformation series represent static sets of alternative solutions to a given technological problem or symbolic
representation of a specific meaning.
15
Connection: Compare with the evolutionary perspective on technological change illustrated in

Chap. 17.
306
16.5.2
I. Tmkin
Homology and Style
The biological distinction between homology and homoplasy is neither ontologically

nor epistemologically equivalent to the distinction between style and function in
material culture. Homology has little meaning in the context of cultural evolution,
because it is rooted in the physical process of character state transformation,
ultimately arising trough the fixation of variant character states following a speciation event. Homology manifests itself in the pattern of character state distribution
through transformation; in contrast, there is no directly comparable, inherent link
between artifact attributes and style.
In biology, homologies are postulated based on intrinsic structural similarities
and tested by congruence with other characters; identification of stylistic features is
based upon their neutrality with respect to cultural selection. Even though based on
different logic than presented here, it has already been pointed out that style and
function do not readily translate into homology and analogy (OBrien and Leonard
2001). Nevertheless, the concepts of biological homology and cultural style both
refer to aspects of their respective domains that are critical for historical inference,
albeit for different reasons. The difference does not by any means undermine the
usefulness of the fundamental dichotomy in archaeology to explain patterns of
spatial and temporal distributions of artifacts; it is just not explicable in terms of
homology and biological evolutionary phenomenology. An attempt to view the
style/function dichotomy in light of evolutionary processes leads to the conflation of
conceptual categories (style and function as universal processes) with empirical
categories (style and function as observed characteristics of particular artifacts
resulting, for example, from a similar manufacturing process), inviting analytical
problems when style was treated as an empirical category (Cochrane 2001).
16.5.3
Methodological Implications
Even though the biological notion of homology is neither ontologically nor epistemologically applicable to material culture, it should not preclude phylogenetic
reconstruction based on data derived from cultural artifacts. On the contrary, I argue
that phylogenetic reconstruction based on the analysis of similarity in artifact design
is critical for historical inference in cultural evolution, but it can be successfully
applied only when underlying methodological and theoretical assumptions are
properly understood. Importantly, this means not only reorienting ones outlook
when interpreting the resulting phylogenetic patterns, but selecting appropriate
phylogenetic methods in the first place.
Process-agnostic cladistic inference is laden with implicit biological assumptions, including the notions of homology and transformation series that might be
applicable with few or no modifications to some aspects of human culture (i.e.,
languages), but have limited application to others (i.e., material culture). In the
307
latter, the meanings of the fundamental concepts of character, character state, and
their relationships are different from those in living systems, and have to be treated
accordingly. For instance, the emphasis on homology in biological systematics
provided justification for the predominant use of discrete character methods that
make use of exclusively shared derived characters (synapomorphies) and allow for
reconstructing evolution in a transformation series and inferring ancestral attributes.
Given the criticism of the relevance of the biological notion of homology to material
culture, distance methods, which estimate overall similarity, might be more
appropriate in evaluating relationships among artifacts that have been shown to
outperform cladistic methods in some cases (Tmkin and Eldredge 2007). In the
distance-based framework, the evolution of individual characters can be explored
by mapping characters on a distance-based topology a posteriori.
While patterns of similarity in artifact design may indirectly reflect aspects of
cultural evolution, insight into the causal mechanisms responsible for these patterns
must be sought at the level of evolving sociocultural entities, those capable of generating variation through proliferative replication that is amenable to sorting, such
as communicable concepts. Therefore, relatedness amongst cultural elements may
reside at the conceptual level not captured by traditional phylogenetic methods
focusing on measurable attributes of physical objects. Recent attempts to combine
data for physical attributes of cultural artifacts with conceptual and symbolic information appear promising in this regard (Veloz et al. 2012). These efforts, that
employed a distance-based approach in the context of graph theory, not only allowed
for simultaneous analysis of cognitive information and physical character data, but
also provided the means for evaluating relative contributions of these data types to
historical inference and for representing inferred historical relationships as a
network, rather than a bifurcating hierarchical tree.
16.5.4
Looking Forward
Profound parallels between processes of historical change in biological and material

cultural realms underscore fundamental principles of evolving systems built around
the Darwinian core of descent with modification. Phylogenetics is an overarching
theoretical framework for historical inference, but cannot provide a single universal
methodological approach accounting for disparate modes of transmission and
different kinds of historical entities. The paramount goals of archaeological
researchconstructing and explaining the evolution of cultures reflected in artifact
designcalls for a sound theory of cultural trait as a phylogenetic character and
incorporating the knowledge of cultural transmission into the practice of historical
reconstruction in sociocultural studies. Interestingly, major cultural transmission
theorists argued that important disanalogies in pathways of information transfer
between biological and cultural systems might have arisen precisely because the
two systems are functionally analogous: from the dual inheritance theory perspective, combining different but complementary modes of inheritance systems
308
I. Tmkin
maximizes the stability and persistence of a sociocultural system overall (Boyd and
Richerson 1985).16
Focusing on just a single aspect of cultural phylogeneticshomology of manmade objectsexposed many avenues for future theoretical and methodological
developments in sociocultural evolution: (1) a revision of the concept of character
in material cultural evolution in the light of cultural transmission theory; (2) recognizing units of cultural evolution based on their replication ability (which is fundamentally more complex than replication in biological systems because of the dual
inheritance); (3) an explicit hierarchical representation of sociocultural organization
across scale, necessary for elucidating causality in sociocultural evolution [for
attempts to introduce hierarchy theory in cultural evolution see Eldredge and Grene
(1992), Eldredge (2009), and Hurt et al. (2001)]; and (4) the development of
methodologically pluralistic approaches for constructing cultural phylogenies built
upon explicit models of cultural transmission that are not constrained by implicit
biological assumptions.
Search for parallels between biological and material cultural evolution is not a
futile exercise: clarifying the underlying ontological structure within each system is
an important step towards creating a sound framework for an overarching causal
theory of sociocultural evolution. Addressing the questions outlined above creates
the challenge of looking far beyond analogies between the two realms, requiring an
integration of broader multidisciplinary expertise from anthropology, sociology,
archaeology, economics, ethology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.
References
Adams, W. Y., & Adams, E. W. (1991). Archaeological typology and practical reality: A dialectical approach to artifact classification and sorting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Binford, L. R. (1962). Archaeology as anthropology. American Antiquity, 28, 217225.
Binford, L. R. (1965). Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process. American
Antiquity, 31, 203210.
Bloch, M. (2000). A well-disposed social anthropologists problem with memes. In R. Aunger
(Ed.), Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science (pp. 189203). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Blute, M. (2010). Darwinian sociocultural evolution: Solutions to dilemmas in cultural and social
theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bock, W. J. (1973). Philosophical foundations of classical evolutionary classification. Systematic
Biology, 22, 375392.
Bock, W. J. (1977). Foundations and methods in evolutionary classification. In M. K. Hecht, P. C.
Goody, & B. M. Hecht (Eds.), Major patterns in vertebrate evolution (pp. 851895). New York:
Plenum Press.
Chicago Press.
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., Borgerhoff Mulder, W. M., & Durham, W. H. (1997). Are cultural
phylogenies possible? In P. Weingart, P. J. Richerson, S. D. Mitchell, & S. Maasen (Eds.),
16
Connection: Chap. 11 comments on Richerson and Boyds approach.
309
Human by nature, between biology and the social sciences (pp. 355386). Mahwah: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates. Reprinted in R. Boyd & P. J. Richerson. (2005). The origin and evolution
of cultures (pp. 310336). New York: Oxford University Press.
Brower, A. V. Z. (2000). Evolution is not a necessary assumption of cladistics. Cladistics, 16,
143154.
Brower, A. V. Z., & Schawaroch, V. (1996). Three steps of homology assessment. Cladistics, 12,
265272.
Chang, K. C. (1967). Major aspects of the interrelationship of archaeology and ethnology. Current
Anthropology, 8, 227243.
Clarke, D. L. (1968). Analytical archaeology. London: Methuen.
Cochrane, E. E. (2001). Style, function, and systematic empiricism: The conflation of process and
pattern. In T. D. Hurt & G. F. M. Rakita (Eds.), Style and function: Conceptual issues in evolutionary archaeology (pp. 183202). Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
Colless, D. H. (1985). On character and related terms. Systematic Zoology, 34, 229233.
Cracraft, J. (1981). The use of functional and adaptive criteria in phylogenetic systematics.
American Zoologist, 21, 2136.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of
favoured races in the struggle for life. London: J. Murray.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Pinna, M. C. C. (1991). Concepts and tests of homology in the cladistic paradigm. Cladistics,
7, 367394.
Dunnell, R. C. (1978). Style and function: A fundamental dichotomy. American Antiquity, 43,
192202.
Eldredge, N. (2002). Hierarchy: Theory and praxis in evolutionary biology. In R. E. Auxier & L. E.
Hahn (Eds.), The philosophy of Marjorie Grene. With reply by Marjorie Grene (pp. 315334).
Peru: Open Court.
Eldredge, N. (2006). Foreword. In C. P. Lipo, M. J. OBrien, M. Collard, & S. J. Shennan (Eds.),
Mapping our ancestors: Phylogenetic approaches in anthropology and prehistory (pp. xiii
xvi). New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction.
Eldredge, N. (2009). Material cultural macroevolution. In A. M. Prentiss, I. Kuijt, & J. C. Chatters
(Eds.), Macroevolution in human prehistory: Evolutionary theory and processual archaeology
(pp. 297316). New York: Springer.
Eldredge, N., & Cracraft, J. (1980). Phylogenetic patterns and the evolutionary process: Method
and theory in comparative biology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Eldredge, N., & Grene, M. (1992). Interactions: The biological context of social systems.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Eldredge, N., & Salthe, S. N. (1984). Hierarchy and evolution. Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary
Biology, 1, 184208.
Farris, J. S. (1967). The meaning of relationship and taxonomic procedure. Systematic Zoology, 16, 4451.
Farris, J. S. (1970). Methods for computing Wagner trees. Systematic Zoology, 19, 8392.
Farris, J. S., Kluge, A. G., & Eckardt, M. J. (1970). A numerical approach to phylogenetic systematics. Systematic Zoology, 19, 172189.
Fitch, W. M. (1971). Toward defining the course of evolution: Minimum change for a specific tree
topology. Systematic Biology, 20, 406416.
Foucault, M. (1966). Les mots et les choses. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Freudenstein, J. V., Pickett, K. M., Simmons, M. P., & Wenzel, J. W. (2003). From basepairs to
birdsongs: Phylogenetic data in the age of genomics. Cladistics, 19, 333347.
Frost, D., & Kluge, A. G. (1994). A consideration of epistemology in systematic biology, with
special reference to species. Cladistics, 10, 259294.
Gifford, J. C. (1960). The type-variety method of ceramic classification as an indicator of cultural
phenomena. American Antiquity, 25, 341347.
310
I. Tmkin
Goldstein, P. Z., & DeSalle, R. (2000). Phylogenetic species, nested hierarchies, and character
fixation. Cladistics, 16, 364384.
Gorodtsov, V. A. (1908). Pervobytnaya arkheologiya: kurs lektsij. Moskva: Pechatnya
Snegerevskoj.
Gorodtsov, V. A. (1927). Tipologichesky metod v arkheologii. Ryazan: Obschestvo Issledovatelej
Ryazanskogo Kraya.
Grant, T., & Kluge, A. G. (2004). Transformation series as an ideographic character concept.
Cladistics, 20, 2331.
Gray, R. D., Greenhill, S. J., & Ross, R. M. (2007). The pleasures and perils of darwinizing culture
(with phylogenies). Biological Theory, 2, 360375.
Hennig, W. (1965). Phylogenetic systematics. Annual Review of Entomology, 10, 97116.
Hennig, W. (1966). Phylogenetic systematics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Howe, C. J., & Windram, H. F. (2011). Phylomemetics-evolutionary analysis beyond the gene.
PLoS Biology, 9, e1001069.
Hull, D. (1980). Individuality and selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11,
311322.
Hurt, T. D., & Rakita, G. F. M. (Eds.). (2001). Style and function: Conceptual issues in evolutionary
archaeology. Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
Hurt, T. D., VanPool, T. L., Rakita, G. F. M., & Leonard, R. D. (2001). Explaining the co-occurrence
of traits in the archaeological record: A further consideration of replicative success. In T. D.
Hurt & G. F. M. Rakita (Eds.), Style and function: Conceptual issues in evolutionary archaeology
(pp. 5167). Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
Jelinek, A. J. (1976). Form, function, and style in lithic analysis. In C. E. Cleland (Ed.), Cultural
change and continuity. Essays in honor of James Bennett Griffin (pp. 1934). New York:
Academic Press.
Klejn, L. S. (1991). Archeologicheskaya tipologiya. Leningrad: Akademiya Nauk SSSR.
Kluge, A. G. (2003a). On the deduction of species relationships: A prcis. Cladistics, 19,
233239.
Kluge, A. G. (2003b). The repugnant and the mature: Atemporal similarity and historical identity
in phylogenetic inference. Cladistics, 19, 356368.
Kroeber, A. L. (1909). Archaeology of California. In F. Boas (Ed.), Putnam anniversary volume:
Anthropological essays presented to Frederic Ward Putnam in honor of his seventieth birthday,
April 16, 1909, by his friends and associates (pp. 142). New York: G.E. Stechert & Co.
Kroeber, A. L. (1919). On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified by changes of fashion. American Anthropologist, 21, 235263.
Kroeber, A. L. (1931). Historical reconstruction of culture growths and organic evolution.
American Anthropologist, 33, 149156.
Kroeber, A. L. (1943). Structure, function and pattern in biology and anthropology. The Scientific
Monthly, 56, 105113.
Kroeber, A. L. (1957). Style and civilizations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lankester, E. R. (1870a). II.On the use of the term homology in modern zoology, and the distinction between homogenetic and homoplastic agreements. Annals and Magazine of Natural
History, 6, 3443.
Lankester, E. R. (1870b). XXXII.On the use of the term Homology. Annals and Magazine of
Natural History, 6, 342.
Lebedev, G. S. (1979). Arkheologichesky tip kak sistema priznakov. In L. S. Klejn (Ed.), Tipy v
kulture: metodologicheskiye problemy klassifikatsii, tipologii i sistematiki (pp. 7488).
Leningrad: Leningradsky Gosudarstvenny Universitet.
Lvi-Strauss, C. (1952). Race and history. Paris: UNESCO.
Lipo, C. P. (2006). The resolution of cultural phylogenies using graphs. In C. P. Lipo, M. J.
OBrien, M. Collard, & S. J. Shennan (Eds.), Mapping our ancestors: Phylogenetic
approaches in anthropology and prehistory (pp. 89107). New Brunswick: Aldine
Transaction.
311
Lipo, C. P., & Madsen, M. (2001). Neutrality, Style, and drift: Building methods for studying
cultural transmission in the archaeological record. In T. D. Hurt & G. F. M. Rakita (Eds.), Style
and function: Conceptual issues in evolutionary archaeology (pp. 91118). Westport: Bergin
and Garvey.
Lumsden, C. J., & Wilson, E. O. (2005). Genes, mind, and culture: The coevolutionary process (25
anniversaryth ed.). Hackensack: World Scientific.
Lyman, R. L. (2001). Culture historical and biological approaches to identifying homologous
traits. In T. D. Hurt & G. F. M. Rakita (Eds.), Style and function: Conceptual issues in
evolutionary archaeology (pp. 6989). Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
Mace, R., & Holden, C. J. (2005). A phylogenetic approach to cultural evolution. Trends in Ecology
& Evolution, 20, 116121.
Malmer, M. P. (1962). Jungneolithische Studien. Bonn: R. Habelt.
Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture and
synthesize the social sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mishler, B. D. (2005). The logic of the data matrix in phylogenetic analysis. In V. A. Albert (Ed.),
Parsimony, phylogeny, and genomics (pp. 5770). Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press.
Moberg, C. (1970). Comments on analytical archaeology: Archaeograms and historical entities.
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 3, 2124.
Neff, N. A. (1986). A rational basis for a priori character weighting. Systematic Zoology, 35,
110123.
Neff, H. (2001). Differential persistence of what? The scale of selection issue in evolutionary
archaeology. In T. D. Hurt & G. F. M. Rakita (Eds.), Style and function: Conceptual issues in
evolutionary archaeology (pp. 2540). Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
Nelson, G. J., & Platnick, N. I. (1981). Systematics and biogeography: Cladistics and vicariance.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Neustupn, E. (1958). Evolution in archaeology. Epitymbion Roman Haken (pp. 48). Prague:
Societas Archaeologica Bohemoslovenica.
OBrien, M. J., & Leonard, R. D. (2001). Style and function: An introduction. In T. D. Hurt & G. F.
M. Rakita (Eds.), Style and function: Conceptual issues in evolutionary archaeology (pp. 123).
Westport: Bergin and Garvey.
OBrien, M. J., Lyman, R. L., Glover, D. S., & Darwent, J. (2003). Cladistics and archaeology.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
OBrien, M. J., Lyman, R. L., & Leonard, R. D. (1998). Basic incompatibilities between evolutionary
and behavioral archaeology. American Antiquity, 63, 485498.
OHara, R. J. (1988). Homage to Clio, or, toward an historical philosophy for evolutionary biology.
Systematic Zoology, 37, 142155.
Owen, R. (1843). Lectures on the comparative anatomy and physiology of the invertebrate animals,
delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans.
Patterson, C. (1982). Morphological characters and homology. In K. A. Joysey & A. E. Friday
(Eds.), Problems of phylogenetic reconstruction (pp. 2174). London: Academic.
Patterson, C. (1988). Homology in classical and molecular biology. Molecular Biology and
Evolution, 5, 603625.
Platnick, N. I. (1978). Classifications, historical narratives, and hypotheses. Systematic Zoology,
27, 365369.
Platnick, N. I. (1979). Philosophy and the transformation of cladistics. Systematic Biology, 28,
537546.
Pocklington, R. (2006). What is a culturally transmitted unit, and how do we find one? In C. P.
Lipo, M. J. OBrien, M. Collard, & S. J. Shennan (Eds.), Mapping our ancestors: Phylogenetic
approaches in anthropology and prehistory (pp. 1931). New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction.
Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. London: Routledge.
Prendini, L. (2001). Species or supraspecific taxa as terminals in cladistic analysis? Groundplans
versus exemplars revisited. Systematic Biology, 50, 290300.
312
I. Tmkin
Rahkonen, C. (1989). The kantele traditions of Finland. Bloomington: Indiana University.

Remane, A. (1952). Die Grundlagen des natrlichen Systems, der vergleichendenAnatomie und
der Phylogenetik. Leipzig: Geest & Portig.
Rouse, I. (1960). The classification of artifacts in archaeology. American Antiquity, 25, 313323.
Rouse, I. (1972). Introduction to prehistory: A systematic approach. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sackett, J. R. (1973). Style, function and artifact variability in palaeolithic assemblages. In
C. Renfrew (Ed.), The explanation of culture change: Models in prehistory (pp. 317325).
London: Duckworth.
Salthe, S. N. (1985). Evolving hierarchical systems: Their structure and representation. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Sanderson, S. K. (2007). Evolutionism and its critics: Deconstructing and reconstructing an evolutionary interpretation of human society. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Sankoff, D., & Rousseau, P. (1975). Locating the vertices of a Steiner tree in arbitrary space.
Mathematical Programming, 9, 240246.
Scott-Ram, N. R. (1990). Transformed cladistics, taxonomy, and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sher, Y. A. (1970). Intuitsiya i logika v arkheologicheskom issledovanii (f formalizatsii tipologicheskogo metoda arkheologii). In B. A. Kolchin & Y. A. Sher (Eds.), Statistikokombinatornye metody v arkheologii (pp. 824). Moskva: Nauka.
Smith, H. M. (1967). Biological similarities and homologies. Systematic Zoology, 16, 101102.
Spaulding, A. C. (1953). [Review of James A. Fords] Measurements of some prehistoric design
developments in the Southeastern States. American Anthropologist, 55, 588591.
Spaulding, A. C. (1960). The dimensions of archaeology. In G. E. Dole & R. L. Carneiro (Eds.),
Essays in the science of culture in honor of Leslie A. White: In celebration of his sixtieth birthday and his thirtieth year of teaching at the University of Michigan (pp. 437456). New York:
Crowell.
Steele, J., Jordan, P., & Cochrane, E. (2010). Evolutionary approaches to cultural and linguistic
diversity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365,
37813785.
Steward, J. H. (1929). Diffusion and independent invention: A critique of logic. American
Anthropologist, 31, 491495.
Tmkin, I. (2004). Evolution of the Baltic psaltery: A case for phyloorganology? The Galpin
Society Journal, 57, 219230.
Tmkin, I., & Eldredge, N. (2007). Phylogenetics and material cultural evolution. Current
Tmkin, I., & Eldredge, N. (2015). Networks and hierarchies: Approaching complexity in evolutionary theory. In E. Serrelli & N. Gontier (Eds.), Macroevolution: Explanation, interpretation
and evidence (pp. 183226). New York: Springer.
Tnurist, I. V. (1977). Gde vo gusli zvonili? (Opyt kartografirovaniya narodnykh muzykalnykh
instrumentov) [Ethnographical studies of northwestern USSR: traditions and culture of the village]. Etnograficheskie issledovaniya Severo-Zapada SSSR: traditsii i kultura selskogo naselenija. Leningrad, pp. 1629.
Vansina, J. (1990). Paths in the rainforests: Toward a history of political tradition in equatorial
Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Veloz, T., Tmkin, I., & Gabora, L. (2012). A conceptual network-based approach to inferring
cultural phylogenies. Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society,
pp. 24872492.
Wagner, G. P. (1999). A research programme for testing the biological homology concept. In G. R.
Bock & G. Cardew (Eds.), Homology (pp. 125134). New York: Wiley.
Wagner, G. P. (Ed.). (2001). The character concept in evolutionary biology. San Diego: Academic.
313
Wagner, G. P., & Stadler, P. F. (2003). Quasi-independence, homology and the unity of type: A
topological theory of characters. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 220, 505527.
Watson, P. J., LeBlanc, S. A., & Redman, C. L. (1971). Explanation in archeology: An explicitly
scientific approach. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wiley, E. O. (1975). Karl R. Popper, systematics and classification: A reply to Walter Bock and
other evolutionary taxonomists. Systematic Zoology, 24, 233243.
Willey, G. R. (1953). Archaeological theories and interpretation: New world. In A. L. Kroeber
(Ed.), Anthropology today (pp. 361385). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chapter 17
On the Origin of Technologies: The Invention

and Evolution of the Bow-and-Arrow
Giuseppe Carignani
17.1
Introduction
In 1939, at the very beginning of the golden age of science-fiction, Lester Del Rey
wrote the short story The Day is Done in which he described the fatal encounter
between two humans, Hwoog, a Neanderthal, the last of his tribe and possibly of his
species, and Lagoda, one of our sapiens ancestors.
Lagoda is the fictional inventor of a new magic weapon, the bow-and-arrow. A
compassionate character, he tries to teach the Neanderthal how to use it, but Hwoog,
whose fingers are large and maladroit, is unable to wield this new weapon. There
are two aspects of the Neanderthal disability: the first is that he is anatomically
maladapted, the second more insidious factor is that Hwoog has given up mentally
(De Paolo 2003).
But upon reading Del Reys vintage narrative, we learn the real nature of Hwoogs
failure: he is utterly unable to understand the new weapon: The spear was too tiny
to kill more than rodents, he thinks and the big stick had not even a point (Del
Rey 1939). Dispirited, Lagoda gives up his teaching. This weapon is not for you
is his sad final remark: the Neanderthal cannot understand how the bow-and-arrow
functions, thus his species is doomed.1
Surprisingly, but not for the first time, science fiction has given us here an early
insight into later research, anticipating the contemporary debate on the inception of
mechanically-projected weaponry: were the Neanderthal actually unable to master
the cognitive processes needed for conceiving and implementing composite
technology as some research suggests (Lombard and Haidle 2012) or were they
1
Connection: Sect. 10.2 articulates, from a philosophical point of view, the non-separability of
cultural objects from the cultural spaces and power relations that are the source of their value. In
Chap. 3 we also learn that artifacts can be involved in cultural processes of identity production.
G. Carignani (*)
DIES - Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Udine, Udine, Italy, EU
e-mail: giuseppe.carignani@uniud.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_17
315
316
G. Carignani
limited in their technological inventiveness by contextual, non-cognitive issues, as

others believe (Shea and Sisk 2010)?2
In either case, the bow-and-arrow invention is now recognized by many scholars
as an enabling technology which supported the successful dispersal of Homo sapiens
out of Africa, provoking, eventually, the extinction of all other competing Homo species
(Shea and Sisk 2010). If they were armed with the bow and arrow, paleoanthropologist Sally McBrearthy proudly writes about our ancestors, they would have been
more than a match for anything or anyone they met (McBrearthy 2012: 532).
Building on recent archeological discoveries related to the bow-and-arrow
(Brown et al. 2012), McBreathy argues that the humans who manufactured it could
have developed not only novel cognitive capabilities but also the ability of passing
technological knowledge down the generations.
In synthesis, composite weaponry technology is increasingly being recognized
as a distinctive trait of modern humans: the extraordinary importance of the invention and diffusion of the weapon, therefore, can hardly gain more recognition.
This notwithstanding, the mechanisms which led to the invention are not well
understood: there is a clear gap both in innovation science and in evolutionary
archaeology about the inception of bow-and-arrow technology.
One obvious reason explaining the gap could be the fact that precious little
physical evidence of early bow-and-arrows remains: most modules of the weapon
made of perishable materials rarely survive, so the majority of the research is
based on the study of stone artifacts (the arrowheads) and contextual assumptions.
On the other hand, a second more subtle reason could be found in the lack of a
theory explaining the causal chain leading to radical invention: the bow-and-arrow
breakthrough marks a technological discontinuity which is difficult to frame in the
current evolutionary theories of technological change.
The aim of this article is to try and shed some new light on the case, considering
the new archaeological discoveries, through the interpretive framework of an
extended model of technological change, based on the evolution of bacteria rather
than that of eukaryotes, and therefore acknowledging Horizontal Transfer (the
recombination of functional modules across diverse lineages) as an evolutionary
force as powerful as Vertical Inheritance.3
The paper is organized as follows: first of all, I briefly present the physical and
engineering principles of the bow-and-arrow, introducing in particular the concepts
of modularity and functional module, which is central to the following evolutionary
approach to the case study; second, I introduce the novel archaeological evidence
2
Shea and Sisk argue that the Neanderthal, burdened by their higher (in comparison with the
Sapiens) daily caloric requirements, could not allot the time and resources necessary to develop
mechanically-projected weaponry. The Neanderthal mastered composite (modular) technology
(and in particular hafted tools and weapons) well before the invention of the bow-and-arrow
(Wragg Sykes 2015) but no evidence of Neanderthal-made bow-and-arrows has been discovered
yet.
3
Connection: Sect. 15.3 discusses functional vs. non-functional aspects in archeology, and Chap.
16 problematized the functional vs. stylistic dychotomy in sorting out characters in material culture. Chapter 18 acknowledges the importance of horizontal transfer for language dynamics.
17 On the Origin of Technologies: The Invention and Evolution of the Bow-and-Arrow
317
that provides the factual base on which the evolutionary account proposed in this
paper is founded; third, building on a theoretical framework developed for innovation management, I explain why the bow-and-arrow should be considered a radical
innovation and what this implies; fourth, I introduce the background of the evolutionary approaches to technological change and briefly describe the novel Woesian
model of technological change which I apply to the case of the bow-and-arrow;
fifth, in the core chapter of the paper, I apply this model to recent archeological
discovery inferring the evolutionary trajectory of the bow-and-arrow, evidencing in
it the key role of horizontal transfer and modular exaptation; finally, I discuss the
implications of this evolutionary interpretation of the case. I argue that the same
evolutionary patterns can explain many a radical innovation and that some of the
concepts can apply outside the technological arena and have some explanatory
value for evolutionary archaeology and innovation management, and could contribute to a better understanding of the origin and nature of technology.
17.2
Background
17.2.1
The Bow and Arrow as a Modular Artifact
17.2.1.1
Concept
A bow-and-arrow set is composed of two main elements: (1) the bow, a stave made
of wood or other elastic material, bent and held in tension by a string; (2) the arrow,
a thin wooden shaft with a tip (or arrowhead, made of stone in early arrows).
The arrow is fitted to the string by a notch and drawn back until enough elastic energy
is stored in the bow so that when released it will launch the small, light arrow at high speed.
The exosomatic storage and subsequent fast release of elastic energy is the
distinctive engineering principle of mechanically-projected weaponry4 (according to
the terminology proposed by Lombard and Hidle (2012) which I adopt in this paper).
17.2.1.2
Function and Functional Module
The bow and arrow is a modular artifact: it is composed of discrete components

(modules) each of which is in turn composed of other lower-level modules. The
modular hierarchy (referred to also as the architecture) of the artifact can therefore
be represented by a modular tree (Fig. 17.1).
Moreover, each module is associated with a discrete function. The association
module-function in artifacts and its biological counterpart is a foundational concept
in the evolutionary model outlined in this paper.
4
The atlatl (Shea and Sisk 2010) and a number of much more recent weapons, including ballistas,
catapults, and crossbows also belong to this class of artifacts.
318
G. Carignani
Bow and
Arrow Set
Arrow
Bow
Stave
Bow String
Cord-stop
Shaft
Arrowhead
Fletching
Fig. 17.1 The bow-and-arrow modular tree. The modular tree is a simple representation of a
modular artifact. The components (functional modules) of the artifact are represented at each level
by the nodes of the tree. The arcs connecting the nodes across levels describe the composition of
each module
The concept of functional module is currently acknowledged as central in biological

research. For example, Hartwell Hopfield, Leibler and Murray in their influential
paper (1999: C47) strongly argue for functional modules as a critical level of
biological organization. Moreover, they claim that it is a distinctive link between
the biological and technological domain: the notion of function and functional
properties separates biology from other natural sciences and links it to synthetic
disciplines such as computer science and engineering.
Unfortunately, the concept of function and functional module is not as straightforward as it seems in technology.5 In this paper, however, I will adopt the consensus concept of biological function (aka proper function). In accordance with this
definition, the proper function of an artifact is not what the artifact (or module) is
designed for, but what it is selected for: the proper function of an item is to do
whatever it was selected for (Neander 1991: 171).6
17.2.1.3
Exaptation
Adopting the biological concept of proper function for artifacts has the advantage
of taking into account the changeability of technological functions. Indeed, it disconnects the concept of function from the intentionality of the manufacturer linking it
5
For example Baldwin and Clarke (2000), while introducing an elaborate and important theory of
modularity in complex technological systems explicitly refuse the concept of function as a foundational property of modularity. Their definition of modularity is based on relationship among
structures, not functions because functions are inherently manifold and nonstationary (ivi: 63,
footnote 2).
6
Discussing in depth the epistemological base supporting the adoption of the etiological concept
of proper function in technology is out of the scope of this paper: please refer to Andriani and
Carignani (2014) for a more detailed discussion.
319
instead to the selection by the user. The selection of an artifact (or a module) for a
new function (different from the one for which it was designed or manufactured) is
generically defined as functional shift or more specifically preadaptation or exaptation. The concept is not new in biological evolution or in technological innovation.
The importance of functional shifts in biological evolution was recognized by
Darwin himself, who referred to it as the wonderful metamorphoses in function in the summary of Chap. 6 of Origin (1859). The concept was later defined
preadaptation by the French naturalist Lucien Cunot (1914). Cunots preadaptation refers to traits whose functional shift increases the fitness of an organism.
The concept was reframed by Gould and Vrba in their famous 1982 paper (Gould
and Vrba 1982), in which they coined the fortunate term exaptation to describe the
process (rather than the effect) of functional shift.
The analogous process of functional shift, called exaptation or preadaptation, has
also been researched in technological change (Dew et al. 2004; Cattani 2005, 2006;
Andriani and Cohen 2013).
The importance and explanatory value of the concept is still debated: indeed, some
scholars believe it is finally being abandoned in biological evolution because it is
intrinsically weak, while maintaining a value in cultural evolution (Larson et al. 2013).
Here, I argue for a different perspective because, ironically, but in accordance
with the bacterial analogy on which this paper is founded, the importance of functional shift is again gaining consensus, not in eukaryotic, but in bacterial evolution,
where it is considered a central mechanism for evolutionary change (Ganfornina
and Sanchez 1999).
Accordingly, I will adopt the concept of modular exaptation, in which functional shift is referred not to a whole artifact but to its modules (Andriani and
Carignani 2014). I propose modular exaptation as a critical process in the invention
of the bow-and-arrow.7
17.3
The Invention of the Bow-and-Arrow: Archeological

Evidence
Recent archeological discoveries,8 regarding in particular the Howiesons Poort

culture,9 have provided new evidence supporting the existence of mechanicallyprojected weaponry in Sub-Saharian Africa between 71,000 and 64,000 years ago
(Brown et al. 2012; Lombard and Phillipson 2010).
At this moment these are the oldest archeological records which can be related to
bow-and-arrow technology.
7
Connection: The reader can refer to the Connection in Sect. 3.1 for additional references and
connections to the concept of exaptation.
8
Connection: Chap. 15 presents a theoretical background on archaelogical methodologies.
9
The Howiesons Poort culture flourished across a vast area in southern Africa from 65 to 60 kyr
ago (Jacobs and Roberts 2009).
320
G. Carignani
This evidence has triggered new interest in the bow-and-arrow origin, because
some researchers claim that mastering the manufacture and use of complex composite (modular) artifacts has important cognitive implications and could possibly
be considered a proxy for modern human cognition (Lombard and Haidle 2012).
The consequent impact on the successful worldwide dispersal of the Sapiens
species is also emphasized in research literature (Lombard and Haidle 2012): the
availability of a lightweight, accurate and powerful alternative to contemporary
hand-delivered weaponry gave the humans who were able to use it an upper hand
over other human species. The competitive advantage of the bow-and-arrow as a
hunting weapon was not just the limited increase in range, but more so the possibility
of carrying a weapon capable of shooting many arrows in sequence with good
accuracy and enough penetrating power to kill or wound small and medium-sized
animals10: a perfect weapon for following game over long distances on difficult
terrain (Lombard and Phillipson 2010). Accordingly, Sisk and Shea (2009) define
projectile weapons as a niche-broadening technology, since they decrease the
risks associated with preying on large, dangerous animals and increase the returns
on hunting smaller, fast-moving terrestrial mammalians, birds, and fish.
The bow-and-arrow is ubiquitous: it was re-invented in many places and at different times over the millennia. However, I will refer to Lombard and Phillipson
(2010), as the primary source for this paper: discussing the new discoveries from
Sibudu Cave (KwaZulu Natal, South Africa) Lombard and Phillipson also expose
contextual evidence which not only robustly supports their claim about the use of
the bow-and-arrow, but also provides a perfect factual base for validating the
extended Woesian evolutionary theory of technological change. This evolutionary
account of the inception of the new radical technology, including the distinctive
processes of horizontal transfer, modular exaptation and amelioration, is the core
contribution of this paper.
17.4
The Bow-and-Arrow as a Radical Innovation
A specific reason for particular interest in the bow-and-arrow invention and at the
same time for the difficulty in positioning it in evolutionary innovation is its
discontinuity with its contextual technological state-of-the-art-ness: it is at first
sight what is commonly called a radical innovation. The multidisciplinary approach
we pursue in this book suggests trying and clarifying the concept, applying to this
pre-scientific and pre-economic case of technological innovation a framework
developed in the field of innovation management and usually applied to contemporary
technological change (Henderson and Clark 1990).
10
Including both non-human and human animals: an arrow shoulder shot is the probable cause of
death of tzi, the famous Tyrolean Neolithic Iceman discovered in 1991 on the Italian-Austrian
border (Gostner and Egarter 2002). tzi himself was carrying a bow and some arrows.
321
First of all, we notice that while bow-and-arrow technology has changed extensively during the latest 64,000 years (and especially in the last millennium) we can
still recognize the architecture of the original invention of 64 kyr ago (kiloyears
ago). In particular, the first modular level in modern bows still shows the same functional modules, the bow, and the arrow, in turn composed, at the second level, of the
same submodules. It is true that a number of new components are present in modern
arrows, and new materials are extensively used, but these components were added
to the original modular tree rather than substituted to those already in existence. In
other cases, ancient components were split into smaller lower-level components, but
the new assembly maintains the functional role of the old one. For example, the
modern compound bow (Fig. 17.2) is composed of several new submodules, including cams, axles and pulleys, and has a number of advantages in comparison with the
longbows, in that it is less cumbersome and its wielding requires less effort. The
function of the compound bow, however, remains the exosomatic storage of elastic
energy, which was the original breakthrough and the core concept that has remained
unchanged throughout the millennia.
The innovation, thus, perfectly fits into the framework proposed by Henderson
and Clark in their seminal paper (Henderson and Clark 1990), Table 17.1.
Clearly, the original invention of the bow-and-arrow qualifies as a radical innovation (lower-right quadrant in Table 17.1), in which both the core concepts and the
linkages between core concepts and components (in comparison with previously
existing hand-thrown weapons) were overturned. The architecture of the new
artifact revolutionized weapons technology, while all the successive modifications,
despite some of them having great historical impact, cannot be labeled as radical
innovations. Indeed, even if the performances have been of course greatly improved,
the modern Olympic bow and arrow and more recent compound arrows (Table 17.1)
qualify as just incremental or modular innovations.
We can, therefore, define the bow-and-arrow as a radical innovation. Classifying
the invention of the bow-and-arrow in terms of modern innovation is not a mere
exercise in science. Radical innovation is important in innovation management,
because it could lead to the emergence of new dominant designs and open new
markets (Abernathy and Utterback 1978; Geroski 2003), but its inception is not well
understood. The bow-and-arrow case has the characteristics to be a useful comparison for much more recent radical inventions, showing many similarities and a few
differences as well. Moreover, the comparison could work in both directions, giving
the opportunity of applying the concepts and results of modern innovation management to ancient technological change.
322
G. Carignani
Fig. 17.2 The compound bow, invented by H.W. Allen in 1969, was a major improvement in
archery, but it was not (according to our framework) a radical innovation, since the core concept
and first-level modules remain unchanged, as shown in this original patent drawings
323
Table 17.1 A framework for defining innovation (Adapted from Henderson and Clark 1990)
Linkages between core concepts and

components
Unchanged
Changed
17.5
17.5.1
Core concepts
Reinforced
Incremental
Innovation
Architectural
Innovation
Overturned
Modular Innovation
Radical Innovation
Evolutionary Technology
Background
The evolutionary approach to technological change is hardly new: while its inception dates back to pre-Darwinian times, structured theories were developed by a
number of pioneers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and reached
maturity in the second part of the twentieth century.
In opposition to the nave vision that attributes radical innovation to heroic
inventors creating technological discontinuities, thanks to their extraordinary
insights, the evolutionary approaches, due to their Darwinian inspiration, embrace
the concept of continuous technological change.
Of particular interest for this paper are the theoretical and empirical contributions of Usher (1929) and Gilfillan (1935) whose pioneering books, including the
details of engineering development, clearly expound the recombinant nature of
technological innovation and develop the concept of cumulative change (Basalla
1988: 2024).
The recent contributions of Brian Arthur (2007, 2009) add the explicit recognition of modularity as a foundational concept of technological change leading to the
definition of technology as autopoietic. According to Arthur, technologies are put
together from components transferred from other technologies, evolving from simple to complex structures. His model is based on the principles of combination and
recursiveness: technologies are formed by combination organized around a working
modular architecture which corresponds to the way the parts and their connections
work together.
Evolutionary archeology (OBrien and Lyman 2002), which aims to answer
archeological questions through evolutionary concepts and methodologies, is
founded on the same conceptual framework the Darwinian concept of descent
with modifications, epitomized by the principles of variation, selection, and inheritance and is therefore of particular interest here.11
11
Connection: In what follows the reader will find the concept of horizontal tranfer, that is strictly
related to the theories of cultural transmission, as discussed, for example, in Sects. 16.3.2 and 12.4,
as well as in Chap. 11.
324
17.5.2
G. Carignani
Horizontal Transfer
Alas, radical innovations hardly fit into the evolutionary framework of the theories
overviewed in the previous paragraph: one of the critical issues, as we shall see
shortly, is that all previous theories of technological (and cultural) change are based
on the canonical Darwinian model whose primary evolutionary process is vertical
inheritance and whose consequent iconic representation is the tree of life.
Indeed, an evolutionary process based solely on Vertical Inheritance poses a
critical disanalogy to the model since, as pointed out by anthropologist Alfred
Kroeber in his authoritative textbook (Kroeber 1948) cultural evolution is better
represented by a network than by a tree. It is apparent that cultural evolution (like
technological innovation) shows a reticulate pattern, not a hierarchical one.
The evolutionary theory I adopt here while of course in accordance with the
Darwinian principles of variation, selection, and retention is not based on the
canonical model whose dominant evolutionary process is Vertical Inheritance, but
includes as an equally important evolutionary process Horizontal Transfer.
17.5.3
An Extended Model of Technological Change:

The Woesian Perspective
Horizontal Transfer is widely recognized as a viable mechanism in cultural transmission, but it is sometimes seen as an anomaly and a difficulty on theory (Greenhill
et al. 2009). On the contrary, in the model I adopt here (shortly outlined in this
paragraph, and described in detail in Cattani et al. 2013b) Horizontal Transfer is not
only acknowledged as an evolutionary force as powerful as Vertical Inheritance, but
proposed as a structural part of an extended theory of technological evolution.
The extended model of technological (and possibly cultural) evolution seeks its
biological counterpart domain not in the evolution of eukaryotes, in which Vertical
Inheritance is still acknowledged as the dominant evolutionary process, but in the
evolution of bacteria, where Horizontal Genetic Transfer is today recognized as a
major evolutionary mechanism (Ochman et al. 2000; Koonin et al. 2001; Woese
2002; de la Cruz and Davies 2000).
What actually could happen in bacterial evolution is that part of a gene or a
whole gene or a cluster of genes is transferred from one organism to another via
HGT, regardless of the lineage they belong to. After this transfer, the genes must be
maintained in the recipient cell (the retention process). Next, they have to undergo
a strong selection phase and eventually spread within the bacterial population the
strain which is generated through replication of the recipient organism (the fixation
process). Finally, the transferred genes must increase the fitness of the function
they carry in their new lineage they can actually be considered genetic functional
modules , which means that they need to adapt to the lineage phenotype, a process
referred to as amelioration (Lawrence and Ochman 1997; Eisen 2000).
325
The adoption of this new perspective clarifies the concept of Horizontal Transfer
in technological (and cultural) evolution: what is actually horizontally transferred
are not generic traits or other fuzzily defined entities, but functional modules. This
more formal concept can support a structural extension of the theory which, while
seamlessly extending the Darwinian model, embraces a new vision based on pattern
pluralism (Doolittle and Bapteste 2007) rather than the single tree of life pattern,
and opens new perspectives and avenues of research not only in biology (Woese
2004), but also in technological and cultural evolution.
In particular, this new perspective is necessary in order to explain radical innovations, because the gradualist models of evolution are at a loss in doing so while other
theoretical concepts, like punctuated equilibria or Lamarckian mechanisms, cannot
support robust analogies because they are scientifically discredited in biological
evolution.
On the contrary, when Horizontal Genetic Transfer is acknowledged as a structural evolutionary event it is natural to represent biological evolution by a phylogentic network (also called a phylogenetic graph) rather than by the familiar phylogenetic
tree. The notable aspect is that this is the same topological pattern evidenced by
Kroeber in his tree of cultural evolution: the disanalogy between cultural and biological evolution seems to disappear under the Woesian model.
When the impact of Horizontal Transfer is massive12 the organisms involved are
described as chimeras because they result from the assemblage of functional modules
originating from diverse lineages. Analogously, many radical innovations can be described
as evolutionary chimeras (Woese 1987: 230). The bow-and-arrow is such a case.
17.6
17.6.1
The Invention and Diffusion of the Bow-and-Arrow:

A Woesian Perspective
Introduction
Technological artifacts and in particular inventions and innovations are to be

regarded as cultural traits (OBrien et al. 2010). The nature of technological artifacts, and in particular of radical inventions, however, set them apart from quintessential cultural traits like language: indeed, the intentional harnessing of natural
12
Carl Woese conjectured the existence of a critical discontinuity in biological evolution, the
Darwinian Threshold. Before the Darwinian Threshold Horizontal Transfer was rampant, species
did not exist, and evolution was essentially reticulate. The existence of the Darwinian Threshold is
not a necessary hypothesis for the extended model of technological evolution I adopt here in that
the importance and ubiquity of Horizontal Genetic Transfer in bacterial evolution is independently
recognized in literature. However, I adopt the term Woesian model because the fascinating
representation of evolution preceding the Threshold given by Woese seems to capture perfectly the
dynamics of the industrial revolutions, in which radical innovations arise and new industries are
born: only global invention arising in a diverse collection of primitive entities is capable of providing the requisite novelty. (Woese 2002: 8746).
326
G. Carignani
phenomena in response to an existing need appears to be the driver of novel artifacts.

Invention, according to Arthur (2009: 274),
is a process of linking some purpose or need with an effect that can be exploited to satisfy
it. It may begin with a purpose or need for which existing methods are not satisfactory; this
forces the seeking of a new principle (the idea of an effect in action). Or it may begin with
a phenomenon or effect itself usually a freshly discovered one for which some associated principle of use suggests itself.
While in general accordance with Arthurs concepts, I would like to emphasize

the importance of the interplay of technology with the socio-cultural environment:
in short, recognizing radical technological innovations also as cultural traits.
Indeed, engineering breakthroughs do not blossom in the desert: they find their
nurture in technological traditions (artifacts, tools and knowledge), and in turn
they are selected and supported by the socio-technical environment with which they
co-evolve.
17.6.2
Contextual Conditions: Setting the Stage for Radical

Innovation
Lombard and Phillipson 2010 (640, 641) describe a number of cognitive, technological
and natural conditions which are contextual to the invention of the bow-and-arrow
in KwaZulu Natal, circa 64,000 years ago.
In order to elucidate the Woesian evolutionary account I am building, I propose
a reclassification of Lombard and Phillipsons checklist into classes instrumental in
understanding the evolutionary process:
1. The environment: socio/economic, climatic and ecological context:
Changes in faunal assemblages;
Changes in climate and vegetation.
Fishing and fowling;
Broad based, varied game procurement.
2. Available functional modules (general purpose technologies)
Formal knots;
Formal hafting technology;
Long, strong cords;
Stone tipped spears.
3. Technological artifacts in use (including preadapted functional modules)
Snares;
Bow drills.
327
Lombard and Phillipson also include in the list the use of latent energy in flexed
wood. Borrowing from evolutionary archeology (OBrien and Lyman 2002) I prefer
to describe this empirical knowledge13 as part of the replicator of the functional
module (the bow) which stores latent (elastic) energy. Each artifact has therefore a
twofold description: the physical entity (also called the interactor) and the knowledge (and tools) necessary for its replication (also called the replicator).14
17.6.2.1
Invention (Horizontal Transfer and Exaptation)
The invention of the bow-and-arrow is clearly a case of recombinant innovation in

accordance with Arthurs model: the inventor15 recombined the existing technologies into the novel artifact. In particular, we can easily recognize by the modular tree
that the recombination has two distinct main branches, defined in Fig. 17.1 and in
Fig. 17.3 as the arrow side and the bow side.
The breakthrough, i.e., the idea of exosomatic storage of elastic energy, took
place in the bow side. It is therefore necessary to investigate the origins of this revolutionary idea in more detail.
Lombard and Phillipson (2010) emphasize the presence of two kinds of different
artifact immediately preceding (or concomitant with) the bow and arrow invention,
which they clearly suggest as possible sources of the bow functional module: they
are the bow-drill, used for starting a fire or for piercing resistant materials and the
snare, a spring-trap used for capturing small animals.
The usage of the bow-drill is documented through archaeological physical
records (drilled holes in hard materials like stone or bone) in periods preceding or
concomitant with the invention, both in the South African site and in other places.
13
It is hardly necessary to notice that scientific knowledge of the underlying phenomena is useful
but not necessary to technology development
14
Here I refer to the deceptively simple definitions given by OBrien and Lyman (2002: 26): a
replicator is an entity that passes its structure directly through replication. The concept will be
discussed in more depth later in this paper.
15
Actually, the inventors, since the process happened several times in different places and times.
Arthur dislikes the term inventor because it has connotations of lone eccentric at work (Arthur
2009: 111), suggesting the adoption of the term originator instead. On the same wavelength
Basalla (1982) warns against the nave concept of heroic inventor. I cannot disagree with these
distinguished scholars from an evolutionary point of view. But there is also a human side to inventions. Indeed, the persons who originate radical innovations are remembered in the historical
record as men and women of vision and commitment who struggled to transform their ideas into
reality, engaging in what can often be defined a heroic battle against conventional wisdom and
established expertise. The unknown people who invented the bow-and-arrow were probably no
exception: I will therefore skip Arthurs originator suggestion maintaining, instead, the more
romantic term inventor.
328
Fig. 17.3 The bow-andarrow stylized phylogenetic
graph. Horizontal Transfer
takes place at the
intersection between the
stave (bow) and the arrow
directed arcs, from which a
new lineage (the Chimeric
Artifact bow-and-arrow)
is created
G. Carignani
Bow-and-arrow
Bow
Bow
Side
Snare
Arrow
Arrow
Side
Stone-tipped
Spear (extinct)
Spring-traps are not archaeologically documented but they are traditional artifacts
still in use in Southern Africa, for example in the Kalahari Desert.
Both are candidates for having provided the key module (the bow) of the invention.
Clearly, both were components of artifacts intended for completely different functions (namely, drilling hard materials, starting a fire, or capturing small animals).
The inception of the bow-and-arrow suggested by Lombard and Phillipson seems
straightforward: a natural phenomenon (the fact that the energy stored in the flexedwood component of the snare or of the bow drill was able to launch a small spear)
was perceived by the inventor. Then, he or she selected this functionality, already
part of the behavior of the artifact, as the new function around which he or she
assembled the first crude bow-and-arrow. This is the evolutionary signature event of
the invention: a module already in existence became the central component of a
novel artifact thanks to a modular exaptation (Andriani and Carignani 2014).16 As I
have already pointed out, the mechanism is hardly new in technological change, in
that it is documented in a number of case studies (e.g. Dew et al. 2004).
In the seemingly easy assemblage of the first prototype of the novel artifact using
a stave cut from a spring-trap or possibly an existing bow drill a number of
cognitive processes can be presumed to be at work, in that the inventor, after grasping
and harnessing a physical phenomenon, re-modularized the artifact, associating
each module to a discrete function.
16
We notice that while the phenomenon underlying the invention is the same in snares and in bowdrills (the flexural behavior of certain materials physically described by Hookes law), two different functionalities are exploited for the two artifacts: providing a tensional force is the functionality
for which the bow is used in the drill, while storing and discharging elastic energy is what it provides in the snare. So, while the drill-bow is more similar to the form of the bow in the weapon the
functioning of the weapon is better understood by seeing a snare in action.
329
While embracing the caveat of Usher who in his seminal book declared that The
requirements of historical analysis of the development of mechanical appliances do
not impose upon us the task of minute examination of the internal aspects of the
mental processes (Usher 1929: 16) it is however interesting to notice that technological modularization could possibly be associated with abstract thinking, since the
same conceptual structures (i.e. the hierarchical modular architecture) are also central in other manifestations of symbolic human cognition, e.g. language.17
The origin of the second key module, the arrow, follows the same line, but is less
difficult to understand, since tipped stone points were commonly in use, and so
functional shift was not necessary: they were probably crudely adapted in the prototypes (as inventors and engineers do even today) and underwent later engineering
refinement (amelioration).
The breakthrough was then technically made possible by borrowing from the collection of general purpose technologies that were present, including the mastering of
the tools (higher-order cultural traits) and procedures necessary for their manufacture. The prototyping of the first bow thus included cords and formal knots, already
developed for other technological artifacts (e.g. fishing lines and hafted tools).
In synthesis, horizontal transfer of existing modules and modular exaptation are
the processes through which the novel artifact was generated. The bow and arrow is
an evolutionary chimera possibly the first one since it did not have a history in
its own right but was originated by the Horizontal Transfer of components across
diverse technological lineages (Fig. 17.3).
17.6.2.2
Diffusion of the Bow-and-Arrow: The Evolution of a New

Cultural Trait
In accordance with the etiological definition of function a selection by the users is

the distinctive event marking a functional shift: indeed, the invention can successfully become a full-fledged innovation only when the users in this case hunters
and possibly warriors select the new weapon as a better fit to their needs. As we
have already noticed, the bow-and-arrow decreases the risks in hunting big game
and increases the returns on hunting smaller, fast-moving prey (Sisk and Shea
2009) possibly including humans. The advantage for single high-skilled hunters
over groups of hunters chasing animals with spears in the periods of the disappearance of big mammals seems a straightforward consequence, confirmed in principle
by the replication and diffusion of the bow-and-arrow, carried by the groups of
Sapiens during their successful dispersal out of Africa (McBrearthy 2012).
In this case, we clearly see how needs can follow the invention rather than precede it. The intentional explanation of invention as a straightforward response to
17
According to Herbert Simon (1962) modularity is a systemic property of complex systems in
general and artifacts in particular, and one of the mainstays on which a science of the artificial
(Simon 1996) can be founded.
330
G. Carignani
need does not grasp the complexity of the process. The bow-and-arrow case shows
how the innovation originated by a microtechnical event of horizontal transfer and
exaptation, interacting with the context, triggered a coevolutionary socio-technical
process with far-reaching consequences.
In the long evolutionary phase, following the Horizontal Transfer, the novel
architecture was refined without being overturned and innovation became incremental rather than radical. The well-known pattern of Vertical Inheritance became
the dominant evolutionary process, and a tree-like pattern characterized by technological clades emerged. Each chimeric bow-and-arrow became the root of the evolutionary tree, and one of them is the common ancestor of all modern Western
bow-and-arrows, including the longbow and the compound bow.
A significant process showing how Horizontal Transfer seamlessly extends
rather than contrasting the traditional models of evolutionary archeology lies in the
adaptive transition of the horizontally transferred modules to the definitive form.
Indeed, an adaptive process follows nearly any event of Horizontal Transfer, because
the transferred modules are not perfectly fit for working in the new artifact, and
therefore need to be adapted. This signature process finds a perfect analogue in the
adaptive process which follows HGT events in bacterial evolution, where it is called
amelioration (Lawrence and Ochman 1997; Eisen 2000).
An important characteristic of technological amelioration is that it implies morphological changes in the modules composing the new artifact, and these morphological changes can be detected and measured, helping to locate the HGT event.
Hard evidence of this adaptive process in the case of the bow-and-arrow can be
found in the evolution of the arrowheads, which are important because they are the
only remaining physical records of early bow-and-arrows and their evolution has
been extensively studied. The adaptive path of the arrowheads diverge from that of
the other spears from which they originated through Horizontal Transfer, and this
clearly locates in time the bifurcation which is the signature event marking the radical invention. For example, in Fig. 17.4 the bifurcation is plainly visible in stratum
5, clearly marking the emergence of a new design sub-space characterized by morphological attributes disconnected from those of the originating artifacts (for the
concept of design space in cultural traits see OBrien et al. 2010).
Another adaptive engineering process is the evolution of modularity, through the
addition of other modular components, which can improve the performance of the
artifacts without overturning their core concepts. The 71,000-year-old microliths
proposed by Brown et al. (2012) as being related to bow-and-arrow technology are
early examples of modular evolution. Another example is fletching (stabilizing the
flight of the arrow through a stabilizer connected to the end of the arrow, usually
with feathers); fletching is not strictly necessary for a working bow-and-arrow and
could have been adapted from other technical modules or from naturifacts.18 The
18
The term naturifact is used by Basalla (1988: 50) to indicate natural objects that could serve
as models to initiate the process of technological evolution
331
Fig. 17.4 The Horizontal Transfer bifurcation is marked by morphological evidence, here clearly
visible in stratum 5 where the divergence between dart points attributes and arrow points attributes
originates a separate design space (Adapted from Lyman et al. 2008b)
evolution of modularity19 of the bow-and-arrow is well documented in archeological

records and subsequently in history, leading in due time to modern developments of
the weapon, like for example the compound bow (Fig. 17.2).
In turn, successive engineering adaptative processes (amelioration) pushed the
development of tools and processes for manufacturing the weapon, which were
higher-order cultural traits that contributed to increasing the set of general purpose
technologies available. Indeed, general-purpose technologies usually evolve from
technologies developed for specific usages (Arthur 2009).
Moreover, the bow-and-arrow diffusion can also be seen as source of preadapted
new modules ready for generating new chimeric radical invention. For example,
although speculative and supported only by contextual evidence the bow-and-arrow
could have provided a key module exapted in the invention of the mouthbow (a
musical instrument used for example in the Kalahari) and later of other string
instruments.
17.6.3
Discussion: Emergence, Transmission and Replication

of Technological Cultural Traits
The mechanisms of emergence, transmission and replication of cultural traits are

central issues in cultural evolution. The specific case of modular artifacts like the
bow-and-arrow, moreover, shows peculiar micropatterns that seems typical of
19
Modularity is a gateway to Open Collaborative Innovation (Baldwin and von Hippel 2011); the
evolution of the modular architecture of physical artifacts can empirically be recognized in Internet
driven open collaborative innovation (Carignani et al. 2011).
332
G. Carignani
technology, but could also suggest a novel approach to significant research

questions in the broader context of cultural evolution:
1. The bow-and-arrow (like many other innovations) appeared at different times in
different places, a nearly ubiquitous example of the evolution of cultural traits
(Lyman et al. 2008a: 2805). What are the reasons for this ubiquity?
2. Like all cultural traits, the bow-and-arrow can be seen as a unit of transmission
and as a unit of replication as well (OBrien et al. 2010). But what are the microprocesses responsible for technological (and possibly cultural) transmission and
replication?
The key concept in answering both questions lies in recognizing the modular
artifact as the primary unit of analysis in evolutionary technology. Basalla in his
seminal book argued compellingly for this deceptively nave approach, because:
The artifact not scientific knowledge, nor the technical community, not social and economic factors is central to technology and technological change. (Basalla 1988: 30)20
In order to address the first question, I would like to point out that multiple independent inventions like the bow-and-arrow are hardly unique in the history of technological change: many radical innovations have been reinvented several times in
several places. For example, turbine jet propulsion was independently conceived
and prototyped by Hans von Ohain in Germany and Frank Whittle (later Sir Frank
Whittle) in the UK in the decade preceding WW2 (Constant 1980; Giffard forthcoming). This is not an isolated case: the history of technology is replete with such
examples. A common trait with these cases is that we can usually discover minor
differences between the independent inventions, but they resemble each other
because they share the same modular architecture, which seems the invariant entity
in multiple invention.
The analogy with biology is enlightening: we find the analogous phenomenon in
biological evolution, where independently evolved organs are called analogues (in
opposition to homologues which have a common ancestor), as pointed out by
Konrad Lorenz in his Nobel Acceptance Lecture (Lorenz 1973). The Nobel laureate
strongly argued for the power of analogy as a source of knowledge, discussing in
particular the analogy between the biologic and technological domains. He emphasized the difference between homologues and analogues in biological evolution discussing the case of the parallel evolution of eyes in cephalopoda and in vertebrata.
These organs are not homologues but analogues. They evolved independently, but
have a strong resemblance: to be more precise, they share the same modular architecture, and in both we can recognize the same functional modules. Engineering
reasons seem responsible for this convergence. The multiple invention of the bowand-arrow fits the pattern: there is a limited repertoire of feasible architectures for
harnessing the breakthrough concept of exosomatically storing and releasing elastic
20
This is particularly true in this study since scientific knowledge and the technical community
were not very developed in Paleolithic times.
333
energy, therefore when all the contextual conditions are in place the inventor of the
bow-and-arrow is expected to appear.
The difficult but possible coexistence between evolution and intentionality a
vexed issue in evolutionary technology finds here a possible clarification: the
invention is intentional, but its inception, its success and its diffusion are determined
by the socio-cultural environment and follow an evolutionary path.
The centrality of the (modular) artifact as the unit of analysis also hints at the
answer to the second question about transmission and replication: technology has
the power of transmitting itself down the generations through its products, the
artifacts.
Nonetheless, the knowledge associated with each artifact, and to each functional
module, is only in part included into the artifact itself. Amazingly, the nave idea
that all the knowledge necessary for understanding and replicating an artifact is
included in the artifact itself is proposed by many authoritative scholars outside the
field of engineering: for example, Gould (Gould 1987: 70) states that five minutes
with [] a bow and arrow may allow an artisan of a culture to capture a major
achievement of another. On the contrary, the necessity of a replicator different from
the interactor is demonstrated by several cases in the history of technology: a
beautiful example is the study by Cattani et al. (2013a), showing how the failed
transmission of tacit knowledge makes it impossible to replicate the Cremonese
string instruments today, albeit a number of them being still in existence and having
been comprehensively analyzed.
What emerges from the bow-and-arrow case study is that the concept of technological replicator needs possibly an extension: not only is it something much more
complex than just knowledge, including organizational procedures and social (as
well as technical) learning, but it also has a tangible component in the form of
manufacturing tools (higher-level cultural traits).
As Arthur states, technology is autopoietic, in that it builds itself out of itself, but
the technological autopoiesis is so ingrained in the socio-cultural fabric that it is all
but impossible to understand technological artifacts without also considering them
as cultural traits.
17.6.4
The Bow-and-Arrow Woesian Evolution: A Common

Pattern of Radical Innovation?
In this paper, I applied to the case of the bow-and-arrow an extended Woesian

model of technological change, in which Horizontal Transfer of functional modules
across technologies is acknowledged as a primary evolutionary mechanism as
powerful as Vertical Inheritance and the distinctive processes of modular exaptation
and ameloration and the key roles they play.
334
G. Carignani
The Woesian model extends, rather than contrasts, the evolutionary models of
technological change: indeed, radical innovations21 and possibly other cultural
discontinuities can be explained through Horizontal Transfers across lineages while
the concepts and methods for studying cultural Vertical Inheritance remain valid in
studying incremental innovation, in which the processes of Horizontal Transfer are
not so critical.
According to this extended model technological evolution is driven jointly by
Vertical Inheritance and by Horizontal Transfer, interacting in a stylized feedback
cycle that can be described as follows (Andriani et al. 2013): the process begins
when recombinable and exaptable functional modules are available to humans.
Then two processes can take place.
1. Radical Innovation through Horizontal Transfer and Exaptation: functional
modules composed of other artifacts are recombinated by inventors. In this phase
functional shift usually takes place, because the existing functions for which the
modules were designed do not perfectly fit the new function. The invention
harnesses natural phenomena (the storage of elastic energy in the case of the
bow-and-arrow) through engineering creativity, but the engineering is fostered
by the socio-technical environment (availability of general purpose technologies
and tools, e.g. second order cultural traits) and exaptable modules. Horizontal
Transfer is the signature evolutionary process;
2. Incremental Innovation, diffusion and diversification: if the socio-technical environment selects the novel artifacts (including their functional modules) they are
reproduced for the new functions, sometimes creating a new industry in which
their performances are improved through a process of engineering adaptation to
meet the new function, beginning with technological amelioration of the transferred functional modules. This usually long phase is characterized by selection
by users, co-evolution with the changing social and cultural environment and
engineering adaptation. Vertical Inheritance becomes the dominant evolutionary
force as the novel architecture becomes the common ancestor of a tree-shaped
cluster of technological clades.
The process generates not only new artifacts, but also new tools (higher-order
cultural traits) and new functional modules which in due time can become new general purpose technologies, which in turn act as complex replicators. Since the new
modules may exhibit new behaviors they can again be exapted: the inventors can
discover new functions for them and recombine them in novel creative ways.
What emerges is the concept of radical innovations as evolutionary chimeras,
which have no direct ancestors because their composed modules originate from different technological lineages, sometimes including functional shifts. A number of
notable examples in the history of technology seem to fit this feedback cycle.
The digital camera, for one, can be considered an evolutionary chimera. It is a
modular artifact in which one of the original key modules, the chemical film, was
displaced by the CCD (Charge Coupled Semiconductor Device) imager, invented at
21
Sensu Henderson and Clark (1990).
335
Bell Laboratories in 1970 (Boyle and Smith 1970). First used in astronomy and in
other scientific applications, digital photography eventually invaded both the professional and the mass market of general photography, leading to the eventual
extinction of chemical photography.
Technological evolutionary chimeras are often lead examples of disruptive
innovation (Christensen 1997): this in particular applies to the case of the digital
camera which all but destroyed the leading industry in traditional photography
Kodak notwithstanding the fact that Kodak itself pioneered this innovation (Lucas
and Goh 2009).
Digital photography and the bow-and-arrow can be seen both as typical technological evolutionary chimeras, located at the extremes of human technological
development, 64,000 years apart. The case of the digital camera can be described
with a phylogenetic graph (Fig. 17.5) whose resemblance to that of the bow and
arrow (Fig. 17.3) is striking and both exhibit the very topological patterns shown
by biological phylogenetic networks. This seemingly common pattern of radical
innovation is shared with other cases of radical innovation which can be found
throughout the history of technology): the microwave oven (Andriani and Carignani
2014), the bicycle (Bijker 1995) or the already mentioned turbo-jet power plant
(Constant 1980; Giffard forthcoming), just to mention a few.
Two possible contributions emerge from the discussion: first, the usefulness of
Horizontal Transfer in understanding discontinuous innovation. As in many radical
innovations seemingly marking a discontinuity, the underlying gradual process of
evolution emerges when we consider as the unit of analysis not the whole artifact,
which is an evolutionary chimera, and thus has no history of its own, but its
functional modules, transferred across different technological lineages.
Second, the proposal of an extended concept for the technological replicator. A
number of tools, manufacturing processes and procedures, and technological knowl-
Fig. 17.5 Digital camera

stylized phylogenetic
graph. The evolutionary
mechanisms and graph
topology strikingly
resemble those discussed
about the bow-and-arrow
origin
336
G. Carignani
edge, which were already available, were necessary in supporting the development
and diffusion of bow-and-arrows, cars, jet-propulsion power plants, microwave
ovens, and digital cameras. Mechanical precision tools, advanced alloys, radar technology, electronics and ICT played, at different times, the key role of the replicators
that formal knots, strings and hafting had for the bow-and-arrow.
The conclusion, and main avenue of research suggested by this paper, lies in the
potential impact that the extended theory could possibly have in evolutionary archeology and cultural evolution on the one hand, and on innovation science and innovation management on the other.
In evolutionary archeology, and cultural evolution at large, the integration of
Horizontal Transfer as an evolutionary force as powerful as Vertical Inheritance in
a general theory of technological evolution should be seen not as a difficulty on a
theory able to jeopardize current methods (Greenhill et al. 2009), but as a great
opportunity. Indeed, embracing pattern pluralism (Doolittle and Bapteste 2007) as a
useful epistemic view of evolutionary archeology opens the way towards borrowing
novel powerful methodologies from geneticists some of which are already available
to study technological (and cultural) reticulate evolution.
17.7
Conclusion: On the Origin of Technology
This paper investigated the origins of the bow-and-arrow under two perspectives:
the bow-and-arrow as a cultural trait and the bow and arrow as a technological
radical innovation. The two perspectives, of course, are not in contrast: technology
is part of the cultural environment with which it coevolves. Nonetheless, it is often
perceived as something different, because it has distinctive traits: technology obeys
its own rules, derived by natural laws through creative engineering.
This paper is broadly oriented at reconciling and connecting the two perspectives: the bow-and-arrow was an invention originated by an engineering breakthrough made possible by the existence of previous modular artifacts, but its
transformation into a full-fledged innovation and its further diffusion would have
been impossible without social learning and cultural co-evolution.
This also suggests some possible research opportunities in innovation management: radical technological innovations are the clearest examples of Schumpeterian
creative destruction (Schumpeter 1934). They often begin as inferior technologies,
underestimated by the incumbent industries, which may later become dominant
designs, displacing the existing technologies, with the potential to create new markets and disrupt whole industries or in some cases, like that of the bow-and-arrow,
whole civilizations. Indeed, considering the sad story of many previously successful
incumbents from Hwoog to Kodak hardly anyone will deny the importance of
understanding the evolutionary forces able to generate new evolutionary chimeras.
But the story of the bow and arrow also encourages a multidisciplinary approach
to innovation management, in that some answers to management dilemmas could lie
337
in the knowledge of anthropologists and cognitive scientists rather than in that of

economists and management scholars.
Indeed, the story of the bow-and-arrow suggests not only that technology should
not be considered a brainchild of Homo scientificus we saw how bow-and-arrow
technology predates science by some 60,000 years -, but also that it is not generated
by the selfish behavior of Homo economicus; rather it is deeply rooted in the very
cognition and culture of Homo sapiens.
Acknowledgements The inception of the bow-and-arrow has been fascinating and intriguing to
me for a few years now, so I have bothered a number of colleagues and friends with this case study,
and I would like to thank them all for their patience and suggestions.
However, I would like to acknowledge in particular my debt to five people, without whose
support and help I would not have been able to write this paper.
First of all, my friend and colleague at the University of Udine, Dr Giusi Zaina. Giusi is a
biologist and a molecular geneticist: I would not have ventured into bacterial evolution without her
guidance. The background and insight into the Woesian World is hers; the possible misunderstandings,
of course, are mine.
I would also like to acknowledge my friends and colleagues, Gino Cattani (Professor of
Management and Organization at the NY Stern School of Business New York University, US)
and professor Pierpaolo Andriani (Professor of Complexity and Innovation Management at Kedge
Business School, Marseille, France), with whom I discussed at length and coevolved the theoretical
frameworks underlying this paper.
Finally, I would like to thank Michael OBrien (Dean and Professor of Anthropology and
Archeology at the University of Missouri, US) and Robert Layton (Professor of Anthropology at
the University of Durham, UK) for their suggestions and their encouragement which finally
triggered the writing of this paper.
References
Abernathy, W., & Utterback, J. (1978). Patterns of industrial innovation. Technology Review, 80(7),
4047.
Andriani, P., & Carignani, G. (2014). Modular exaptation: A missing link in the synthesis of artificial form. Research Policy, 43(9), 16081620.
Andriani, P., & Cohen, J. (2013). From exaptation to radical niche construction in biological and
technological complex systems. Complexity, 18(5), 714.
Andriani, P., Carignani, G., & Kaminska-Labbe, R. (2013). The appearance of new functions in
technological innovation: The role of exaptation. Academy of Management Proceedings. 2013:1
11518.
Arthur, W. B. (2007). The structure of invention. Research Policy, 36, 274278.
Arthur, W. B. (2009). The nature of technology. New York: Free Press.
Baldwin, C. Y., & Clark, K. B. (2000). Design rules: The power of modularity. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Baldwin, C., & von Hippel, E. (2011). Modeling a paradigm shift: From producer innovation to
user and open collaborative innovation. Organization Science, 22(6), 13991417.
Basalla, G. (1988). The evolution of technology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bijker, W. E. (1995). Of bicycles, bakelites and bulbs: Towards a theory of sociotechnical change.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Boyle, W. S., & Smith, G. E. (1970). Charge coupled semiconductor devices. Bell System Technical
Journal, 49(4), 587593.
338
G. Carignani
Brown, K. S., Marean, C. W., Jacobs, Z., Schoville, B. Z., Oestmo, S., Fisher, E. C., Bernatchez,
J., Karkanas, P., & Matthews, T. (2012). An early and enduring advanced technology originating 71,000 years ago in South Africa. Nature, 491, 590593.
Carignani, G., Andriani, P., & De Toni, A. F. (2011). The evolution of modularity and architectural
innovation: Web-enabled collective development of a tangible artifact. International Journal of
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 14(4), 333355.
Cattani, G. (2005). Preadaptation, firm heterogeneity, and technological performance: A study on
the evolution of fiber optics, 19701995. Organization Science, 16(6), 563580.
Cattani, G. (2006). Technological pre-adaptation, speciation, and emergence of new technologies:
How corning invented and developed fiber optics. Industrial and Corporate Change, 15(2),
285318.
Cattani, G., Dunbar, R. L. M., & Shapira, Z. B. (2013a). Value creation and knowledge loss: The
case of cremonese stringed instruments. Organization Science, 24(3), 813830.
Cattani, G., Carignani, G., & Zaina, G. (2013b). A Woesian perspective of technological change.
Paper presented at the 2nd European theory development workshop in OMT & strategy, 2021
June 2013, HEC Paris.
Christensen, C. M. (1997). The innovator dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Constant, E. W. (1980). The origins of the turbojet revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Cunot, L. (1914). Thorie de la pradaptation. Scientia, 16, 6073.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origins of species (1st ed.). London: Murray.
De la Cruz, F., & Davies, J. (2000). Horizontal gene transfer and the origin of species: Lessons
from bacteria. Trends in Microbiology, 8(3), 128133.
De Paolo, C. (2003). Human prehistory in fiction. Jefferson: McFarland & C. Publishers.
Del Rey, L. (1939). The day is done. In Astounding science fiction. New York City: Street and
Smith Publications.
Dew, N., Sarasvathy, S. D., & Venkataraman, S. (2004). The economic implications of exaptation.
Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 14, 6984.
Doolittle, W. F., & Bapteste, E. (2007). Pattern pluralism and the tree of life hypothesis. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(7), 20432049.
Eisen, J. A. (2000). Horizontal gene transfer among microbial genomes: New insights from complete genome analysis. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, 10, 606611.
Ganfornina, M. D., & Sanchez, D. (1999). Generation of evolutionary novelty by functional shift.
BioEssays, 21, 432439.
Geroski, P. A. (2003). The evolution of new markets. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Giffard, H. S. (forthcoming). Making jet engines. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gilfillan, S. C. (1935). Inventing the ship. Chicago: Follet Publishing Company.
Gostner, P., & Egarter, E. V. (2002). Report of radiological-forensic findings on the iceman.
Journal of Archaeological Science, 29(3), 323326.
Gould, S. J. (1987). An urchin in the storm. New York: Norton.
Gould, S. J., & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation A missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology,
8, 415.
Greenhill, S. J., Currie, T. E., & Gray, R. D. (2009). Does horizontal transmission invalidate cultural phylogenies? Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, 276, 22992306.
Hartwell, L. H., Hopfield, J. J., Leibler, S., & Murray, A. W. (1999). From molecular to modular
cell biology. Nature, 402, C47C52.
Henderson, R. M., & Clark, K. B. (1990). Architectural innovation: The riconfiguration of existing
product technologies and the failure of established firms. Administrative Science Quarterly,
35(1), 930.
Jacobs, Z., & Roberts, R. G. (2009). Catalysts for stone age innovations. Communicative and
Integrative Biology, 2, 191193.
Koonin, E. V., Makarova, K. S., & Aravind, L. (2001). Horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotes:
Quantification and classification. Annual Review of Microbiology, 55, 709742.
339
Kroeber, A. L. (1948). Anthropology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Larson, G., Stephens, P. A., Tehrani, J. J., & Layton, R. H. (2013). Exapting exaptation. Trends in
Ecology & Evolution, 28(9), 497498.
Lawrence, J. G., & Ochman, H. (1997). Amelioration of bacterial genomes: Rates of change and
exchange. Journal of Molecular Evolution, 44, 383397.
Lombard, L. M., & Haidle, M. N. (2012). Thinking a bow-and-arrow set: Cognitive implications
of middle stone age bow and stone-tipped arrow technology. Cambridge Archaeological
Journal, 22(2), 237264.
Lombard, L. M., & Phillipson, L. (2010). Indications of bow and stone-tipped arrow use 64,000
years ago in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Antiquity, 84, 635648. Cambridge Archaeological
Journal, 22(2), 237264.
Lorenz, K. Z. (1973, December 12). Analogy as a source of knowledge. Nobel Lecture. In
J. Lindsten (Ed.). (1992). Nobel lectures, physiology or medicine 19711980 (pp. 97107).
Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.
Lucas, H. C., & Goh, J. M. (2009). Disruptive technology: How Kodak missed the digital photography revolution. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 18, 4655.
Lyman, R. L., Todd, L., Van Pool, T. L., & OBrien, M. J. (2008a). Variation in North American
dart points and arrow points when one or both are present. Journal of Archaeological Science,
35, 28052812.
Lyman, R. L., Van Pool, T. L., & OBrien, M. J. (2008b). The diversity of North American
projectile-point types, before and after the bow and arrow. Journal of Anthropological
Archaeology, 28, 113.
McBrearthy, S. (2012). Sharpening the mind. Nature, 491, 531532.
Neander, K. (1991). Function as selected effects: The conceptual analysts defense. Philosophy of
Science, 58, 168184.
OBrien, M., & Lyman, R. L. (2002). Evolutionary archeology: Current status and future prospects. Evolutionary Anthropology, 11, 2636.
OBrien, M., Lyman, R. L., Mesoudi, A., & VanPool, T. L. (2010). Cultural traits as units of analysis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 365, 37973806.
Ochman, H., Lawrence, J. G., & Groisman, E. A. (2000). Lateral gene transfer and the nature of
bacterial innovation. Nature, 405, 299304.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). The theory of economic development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Shea, J. J., & Sisk, M. L. (2010). Complex projectile technology and homo sapiens dispersal into
western Eurasia. Paleoanthropology, 2010, 100122.
Simon, H. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, 106, 467482.
Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of artificial. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Sisk, M. L., & Shea, J. J. (2009). Experimental use and quantitative performance analysis of triagular flakes (Levallois points) used as arrowheads. Journal of Archaeological Science, 36,
20392047.
Usher, A. P. (1929). A history of mechanical inventions. New York: Mc Graw Hill Book Company.
Woese, C. R. (1987). Bacterial evolution. Microbiological Reviews, 51, 221271.
Woese, C. R. (2002). On the evolution of cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
99(13), 87428747.
Woese, C. R. (2004). A new biology for a new century. Microbiology and Molecular Biology
Reviews, 68, 173186.
Wragg Sykes, R. M. (2015). To see a world in a hafted tool: Birch pich composite technology,
cognition and memory in Neanderthals. In F. Coward, M. Pope, & F. Wenban-Smith (Eds.),
Settlement, society and cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 18
Trees, Languages and Genes: A Historical

Path
Federica Da Milano and Nicoletta Puddu
18.1
Parallels Between Linguistic and Biological Evolution
Approaching this topic, the first thing to establish is a clear definition of culture
and cultural evolution.1 Culture is one of those terms that has many different
meanings: as Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza (2013) point out, Kroeber and
Kluckhohn, anthropologists, put together 164 different definitions of the term.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, culture is the integrated pattern of
human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning
and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. In this view, how can we
define cultural traits? According to OBrien et al. (2010), echoing the distinction
made by Schumpeter (1934)2 between inventions and innovations
cultural traits are units of transmission that permit diffusion and create traditions patterned ways of doing things that exist in identifiable form over extended periods of time. As
with genes, cultural traits are subject to recombination, copying error, and the like and thus
can be the foundation for the production of new traits. In other words, cultural traits can be
both inventions new creations and innovations inventions that successfully spread.
(cit. in OBrien et al. 2010: 3797)
Connection: In most disciplines, cultural evolution has lost any progressionist meaning. A partial
exception is cultural anthropology (for a discussion, see Connection in the introduction of Chap. 3).
2
Connection: See Chap. 12 for the complete articulation of the relationship between economics
and cultural traits.
F. Da Milano (*)
e-mail: federica.damilano@unimib.it
N. Puddu
University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
e-mail: n.puddu@unica.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_18
341
342
F. Da Milano and N. Puddu
Moreover, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981: 73) define a cultural trait as the
result of any cultural action (by transmission of other individuals) that can be clearly
observed or measured on a discontinuous or continuous scale.
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) explicitly consider language as cultural
objects. From this perspective, traits would be observable and measurable
features of the language. The relationship between language and culture has been a
longstanding debate among linguists.3 Since Sapir-Whorfs studies, much attention
has been devoted to establishing how language influences thought and vice versa. In
some approaches cultural learning has been claimed to have a fundamental role in
language evolution (Christiansen 2013). According to Tomasello (2008: 315) [c]
onventional grammatical devices and constructions, just like simple conventions
such as words, are cultural-historical products created by specific cultural groups
for meeting their communicative needs. Even if not all the approaches give such
importance to culture in language evolution, stressing on the contrary the importance of innate knowledge (see Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker), no approach denies
that language is transmitted culturally. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) also
suggest that the forces of mutation, selection, migration and drift, which are central
to the theory of biological evolution under genetic transmission, have analogues in
the specific-trait approach to cultural evolution.
Language transmission has also been compared with gene transmission: CavalliSforza et al. (1988) outlined the most likely phylogenetic trees for worldwide human
groups, based on blood groups and other classical genetic markers, and found close
resemblances to the trees so obtained from the main suggestions for the phylogenetics
of the worlds language families then available. The paper raised a wide-ranging
discussion among linguists, but the idea that the transmission of both genes and
languages follows similar paths since then has been thoroughly investigated from
different perspectives. In recent years, many attempts have been made to compare
linguistic and genetic data. Their analogy is due to the population nature of both
language and gene transmission. Both language and gene transmission affect all
human populations (Sokal et al. 1990: 156). Languages and species are produced by
communities of individuals historically connoted, delimitated by a boundary
(cultural or biological), and both are subject to continuous change. Both genetic and
language patterns result from the biological and social interactions of individuals
and groups in the population concerned (Pievani 2011, 2013).
18.2
Models of Evolution in Linguistics and Biology
As a matter of fact, analogies between languages and biological organisms have

been used since ancient times (Mancini 2013) and were particularly developed in
nineteenth century linguistics (Morpurgo Davies 1994). During the first half of the
3
Connection: For a commentary of Cavalli Sforza and Feldmans theoretical endeavor, see Chap. 11.
18
Trees, Languages and Genes: A Historical Path
343
nineteenth century, many influential linguists, such as Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm,
Rasmus Rask, and Friedrich Schlegel made reference to botany, comparative
anatomy, and physiology.
The well known parallel between languages and species, which could both be
represented by means of a phylogenetic tree, is stated by Darwin in his famous
passage.4
If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of
man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout
the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects,
had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. [] The
various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be
expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect
together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the
filiation and origin of each tongue. (Darwin 1859: 319320)5
Darwin was not the first scientist to use an evolutionary tree: a rudimentary tree
was included in Lamarcks 1809 Philosophie Zoologique. However, the Origin of
Species (1859) made tree diagrams historically meaningful and useful as explanations of the natural world (Atkinson and Gray 2005: 517).
In 1863, just 4 years after the publication of Origin of the Species by Darwin, the
linguist August Schleicher published a paper (Die Darwinsche Theorie und die
Sprachwissenschaft) reconstructing an Indo-European language tree. Actually,
according to Koerner (1983), Schleicher had used language trees (Stammbaum) in
two 1853 publications before the Origin of Species was first published. Koerner
even credits the idea of the Stammbaum to Friedrich Schlegel (17721829) who
used this theoretical approach in an 1808 publication on comparative grammar.
In 1884, Brugmann made an important refinement to the way historical linguists
inferred language trees by making the crucial distinction between innovations,
shared characters that were not present in the ancestral form, and retentions,
shared characters inherited from a common ancestor. He proposed that a set of languages constitutes a subgroup (in other words, a clade) only if they are united by
shared innovations; shared retentions are irrelevant for determining a clade. This
distinction was made in biology 70 years later, in 1950, when Willi Hennig differentiated symplesiomorphies (shared retentions) from synapomorphies (shared
innovations).6
The theoretical model of the evolutionary tree is not always useful to represent
the differentiation of languages, because exchanges and mutual influences can occur
between different languages of neighbouring populations: it is a form of migration
On the importance of language studies on Darwins thought see also Cohen (2013).
13.3, 16.2, 20.3, and 20.4.
6
Connection: All these biological concepts are explained in detail in Chap. 16, along with their
analogues in culture.
5
344
which is not comparable to the migration which occurs in biology.7 When we study
the evolution of different species there can be no migratory exchange between
species because by definition the interbreeding between individuals of different
species cannot result in fertile offspring. Already some nineteenth century scholars
opposed the Stammbaum model of language evolution, among them one of
Schleichers students, Johannes F.H. Schmidt, who proposed a wave theory of language
change (Schmidt 1872). Studying dialects, he had become aware of the relevance
of borrowing between neighbouring populations. According to the wave theory,
language change spread in waves emanating from an epicentre. Schmidts model
shows a considerable resemblance to the demic diffusion models used recently in
biology, for example, by Menozzi et al. (1978).
Croft (2000), in his book eloquently entitled Explaining Language Change: An
Evolutionary Approach, has identified three approaches for an evolutionary model
of language change: literal, analogical, generalized. According to the first one,
language has a genetic capacity, and hence obeys certain principles of biology: this
approach is associated with Chomskyan linguistics, because Chomsky argues for
the biological basis of quite specific linguistic properties. The analogical or,
according to Winter-Froemel (2008), metaphorical approach finds analogies
between certain biological processes as described by evolutionary theory and certain
processes of language change that call for description. An example of the analogical
approach appears to be the use of the biological metaphor in Creole studies, e.g.
Mufwene (2001).8 Janda and Joseph (2003) discuss at length the necessary caution
needed in the adoption of metaphors and analogies drawn from the natural sciences
in a very interesting chapter devoted to the nature of language change. The third
approach is adopted by Lass (1990), who proposes a generalized theory of
evolutionary processes, which applies to the evolution of species and their traits in
biology, to language change in linguistics, and to other domains as well.
18.3
Languages and Genes
If parallels between biological organisms and languages date back to early periods
in the history of linguistics, more recently, the development of DNA studies and,
especially of population genetics, has moved the debate from the analogies between
languages and species to the analogies between languages and genes. We will discuss
here the main analogies and differences between languages and genes as they have
been proposed in the current debate.
7
Connection: The importance of horizontal transfer for cultural change is core of Chap. 17,
addressing the dynamics of technological innovation.
8
Connection: Language patterns can also be interpreted in terms of cultural creolization, as
presented in Sect. 2.5.
18
18.3.1
345
Gene Transmission and Language Transmission
Since languages and genes are transmitted vertically from parents to children, they
both possess a phylogenetic history. However, only language, like other cultural
objects, can also be transmitted horizontally and obliquely (Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldman 1981). The importance of the horizontal transmission of languages is well
known, having already been modeled in Schmidts wave theory and remarked on by
Cavalli-Sforza (1994). Some linguists, such as Mufwene (2001: 12) go as far as to
say that language transmission is primarily horizontal.
Languages and genes also differ in several aspects regarding the processes of
vertical transmission. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) noted that vertical cultural transmission is different from vertical genetic transmission since it does not
require biological kinship. Moreover, Cavalli-Sforza (1994) and Mufwene (2001)
noted that the transmission of language can be bidirectional, i.e. children may influence their parents linguistic behavior. For all these reasons, a perfect parallel transmission of biological and cultural inheritance is not always assured.
Mancini (2013) notes that, while the replication of genes happens because of
purely mechanical reasons, language variables are selected by the speaker on the
basis of their socio-pragmatic marks. In other words, the speaker cannot be considered as a passive host, since he is himself the motive of change.9 One of the results
of this is, for instance, that the child might not acquire his parents language because
parents decide not to transmit their heritage language (Comrie 2006). Language
shift is very common in case of minor languages and can take place gradually, over
several generations, or rapidly, over a generation or two (Austin and Sallabank
2011).
Finally Sokal et al. (1990) suggest that only genes have the Mendelian mechanism for segregation and recombination. However, Mufwene (2001) considers language restructuring intended as system reorganization in cases of intensive
language contact (and especially in Creole genesis) as comparable to genetic
recombination.
18.3.2
Language Boundaries and Genetic Boundaries
Both languages and genes change over space, and various studies highlight that
linguistic boundaries are often also genetic boundaries. Barbujani and Sokal (1990)
argue that in Europe 33 genetic boundaries are also linguistic boundaries and, moreover, that seven of these are not geographic boundaries.
Belle and Barbujani (2007) claim that, around the world, language barriers have
a small but detectable effect on DNA diversity. At a local level, geographic distances
9
Connection: Learning is treated as active appropriation also in the theoretical approach of Chap.
7, corroborated by empirical evidence from studies of multicultural minds.
346
are the major block to gene flow, but, on a broader scale, both geographical and
cultural barriers become relevant (Barbujani 1997). Cultural, linguistic and geographic barriers together not only have effects on the genome but also in cases of
relatively recent isolation (see, for instance, the case of Carloforte island in Robledo
et al. 2012).
Sims-Williams (1998), commenting on the work by Barbujani and Sokal (1990),
points out that there is a degree of arbitrariness in establishing linguistic boundaries.
As Gnerre (2011) remarks, the very notion of linguistic boundary is problematic,
since languages are often disposed on a dialectal continuum. The same difficulties
in establishing sharp boundaries between species and varieties has repeatedly been
observed by biologists (Hey 2001) and Darwin himself was much struck how
entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties (Darwin
1859: 48).
Given these caveats, linguistic barriers, like cultural barriers may certainly pose
a limit to gene flow.10 In contexts like Europe, major nation states led populations
and languages to seal themselves off from one another and marriages tended to be
celebrated within the speech community. However, Comrie (2006) suggests being
cautious in generalizing such a pattern to the whole world and, more so, to the past.
18.3.3
Genetic Drift and Language Drift
Both languages and genes can be subject to drifts. Indeed, caution must be used
in cases when we establish parallels between genetic drift and language drift.
Genetic drift results from random variations in the distribution of alleles from
one generation to the other. If a group of individuals, especially if small, isolate
from the parent species due to genetic drift and natural selection, its genome will
change considerably, giving rise to an isolate.
Language drift had already been defined by Sapir (1921: 165166):
Language exists only in so far as it is actually used spoken and heard, written and read.
What significant changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual variations.
This is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that the general drift of language can
be understood from an exhaustive descriptive study of these variations alone. They
themselves are random phenomena, like the waves of the sea, moving backward and
forward in purposeless flux. The linguistic drift has direction. In other words, only those
individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a certain direction, just as only
certain wave movements in the bay outline the tide. The drift of a language is constituted by
the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are
cumulative in some special direction.
According to Sapirs definition, an important difference emerges between genetic

drift, which is random, and language drift, which, even if based on random individual
variation, has a direction. Moreover, it has been claimed that language drift can be
10
Connection: On cultural boundaries and their symbolic nature, see Chap. 9.
18
347
sensitive to the will of the speakers, who, at different levels, and with different degrees
of awareness, may realize processes of convergence and divergence among
languages (Gnerre 2011; Grandi 2011).
A special case of genetic drift is the so called serial founder effect, which takes
place when two populations migrate over large distances. Since small migrant
populations carry only a small part of the genetic variability of the original group,
they tend to diverge rapidly.
Atkinson (2011), on the basis of Hay and Bauer (2007), claims that phonemes,
the smallest contrastive units in the sound system of a language, positively correlate
with population size like genes. Consequently, small populations undergo a serial
founder effect which reduces both their genetic variability and their phonemic
oppositions. Atkinson (2011) applies the serial founder effect model to global
phonemic diversity on the basis of the data in Haspelmath et al. (2005) and concludes that phonemic diversity decreases proportionally to the distance from Africa.
In his opinion, this supports an African origin of human languages and that in their
migration from Africa small populations reduced both their genetic and phonological
diversity.
Criticism to this approach was based on different points (for comments on both
data and method, see Bybee 2011). The unit of analysis itself is problematic: on the
one hand, the notion of phoneme is debated (see Albano Leoni 2013), and, on the
other hand, it has been argued that, in a possible analogy between genes and
phonemes, allophones should be considered as alleles. Consequently a founder
effect, if any, should be sought at the phonetic level, rather than at the phonological
level (Bowern 2011).
Especially controversial is the assumption that phonological complexity correlates directly with population size (see for instance Cysouw et al. 2012; Jaeger et al.
2012) and, what is more, no theoretical explanation is available for this possible
correlation (Donohue and Nichols 2011).
18.3.4
Molecular Clocks and Language Clocks
Both languages and genes change over time. However, as Patrick Sims-Williams
(2012) points out, neither linguistic nor genetic nodes are firmly fixed in both space
and time. Molecular clocks based on mtDNA and on the Y chromosome have
been widely used in order to date population splits. They are based on the idea that
neutral mutations arise at a constant rate: consequently, the number of mutations
that separate two populations can tell us the date of their separation. However, even
if the idea of a molecular clock is widely accepted in genetics, both regularity of
mutations and time rate estimation have been put into question. For this reason,
molecular clocks are assumed to have a relatively high error range in dating times
(Kondrashov and Kondrashov 2010).
In linguistics, dating times through systems which postulate regular time mutation were first proposed by Swadesh (1950) who was declaredly inspired by the
348
radiocarbon dating method developed some years before (Swadesh 1952). He

supposed that not only basic vocabulary, i.e. pronouns and numerals, but also
everyday expressions connected with concepts and experiences common to all
human groups or to the groups living in a given part of the world during a given
epoch tend not to be borrowed. Consequently, differences in basic vocabulary have
been considered as a useful tool to quantify distances among languages. In order to
measure such linguistic divergence, Swadesh compiled a list, known as
Swadeshs list, which in his definitive version (Swadesh 2006 [1971]) is made up
of 100 words and is intended to be a representative sample.
Moreover, he assumed that the words with a given meaning in basic vocabulary
have a constant rate of decay, i.e. they change at a constant time rate, measured
on a logarithmic basis. Such an approach, known as glottochronology, was heavily
criticized. In particular, the idea of a fixed rate change in basic vocabulary is at odds
with the fact that language change occurs at different speeds. As Heggarty (2010:
304) points out, language change and divergence are acutely susceptible to other
forces which can intervene to speed it up or (more questionably) slow it down; and
these forces are highly unstable through time and space. Moreover, a fundamental
role in language divergence is played by the coherence of speaker communities, so
that any measures of language divergence lexicostatistics included can reflect
differences not in time-depth but in the degree of coherence of speaker communities
(especially across a continuum) (Heggarty 2010: 305).
In recent times, quantitative approaches to linguistic diversity on a lexical basis
have been reconsidered and automated dating of the major language families on the
basis of lexical similarities have been proposed, for instance, by Holman et al.
(2011). New word lists of basic vocabulary have been proposed, like the sublist by
Holman et al. (2008), based on Swadeshs list, or the so-called Leipzig-Jakarta
list developed on the basis of loanword studies between 41 languages (Tadmor
2009).
Swadesh (1952: 455) was persuaded that of the three main aspects of language
sounds, structures, lexicon the third lends itself best to the requirements of a
statistical time index. While traditionally statistical methods were applied only to
the lexicon, more recent approaches have also tested statistical methods on other
levels of analysis. Heggarty et al. (2005) and McMahon et al. (2007) developed a
method to quantify phonetic distances among dialects and languages.
Longobardi and Guardiano (2009) proposed a Parametric Comparison Method
in order to measure syntactic distances among languages considered as more
stable and less arbitrary than lexical distances. This method is also the basis of an
ongoing research project called Language and Gene Lineages (LanGeLin), which
takes into account, at the same time, the languages and the genome of 53 populations of the world in order to compare genetic distances and linguistic distances and
build parallel taxonomies.
The relationship between language distances and language taxonomies takes us
to the key similarity between population genetics and historical linguistics which is
the possibility of reconstructing a phylogenetic history for both languages and
18
349
genes. In other words, they can both be represented through trees and this allows
scholars of both disciplines to compare their data.
18.3.5
Phylogenetic Methods
18.3.5.1
Language Trees and Gene Trees
In 1988, a seminal paper by Cavalli-Sforza (et al.) matched a genetic tree of 42 word
populations based on distances calculated on 120 allele frequencies, with a language
tree, mainly based on the works by Greenberg (1987) and Ruhlen (1987). CavalliSforza et al. (1994), in their comprehensive study on the history and geography of
human genes, often mention language families and compare their phylogeny with
linguistic phylogenies.11 These studies have led to a very interesting debate in
linguistics which had its origin in the Darwinian debate and continues today.
As previously mentioned, in historical linguistics phylogenetic relationships
have been traditionally represented by schleicherian trees. Population genetics
also makes use of phylogenetic trees, which show the genetic distance and divergence times between populations. Therefore, the two trees display different types of
relationships: in the case of traditional language trees, branches conjoin languages
which are assumed to descend directly from one another, while, in the case of the
genetic trees, branches represent relative distance between populations.
Moreover, the language tree used by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988) was fundamentally based on the multilateral comparison method, first elaborated by Greenberg
(1957) and then applied by Greenberg (1987) and Ruhlen (1987) in order to group
language families into superordinated linguistic phyla and macrophyla.
The method of multilateral (or mass) comparison resides on the principle that
finding the lexical similarities of a few words across many languages is an index
of genetic affiliation. The main criticism to this method is that such similarities are
not found by means of the comparative method which is based on regular sound
correspondences between forms close enough in meaning (see for instance Campbell
2004; Ramat 2009). A standard comparative method is however not suitable for
long-distance grouping, since it cannot apply at time depths over 8,000 years
(Nichols 1992).
Furthermore, the possibility of comparing linguistic traditional trees and genetic
trees is related to the assumption that in both changes occur at constant speed. As
already noted, however, language change can also occur with different speeds in
relation to extra-linguistic events, such as migrations or invasions.
Moreover, a clear distinction between ethnos and language must be kept, since
ethnically and culturally different populations may speak the same language, while
populations more akin may speak different languages (see Sims Williams 1998; Di
Giovine 2009; Consani 2010).
11
Connection: The reader can refer to Chap. 16 to have a presentation of phylogenetic analysis.
350
As Mancini (2013: 128) emphasizes, since languages are not natural species, but
rather cultural objects, the apparent historical continuity that is perceived in any tree
diagram and that which is projected in the lines between the different taxa hides
relations of reciprocal hybridization which are often very deep. In linguistics interspecific fertilization is very frequent, whereas in genetics it is absent by definition.
18.3.5.2
Computational Methods for Linguistic Phylogeny
In recent years many computational techniques have been derived directly from
biological sciences and have been adopted by linguists in order to build language
phylogenies. The main difference between traditional schleicherian trees and
computational trees is that traditional trees are rooted (or hierarchical), i.e. they
reconstruct the mother-daughter relationships in language families (Nichols and
Warnow 2008). Computational trees, on the contrary, can be either rooted or not
and, if not, they simply measure distance between languages like genetic trees. The
nineteenth century debate between the tree-model and the wave-model is also
reflected in these models, since there are computational tools which return a tree,
while others give a network (Heggarty et al. 2010). Networks represent historical
relations without favouring vertical over horizontal transmission, and so are
expected to represent both phenomena of divergence and convergence. Computational
methods also differ on the stochastic model they assume: a fundamental difference
must be traced between character-based algorithms, which do not assume a constant
rate of evolution, and distance-based algorithms, which, on the contrary, do assume
it (Longobardi et al. 2013).
In addition, phylogenetic analyses differ on the kind of data matrix they use.
Nichols and Warnow (2008) divide the characters used in linguistic phylogeny into
three classes: cognates, typological characters, and words.
Cognates are the traditional characters used to reconstruct phylogenies. They
are recognized by means of the traditional comparative method as individual
morphemes, consisting of a form and a function or meaning and demonstrably
inherited from a unique ancestor (Nichols and Warnow 2008: 764). They are typically non-homoplastic, since they are supposed not to arise by chance and recur
independently. Phyletic characters are similar to cognates, since they are changes
which, in principle, can recur independently, but which are sufficiently specific to
be recognized as unique in a particular family. An example of a phylogeny based on
cognates are the works of Ringe et al. (2002) and Gray and Atkinson (2003) on the
Indo-European family.
Typological characters, on the contrary, are by their own definition homoplastic.
They are structural features of language, with more than one possible value and can
be found in any part of grammar and lexicon. The most comprehensive collection of
typological features is Haspelmath et al. (2005), which is currently the basis for
many phylogenetic analyses (see for instance the work of Dunn et al. 2005 on
Austronesian languages).
18
351
Words, or better, lists of glosses, can be used as characters if they undergo a

lexicostatistic analysis as discussed in Sect. 18.3.4 (see for instance McMahon et al.
2005, who apply a lexicostatistic approach to the Andean languages).
Nichols and Warnow (2008), having discussed at length different computational
phylogenetic methods that have been applied to different language families, conclude that, aside from method, it is accurate data selection both of characters and
languages that guarantees adequate estimation of phylogenies.
18.3.6
Languages and Genes: A Summary
Through the analysis of the relevant literature, we have compared methods in

historical linguistics and population genetics, highlighting analogies and differences especially in their unities of analysis. We can summarize the main points here:
Languages and genes can be transmitted vertically from parents to children.
However, language transmission can also be bidirectional, vertical, horizontal
and oblique. Moreover, the transmission of a language from parents to children
can be interrupted because of the speakers attitude towards the language, as in
cases of language shift.
Languages and genes change over space and it is possible to trace boundaries
between languages and genotypes. Linguistic barriers, like other cultural or geographic barriers that can pose a limit to gene flow, have a detectable effect on
genotypes. However, boundaries between languages can be fuzzy and difficult
to detect in a dialectal continuum.
Languages and gene pools tend to develop peculiar features in isolation, i.e., they
are subjected to drifts. However a fundamental distinction must be noticed:
while genetic drift is random by definition, language drift can be sensitive to the
will of the speakers.
Languages and genes change over time and clocks have been proposed in
order to measure their split date. However, if molecular clocks are widely
accepted, language clocks are much more debated, mainly because linguistic
change does not happen at a regular mean.
Both languages and genes possess phylogenies which can be represented by
means of trees. The tree-metaphor has been extensively applied in both linguistics and population genetics: genetic trees and language trees have often been
compared in order to reconstruct population history. We have highlighted, on the
one hand, the interest in comparing methods and data from different domains
and, on the other hand, the potential risks of such a procedure.
352
18.4
Conclusions
As Grandi (2011) underlined, biological evolution, cultural evolution and linguistic

evolution are intertwined in a very complex way. On the one hand, language played
a fundamental role in the cultural evolution of modern humans. On the other hand,
cultural evolution, while unravelling according to different dynamics in comparison
to biological evolution, can orient it. Moreover, biological sciences and language
sciences, since early periods, have applied similar methods in order to reconstruct
phylogenies.
After the discovery of DNA and, especially, with the development of population
genetics, analogies between languages and genes have been developed and concepts
such as vertical transmission, drift, clock-like mutation, and the founder
effect were applied to both fields. Through the analysis of literature, we have
shown, on the one hand, that such analogies have been fruitfully used in order to
reconstruct similar processes. On the other hand, we stressed the importance of
proceeding with all due caution in establishing analogies, and, especially, in identifying unities of comparison.
Authors Note The structure of the paper has been developed by both authors. Federica Da
Milano is responsible for Sects. 18.1 and 18.2, Nicoletta Puddu for Sect. 18.3; both authors for the
conclusions. We would like to thank Carla Cal, Antonietta Marra and two anonymous reviewers
helpful comments and suggestions. All mistakes are our own.
References
Albano Leoni, F. (2013). Genetica, linguistica e fonologia. In E. Banfi (Ed.), Sullorigine del
linguaggio e delle lingue storico-naturali. Un confronto fra linguisti e non linguisti (pp. 4968).
Roma: Bulzoni.
Atkinson, Q. D. (2011). Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language
expansion from africa. Science, 332(6027), 346349.
Atkinson, Q. D., & Gray, R. D. (2005). Curious parallels and curious connections-phylogenetic
thinking in biology and historical linguistics. Systematic Biology, 54(4), 513526.
Austin, P. K., & Sallabank, J. (Eds.). (2011). The Cambridge handbook of endangered languages.
Barbujani, G. (1997). DNA variation and language affinities. American Journal of Human
Genetics, 61, 10111014.
Barbujani, G., & Sokal, R. R. (1990). Zones of sharp genetic change in Europe are also linguistic
boundaries. Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 87(5), 18161819.
Belle, E. M. S., & Barbujani, G. (2007). Worldwide analysis of multiple microsatellites: Language
diversity has a detectable influence on DNA diversity. American Journal of Physical
Bowern, C. (2011). Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects. Linguistic
Typology, 15(2), 207216.
Bybee, J. (Ed.). (2011). The vanishing phonemes debate, apropos of Atkinson 2011. Linguistic
Typology, 15(2) (Special Issue), 147534.
18
353
Campbell, L. (2004). Historical linguistics: An introduction (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.
Cavalli Sforza, L. L. (1994). Geni, popoli e lingue. Milano: Adelphi.
Cavalli Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative
approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Cavalli-Sforza, F. (2013). Chi siamo. La storia della diversit umana.
Torino: Codice Edizioni.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Piazza, A., Menozzi, P., & Mountain, J. (1988). Reconstruction of human
evolution: Bringing together genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 85, 60026006.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Menozzi, P., & Piazza, A. (1994). The history and geography of human
genes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Christiansen, M. H. (2013). Modelling cultural evolution. Language acquisition as multiple-cue
integration. In C. Lefebvre, B. Comrie, & H. Cohen (Eds.), New perspectives on the origins of
language (pp. 487504). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cohen, H. (2013). Historical, Darwinian and current perspectives on the origin(s) of language. In
C. Lefebvre, B. Comrie, & H. Cohen (Eds.), New perspectives on the origins of language
(pp. 330). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Comrie, B. (2006, September 810). Languages and genes. Position paper for the conference
language and genes. University of California Santa Barbara. http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/
projects/Languages-and-Genes/position.html
Consani, C. (2010). Scienze umane e scienze della natura nel dibattito scientifico del XIX secolo:
lapporto della linguistica. In F. Stoppa & R. Veraldi (Eds.), Darwin tra storia e scienza
(pp. 281292). Roma: Edizioni Universitarie Romane.
Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman.
Cysouw, M., Dediu, D., & Moran, S. (2012). Comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial
founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science, 335, 657.
Di Giovine, P. (2009). Identit linguistica e identit etnica: una falsa equazione. Geotema, 37,
2932.
Donohue, M., & Nichols, J. (2011). Does phoneme inventory size correlate with population size?
Linguistic Typology, 15, 161170.
Dunn, M. R., Terrill, A., Reesnik, G. P., Foley, R. R., & Levinson, S. C. (2005). Structural phylogenies and the reconstruction of ancient language history. Science, 309, 20722075.
Gnerre, M. (2011). Linafferrabile diversit delle lingue. In N. Grandi (Ed.), Dialoghi sulle lingue
e sul linguaggio (pp. 115136). Bologna: Patron.
Grandi, N. (2011). Lingue e linguaggio nellequilibrio instabile tra natura e cultura. In N. Grandi
(Ed.), Dialoghi sulle lingue e sul linguaggio (pp. 1125). Bologna: Patron.
Gray, R. D., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2003). Language tree divergences support the Anatolian theory of
Indo-European origin. Nature, 426, 435439.
Greenberg, J. (1957). Essays in linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenberg, J. (1987). Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. S., Gil, D., & Comrie, B. (Eds.). (2005). World atlas of language
structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hay, J., & Bauer, L. (2007). Phoneme inventory size and population size. Language, 83, 388.
Heggarty, P. (2010). Beyond lexicostatiscs. How to get more out of word list comparisons.
Diachronica, 27(2), 301324.
Heggarty, P., Maguire, W., & McMahon, R. (2005). From phonetic similarity to dialect classification:
A principled approach. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera, & D. Geeraerts (Eds.), Perspectives
on variation (pp. 4391). Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.
Heggarty, P., Maguire, W., & McMahon, A. M. S. (2010). Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How
divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories. Proceedings of the
354
Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(Special issue on Cultural and Linguistic Diversity,
Eds. J. Steele, P. Jordan, & E. Cochrane), 38293843.
Hey, J. (2001). Genes, categories and species. The evolutionary and cognitive causes of the species
problem. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holman, E. W., Wichmann, S., Brown, C. H., Velupillai, V., Muller, A., & Bakker, D. (2008).
Explorations in automated language comparison. Folia Linguistica, 42, 331354.
Holman, E. W., Brown, C. H., Wichmann, S., Mller, A., Velupillai, V., Hammarstrm, H., Sauppe,
S., Jung, H., Bakker, D., Brown, P., Belyaev, O., Urban, M., Mailhammer, R., List, J.-M., &
Egorov, D. (2011). Automated dating of the worlds language families based on lexical similarity. Current Anthropology, 52(6), 841875.
Jaeger, T. F., Pontillo, D., & Graff, P. (2012). Comment on Phonemic diversity supports a serial
founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science, 335, 1042.
Janda, R. D., & Janda, B. D. (2003). On language, change, and language change or, of history,
linguistics, and historical linguistics. In R. Janda & B. D. Janda (Eds.), The handbook of
historical linguistics (pp. 3180). Oxford: Blackwell.
Koerner, K. (Ed.). (1983). Preface. In A. Schleicher, Die sprachen Europaas in systematischer
ubersicht. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Kondrashov, F. A., & Kondrashov, A. S. (2010). Measurements of spontaneous rates of mutations
in the recent past and the near future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365,
11691176.
Lamarck, J.B. (1809). Philosophie zoologique. English edition: Lamarck, J.B. (1984). Zoological
philosophy: An exposition with regard to the natural history of animals (trans: Elliot, H.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lass, R. (1990). How to do things with junks: Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of
Linguistics, 26, 79102.
Longobardi, G., & Guardiano, C. (2009). Evidence for syntax as a signal of historical relatedness.
Lingua, 119, 16791706.
Longobardi, G., Guardiano, C., Silvestri, G., Boattini, A., & Ceolin, A. (2013). Toward a syntactic
phylogeny of modern Indo-European languages. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 3(1),
122152.
Mancini, M. (2013). Il paradosso darwiniano: Convergenze e divergenze di paradigma. In E. Banfi
(Ed.), Sullorigine del linguaggio e delle lingue storico-naturali. Un confronto fra linguisti e
non linguisti (pp. 105142). Roma: Bulzoni.
McMahon, A., Heggarty, P., McMahon, R., & Slaska, N. (2005). Swadesh sublist and the benefits
of borrowing: An Andean case study. Transaction of the Philological Society, 103(2),
147170.
McMahon, A., et al. (2007). The sound patterns of English: Representing phonetic similarity.
English Language and Linguistics, 11, 113143.
Menozzi, P., Piazza, A., & Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. (1978). Synthetic maps of human gene frequencies
in Europeans. Science, 201, 786792.
Morpurgo Davies, A. (1994). La linguistica dellOttocento. In G. Lepschy (Ed.), Storia della
linguistica (Vol. 3, pp. 11399). Bologna: Il Mulino.
Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nichols, J. (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nichols, J., & Warnow, T. (2008). Tutorial on computational linguistic phylogeny. Language and
Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 760820.
OBrien, M. J., Lyman, R. L., Mesoudi, A., & VanPool, T. L. (2010). Cultural traits as units of
analysis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 365, 37973806.
Pievani, T. (2011). Evoluzione delle specie, evoluzione delle lingue: affinit, interazioni e cautele.
In N. Grandi (Ed.), Dialoghi sulle lingue e sul linguaggio (pp. 5774). Bologna: Patron.
18
355
Pievani, T. (2013). Levoluzione del linguaggio e la grande espansione umana: nuovi intrecci fra
genetica e linguistica. In E. Banfi (Ed.), Sullorigine del linguaggio e delle lingue storiconaturali. Un confronto fra linguisti e non linguisti (pp. 153168). Roma: Bulzoni.
Ramat, P. (2009). Uno sguardo dinsieme. In P. Cotticelli Kurras & G. Graffi (Eds.), Lingue, ethnos
e popolazioni: evidenze linguistiche, biologiche e culturali. Atti del XXXII Convegno della
Societ Italiana di Glottologia (pp. 1131). Roma: Il Calamo.
Ringe, D. A., Warnow, T., & Taylor, A. (2002). Indo-European and computational cladistics.
Transactions of the Philological Society, 100, 59129.
Robledo, R., Corrias, L., Bachis, V., Puddu, N., Mameli, A., Vona, G., & Cal, C. M. (2012).
Analysis of a genetic isolate: The case of Carloforte (Italy). Human Biology, 84, 735754.
Ruhlen, M. (1987). A guide to the worlds languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language. An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company.
Schleicher, A. (1863). Die darwinsche theorie und die sprachwissenschaft. Weimar: Hermann Bohlau.
Schleicher, A. (1873). Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Weimar: Bhlau.
Schmidt, J. (1872). Die verwantschaftsverhaltnisse der Indogermanische sprachen. Weimar:
Herman Bohlau.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1934). The theory of economic development: An inquiry into profits, capital,
credit, interest, and the business cycle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sims Williams, P. (1998). Genetics, linguistics and prehistory: Thinking big and thinking straight.
Antiquity, 72, 505527.
Sims Williams, P. (2012). Bronze and Iron-age Celtic speakers: What dont we know, what cant
we know, and what could we know? Language, genetics and archaeology in the twenty-first
century. The Antiquaries Journal, 92, 427449.
Sokal, R. R., Oden, N. L., Legendre, P., Fortin, M.-J., Kim, J., Thomson, B. A., Vaudor, A.,
Harding, R. M., & Barbujani, G. (1990). Genetics and language in European population. The
American Naturalist, 135(2), 157175.
Swadesh, M. (1950). Salish internal relationships. International Journal of American Linguistics,
16, 157167.
Swadesh, M. (1952). Lexico-statistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, 96(4), 453463.
Swadesh, M. (2006 [1971]). The origin and diversification of language. New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers.
Tadmor, U. (2009). Loanwords in the worlds languages: Finding and results. In M. Haspelmath &
U. Tadmor (Eds.), Loanwords in the worlds languages. A comparative handbook (pp. 5575).
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Winter-Froemel, E. (2008). Towards a comprehensive view of language change. Three recent
evolutionary approaches. In U. Detges & R. Waltereit (Eds.), The paradox of grammatical
change. Perspectives from romance (pp. 215250). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chapter 19
Signaling in Style: On Cooperation, Identity

and the Origins of Visual Art
Larissa Mendoza Straffon
19.1
Introduction
Visual art is one of the most characteristic human cultural traits. We now have evidence that its practice goes back over 100,000 years, and its universal presence and
relevance among modern-day populations make it a fascinating case study for
researchers of behavioral evolution. Accounts of why and what for did humans first
start to recurrently engage in visual art vary from simple pleasure to Machiavellian
social manipulation.1 From an evolutionary perspective, several authors have argued
for visual art as a human adaptation for functions that range from mate choice
(Dutton 2009; Miller 2000), to social cohesion and alliance (Coe 2003; Dissanayake
1992), to cognitive enhancement (Zeki 1999). These explanations, however, do not
always incorporate data from the archaeological and palaeoanthropological records,
which provide the only tangible evidence for the actual processes involved in the
emergence and early development of visual art. Due to this relative disregard of the
material record, most existing models have not been able to account satisfactorily
for three key issues in visual arts origins: (1) Timing: why visual art evolved when
it did; (2) Uniqueness: why it seems to have flourished only among Homo sapiens
populations; and; (3) Form: why it followed the pattern of development observed in
the archaeological record.
The theory of style as an information signal developed by anthropologists
Martin Wobst (1977) and Polly Wiessner (1983, 1984) has the potential to explain
these patterns of formal development, which is one of the key issues at hand. Seeing
style as one of the central components of visual artworks could clarify why visual
1
Connection: Chaps. 20 and 21 address in similar evolutionary whys and hows of human traits
that determine the capacity for cultural variation: aesthetic preferences and literature.
L. Mendoza Straffon (*)

Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
e-mail: l.mendoza@hum.leidenuniv.nl
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_19
357
358
L. Mendoza Straffon
art became a particularly suitable signal for expressing social identity in cooperative networks.2
In this paper, I present a hypothesis that attempts to reconcile functional accounts
of visual art origins with the earliest traces of visual artworks known to us, by suggesting a communication framework. That is, I propose that by conceiving of visual
art as a communication signal it should be possible both, to account for the array of
effects and functions of visual art pointed out by existing models, and to explain the
timing and developmental pattern of visual artworks in the late Pleistocene.3
19.2
Proposal
The account presented below relies on three key premises: (1) In the Pleistocene,
modern human populations became organised in networks of indirect reciprocal
cooperation, i.e. band society. (2) Indirect reciprocity selected for cultural strategies
of individual recognition, i.e. extended memory based on sign systems (social markers), and (3) The pay-offs of indirect reciprocity favoured increased investment in
social markers, namely visual art, as a proxy of identity and reputation.
My argument is that the sort of reciprocal relations that typify human societies
require high memory capacity for individual recognition and monitoring of behavior. Because of cognitive constraints, large-scale indirect reciprocity favoured the
development of ways to overcome these limitations. Some solutions were cognitive
(e.g. chunking information to remember), and others were cultural (e.g. sign systems). Visual art arose as one of these cultural strategies. Because visual art initially
became a manner of displaying individual identity through convention, it became
relevant to a persons social image, which is an important indicator for engaging in
cooperation. So, even if visual art turned out to be a costly strategy, its cost would
have been compensated by pay-offs in future returns by reciprocity partners, which
came to be a powerful motivation for people wanting to invest in it. Because recognition through visual art created expectations about behavior, it helped manage
interaction risks with out-group individuals, selecting for lower indices of stress and
conflict, and greater cooperation. As human populations became larger and more
expanded, more intensive interactions between social networks favoured the emergence of collective identities and forms of visual art. In turn, larger populations
could support the specialization of visual art practices, allowing for the development of increasingly complex artistic traditions.
2
Connection: Sect. 10.3 offers a philosophical analysis of style for example artistic or writing
style as not planned, repeated out of control, and recognized in hindsight and on a large observation scale.
3
Connection: This Chapter often recalls the crucial role played by archaeology. Please, refer to
Chap. 15 for a theoretical introduction to the role of archeology in identifying cultures and cultural
traits.
19
Signaling in Style: On Cooperation, Identity and the Origins of Visual Art
359
To support this, I set out to show that: (a) modern humans are in fact highly cooperative and that indirect reciprocity is a uniquely modern human strategy; (b) huntergatherers depend on networks organized by indirect reciprocal relations to obtain
sufficient access to resources and mates; (c) keeping up with these extended social
networks surpasses the capacity of human memory, but is managed by cultural strategies, such as social markers; and, (d) visual art arose as a cultural strategy toinform
about the identity and reputation of art-makers and art-displayers, which is relevant
in social interactions beyond a persons intimate network. But first, I offer a definition of visual art as a signal, and a brief summary of the archaeological record of
early visual art forms.4
19.3
Defining Visual Art as a Signal
Visual art, in archaeology and art history, has often been defined as a set of artifacts
or practices with aesthetic and/or symbolic properties, devised for pleasure or expression (e.g. Breuil and Windels 1952; Gombrich 1995; Leroi-Gourhan 1993). Such a
definition, while broad enough to allow the inclusion of all sorts of archaeological
examples of visual arts, is more descriptive than prescriptive, that is, it may inform
us about what visual art does or what it looks like, but not much about what it is. To
be sure, visual art does have an aesthetic and a symbolic component, but neither is
restricted to nor sufficient for defining visual art. Evolutionary models, for their part,
have recurrently defined visual art in terms of what it evolved for, suggesting an
array of adaptive functions, for instance as fitness indicator in mate choice (Miller
2000), as message enhancer in communal ceremonies (Dissanayake 1992), as symbolic display (Power 1999), or as mark of group membership (Coe 2003). When
explored in detail, these examples, and several others, denote that visual art conveys
information. To put it simply, implicitly or explicitly, visual art is recognized as a
communication signal, and I suggest that it should be defined as such.
Defining visual art as a signal actually can explain why on the one hand, as
archaeologists and art historians argue, it is pleasurable and expressive, and on the
other, why it serves so many functions, as evolutionists have noted. In biological
communication studies, a signal is described as any act or structure (stimulus) that
conveys information to other organisms and affects their behavior (Otte 1974). To
be effective, signals must be detectable, that is, they must grab the attention of the
perceiver and be distinguishable against the background (Endler 1993). Therefore,
to enhance detectability, signals will usually exploit the receivers perceptual
biases and rely on strategies such as redundancy, conspicuousness, pattern, novelty, and exaggeration, which incidentally are characteristics often attributed to
visual art (Dissanayake 2007; Dutton 2009: 52). In this manner, visual arts
4
Connection: The hypothesis of visual art as a signal to obtain cooperation in complex societies is
a good example of applying Evolutionary Game Theory (Sect. 12.3) and its models of evolution of
cooperative behaviors.
360
L. Mendoza Straffon
aesthetic component is explained by the signals necessity to stimulate the viewers

perception. To this aim, visual art incorporates and makes use of sensorial biases
and preferences related to an objects visual properties, such as colour, size, texture, shape, etc. (Aiken 1998; Hodgson 2006; Verpooten and Nelissen 2010).
Furthermore, as mentioned above, a signal is not only about emitting information
but its purpose is also to influence the viewers behavior, for instance in order to
coordinate action or influence decision-making. Visual art, then, exploits the aesthetic properties of materials to grab attention, and also plays on the affective reactions that these evoke to influence the viewer. But whereas perceptual biases are, in
their majority, biologically determined, affective systems, related to that which is
seen as good, pleasing, beautiful, relevant, etc., are largely shaped by culture (EiblEibesfeldt 1988; Grammer et al. 2003; Panksepp 2005). Furthermore, visual art is
in principle conventional and involves assigning meaning to an object or behavior,
in other words, it is symbolic (Bunge 2003:58).
In brief, visual art, like all biological communication signals, relies on the mechanisms of display and response, and increases detectability by manipulating the
perceptual biases of conspecifics, but in addition, visual art exploits human cultural
affective systems and symbolic conventions, which accounts for pleasure and
expressiveness. Understanding art as a signal, further explains its multiple functions. Animal signals, too, are often displayed in various contexts. For example,
birdsong can be used to signal territoriality, for individual recognition, and to lure
mates (Naguib and Riebel 2006); cephalopods bioluminescence serves to entice
prey, deter predators, coordinate action, and attract mates (Mather 2004); and the
mimetic abilities of chameleons are employed in camouflage, rivalry, and sexual
display alike (Stuart-Fox and Moussalli 2008). So, animals make use of their perceptual and physical abilities to communicate with each other in different situations,
and humans are no exception (Finnegan 2002), therefore there is no need to restrict
visual art to one particular function, either today or in the past. But unlike the animal
examples given previously, visual art (often) involves an extra-somatic display element, i.e. it is not an organ or a physical trait, but it requires the adoption and
manipulation of material objects. In this sense, visual art is also a form of human
technology (Kuhn and Stiner 2007), and like any technology we should expect it to
change and diversify over time and across cultures. These changes in the technological aspect of visual art, in addition, can be traced back in the archaeological
record, allowing us to infer patterns of occurrence and development and to link
these to social interactions.
A view of visual art as a communication device is not at all a new perspective in
either archaeology or art history. However, in the past, communication approaches
have focused mainly on explaining, interpreting or decoding the messages contained in art and on the dynamics of information exchange. Cognitive and behavioral
archaeology have often taken that position, where the goal has been to reconstruct
systems of symbols and meanings through the study of art and other cultural remains
(Tilley 1994). For instance, in the study of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, much has
been said about the possible meaning of the paintings, whereas much less has been
suggested in terms of testable hypotheses that explain its development across
19
361
periods. Similarly, evolutionary scenarios have put forward many possible adaptive
functions for visual art, but because visual art, like most signals, can be used for
several purposes, reverse-engineering from (one) current function offers only
descriptions of visual arts effects but does not explain how it became part of the
human behavioral and cultural repertoires in the first place. Hence, in order to formulate novel and viable hypotheses on the evolutionary origins of visual art, it might
be fruitful to shift our traditional focus from content (information/meaning) and
function (effects) to form (material/style) and development (diversification/change).
That is, by looking at the emergence and transformation of different visual art forms,
materials, techniques and styles, we will be better equipped to construct competing
hypotheses for the origins and function of visual art, than by speculating about its
meaning.
To sum up, visual art complies with all the characteristics of a visual communication signal: it is a stimulus that conveys information (about the sender or the
environment) and influences the behavior of the perceiver by eliciting an aesthetic
and affective reaction. Hence I suggest that visual art should be redefined as a communication signal expressed in material culture, or signalling in artifact mode
(Wobst 1977: 326), and should be studied as such.
19.4
Summary of the Early Record of Visual Art
Traditionally, studies on the origins of visual art have focused on the earliest evidence of figurative art, of which the most impressive examples are the Upper
Palaeolithic cave paintings of France and Spain. So far, the oldest date for these
painted caves has been obtained from Chauvet Cave, in France, at 33,000 BP
(Clottes and Arnold 2003). The earliest examples of representational art in Europe
are nonetheless not painted but sculpted in mammoth ivory. The region of Swabia,
in Germany, has yielded a number of small animal and anthropomorphic ivory figurines. The most remarkable examples are a female representation, known as the
Hohle Fels Venus, dated at c.40,000 BP and the Lwenmensch statuette, part
man-part lion, at c.35,000 BP (Conard 2003, 2009; Conard and Bolus 2003).
However, recent finds in Africa and the Middle East have made scholars reconsider the practices that may actually constitute the earliest visual art-making. It has
become apparent that the oldest manifestations of visual art include pigment use,
personal ornaments and incised objects.
In South Africa, the sites of Klasies River, Howiesons Poort, Border Cave, and
Blombos Cave have yielded a long record of ochre use spanning from 160 to 75,000
years ago (Barham 1998; McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Watts 2009), and in the
Levant, evidence from Qafzeh Cave in Israel, shows that red ochre was being
extracted and processed there some 90,000 years ago (Hovers et al. 2003). It is
notable that ochre minerals were being carefully selected and processed: particular
ochre sources were targeted, the most intense hues of red were sought-after, and
often transported some distance to be finally processed and used, which points
362
L. Mendoza Straffon
to intentional actions that would not be expected if pigment use had been casual or
strictly utilitarian (McBrearty and Stringer 2007; Watts 1999). A recent find of a
100,000 year-old ochre-processing workshop at the site of Blombos Cave confirms
that ochre was being purposively exploited for pigment production (Henshilwood
et al. 2011). The recurrent presence of red ochre, in particular, in early modern
human contexts suggests that ochre use is a deeply rooted practice in our species
(Watts 2009), and most probably it was used for utilitarian as well as ritual and
aesthetic activities. For example, several of the early seashell beads discussed below
show traces of red ochre, which indicates either purposeful coloration or transfer by
contact with ochre-stained skin or garments; suggesting the aesthetic use of red pigments. Furthermore, red ochre is frequently found in association with human burial,
particularly in the European Early Upper Palaeolithic (Riel-Salvatore and GravelMiguel 2013), which points to a possible ritual use. However, because the actual
applications of ochre can only be inferred indirectly, its interpretation as evidence
of visual art behavior remains somewhat ambiguous and controversial (DErrico
et al. 2012).
The presence of personal ornaments, or beads, offers a stronger case as evidence for visual art. Once seen as mere trinkets, researchers now recognize the
artistic, symbolic and social potential of personal ornaments and the important role
that they might have played in the lives of Pleistocene humans (Moro and Gonzlez
2010). With this re-evaluation personal ornaments are now considered a hallmark of
modern human behavior (McBrearty and Brooks 2000), and as symbolic artifacts
credited with specific social functions, for instance to convey identity (Kuhn and
Stiner 2007; White 1993; Zilho 2007). The earliest archaeological examples of
personal ornaments are constituted by seashells of small marine molluscs that in
several cases have been perforated, polished, coloured with pigment, and hung from
a string (Henshilwood et al. 2004; Vanhaeren et al. 2013). Those modifications indicate that the shells could have been used as jewellery or decorations sewn to pieces
of clothing, or to personal items like bags, baskets, or domestic utensils (White
1992). These shell ornaments have been found in several Pleistocene sites in Israel
and in the north and south of the African continent, dating as far back as 120,000 BP
(Vanhaeren et al. 2006). Body ornamentation is a good medium for social communication, particularly to convey messages of ethnicity and identity (Coe 2003; Kuhn
and Stiner 2007; White 1993; Wiessner 1983, 1984; Wobst 1977; Zilho 2007).
Another class of early visual artworks are engraved or incised artifacts. These
include objects showing traces of intentionally made patterns, or decorations, generally by incision. The earliest examples of such items are constituted by materials
marked with repeated linear or geometrical motifs. Blombos Cave in South Africa
has yielded a collection of over a dozen engraved pieces of ochre dated between 100
and 75,000 years ago (Henshilwood et al. 2009). The site of Diepkloof in South
Africa yielded a group of 270 ostrich eggshell fragments showing deeply engraved,
well-arranged linear motifs dated to around 60,000 years ago. In ethnography,
ostrich eggs are typically used by the Kalahari San hunter-gatherer groups to collect
and store water and are engraved with geometric patterns, similar to the ones from
the archaeological examples, to indicate the ownership or content of the container
19
363
(Texier et al. 2010), which may suggest a possible function for the archaeological
examples.
In sum, the types of materials considered as the earliest evidence for visual art
behavior in the Pleistocene include pigments, personal ornaments, decorated
objects, carvings, and wall or rock paintings, and variations of them. These are all
objects or practices imbued with conventional aesthetic and affective properties,
made or used for display and the (implicit or explicit) transmission of information
to affect others behaviors (i.e. signalling). The early record of visual art however is
neither strictly linear nor continuous; some forms appear and disappear at different times and places, while the emergence of a new form does not dictate the extinction of pre-existing ones. We should also consider that there undoubtedly were other
forms of visual art which have left no trace in the archaeological record (e.g. body
art, visual art made from or on perishable materials like wood, bark and leather, and
temporary visual art forms like sand painting). But from the surviving evidence, it
is clear that humans have recurrently engaged in the making of visual art for at least
100,000 years, some 60,000 years earlier than usually considered. So any new
model of visual art origins must account for the current state of the record and
attempt to explain the emergent patterns of occurrence and change of visual art
forms over the Pleistocene.
19.5
Human Cooperation Strategies
Cooperation may be defined as collective action by two or more individuals who

interact or coordinate their behaviors to achieve some common goal for mutual
benefit (Smith 2003: 402). Many animal species, from insects to fish to birds to
mammals, engage in cooperative behaviors which entail different strategies and
purposes; some examples include cooperative breeding, collective hunting, predator
spotting, food sharing, grooming, group guarding and defence, among others
(Dugatkin and Reeve 1997).
Humans are indisputably the most cooperative of all primate species. Competition
and conflict of interest, of course, also play an important role in human interactions,
as in the lives of all social animals. However, humans seem to have evolved special
cognitive abilities towards collaborating with others, which appear early in ontogeny and constitute the structure of our societies (Tomasello et al. 2005). Most human
daily activities, for instance, are fundamentally cooperative, from foraging, to toolmaking, to rearing children. All of these actions involve working together with others towards a common goal, what has been called shared intentionality (Tomasello
and Carpenter 2007). Cooperation involving shared intentionality underlies much of
human behavior and seems to have been especially relevant in the evolution of
human communication (Grdenfors et al. 2012; Tomasello 2008). Indeed, current
approaches in evolutionary linguistics increasingly stress the role of social interactions and organised cooperative activities as selective forces in the development of
language and speech (Aiello and Dunbar 1993; Buckley and Steele 2002; Croft
364
L. Mendoza Straffon
2000; Dor and Jablonka 2010; Dunbar 1998; Fitch et al. 2010; Grdenfors 2004;
Sinha 2009; Tomasello 2008). So, if cooperation served as an important selective
pressure for human communication and if, as suggested above, visual art may be
understood as an instance of human communication, it follows that visual art too
must have developed under the pressures of cooperative behavior.
There are many modes of cooperation in nature, but reciprocity (help someone
who might help you later) is the most salient form of human cooperation (Dugatkin
1997: 167). Humans engage in several reciprocal strategies. One example is the socalled tit-for-tat or equivalent retribution, where individuals cooperate with a partner and subsequently copy their partners last move, collaborating or defecting
accordingly. This form of reciprocation is not very cognitively demanding, and is
widespread in animal cooperation. However, as cooperative interactions become
more complex (e.g. delayed retribution, repeated interactions, cooperation with
multiple partners), individuals will be required to recognize their partners in addition to recalling their last move in order to respond appropriately (Dugatkin 2002),
which imposes higher costs on memory capacity. Thus, complex cooperation generates selective pressures for enhanced memory related to identifying others and
remembering past behavior. Accordingly, in social species one can expect the extent
of cooperation to increase with memory capacity and the ability for individual recognition (Crowley et al. 1996).
Group-living primates generally specialize in exploiting feeding patches along a
landscape and are therefore organized in communities that aggregate and separate
over the landscape according to the availability of supplies, or fission-fusion
groups. In groups like these, cooperative partners shift often and interaction
sequences are short and delayed (Crowley et al. 1996). These circumstances require
the ability to encode information about who was involved in what interaction and to
remember such knowledge over longer periods (Aureli et al. 2008). Delayed reciprocity is common in humans, but also among apes and monkeys, whose cognitive
capacities allow them to identify the members of their own group as well as those of
rival groups and remember how they have related to each other in the past (Pokorny
and de Waal 2009).
Pleistocene humans, very likely, were also organised in fission-fusion communities, specialized in exploiting resources distributed in patches, clustered and
spread over large areas (Kaplan et al. 2000). However, in addition to delayed reciprocity, humans also often engage in indirect reciprocity, which involves helping a
recipient who may not be able to reciprocate so that the return is not expected to
come directly from the original recipient but from another member of the group
(Suzuki and Akiyama 2005). Because the cooperative behavior of the receiver has
not always been directly observed by the helper, here individual recognition does
not suffice as a basis for deciding whether or not to cooperate. An additional criterion is needed, one that reflects the intentions and norms of individuals: reputation
(Semmann et al. 2004). Reputation is a social identity that creates an expectation of
behavior and interaction, and directly affects decision-making regarding whether or
not to engage in cooperation. Cooperation can be costly, especially if there is no
reciprocation, therefore people will preferentially cooperate with reputed good
19
365
cooperators, and will be interested in learning about others reputations and investing in their own (Emler 1990; Tomasello 2008: 200). Reputation, therefore, probably played an important role in the evolution of this uniquely human cooperation
strategy, which in turn allows for the types of exchange networks and institutions
that characterize human societies (Bowles and Gintis 2011).
However, as community size increases reputation-based decision-making turns
difficult because it becomes hard to assess the reputation of each individual in a
large community (Suzuki and Akiyama 2005). Although the number of people and
relationships that a modern human is capable to keep track of is still being debated,
it is clear that there are cognitive constraints on learning and memory. Estimates
indicate that a persons cognitive network (the amount of face-to-face relationships
one is able to follow simultaneously) averages 150 (Hill and Dunbar 2003), and
rarely exceeds 500 (Kosse 1990) individuals. On the one hand, this poses a problem
if a person is required to enter cooperation at a larger scale, on the other, we know
people often do. This indicates that humans have developed ways to overcome those
cognitive constraints, for example categorical thinking, i.e. thinking and remembering entities in categories instead of individually. Often, these categories may be
expressed and managed materially, through symbols. In social contexts, for instance,
we make use of social markers like emblems or badges which then stand for certain categories or classes (McElreath et al. 2003). Material markers, in this manner,
may assume and signal the identity or status of a network or a single person in such
a network (Gamble 1999: 57). It is in this context, I suggest, that we find an explanation for the incorporation of visual art in the human behavioral repertoire.
19.6
Style as a Signal of Identity
In colloquial terms, style means simply a way of doing things. But in archaeology,
style generally refers to formal variability, or specific patterns of variation in the
form of artifacts that are socially constrained (Chase 1991).5 Style as repeated patterning is not only a property of material culture, it pervades all human actions and
institutions (e.g. diet, language, ritual, etc.), to the extent that they belong in a particular cultural context. Explaining how style itself comes into being need not
invoke agency or intentionality. For instance, style can arise spontaneously as a
side-effect of grouping; that is by simply living in a community, sharing a location,
doing things together, and learning from each other, individuals can generate patterned behavior distinctive of their group (van der Post and Hogeweg 2008). And
once certain patterns start being used in identical fashion in a group, they may
become conventional and begin to serve for communication they become a signal
(Luria and Vygotsky 1992:57). Style in material culture can then be used as an
active strategy to transmit information (Wobst 1977), so that differences in style can
convey identity, affiliation or status. For example, dress and body ornamentation
5
For a review of the different uses of style in archaeology, see: M. Conkey (1990, 2006).
366
L. Mendoza Straffon
can inform about where a person comes from (territory, country, region, etc.), the
social group the person belongs to (class, occupation, age, gender, etc.), or the persons social status (rank, attachment, authority, etc.). But, as Wobst noted, signalling
in style has some minimum and maximum efficiency values: within the intimate
network of a person, the information becomes redundant because its content is
likely to be known; similarly, for a person that is too removed from the sender the
message becomes insignificant as the chances of receiving and decoding it will be
low. So, the relevance of the message should positively correlate with the size of the
social networks that individuals participate in.
Anthropologist Polly Wiessner has identified two basic types of style in human
material culture, which she calls assertive and emblemic (1983). Assertive style
refers to variability that is individually based and conveys information about a persons identity (status, affiliation, membership, etc.), and is generally displayed in
intragroup contexts. Those items of material culture that better portray assertive
style are visible personal utensils and body ornaments. Emblemic style, for its part,
corresponds to messages that typically refer to group norms, values, or attributes
(can include messages of identification, territoriality, authorship, ownership, preand proscription, etc.) and is generally useful in mediating intergroup relations.6
Flags, badges, tags, and all types of emblems and motifs associated with some specific social group are instances of emblemic style. When network interactions are
limited to local relations with related individuals, assertive style is expected to be
predominant, for example among small-scale hunter-gatherers (Wiessner 1983).
The importance of style as a signal of social identity is related to good reputation
building. Investing in style is seen as an indicator of initiative and hard work, which
helps build a good reputation, which in turn is an important criterion in reciprocal
cooperation, as discussed above. Among historical hunter-gatherers, for example,
the main motivation for stylistic investment is most often related to present oneself
positively in the eyes of others (Darwin 1879: 643; Wiessner 1983). Given this correlation, it is possible to hypothesize that assertive style coevolved with reputationbased indirect reciprocity networks (Wiessner 1983: 258).
As already suggested, to engage in large-scale cooperation, Pleistocene humans
had to overcome the constraints of cognitive memory. Most likely they achieved this
by means of cultural strategies, like social markers and assertive style that allowed
them to infer and recall information about the identity and behavior of potential
cooperative partners. Past behavior cannot always be known, but people can observe,
identify and make judgements based on style investment. Visual art-making is a
practice that purposefully exploits style for communication, i.e. it manipulates and
displays the formal properties of artifacts (e.g. form, colour, shape, texture, etc.).
For this reason, visual art could have provided a suitable strategy for signalling
identity in cooperative networks and for building a good reputation.
So, following Wobsts and Wiessners observations, we may predict that (a) the
earliest forms of visual art will co-occur with the establishment of indirect reciprocity
Connection: A discussion of values as cultural traits is found in Sect. 14.3 and Chap. 12.
19
367
networks, and (b) assertive forms of visual art (e.g. personal ornaments) will predominate in these earliest instances.
19.7
Context of Development
In the late Pleistocene period, human populations seem to have gone through an
important transition in social organization, from the primate-like troop to the huntergatherer band, based on regional reciprocal networks of exchange and cooperation.
The most important difference between these two types of organization is that,
whereas the troop is constituted by small groups of close kin, the band is made up
by related and unrelated individuals bonded by cultural rules of membership and
affiliation (Barnard 2009). These social rather than blood relations on the one hand
allowed people to bond freely with non-kin, but on the other, must have required
strategies to strengthen bonds and reduce aggression from non-kin, and visual art
could have been one of them. To be sure, some scholars have suggested that the
troop-to-band transition must have taken place by the time the earliest personal
ornaments appear in the archaeological record, i.e. prior to 100,000 years ago
(Ambrose 2010; Kuhn and Stiner 2007).
The reasons as to why modern humans may have come to organize themselves in
this way at that time are still being readily discussed. One suggestion is that harsh
dry climatic conditions in Africa by 130,000 years ago may have driven diverse
human groups to aggregate themselves in constrained regions for instance along
the coast (Barham and Mitchell 2008: 238). In consequence, local populations
would have become denser and interactions with unfamiliar peoples would have
increased and intensified, eventually giving rise to extended social network structures. Complementary subsistence through reciprocal cooperation between task
groups and bands would have provided a safety net against scarcity, allowing for
a more stable population size (Whallon 2006). Through exchange and reciprocity,
these human populations could have overcome ecological, demographic and technological deficiencies (Horan et al. 2005).
So, with the development of the hunter-gatherer band society, pressure for an
index of cooperation might have increased. The need to create and maintain indirect
reciprocal relations with non-kin may have pressured humans to invest more heavily
in their visual signals. Because of their function in reciprocity systems, style investment would be greater in aesthetic, highly visible (openly or frequently displayed)
or mobile (prone to exchange) items, such as beads. The combination of denser
populations and more contact among diverse groups may be key factors in understanding the proliferation of visual art production at this time (Kuhn and Stiner
2007; Shennan 2001). It is possible that the personal ornaments that constitute the
earliest instances of visual art in the archaeological record may have been used in
this manner, to signal identity and reputation among Pleistocene populations
(Ambrose 2010; Kuhn and Stiner 2007). As human groups became larger and more
expanded, more intensive interactions between social networks favoured the
368
L. Mendoza Straffon
emergence of emblemic style forms and collective identity. In turn, larger populations could support the specialization of visual art-making, allowing for the development of complex artistic traditions like the standardized image-making of the
European Palaeolithic rock art. This two-stage development of visual art forms
(assertive and emblemic modes) seems to be consistent with the Pleistocene record,
where personal ornaments are the earliest predominant form of visual art, and
emblemic styles like representational art appear only later and at a punctuated pace.
The data outlined above indicates that indirect reciprocity should select for
expanded memory capacity and for behavioral and cultural strategies that enhance
individual recognition and image-score control. The conjunction and expansion of
these three variables (memory, identity and reputation) is what makes possible the
establishment of large-scale cooperation networks among humans. I have suggested
that visual art became a signal of identity and served as an index of reputation, helping people make decisions regarding whether or not to engage in or expect cooperation from others, making social intercourse more predictable. In this manner, visual
art could have conveyed adaptive benefits to Pleistocene populations by facilitating
cooperation and reducing risks of social conflict and aggression.
This account also offers a potential explanation for the differential presence of
visual art in the Neanderthal and Homo sapiens records without invoking great cognitive differences between the two. Recent research suggests that the main differences between these two groups lie precisely in demography and social organisation
(Hayden 2012). Neanderthals were specialized hunters of large terrestrial herbivores, lived in small foraging groups that required large territories and had low
population densities (Snodgrass and Leonard 2009). This would have precluded
extensive contact between unrelated groups. Furthermore, data from raw material
and artifact mobility also indicates that Neanderthals rarely engaged in longdistance exchange of the sort observed among modern human hunter-gatherers
(Horan et al. 2005). These differences in group size and organisation would have
acted as constraints for the development of systematic visual art behaviors. In the
absence of extended social networks based on indirect reciprocity, there is little
chance that signalling in visual art would have had a significant role in Neanderthal
society. The same seems to have applied for early Homo sapiens populations prior
to 130,000 years ago (Zilho 2011).
19.8
Conclusion
I have suggested that visual art is an instance of human communication, where the
latter is understood in a biological sense, as coordinated behavior among organisms.
More specifically, visual art may be redefined as a communication signal expressed
in material media. As other human communication systems, visual art is likely to
have developed under the pressures of cooperative behavior. The typical modes of
human cooperation, mainly direct and indirect reciprocity, require capacity for individual recognition, which is constrained by memory capacity. However, forms of
19
369
bodily adornment could have served as signals of identity for recognition in reciprocal interaction, helping humans overcome the cognitive constraints of memory. This
might have favoured the emergence of individual or, in Wiessners terms, assertive
art forms. By recognizing particular artistic forms or styles people could then generate expectations of others behaviors, predict the outcome of interactions, and react
accordingly. Hypothetically, because these art signals became linked to individual
identity they could be used to build and track reputations in cooperative relations.
And because people are more prone to cooperate with good cooperators, investment in visual art might be expected, despite its costs. Also, by culturally expanding
the cognitive constraints of memory in recognition, visual art could have allowed
the establishment of expanded cooperative networks. As population sizes grew
larger in the latter Pleistocene, collective or group identities are likely to have
emerged. This would have favoured the development of emblemic art forms, such
as the highly conventionalized regional artistic traditions of the European Upper
Palaeolithic. These, in turn, might have been crucial for establishing and managing
inter-group relations at a regional scale (Barton et al. 1994).
The current state of the archaeological record of Pleistocene visual art so far supports the two main predictions derived from this model; as discussed above, the
earliest evidence of visual art (seashell beads) seem to correlate with the establishment of band societies that are typically organized in networks of indirect reciprocity, and they constitute instances of assertive or person-based style that likely refer
to individual social identities, which are important to display and recognize in cooperative interactions.
The model sketched in this chapter, unlike most origins-of-art models, offers an
explanation that is consistent with the current state of the archaeological record of
visual art in the Pleistocene and addresses the three issues mentioned at the beginning of this paper: timing, uniqueness, and form.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editors, E. Serrelli and F. Panebianco, for inviting me to
contribute to this volume, and to two anonymous referees for their comments. This paper was
completed within the project Implementing the Extended Synthesis into the Sociocultural
Domain, directed by Nathalie Gontier and funded by the John Templeton Foundation, whom I
thank for their support.
References
Aiello, L. C., & Dunbar, R. I. (1993). Neocortex size, group size, and the evolution of language.
Current Anthropology, 34(2), 184193.
Aiken, N. E. (1998). The biological origins of art. Westport: Praeger.
Ambrose, S. H. (2010). Coevolution of composite-tool technology, constructive memory, and language: Implications for the evolution of modern human behavior. Current Anthropology,
51(S1), S135S147.
Aureli, F., Schaffner, C. M., Boesch, C., Bearder, S. K., Call, J., Chapman, C. A., Connor, R., Di
Fiore, A., Dunbar, R. I., & Henzi, S. P. (2008). Fission fusion dynamics. Current Anthropology,
49(4), 627654.
370
L. Mendoza Straffon
Barnard, A. (2009). Social origins: Sharing, exchange, kinship. In R. Botha & C. Knight (Eds.),
The cradle of language (pp. 219235). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barham, L. S. (1998). Possible early pigment use in South Central Africa. Current Anthropology,
39(5), 703710.
Barham, L., & Mitchell, P. (2008). The first Africans: African archaeology from the earliest tool
makers to most recent foragers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barton, C. M., Clark, G. A., & Allison, E. C. (1994). Art as information: Explaining upper
Palaeolithic art in western Europe. World Archaeology, 26(2), 185207.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). A cooperative species: Human reciprocity and its evolution.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Breuil, H., & Windels, F. (1952). Quatre cents sicles dart parital: les cavernes ornes de lge
du renne. Montignac: Centre dtudes et de documentation prhistoriques.
Buckley, C., & Steele, J. (2002). Evolutionary ecology of spoken language: Co-evolutionary
hypotheses are testable. World Archaeology, 34(1), 2646.
Bunge, M. (2003). Emergence and convergence: Qualitative novelty and the unity of knowledge.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Chase, P. G. (1991). Symbols and paleolithic artifacts: Style, standardization, and the imposition
of arbitrary form. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 10(3), 193214.
Clottes, J., & Arnold, M. (2003). Chauvet cave: The art of earliest times. Salt Lake City: University
of Utah Press.
Coe, K. (2003). The ancestress hypothesis: Visual art as adaptation. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Conard, N. J. (2003). Palaeolithic ivory sculptures from southwestern Germany and the origins of
figurative art. Nature, 426(6968), 830832.
Conard, N. J. (2009). A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany. Nature, 459(7244), 248252.
Conard, N. J., & Bolus, M. (2003). Radiocarbon dating the appearance of modern humans and
timing of cultural innovations in Europe: New results and new challenges. Journal of Human
Evolution, 44(3), 331371.
Conkey, M. (1990). Experimenting with style in archaeology. In M. Conkey & C. Hastorf (Eds.),
The uses of style in archaeology (pp. 517). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conkey, M. W. (2006). Style, design and function. In C. Tilley et al. (Eds.), Handbook of material
culture (pp. 355372). London: Sage.
Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. London: Longman
Linguistics Library.
Crowley, P. H., Provencher, L., Sloane, S., Dugatkin, L. A., Spohn, B., Rogers, L., & Alfieri, M.
(1996). Evolving cooperation: The role of individual recognition. BioSystems, 37(1), 4966.
DErrico, F., Garca Moreno, R., & Rifkin, R. F. (2012). Technological, elemental and colorimetric
analysis of an engraved ochre fragment from the Middle Stone Age levels of Klasies River
Cave 1, South Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science, 39(4), 942952.
Darwin, C. (1879). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (2nd edn). Edition used:
The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. With an introduction by James Moore and
Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
Dissanayake, E. (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where art comes from and why. New York: The Free
Press.
Dissanayake, E. (2007). What art is and what art does: An overview of contemporary evolutionary
hypotheses. In C. Martindale, P. Locher, & V. M. Petrov (Eds.), Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches to aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (pp. 114). Amityville: Baywood
Publishing.
Dor, D., & Jablonka, E. (2010). Plasticity and canalization in the evolution of linguistic communication: An evolutionary developmental approach. In R. K. Larson, V. Dprez, & H. Yamakid
(Eds.), The evolution of human language: Biolinguistic perspectives (pp. 135147). Cambridge:
19
371
Dugatkin, L. A. (2002). Cooperation in animals: An evolutionary overview. Biology and

Philosophy, 17(4), 459476.
Dugatkin, L. A., & Reeve, H. K. (1997). Cooperation among animals: An evolutionary perspective. Oxford: University Press Oxford.
Dunbar, R. (1998). The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology, 6(5), 178190.
Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure and human evolution. New York: Bloomsbury
Press.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1988). The biological foundation of aesthetics. In I. Rentschler, B. Herzberger,
& D. Epstein (Eds.), Beauty and the brain: Biological aspects of aesthetics (pp. 2968). Basel:
Birkhuser Verlag.
Emler, N. (1990). A social psychology of reputation. European Review of Social Psychology, 1(1),
171193.
Endler, J. A. (1993). Some general comments on the evolution and design of animal communication systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, 340(1292),
215225.
Finnegan, R. (2002). Communicating: The multiple modes of human interconnection. New York:
Taylor & Francis.
Fitch, W. T., Huber, L., & Bugnyar, T. (2010). Social cognition and the evolution of language:
Constructing cognitive phylogenies. Neuron, 65(6), 795814.
Gamble, C. (1999). The Palaeolithic societies of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grdenfors, P. (2004). Cooperation and the evolution of symbolic communication. In K. D. Oller
& U. Griebel (Eds.), Evolution of communication systems: A comparative approach (pp. 237
256). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grdenfors, P., Brinck, I., & Osvath, M. (2012). The tripod effect: Co-evolution of cooperation,
cognition and communication. In T. Schilhab, F. Stjernfelt, & T. Deacon (Eds.), The symbolic
species evolved (pp. 193222). Berlin: Springer.
Gombrich, E. H. (1995). The story of art. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall PTR.
Grammer, K., Fink, B., Moller, A. P., & Thornhill, R. (2003). Darwinian aesthetics: Sexual selection and the biology of beauty. Biological Reviews, 78, 385407.
Hayden, B. (2012). Neandertal social structure? Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 31(1), 126.
Henshilwood, C., DErrico, F., Vanhaeren, M., van Niekerk, K., & Jacobs, Z. (2004). Middle Stone
Age shell beads from south Africa. Science, 304(5669), 404.
Henshilwood, C. S., DErrico, F., & Watts, I. (2009). Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age
levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution, 57(1), 2747.
Henshilwood, C. S., DErrico, F., van Niekerk, K. L., Coquinot, Y., Jacobs, Z., Lauritzen, S.-E.,
Menu, M., & Garca-Moreno, R. (2011). A 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop at
Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science, 334(6053), 219222.
Hill, R. A., & Dunbar, R. I. (2003). Social network size in humans. Human Nature, 14(1), 5372.
Hodgson, D. (2006). Understanding the origins of paleoart: The neurovisual resonance theory and
brain functioning. Paleoanthropology, 2006, 5467.
Horan, R. D., Bulte, E., & Shogren, J. F. (2005). How trade saved humanity from biological exclusion: An economic theory of Neanderthal extinction. Journal of Economic Behavior &
Organization, 58(1), 129.
Hovers, E., Shimon, I., Bar-Yosef, O., & Vandermeersch, B. (2003). An Early Case of Color
Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Humans in Qafzeh Cave. Current Anthropology, 44(4),
491522.
Kaplan, H., Hill, K., Lancaster, J., & Hurtado, A. M. (2000). A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews,
9(4), 156185.
Kosse, K. (1990). Group size and societal complexity: Thresholds in the long-term memory.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 9(3), 275303.
Kuhn, S. L., & Stiner, M. C. (2007). Body ornamentation as information technology: Towards an
understanding of the significance of early beads. In P. Mellars (Ed.), Rethinking the human
revolution (pp. 4554). Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
372
L. Mendoza Straffon
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Luria, A., & Vygotsky, L. S. (1992). Ape, primitive man, and child: Essays in the history of behavior. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Mather, J. A. (2004). Cephalopod skin displays: From concealment to communication. In K. Oller
& U. Griebel (Eds.), Evolution of communication systems: A comparative approach (pp. 193
214). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McBrearty, S., & Brooks, A. S. (2000). The revolution that wasnt: A new interpretation of the
origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution, 39(5), 453563.
McBrearty, S., & Stringer, C. (2007). The coast in colour. Nature, 449(7164), 793794.
McElreath, R., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. (2003). Shared norms can lead to the evolution of ethnic
markers. Current Anthropology, 44(1), 122130.
Miller, G. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature.
London: Heinemann.
Moro Abada, O., & Gonzlez Morales, M. R. (2010). Redefining Neanderthals and Art: An
Alternative Interpretation of the Multiple Species Model for the Origin of Behavioural
Modernity. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 29(3), 229243.
Naguib, M., & Riebel, K. (2006). Bird song: A key model in animal communication. Encyclopaedia
of Language and Linguistics, 2, 4053.
Otte, D. (1974). Effects and functions in the evolution of signaling systems. Annual Review of
Ecology and Systematics, 5, 385417.
Panksepp, J. (2005). Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans.
Consciousness and Cognition, 14(1), 3080.
Pokorny, J. J., & de Waal, F. B. (2009). Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(51), 2153921543.
Power, C. (1999). Beauty Magic: The origins of art. In R. Dunbar, C. Knight, & C. Power (Eds.),
The evolution of culture (pp. 92112). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Riel-Salvatore, J., & Gravel-Miguel, C. (2013). Upper Palaeolithic mortuary practices in Eurasia:
A critical look at the burial record. In S. Tarlow & L. Nilsson Stutz (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of death and burial (chapter 17). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Semmann, D., Krambeck, H.-J., & Milinski, M. (2004). Strategic investment in reputation.
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 56(3), 248252.
Shennan, S. (2001). Demography and cultural innovation: A model and its implications for the
emergence of modern human culture. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 11(1), 516.
Sinha, C. (2009). Language as a biocultural niche and social institution. New Directions in
Cognitive Linguistics, 24, 289310.
Smith, E. A. (2003). Human cooperation: Perspectives from behavioral ecology. In P. Hammerstein
(Ed.), Genetic and cultural evolution of cooperation (pp. 401428). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Snodgrass, J. J., & Leonard, W. R. (2009). Neanderthal energetics revisited: Insights into population dynamics and life history evolution. PaleoAnthropology, 2009, 220237.
Stuart-Fox, D., & Moussalli, A. (2008). Selection for social signalling drives the evolution of chameleon colour change. PLoS Biology, 6(1), e25.
Suzuki, S., & Akiyama, E. (2005). Reputation and the evolution of cooperation in sizable groups.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 272(1570), 13731377.
Texier, P.-J., Porraz, G., Parkington, J., Rigaud, J.-P., Poggenpoel, C., Miller, C., Tribolo, C.,
Cartwright, C., Coudenneau, A., Klein, R., Steele, T., & Verna, C. (2010). A Howiesons Poort
tradition of engraving ostrich eggshell containers dated to 60,000 years ago at Diepkloof Rock
Shelter, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(14),
61806185.
Tilley, C. (1994). Interpreting material culture. In S. Pearce (Ed.), Interpreting objects and collections (pp. 6775). London: Routledge.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tomasello, M., & Carpenter, M. (2007). Shared intentionality. Developmental Science, 10(1),
121125.
19
373
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing
intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675691.
van der Post, D. J., & Hogeweg, P. (2008). Diet traditions and cumulative cultural processes as
side-effects of grouping. Animal Behaviour, 75(1), 133144.
Vanhaeren, M., DErrico, F., Stringer, C., James, S. L., Todd, J. A., & Mienis, H. K. (2006). Middle
Paleolithic shell beads in Israel and Algeria. Science, 312(5781), 17851788.
Vanhaeren, M., dErrico, F., van Niekerk, K. L., Henshilwood, C. S., & Erasmus, R. M. (2013).
Thinking strings: Additional evidence for personal ornament use in the Middle Stone Age at
Blombos Cave, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution, 64, 500517.
Verpooten, J., & Nelissen, M. (2010). Sensory exploitation and cultural transmission: The late
emergence of iconic representations in human evolution. Theory in Biosciences, 129(23),
211221.
Watts, I. (1999). The origin of symbolic culture. In R. Dunbar, C. Knight, & C. Power (Eds.), The
evolution of culture (pp. 113146). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Watts, I. (2009). Red ochre, body painting, and language: Interpreting the Blombos ochre. In
R. Botha & C. Knight (Eds.), The cradle of language (pp. 6292). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Whallon, R. (2006). Social networks and information: Non-utilitarian mobility among huntergatherers. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 25(2), 259270.
White, R. (1992). Beyond art: Toward an understanding of the origins of material representation in
Europe. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 537564.
White, R. (1993). Technological and social dimensions of Aurignacian-age body ornaments
across Europe. In H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay, & R. White (Eds.), Before Lascaux: The complex
record of the Early Upper Paleolithic (pp. 277299). London: CRC Press.
Wiessner, P. (1983). Style and social information in Kalahari San projectile points. American
Antiquity, 48(2), 253276.
Wiessner, P. (1984). Reconsidering the behavioral basis for style: A case study among the Kalahari
San. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 3(3), 190234.
Wobst, M. (1977). Stylistic behavior and information exchange. In C. E. Cleland (Ed.), For the
director: Research essays in honor of James B. Griffin (pp. 317342). Ann Arbor: Museum of
Anthropology, University of Michigan.
Zeki, S. (1999). Inner vision: An exploration of art and the brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zilho, J. (2007). The emergence of ornaments and art: An archaeological perspective on the origins of Behavioral Modernity. Journal of Archaeological Research, 15(1), 154.
Zilho, J. (2011). The emergence of language, art and symbolic thinking. In C. Henshilwood &
F. DErrico (Eds.), Homo symbolicus: The dawn of language, imagination and spirituality
(pp. 111131). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Chapter 20
Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary

Approach
Mariagrazia Portera and Lorenzo Bartalesi
20.1
Aesthetics Is More Than Philosophy of Arts
Neuroscientist Steven Brown and evolution of the arts scholar Ellen Dissanayake
recently published an interesting essay titled The Arts are more than Aesthetics
(Brown and Dissanayake 2009). Reversing this idea, we wish to state at the very
beginning of this paper our claim that aesthetics is more than art, or rather: aesthetics is more than philosophy of art. The currently widespread tendency to make
aesthetics and philosophy of art overlap might be due to the ever authoritative tradition of romantic and idealistic Western philosophy, according to which (see, for
instance, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer) the only objects we can experience aesthetically are works of art (Schaeffer 1992).
For the purposes of this essay, which investigates the evolutionary origin of aesthetic sense and of aesthetic preferences, this (supposed) overlap between aesthetics
and philosophy of art would have far-reaching consequences: if there were no aesthetics beyond the arts, we would be obliged to agree with those scholars who claim
that human aesthetic sense originated during the so-called Upper Paleolithic
Revolution (also known as the Creative Explosion: 50,00045,000 years B.C.),
a short span of time to which the first archaeological evidence for artistic products
is attributed and when the main technological inventions and cultural changes
The authors have both contributed to the conception and design of the entire work; Mariagrazia
Portera is responsible for Sects. 20.1 (second part), 20.2, 20.4; Lorenzo Bartalesi is responsible for
Sects. 20.1 (first part), 20.3.
M. Portera L. Bartalesi (*)
University of Florence, Florence, Italy
e-mail: mariagrazia.portera@unifi.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_20
375
376
M. Portera and L. Bartalesi
(like language and symbolic thought) are supposed to have appeared for the first
time (Mithen 1998).1
Far too little attention has been paid by evolutionary thinkers to the alternative
viewpoint, namely that aesthetic sense might have emerged long before the birth of
the spectacular Ice Age arts and that it might not be restricted to our species, Homo
sapiens. As is well known, the first scientist to advocate the existence of a genuine
aesthetic sense in non-human species was Charles Darwin.
Distancing ourselves from the prevailing romantic and idealistic tradition, we
will use the terms aesthetics and aesthetic throughout this paper to refer to something other than traditional philosophy of art or a process of fruition of the arts. That
is, by aesthetic aesthetic attitude, aesthetic sense we mean a specific perceptual process, triggered by events or objects with certain features, that includes attention, emotional investment, energy expenditure, the formulation of a selective
(possibly implicit) judgment and an association with pleasure (Desideri 2011,
2013). So understood, aesthetic attitude is far from being confined to works of art:
almost anything any kind of object or event can be a legitimate source of aesthetic experience. Moreover, rudiments of the human aesthetic attitude can be
found in nonhuman animals (Davies 2012; Welsch 2004, 2012).
Moving from the assumption that aesthetics and philosophy of art are not coincident, the specific aim of this paper is to focus on a particular aspect of aesthetic
experience, namely the origin and evolutionary role of aesthetic preferences.
As is well known, animals, including humans, have preferences (toward a specific kind of habitat, a specific bodily trait in sexual partners and so on), according
to which they formulate judgments, make choices and orient themselves in the environment (Guilford and Dawkins 1991; see also Endler and Basolo 1998). For
instance, it has been demonstrated that females in the long-tailed widow-bird,
Euplectes progne, prefer males who have an extreme tail length as sexual partners
(Andersson 1982); something similar seems to happen in the monogamous swallow,
Hirundo rustica (Paper Mller 1990); moreover, a rich literature describes the
mechanisms whereby birds and other animals select the habitat which is most suitable for their survival and reproductive aims. And Homo sapiens? How has Homo
sapiens developed its preferences over the course of evolution, in particular its aesthetic preferences? During the past 30 years a great amount of information has
become available on this topic, attesting the presence of various aesthetic preferences in our species. Arising from these studies, in the present essay we will focus
our attention on a fairly specific question: are these aesthetic preferences in humans
universal, innate and genetically encoded or, on the contrary, are they contingent
and variable mere cultural traits emerging as a consequence of exposure to cultural models?2
In order to develop our argument, we follow three steps: firstly, we describe
recent research in the field of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) that finds aesthetic
1
Connection: Chap. 19 presents a theory of how visual art, as documented in the archaeological
record, originated in this period of human history.
2
Connection: Aesthetic preferences as cultural traits are addressed also in Chap. 10.
20
Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach
377
preferences in Homo sapiens; secondly, we go back to Darwin, commenting on

interesting remarks (from his Notebooks) on the consolidation and dissemination of
aesthetic preferences, in the frame of his fascinating and controversial theory of
instincts; finally, following Darwins remarks, we highlight some difficulties which
are inherent to the EP paradigm (prevailing at the moment in Evolutionary
Aesthetics) and claim that, in order to decide whether human aesthetic preferences
are universal, innate and genetically encoded or, on the contrary, culturally variable
and contingent, it is necessary to reformulate the notions of nature and culture and
of their mutual, chiasmatic, relationship and interaction.
20.2
Universality of Aesthetic Preferences: Environmental

Aesthetics and Physical Attractiveness
According to evolutionary psychologists (Barkow et al. 1992) the inherited architecture of the human mind is a result of the evolutionary process. Over generations
and under the pressures of natural selection, Homo sapiens has developed speciesspecific psychological modules that have made it able to survive and reproduce.
Among the several adaptations with which evolution has carefully endowed Homo
sapiens there are aesthetic preferences for a certain type of habitat or for sexual
partners who have this or that specific feature. These preferences, evolutionary psychologists claim, are universal, species-specific, and highly adaptive. A large and
heterogeneous collection of studies composes today a standard model of evolutionary aesthetics focusing on the mechanisms of choice and preference both sexual
and environmental that would be mainly based on species-specific prejudices of
aesthetic perception (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1984). Almost all contemporary evolutionary
research on aesthetic behavior focuses primarily on identifying and describing aesthetic preferences as basic processes of perception that have acquired, over the
course of human evolution, a significance for their adaptive and reproductive
relevance.
The aesthetic ability of humans is therefore interpreted as a specific psychological adjustment evolved modularly through natural selection during the Pleistocene
era (ca 1.8 million years ago) (Tooby and Cosmides 2001).
Almost 20 years ago, evolutionary ecologist Gordon Orians (1980, 1986) championed the so-called savannah-hypothesis, according to which humans have
evolved preferences for habitats with features characteristic of the African savannah, the environment in which lineage of the genus Homo is supposed to have originally flourished. A number of studies seemed to demonstrate that a preference for
savannah-like places is universal and not culturally-dependent. In one of these studies, Orians and Hervageen (1992) (see also Falk 2010) asked subjects from different
countries and cultures (Australia, Argentina, and The United States) to evaluate
photographs showing different types of trees, varying in four features: canopy
shape, canopy density, trunk height and branching pattern. Results showed a
substantial agreement among the participants in selecting the savannah-like form of
378
tree. Contemporary Homo sapiens most preferred habitat seems to be one having
high resource-providing potential, the presence of water, scattered trees, and a
low, grassy ground cover: in other words, a habitat in which survival and reproductive chances are the highest, as it was we presume for our ancestors in the
Pleistocene African savannah.
In late 1993, a further confirmation of the savannah hypothesis was unexpectedly
provided by the work of two Russian migr artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander
Melamid, who performed the first cross-cultural inquiry into what people really
prefer to be represented in a work of art. Thousands of people from nine different
countries (Russia, Ukraine, France, Kenya, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Turkey,
China, and America) were asked about their preferences for subject matter, colour,
size in paintings, and similar characteristics. The results of the survey showed a very
surprising similarity: almost everywhere in the world people rejected abstract paintings and preferred natural scenes including scattered trees, a water course (lake or
river), some peaceful animals and human figures. The most favoured colours turned
out to be brilliant blue and green (see also Coss 2003; Voland 2003). It was quite
obvious for evolutionary psychologists to recognize in these results the mark left on
contemporary Homo sapiens by the ancestral environmental adaptations for habitat
choice. According to these studies, the aesthetic value of an environmental pattern
(such as we have noted, for vegetation, the presence of water, a wide horizon and so
forth) coincides with its adaptive salience and the aesthetic relation takes the form
of a rapid emotional evaluation based on the general features of the environment
with regard to its suitability as a habitat for the human species.3
Homo sapiens is not only endowed with innate environmental preferences for
selecting adaptive habitats, claim evolutionary psychologists, but natural selection
has also provided us with adaptive preferences for the choice of sexual partners. In
his internationally famous handbook on Evolutionary psychology David Buss
writes:
Evolutionary logic leads to an even more powerful set of expectations for universal standards of beauty. Just as our standards for attractive landscapes embody cues such as water,
game, and refuge, mimicking our ancestors savanna habitats [], our standards for
female [and male] beauty embody cues to womens [and mens] reproductive value. (Buss
2005: 147)
A considerable amount of literature, published on this topic in the past three

decades, suggests that over the course of evolution Homo sapiens has evolved standards of beauty directly correlated to the level of fitness of the opposite sex.
According to evolutionary psychologists, the younger and healthier a woman (or
man) appears, the more beautiful she (or he) is judged to be. The reason is rather
obvious: a young and healthy woman has much more reproductive value than an old
and unhealthy one. Signs of beauty include, therefore, such traits as full lips, clear
and smooth skin, clear and brilliant eyes, long and healthy hair, long legs, facial
3
See Dissanayake (1998) who was the first scholar to notice the similarity between Komar and
Melamids polls and paintings and the ideas of Environmental Evolutionary Aesthetics and
Dutton (1998).
20
379
symmetry and so forth. Body fat distribution is another important cue to attractiveness: studies have suggested that women with a low waist-to-hip-ratio between
0.67 and 0.80 are judged to be more attractive than women with a higher one. Just
as for the other cues, a low waist-to-hip ratio correlates to youth and health and
proves that the girl is not pregnant. As far as female preferences for males are concerned, women seem to judge tall and muscular men, whose faces are highly symmetrical and masculine-looking, as more attractive. The reason highly
masculine-looking men are preferred seems to consist in the fact that the level of
masculinity is in direct correlation with the level of testosterone, a hormone that, if
produced in high levels, can compromise the immune system. The more masculine
a man appears, the healthier he is supposed to be, given that he can physically afford
to produce such a large quantity of the hormone (see Zahavi 1997). These constituents of beauty are neither arbitrary nor culture bound, remarks David Buss (2005:
149). Any member of the species Homo sapiens (man or woman), anywhere in the
world, is supposed to find people, described by the cues above, attractive.
In another major study, Langlois et al. (1990) found that human newborns share
with adults the same standard of male and female beauty: exposed to different types
of faces, newborns gaze longer at attractive faces than at unattractive ones, and the
faces they seem to find attractive are the same as those that adults choose. The
results of this study prove, on the one hand, that preferences for facial attractiveness
emerge very early in human development and, on the other hand, challenge the current idea that standards of beauty in our species are gradually learned through exposure to contemporary cultural models. It seems, on the contrary, that they do not
require any kind of training or education to emerge in children. Evolutionary psychologists propose that these standards are universal and innate.
The majority of the studies just mentioned, about environmental and sexual preferences, are questionable and have been questioned, at least from a methodological point of view.4 However, this is not our aim here. Rather, we focus on the idea
of the relationship between nature and culture that these studies, inspired by the EP
programmes, convey. Evidently, even the most motivated among evolutionary
psychologists have to concede that accounting for human aesthetic preferences is
not always so easy. Not all the preferences that humans possess seem to be universal
or innate. On the contrary, most of the preferences that lead us in our everyday life
(food preferences, music preferences, or dress preferences) are the result of processes of social learning and of exposure to cultural models (Jablonka and Lamb
2005; Jablonka and Avitale 2000). We cannot account for them by merely appealing
to genetic inheritance or to innate psychological modules: rather, we need to take
into account the influence of culture.
Now, the point is that, even if evolutionary psychologists concede that culture
does to some degree play a role in the development, consolidation and transmission
of preferences among humans, they typically tend to interpret culture as if it were a
4
Criticism has been expressed about the psycho-evolutionary studies concerning human environmental and sexual preferences, in particular about their methodology. We refer the readers to
Buller (2005), Eldredge (2004), Ruso et al. (2003), and Dupr (2001).
380
second, independent dimension of variability, merely we would say superficially

added to the universal and species-specific natural dimension.5 We will argue that
the EP and EA way of understanding the relationship between nature and culture
nature being innate and universal and culture being acquired, local, and contingent is not the best way to try to explain the development of aesthetic
preferences.
Some suggestions in this sense come from the works of Charles Darwin, the
father of the theory of evolution, by means of natural selection.
20.3
The Aesthetic Instinct in Darwin
Charles Darwin was much more cautious than contemporary evolutionary psychologists in interpreting human aesthetic preferences as if they were adaptations carefully shaped by natural selection, innate, universal and species-specific.6 In the
Origin of Species he writes:
How the sense of beauty in its simplest form that is, the reception of a peculiar kind of
pleasure from certain colours, forms and sounds was first developed in the mind of man
and the lower animals, is a very obscure subject. The same sort of difficulty is presented, if
we inquire how it is that certain flavours and odours give pleasure, and other displeasure.
Darwin (1876: 162)
As is known, the book in which Darwin develops his aesthetic theory is The
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871. Here, Darwin
illustrates aesthetic choice as a powerful engine of sudden and unpredictable
change in the structures of the species, an alternative to natural selection. This is a
crucial point: according to Darwin, the development of a sense of beauty in nonhuman and human animals is not to be ascribed to natural selection, but rather to what
he called sexual selection. These two evolutionary forces are profoundly different:
sexual selection depends not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between
the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful
competitor, but few or no offspring (Darwin 1876/1859: 88).
Let us briefly summarize Darwins aesthetic theory: (1) the sense of beauty is a
perceptual discrimination mechanism, internal and functional to the theoretical
framework of sexual selection; (2) consequently, the sense of beauty is a powerful
engine of change in structures and mental qualities of the species through a coevolutionary relationship with the bodily features of individuals; and (3) it is a crucial element in confirming the cognitive continuity between humans and other
animals because its phylogeny reveals the origin of a sense of beauty in an evolutionary phase that precedes the development of human cognitive architecture.
5
Connection: Similar assumptions, but with a much stronger role of culture, may be recognized in
gene-culture coevolutionary theory (Chap. 11).
6
13.3, 16.2, and 18.2.
20
381
For Darwin, being that the mental difference between humans and superior animals is one of degree and not of kind and being that these creatures share a similar
nervous system structure, aesthetic choice must obey the rules of evolutionary
gradualism:
The male Argus pheasant acquired his beauty gradually, through the females having preferred during many generations the more highly ornamented males; the aesthetic capacity
of the females having been advanced through exercise or habit in the same manner as our
own taste is gradually improved. Darwin (1871: 401)
The continuity between animal aesthetic choice and human taste is, according to
Darwin, just a matter of degree: Obviously no animal would be capable of admiring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful landscape, or refined music; but
such high tastes, depending as they do on culture and complex associations, are not
enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated persons Darwin (1871: 64). Darwin tells
us that humans gradually moved from aesthetic preference for the sexual characteristics of a reproductive partner to that of its extended phenotypes, and to that of
environmental characteristics or variable function artifacts such as a work of art or
a ritual performance.
In the third part of Descent of Man, Darwin reviews the different ideas of beauty
in human cultures to demonstrate how these different ideas influence through
sexual selection the bodily structure of the genus Homo and the evolution of some
of its physical characteristics.
Being that sexual selection depends on such an uncertain element as taste is,
aesthetic choice must be a major driver of sexual dimorphism and the variety of
secondary sex characteristics (Menninghaus 2003). Presence or absence of hair,
shape of the head, and colour of the skin are to ascribe to the choice made by sexual
partners: regularly an arbitrary choice, not necessarily based on adaptive reasons,
that spreads in the population oft thanks to social learning processes and imitation
(see Cronin 1991; Miller 2000).
Referring to hundreds of cases reported by travellers and naturalists from the
four corners of the Earth, Darwin demonstrates how the perfectly round heads of the
inhabitants of Cochinchina, the buttocks of Hottentot females, the extremely fair
complexion of the Yuracar people, and the extraordinarily long head of hair in
several North American tribes represent the results of generations upon generations
of aesthetic choices. A similar explanation is given for behaviors that appear without a fitness utility, such as the stretched lip and ear piercings of the Bocotudo
people or the Maori tradition of tattoos.
Darwin poses the question of the heritability of these aesthetic preferences.
Although he never addressed the matter in published works, we can glean some
important clues from his Notebooks written in 18381840. Notebooks M and N
evidence how Darwin related the matter of aesthetic behavior with the gradual
development of human intelligence on the basis of animal instinct (Bartalesi 2012).
Here the British naturalist presents a theory of instincts (explicitly inspired by
Hume) that acts as a background in front of which a reflection on human aesthetic
behavior takes place (Darwin in Barrett et al. 2009: M 104)
382
Instincts are according to Darwin sedimentations of archaic preferences, past

choices nested in the physical memory of the species but obscure to its individuals,
like a mark in the brain. In Notebook M he writes: When a muscle is moved very
often, the motion becomes habitual & involuntary when a thought is thought very
often it becomes habitual & involuntary; An habitual action must some way affect
the brain in a manner which can be transmitted (ivi: M46).7
On this basis, we can interpret Darwins mysterious note Beauty is instinctive
feeling, & thus cuts the Knot (ivi: M32), in Notebook M, as the affirmation of the
dependence of our aesthetic judgements on the instincts that have gradually sedimented in the natural history of our mind. I should think Darwin writes great
principle of liking, was simply hereditary habit (ivi: N87). He returns to this topic
in Old and Useless Notes about the moral sense: Our tastes in mouth by my theory
are due to hereditary habit (& modified & associated during lifetime), as in our
moral taste. (ivi: NMS50). Aesthetic judgements are, therefore, the active expression of instinctual emotions, the hereditary effect of archaic trains of ideas on the
structure of the body, permanently linked to pain and pleasure perceptions.8 The act
of preference, binding and instantaneous, emerges like any other physical characteristic from the same evolutionary laws of variation and heritability. This is why
for Darwin our aesthetic judgements are in the form of an almost instantaneous
perception (Darwin in Barrett et al. 2009: N20) and our tastes have, at the same
time, both the unjustifiable urgency of an ancestral taste and the variability of a trait
acquired by experience.
As a guarantee of the historical and cultural origin of taste, Darwin introduces an
evolutionary relationship between authentic taste that which obeys the instincts
acquired during evolution and fashion that which depends on cultural habits
developed during life and the natural tendency of any animal species to look for
novelty (see Darwin 1871: 6465:N 28; Menninghaus 2009). It is only in the relationship between these two moments of taste that Darwin sees the evolutionary law
of aesthetic ideals (or, we could say, aesthetic universals). As one species gradually diverges from another on the basis of small variations, authentic taste acquires
the small mutations that happen during the life of individuals up to the moment in
which it mutates into another aesthetic standard. At this point in time, a new idea of
beauty establishes itself as a gradual evolution of the previous instinctual
configuration.
Darwin, thus, finds a very peculiar relationship between nature and culture:
choices made on the basis of fashion, depending on cultural habits developed during
life, gradually transform themselves into nature, that is to say, they impress
7
Connection: The relationship between brain and culture is explored in Chap. 7, and problematized in Chaps. 2, 16, and 21.
8
Neuroscientist Steven Brown, in Brown et al. (2011), comes to a similar conclusion regarding
aesthetic as positive and negative evaluations in certain regions of the brain. Darwin of course
did not know the neurobiology. Furthermore, the term instinct is nowadays not as used as it was
earlier for Darwin and for the early ethologists, e.g. Nikolaas Tinbergen. Contemporary neuroscientists prefer to use the term predisposition and suggest that we might think of certain predispositions as almost automatic.
20
383
themselves in the brain as a heritable trace. We will better detail this process in the
following paragraph. To conclude this part on Darwins theory, we emphasize that
Darwin finds the aesthetic question to be composed of two different matters: on one
side, the evolutionary origin of a universal sense of beauty, on the other, the sociocultural relativity of the different ideas of beauty or aesthetic tastes. Building on this
crucial distinction, Darwin does not attempt to explain the criteria of human aesthetic preference on the basis of their original adaptive function as some evolutionary psychologists do. Rather, he proposes a cultural process of transmission and
innovation of aesthetic instincts.
20.4
Beyond Nature and Culture: A Darwinian Chiasmus
The Darwinian theory of instincts is one of the most controversial parts of his entire
oeuvre. Over the course of his life, Darwin rearranged, modified and reformulated
his theory of instincts many times, as is described by the historian of science Robert
Richards in his very detailed studies on the development of Darwins theory
(Richards 1987, 2005). While in the Notebooks, particularly in the so-called M and
N, the process of instinct consolidation is not directly led by natural selection, in
succeeding works, such as The Origin of Species, the Descent of Man, and The
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, instincts seem to pass through the rigorous filter of natural selection: only useful and adaptive habits become instincts.
We wish to highlight that Darwin talks about aesthetic instincts exclusively in the
Notebooks, that is to say before the incorporation of his general theory of instincts
into the theoretical framework of natural selection, providing further evidence that,
according to Darwin, the aesthetic dimension cannot be explained by natural
selection.
The explanatory hypothesis for the development and spread of aesthetic instincts
given by Darwin in the Notebooks, although underrated by theorists until now, is
extremely interesting, in particular for the relationship that Darwin establishes
between repeated actions (habits), brain modifications and the acquisition of
instincts.
Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has developed, over several decades, a fascinating theory called Neural Darwinism which applies the principles of Darwinian natural selection to the populations of neurons in the human brain. He has discovered
that during the embryonal phase of development of the nervous system as well as in
the phase after birth (when the newborn actively interacts with its environment)
neurons undergo selective processes. That is to say, some neural circuits die while
some others are favoured, enhanced and stabilized by natural selection because they
are reinforced by the surrounding environment (Edelman 1989). In other words, our
brain is actively shaped over the course of development, as Darwin himself had
remarked in his theory of instincts, in spite of his very poor knowledge of the structure and functions of the human brain.
384
The after birth development of the human nervous system is one of the main
interests of French neuroscientist Jean Pierre Changeux, who has proposed a theory
of epigenesis by selective stabilization of neurons and synapses during development
based on the principle that to learn is to eliminate. According to Changeux (2002),
culture physically makes its impression, or trace, in the brain, stabilizing some
synaptic combinations and eliminating the surplus. Even in this case, Darwin had in
some way foreseen it, without any knowledge of the neuroscientific evidence on
which the theory is based.
However, Darwin was also persuaded that these modifications in the brain
acquired by the repetition of mental actions such as preferences and choices, as we
have seen could be transmitted from one generation to the next. His viewpoint
sounds rather Lamarckian, admitting the possibility of the transmission of
acquired features from the parents to their offspring.9 The Lamarckian component
of Darwins theory of instincts has perhaps been one of the reasons it has been
underrated and almost overlooked by scientists and historians until very recently.
Notwithstanding these Lamarckian implications, we think that Darwins insight
on instincts could be very helpful when questioning and rethinking the development, consolidation and spread of aesthetic preferences.
While evolutionary psychologists whose perspective currently prevails within
the field of evolutionary aesthetics conceive sexual and environmental preferences
as innate, universal and species-specific, a sort of universal basement compared to
which cultural differences are no more than superficial accidents, Darwin claims
that some cultural preferences, even if arbitrary, that is to say not strictly adaptive,
can be impressed, generation after generation, in our brain thanks to its extraordinary plasticity, and become heritable. In other words, they can be transformed from
culture into nature. According to Darwin, the relationship between nature and
culture takes the form of a chiasmus10: what is originally a cultural trait (a rather
arbitrary result of social learning or imitation) can be turned, over the course of
evolution, into nature, and what is a natural feature innate, or instinctive can
be transformed in a cultural feature (neither necessary nor universal, rather accidental and contingent), as is the case when a new instinct, a result of the fixation
of new habits, replaces an old one. The passage from Notebook N we have quoted
above (N 28) concerning the relationship between authentic taste and fashion is
extraordinarily clear in this sense.
We claim that one of the greatest challenges facing todays philosophers of art
and, in particular, those who wish to explain the evolutionary origin, development
and role of aesthetic preferences, deciding if they are innate or acquired, universal
or local, necessary or contingent, is precisely to clarify how we must conceptualize
9
Lamarckian theory and the inheritance of acquired characteristics theory are two different theoretical hypotheses: Darwin, for instance, was persuaded by the latter, but not by the former.
Moreover, the adjective Lamarckian has acquired, in the course of the development of biological
research, a rather pejorative meaning.
10
A minimal definition of chiasmus is the following: the (rhetoric) figure in which two or more
elements are related to each other through a reversal of structures.
20
385
the relationship and interaction between nature and culture. As shown by Jablonka
and Lamb (2005) and clearly highlighted by Oyama (2000: 69), any account of
gene-culture evolution using the model of trait transmission for culture as well as
for biology, seeking to remedy the shortcomings of purely genetic theories [by] adding a second transmission channel (see for instance the model proposed by Boyd
and Richerson 2005) continues the dualistic tradition that ensures those
shortcomings.11 The account of the development and spread of aesthetic preferences proposed by evolutionary psychologists trying to avoid genetic determinism
(untenable, if applied to the case of human aesthetic preferences as a whole) by
adding a second, cultural dimension of variability to the universal and speciesspecific ground runs into this dualistic kind of mistake. We doubt that the origin
and development of aesthetic preferences can be explained by referring to genes
alone (as if preferences were encoded in our genomes); just looking at the history of
Western philosophical aesthetics, the appreciation of beauty appears a long way
from being a topic on which people easily reach a universal agreement, as would
certainly be the case if it were governed by our genes.
However, we also doubt that human aesthetic preferences can be reduced to a
mere matter of cultural differences alone, because some very basic preferences
seem indeed to be universally shared (such as the attraction to human faces and
voices, shown even by few-day-old newborns). We doubt, finally, that human aesthetic preferences can be explained by referring to both culture and nature, if the two
dimensions are still simply added one to the other. Even if the model proposed by
Darwin is poor in some respect (especially as he advocates a Lamarckian form of
transmission for instincts, which has obviously turned out to be false), we claim that
his conception of a chiasmus between culture and nature offers a valuable clue: it
suggests that attention be paid to the dialectic interaction between nature and culture, and to the multiple manners in which one transforms the other and is eventually transformed into it.
This is the theoretical direction that the most advanced research in evolutionary
biology has recently taken (Portera 2013). The theory of niche construction, one of
the main topics within the so-called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,12 is a first
step in this sense, showing how organisms, through their choices, their preferences,
activities and metabolism, can shape their environment and alter the selective pressures to which they are exposed. In our species, Homo sapiens, cultural evolution
has extraordinarily amplified this widespread ability to shape the environment and
modify selective pressures. The transmission of aesthetic preferences, as is well
known, does not necessarily follow a vertical pattern of descent: criteria of beauty
spread in all directions, among the components of a population and even beyond its
boundaries. Thanks to the most recent developments in evolutionary biology, we
now know that in biology, too, the transmission of traits does not necessarily imply
vertical descent and, furthermore, does not necessarily imply genes: the horizontal
transfer of genes, on the one hand, and the epigenetic system of inheritance, on the
11
12
Connection: See Chap. 11 on gene-culture coevolutionary theory.

See Pigliucci and Mller (2010) and Odling-Smee et al. (2003).
386
other hand, have radically broadened our conceptions of inheritance and transmission of traits through the generations.
To sum up, we wish to come back to the question proposed at the beginning of
this essay: Are all aesthetic preferences in humans universal, innate, and therefore
genetically encoded or do they emerge as a consequence of the mere exposure to
cultural models? Following Darwins consideration in the Notebooks, we suggest
that the first step towards an answer should be the elaboration of a more accurate
model for the chiasmatic interactions between nature and culture. Cultural evolution and biological evolution are matters of unquestionable fact: the greater purpose
now and one of the challenges facing todays theorists involved in Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis is to try to understand how nature and culture really, factually interact with each other, in forging and shaping humans and their preferences.
References
Andersson, M. (1982). Female choice selects for extreme tail length in a widowbird. Nature, 299,
818820.
Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). (1992). The adapted mind. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Barrett, P. H., et al. (Eds.). (2009). Charles Darwins notebooks, 18361844: Geology, transmutation of species, metaphysical enquiries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bartalesi, L. (2012). Estetica evoluzionistica. Darwin e lorigine del senso estetico. Roma: Carocci.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, S., & Dissanayake, E. (2009). The arts are more than aesthetics and aesthetics is more than
the arts: Neuroaesthetics as narrow aesthetics. In M. Skov & O. Vartanian (Eds.), Neuroaesthetics
(pp. 4357). Amityville: Baywood.
Brown, S., et al. (2011). Naturalizing aesthetics: Brain areas for aesthetic appraisal across sensory
modalities. NeuroImage, 58, 250258.
Buller, D. J. (2005). Adapting minds. Evolutionary psychology and the persistent quest for human
nature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Buss, D. M. (2005). The handbook of evolutionary psychology. London: Wiley.
Changeux, J.-P. (2002). LHomme de vrit. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Coss, R. G. (2003). The role of evolved perceptual biases in art and design. In K. Grammer &
E. Voland (Eds.), Evolutionary aesthetics (pp. 69130). Berlin: Springer.
Cronin, H. (1991). The ant and the peacock: Altruism and sexual selection from Darwin to today.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray.
Darwin, C. (1876/1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (6th edn). London: John Murray
Davies, S. (2012). The artful species: Aesthetics, art, and evolution. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Desideri, F. (2011). La percezione riflessa. Estetica e filsoofia della mente. Milano: Raffaello
Cortina.
Desideri, F. (2013). On the epigenesis of the aesthetic mind. The sense of beauty from survival to
supervenience. Rivista di estetica, 54, 6382. anno LIII.
Dissanayake, E. (1998). Komar and Melamid discover pleistocene taste. Philosophy and Literature,
22, 486496.
20
387
Dupr, J. (2001). Human nature and the limits of science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dutton, D. (1998). Americas most wanted, and why no one wants it. Philosophy and Literature,
22, 530543.
Edelman, G. (1989). Neural Darwinism: The theory of neuronal group selection. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1984). Die Biologie des menschlichen Verhaltens. Grundri der Humanethologie.
Mnchen: R. Piper GmbH & Co.
Eldredge, N. (2004). Why we do it. Rethinking sex and the selfish gene. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company.
Endler, J., & Basolo, A. (1998). Sensory ecology, receiver biases and sexual selection. Trends in
Ecology and Evolution, 13, 415420.
Falk, J. H. (2010). Evolutionary influence on human landscape preference. Environment and
Behavior, 42(4), 479493.
Guilford, T., & Dawkins, M. S. (1991). Receiver psychology and the evolution of animal signals.
Animal Behaviour, 42, 114.
Jablonka, E., & Avitale, E. (2000). Animal traditions: Behavioural inheritance in evolution.
Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M. (2005). Evolution in four dimensions: Genetic, epigenetic, behavioral,
and symbolic variation in the history of life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., & Rieser-Danner, L. A. (1990). Infants differential social
responses to attractive and unattractive faces. Developmental Psychology, 26, 153159.
Menninghaus, W. (2003). Das Versprechen der Schnheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Menninghaus, W. (2009). Biology la mode: Charles Darwins aesthetics of Ornament. History
and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 31(2), 263278.
Miller, G. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature.
New York: Anchor Books.
Mithen, S. (1998). The prehistory of mind. A search for the origins of art, religion and science.
London: Phoenix.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche construction. The neglected
process in evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Orians, G. H. (1980). Habitat selection: General theory and applications to human behavior. In
J. S. Lockard (Ed.), The evolution of human social behavior (pp. 4963). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Orians, G. H. (1986). An ecological and evolutionary approach to landscape aesthetics. In E. C.
Penning-Rowsell & D. Lowenthal (Eds.), Landscape meanings and values (pp. 325). London:
Allen and Unwin.
Orians, G. H., & Hervageen, J. H. (1992). Evolved responses to landscapes. In J. Barkow,
L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind (pp. 555579). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Oyama, S. (2000). Evolutions eye: A systems view of the biology-culture divide. Durham: Duke
University Press Books.
Paper Mller, A. (1990). Male tail length and female mate choice in the monogamous swallow,
Hirundo rustica. Animal Behaviour, 39, 458465.
Pigliucci, M., & Mller, G. B. (2010). Evolution. The extended synthesis. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Portera, M. (2013). Estetica della contingenza. Exattamenti e pennacchi tra biologia e filosofia. In
L. Russo (Ed.), Premio nuova estetica (pp. 91112). Palermo: Aesthetica.
Richards, R. J. (1987). Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richards, R. J. (2005). Darwins metaphysics of mind. In V. Hosle & C. Illies (Eds.), Darwinism
and philosophy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Ruso, B., Renninger, L., & Atzwanger, K. (2003). Human habitat preferences: A generative territory for evolutionary aesthetics research. In K. Grammer & E. Voland (Eds.), Evolutionary
aesthetics (pp. 279294). Berlin: Springer.
388
Schaeffer, J.-M. (1992). Lart de lge moderne. Lesthtique et la philosophie de lart du XVIIIe
sicle nos jours. Paris: Gallimard.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Does beauty build adapted minds? Toward an evolutionary
theory of aesthetics, fiction and the arts. SubStance, 94/95(1), 627.
Voland, E. (2003). Aesthetic preferences in the world of artifacts. Adaptations for the evaluation of
Honest Signals? In E. Voland & K. Grammer (Eds.), Evolutionary aesthetics. Berlin:
Springer.
Welsch, W. (2004). Animal aesthetics. Available for free download on the website: http://www.
contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=243
Welsch, W. (2012). Blickwechsel. Neue Wege der sthetik. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Zahavi, A. (1997). The handicap principle: A missing piece of Darwins puzzle. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Chapter 21
Nothing But Survival: On the Origin

and Function of Literature
Mario Barenghi
Ill start in the most trivial way for someone who normally deals with literature, that
is, with a quote. Its from a poem by the English poet W.H. Auden, whose title is a
question: Progress?
Sessile, unseeing
the Plant is wholly content
with the Adjacent.
Mobilised, sighted,
the Beast can tell Here from There
and Now from Not-Yet.
Talkative, anxious,
Man can picture the Absent
and Non-Existent.1
These three short verses represent the plant world, the animal world and the
human world. The overall sense of the comparison is stated by the rhetorical question of the title. Progress? The answer, obviously, cannot be positive; it is up to the
reader to opt for a categorical denial, expressed in a bitter or sarcastic tone (No
progress, not even the shadow of it!) or for the smiling irony of a doubtful formula
(Progress? Who knows?).2 In both cases, it can be assumed that a glass of sherry
will follow. Im talking about the reader, of course: Auden preferred vodka.
The comparison is made on a crescendo, which outlines a gradual strengthening of the senses and a growing capacity of detachment from events. The plant is
satisfied by the given situation and has no visual faculties; the animal can move and
1
Auden (1973).
Connection: The concept of evolutionary progress, hinted to here, is discussed in the Connection
in the introduction of Chap. 3.
2
M. Barenghi (*)
e-mail: mario.barenghi@unimib.it
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_21
389
390
M. Barenghi
see, and is aware of spatial and temporal distances; man has also acquired the tendency to envision what is not, both in a relative sense (what is not in a given place
and time) and in an absolute sense (that which is not and cannot be). The key, as I
said, is in the punctuation of the title. Was it a benefit to add such unprecedented
language and imagination skills to the visual and motor faculties already present in
the animal species? Are we better off with our talkative insecurity, with our tendency to evoke remote or inaccessible places and times, conditions and unrealistic
assumptions, or do the plants and animals have it better with their much narrower
horizons? From a formal point of view the poem is structured around a series of
multiple gradations: on the one hand, there are the attributes of the living (sessile/
mobilized/talkative; unseeing/sighted/anxious); on the other hand, there are the
object of their attention and their ability to distinguish (adjacent/here and there, now
and not-yet/absent, non-existent). At the climax of the increase in potential, it is
compared to the anticlimax of the progressive anxiety. Not without levity, Auden
echoes a commonplace of moral reflection, according to which the unconscious is a
privilege: the more man is unaware of his own condition, the less he is subject to
feelings of unhappiness. In Italian literature, a clearer and more detailed expression
of this principle is addressed in one of the Operette morali by Giacomo Leopardi,
the Dialogo della Natura e di unAnima (Dialogue between Nature and a Soul).3
Incidentally, sessile is also used to indicate parts of the plant (flowers or fruits)
that are directly attached to the stem: a good example is that of the flowers of the
Cercis siliquastrum or the Judas tree, one of the first trees to bloom in the streets of
our cities. Here sessile has the meaning of stable, sedentary; it usually refers to
animals that stay in one place, such as shells or sponges. However, apart from this
particular, Audens words, taken literally, appear blatantly unfounded. Is the motionless plant content with the adjacent? Of course, plants move: during reproduction
they disseminate their seeds, quickly scattering them over considerable distances
(anyone who has nasturtiums or columbines in the garden knows this very well).
Moreover, if we want to focus on individuals, it is all too obvious that every herb,
shrub or tree tries to find the best sunlight exposure, often in bitter quarrels with its
neighbors. And what about the climbing species? The exploration of the surrounding area technically referred to as circumnutation through sensitive apical
parts, outstretched looking for some support to which they can attach with barbs and
tendrils, is a fascinating phenomenon, which not surprisingly attracted the attention
of Charles Darwin (On the Moving and Climbing of Plants, 1865). In short, unlike
The Operette morali have been translated into English under several different titles: ex. Moral
Tales (translated by Patrick Creagh), Manchester: Carcanet 1983; Operette Morali. Essays and
Dialogues (translated by Giovanni Cecchetti), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Charles Edwardes nineteenth-century translation (Essays and Dialogues, London 1882) is available online at: http://digilander.libero.it/il_leopardi/translate_english/leopardi_dialogue_between_
nature_and_a_soul.html.
21 Nothing But Survival: On the Origin and Function of Literature
391
other poets, such as the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck (Lintelligence des fleurs,
Maeterlinck 1907), Auden is not as fair-minded with other living species.
That said, there is no doubt that humans are talkative, restless and have an ingenious and often feverish imagination. Nor can it be denied that the final lines of this
poem have anything to do with literature: literary uses of language often include
emphasis on the absent and non-existent. Poems, fairy tales, legends, epic tales,
anecdotes and short stories evoke figures and imaginary environments, which differ
from the time and place of the reader or listener. They fantasize about events that
have never occurred, whether plausible or far from the likelihood of being rendered
plausible by the imagination. They re-elaborate past events, distilling and composing them in the worthiest forms in order to be remembered. They give life to invented
characters and give new and different features to real people, turning them into role
models, emblems or heroes. Literature to be understood in the broadest sense of
the word, as a set of poetic uses of language4 does all this; indeed, it exists just for
this purpose. Therefore, at this point we should ask if it is possible that literature has
given our species an evolutionary advantage.
Before answering this question, it is important to reflect on its relevance to the
theme of our book. In this work, I will not deal directly with the transmission of
cultural traits because in the field of literature this topic has been widely and overly
discussed. All studies on the history of literature, the history of literary genres
(Petrarchism, the pastoral poetry, the historical novel), the formal traditions (the
history of the ottava rima, the use of the metaphor), the movements and schools, the
precursors or the epigones of the authors, and the reception of the works, as well as
the entire field of thematic criticism, do nothing but illustrate the modalities of the
dissemination, reproduction and adaptation of traits. One example is the
eighteenth-century novel which reclaims the theme of seduction from the novelistic
tradition, but renews it in a serious tone (pathetic, sometimes tragic), rather than
comical and playful. Importantly, there is a transition from the theme of seduced
ingenuity as in the last novel of the third day of Boccaccios Decameron (Alibech
diviene romita, a cui Rustico monaco insegna rimettere il diavolo in Inferno:
Alibech becomes a hermit and the monk Rustico teaches her how to send the Devil
back to Hell) to the theme of seduced innocence, as in Richardsons Clarissa or
Laclos Liaisons dangereuses. In the literature of the Middle Ages the loss of virginity by a girl was not viewed as a dramatic issue, rather it was at most a humorous
or fun occasion. In the nascent bourgeois civilization it acquired importance, seriousness, psychological and social significance, so much so as to serve as the basis
of entire novels.
A second example concerns the level of expression, and since I am an Italianist,
I will only make reference to Italian literature. The eighteenth century is an era in
which the divergence of poetic language from the language of prose and even
4
The modern idea of literature is an eighteenth-century invention. In ancient times, the word letteratura indicated the condition of the man of letters, or his preparation (as in the expression un
uomo di buona letteratura). On this topic see Escarpit (1958: 259272).
392
M. Barenghi
more so, of course, of the spoken language is particularly striking in Italy. This
phenomenon was recorded at all levels of organization of speech: syntax, morphology and lexicon. There is a whole phrasebook nouns such as etra (air, sky), speme
(hope), pugna (battle), crine (hair), and cinabro (cinnabar); adjectives such as frale
(frail), egro (ill) , antiquo (antique), and onusto (burdened); verbs such as ire (to go),
fiedere (to wound), conquidere (to conquer), and so on which is regarded almost
as the exclusive privilege for writing verse (whose use continued for some time in
opera libretti). The most innovative literary experiences tended to abandon it, reducing the distances from speech; just think of Goldonis plays or the writings of Cesare
Beccaria, the author of the treatise Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and
Punishments, Beccaria 1764). Even with an author in many ways as tied to tradition
as Pietro Metastasio was, it is evident that there is a clear tendency to simplify syntax. Instead, Giuseppe Parinis work contrasts this, in that on the formal level he
opts for a decidedly stately and noble style, very far from the language in use.
However, he uses it to deal with concrete issues, such as important social news, very
specific topics (the smallpox vaccination, the emasculation of singers, and public
hygiene), or general news (the decadence of the Milanese aristocracy). What happens essentially is that expressive refined and archaic expressive forms are retrieved
and used in a satirical and didactic tone.5
The history of literature, like the history of art or the history of philosophy,
speaks of a continuum of the transmission of cultural traits; what is missing, is the
theoretical framework that would make it possible to compare these kinds of facts
to the processes observed in other branches of humanities. In other words, it is necessary to identify a common horizon: to identify a foundation of biological and
cultural co-evolution that legitimizes the comparison between the different orders of
phenomena. Because of this, it is indispensable to return to a functionalist concept
of literature. When faced with a literary phenomenon, the questions that must be
asked are these: What effects does it produce? How does it act on the recipient?
What implications does it have on the aesthetic experience of the text? And, how
does it change the cultural system? Considering the last example, it seems evident
that the use of the high style by Parini represents something that is analogous to
what scholars of evolution call exaptation6 (Gould and Vrba 1982): a functional cooption, which gives a new use to a trait (a set of traits, an organ) previously used
for different tasks. In this case, a set of formal characteristics distinctive of the
epictragic level (the most solemn, as far away from everyday reality) is used to
give poignancy to satire and militant intervention. The same concept of exaptation
seems readable as transposition at the biological evolutionary level of a phenomenon typical of the history of culture. Just think of the rediscovery of emblems and
5
Both examples are from Schulz-Buschhaus (1979). The references to Giuseppe Parini regard the
poem Il Giorno (The Day, 19631965), the odes La salubrit dellaria, Linnesto del vaiolo, La
musica (Salubrious Air, Variolation, Music).
6
Connection: The concept of exaptation can be useful to conceptualize the re-use of cultural traits.
Refer to the Connection in the introduction of Chap. 3 for further connections.
393
figures of the Roman Republic, in Revolutionary France, of the medieval style of

Romanticism, or of the primitivism of early twentieth century art: all formations
of the imaginary with new functions in light of current needs. Examples of this
could be multiplied with ease, and at different scales of magnitude. The cultural
systems make an assiduous practice of bricolage, by adapting the information available to them to ever new contexts. Historical semantics (the study of the changes in
the meanings of words) deals only with linguistic exaptations. The myths of
Odysseus and Prometheus, Don Giovanni and Faust have been narrated in various
periods in countless different ways.
More specifically, you might think of the affinity between the biological concept
of exaptation and the category of recycling, developed by Franco Brioschi (1983).7
In the discursive universe we can identify two types of principle: the consumption
speech and the recycling speech. The first comprises the utterances that exhaust
their function the moment in which they are uttered. Almost everything that we say
in the course of a day belongs to this category: greetings, questions, requests,
answers, explanations, invitations, orders, reports, complaints, secrets, grievances,
insults, and reflections are ephemeral and contextual verbal acts, designed to
achieve a hic et nunc effect from specific and certain interlocutors. Instead, the recycling speeches are born with the intention of having a function in multiple and
diverse contexts. They do not apply to a single situation, but to a type or class (several types or classes, actually) of situations and therefore with different recipients.
This category includes legal texts, sacred texts, prayers, and proverbs: all statements
that keep their textual identity stable, but can be applied (with greater or lesser effectiveness and pertinence) to a series of generally undefined scenarios. Literature falls
precisely into the world of recycling. A fairy tale, a poem, a legend, and a myth
and even more so a novel, the only genre born in the age of writing are designed
to last over time and to diffuse into space in order to be handed down, repeated, and
replayed over the years and (if possible) over the centuries. Now, inevitably, the different circumstances of reception of a text influence the effects it produces. Other
than the macroscopic cases (how many different uses of the words of the Gospel
have there been?), what matters is the principle. A recycling speech, even if only the
most basic one (Two wrongs dont make a right, There's no such thing as a free
lunch), as such is destined to be incessantly reworked, depending on the context of
the enunciation. In a sense, we could say that the phenomenon of recycling (and
therefore the entire literary domain) is a form of textuality, which is inherently exaptative; i.e., reversing the terms of the question, that the idea of exaptation projects
a typical process in the evolution of culture on biological evolution.
With regard to the literary system, if a particular expressive process or thematic
foundation can be equated with the organ of a living species, can we say the same
thing for all our literature with respect to a cultural system? Or about culture with
respect to the human community that developed it? I think, we can. But, in order to
7
The antinomy Verbrauchsrede/Wiedergebrauchsrede was coined by Heinrich Lausberg (1967:
1119).
394
M. Barenghi
avoid this, the combination is reduced to a suggestive analogy, it is necessary to

clarify what the point of literature is (understood in the broadest sense of the word).
The question is to define the function of literature as such. This problem implies a
net change of horizons with respect to the theoretical twentieth century view. In the
course of the twentieth century, the question What is literature? was repeatedly
put forth. The question we must present, however (on the basis of a revealing essay
by the Hungarian scholar, Paul Hernadi, who immigrated to the United States) is
Why literature? (Hernadi 2002). What is the raison dtre of a relatively (or
apparently) gratuitous use of language, that is to say free from the need of contingent practices?
Returning to Audens poetry, it is necessary to question the connection between
those human traits and the nature of literary experience. Can the basic, very elementary connotations that Progress? qualifies as exclusive to our species in particular, the ability to evoke with words what is not here and now, or that which has
no real existence be the basis for an anthropological conception of literature? If it
were possible, we could question the origins of the poetic use of language, but
unfortunately we do not have documentation; the most ancient texts that survived
are relatively recent (a few thousand years old). Things go a bit better in the artistic
field.
The Magdalenian cave paintings (Upper Paleolithic), in particular, the caves of
Altamira and Lascaux were found by chance, and above all, it is by chance that they
were preserved, thanks to exceptionally favorable microclimatic conditions. The
technical skill that they reveal is astonishing. It is impossible to attribute them to
particular individuals; even so, they are true works of art. What is more, since they
date back to between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, we can deduce that the origins
of the paintings are much older. In fact, forms of symbolic production burial rites,
votive statues, musical instruments and ornaments are confirmed from very
ancient times, long before those times which according to historiographical traditions are considered to be the dawn of history (i.e. of the culture of writing). Now, it
seems reasonable that at the same time that these cultural manifestations were
developed, primordial poetic activities also developed. Our ancestors had to express
themselves through stories, legends, songs, myths and prayers. It does not seem
possible that humans who were able to paint figures of deer or bison on a rock wall
in such a masterly manner were not able to speak about a deer or a bison: to narrate
an adventurous hunt in an engaging way, worthy of being passed down to children
and grandchildren.
With regards to hunting, I think those who consider the role attributed to hunting
in relation to the origin and development of language as excessive are right. A much
more persuasive argument comes from the American anthropologist Dean Falk,
according to whom the decisive event came when ancestral mothers needed to put
their little children down on the ground in order to do other tasks, such as searching
for and gathering fruits, herbs and roots. Unlike the young of chimpanzees, the
children of sapiens were no longer able to cling to the backs of their mothers
(females who had been stripped of their fur, who had assumed a bipedal gait, and
395
children who, in addition to not being able to rely on the prehensility of their lower
limbs, were much more immature compared to the offspring of other primates). The
voice would have then been substituted for direct physical contact. From here a
formidable development of sensitivity to the articulation of sounds, destined to
result in the development perhaps simultaneously of singing and language (Falk
2009), from which the practice of producing very special verbal objects that are
susceptible to preservation and dissemination was undertaken.
It is impossible to say exactly when this happened. However, whenever it was, at
the time when non-instrumental uses of the word began to take shape, the margins
for gratuitous activity, free from immediate practical responsibilities, had to be
small. To be able to tell stories around a fire required a non-trivial number of conditions: not to be too exhausted from fatigue, not to have hunger pangs, not to have
difficult digestion, not to have to be involved in childcare activities and not to have
the desire to reproduce. Singing, storytelling, listening and praying are activities
that required time and attention, and therefore consumed energy. Can we really
imagine that our ancestors dedicated themselves to these activities without any benefits, even if indirectly and over time? My guess is that literature was used in the first
instance to survive, just like other human artifacts, whether they were concrete
objects (clothing, tools, weapons, and housing) or symbolic productions (practices,
codes, beliefs, and rituals). The goal was always to improve their livelihoods, reduce
the risk of being overwhelmed by adversity, and live longer and with less discomfort: in short, adapt to the environment. If I interpret the results of research on the
phylogeny of our species, the extraordinary evolutionary success of sapiens is based
on two main factors: adaptive flexibility and social cohesion.8 Literature can provide
an important contribution to both of these requirements. To see in what ways, it is
necessary to bear in mind two premises:
(a) Literature is an inter-subjective and regulated exercise of the imaginative faculties, which is expressed through the creation of an object (a verbal object). The
word poetry comes from the Greek word (poiin), which means to
do, different from (prttein), doing that does not lead to a product.
Even dream activity is involved with imagination, but it is unconscious, evanescent and not communicable; idem, thoughtless, unrestrained and idiosyncratic
daydreaming; regarding delirium, it is a pathological form of ranting. A story,
however, is a non-labile discourse: it is a verbal object addressed to a recipient,
or an act of communication and sharing even when it is a figment of imagination, an objective in a text, a sequence of intelligible words, or addressed to an
audience in terms that make assimilation and further transmission possible;
(b) The property of literature is that the recipient assumes an emotionally involved
attitude. The degree of involvement varies between downright identification,
empathic participation, and a more critical and detached consideration; but the
common denominator of the involvement remains. The listener or reader feels
called into question; he perceives that the discourse concerns him (the etymol8
See for example the recent synthesis of Tattersall (2012).
396
M. Barenghi
ogy, as often happens, is revealing: interested is derived from inter-esse, to

stand in the middle). In the words of Horace, mutato nomine de te fabula narratur (Sermones, I, 1, 6970): with the name changed the story applies to you.
The strongest effects that literature can produce are attributable to the idea of
experience: mainly, in the sense of expansion and enrichment. Subject matter is the
representation of real or imaginary states of the world, and the evocation of possible, past or future events that have taken or will take place. The participatory attitude of the audience transforms the reading or listening into a series of virtual
experiences: or, rather, into a simulation of experiences. No different is the meaning
of Coleridges famous formula of willing suspension of disbelief, often called
upon to represent the mechanism of reading (and in general, the aesthetic reception).9
Real life, real identities are intentionally placed in parentheses: the game of
literature implies its projection into a world of invention, which, next to the characters and through them, we pretend to be the inhabitants. Basically, this imagining of
ourselves as somewhere and someone else is equivalent to an extension of the existential experience, both when the events staged differ greatly from the empirical
conditions and when they appear as potential but not (or not yet) realized. The discovery that reading activates the so-called mirror neurons is symptomatic; they
allow us to simulate in our brain what others do and to understand how they feel
(Dehaene 2007): reading is an apprenticeship of empathy.10
Now, the ideal sharing of other peoples lives, even if experienced only through
the imagination, on the mental plane corresponds to the use of tools. A story or a
collection of stories is like the femur of a warthog or a polished flint or a goat skin.
They are tools to cope with events in a more appropriate manner, without dulling the
current situation, to clearly grasp at greater depth the given reality and to imagine
alternatives. To rise above the contingencies, taking advantage of the ability to see
the Absent, the Non-Existent, is as Auden wrote, or as Vargas Llosa said in his
Nobel lecture in order not to succumb to automatisms and resignation.11 And,
therefore, it is to improve ones ability to adapt: this is all the more necessary for a
species, which from a certain point onwards has assiduously devoted itself to the
exploration and colonization of new territories (as well as exposed, like any other
species, to climatic upheavals).
On the other hand, it would be wrong to overstate the impact of external material
conditions in literary representation and invention. The fictional world into which
one enters when reading or listening to a story is still, first and foremost, a human
environment, a fabric of relationships. Literary experience is an eminently social
practice: this is not only and not so much because it reflects the characteristics of a
society, but also because it contributes actively to its constitution, strengthening
9
The phrase is from ch. XIV of Biographia literaria (vol. VI of Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Princeton University Press, Princeton 19692002).
10
Connection: The relationship between brain and culture is explored in Chap. 7, and problematized in Chaps. 2, 16, and 20.
11
Cf. Vargas Llosa (2011). The speech delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2010, Elogio de la
lectura y la ficcin, is available online at: www.nobelprize.org.
397
adherence to the principles on which coexistence is based. It gives voice to values,

beliefs, expectations, hopes, temptations and fears; in its more mature phases it
gives form to contradictions and obsessions, to aporias and perplexities. Stories and
words have enormous potential for aggregation: there have been people who did not
know the wheel, but not people without stories. The widely understood virtues that
could be called the socio-poietics of literature can also be expressed in institutional forms.
The Jews exist because there is the Book, the Bible. The birth of a city or a nation
is often associated with the endeavors of a hero, founder and liberator: Romulus,
Joan of Arc, William Tell, Simn Bolvar. The Hellenic civilization, without giving
rise to a unitary state, is also recognized in common mythological heritage; Dantes
Divine Comedy played a large role in Italian cultural consciousness, as Shakespeares
plays did in English. Moreover, founding myths are attested at many different levels: by the start of a new historical era (the people of Paris stormed the Bastille on
July 14, 1789), by the invention of a new sport (William Webb Ellis on November
1, 1823, in the playing field of the public school invented Rugby by deciding to play
ball with his hands). Obviously, not every literary work has the power as if by magic
to make new forms of sociability appear; just as not every important historical event
gives rise to literary masterpieces. However, there is no doubt that literature is likely
to produce associative effects, to promote meetings, discussions, and interlocutions:
to create networks.
There are, therefore at least three aspects of literature as a social practice: (1)
because it evokes scenarios whose building blocks are the conditions of the characters, the relationships between the characters, and the interpersonal relationships;
(2) because the representation of their destiny aims to elicit shared or shareable
responses within a given community; and (3) because all this takes place by means
of language, which is a privileged instrument of social construction.
On the first point, I do not think particular clarification is needed. Even the most
imaginative and far-fetched stories, fascinating the listener with their wonderful
strangeness, end up converging on the personal dimension. Science fiction is a good
example: the most original findings in their setting, in the design of the aliens and in
the excogitation of the technological marvels have little life if they cannot affect the
level of humanity with which the reader can identify. The alien is always a hyperbole or an avatar of the foreigner, of the enemy, of the migrant, of the wayfarer or of
the neighbor; the space shuttle is a variant of the horse, the train or the bus.
I think it is difficult to underestimate the potentialities of reading, as much as the
development of the attitude of reading in the souls of other fellow men. The reader
(or, as always, the listener, or spectator) has access to the interiority of the characters
to a degree that is absolutely unknown in real life. Only in a novel can we enjoy the
privilege of learning the feelings and intentions of others clearly as well as measure
the effects that actions, words and events can produce in a conscience which is different from our own. This prerogative of literature is undoubtedly very unique. A
scholar of philosophy of law, Martha Nussbaum, has even argued that to become a
good judge one must be familiar with novels because novels teach us to see things
with different eyes, and this is a crucial requirement for the proper administration of
398
M. Barenghi
justice (Nussbaum 1995). Charles Dickens is one of the authors that Nussbaum
cites: in particular, the passage from Hard Times (Dickens 1854) in which Mr.
Thomas Gradgrind, headmaster and supporter of the idea that only facts and numbers have educational value, complains about the predilection of his countrymen for
romance novels.
There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr Gradgrind greatly
tormented his mind about what people read in this library: a point whereon little rivers of
tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, to
which no depth any diver ever reached and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in wondering about. They
wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, and the lives and deaths of common men
and women! They sometimes, after 15 h work, sat down to read mere fables about men and
women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They
took DeFoe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr Gradgrind was forever working, in print and out of
print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable
product.12
The second aspect deserves more attention. Literature, as stated above, is an act
of communication. Through the use of literary works in the lato sensu listening to
stories around a campfire, in court, or in the barn, dramas staged in a town square or
in a theater, or novels read in secluded solitude not only can we imagine ourselves
in a reality other than our own, by identifying with other figures and personalities,
but we can also carry out an exercise of sharing. Telling, listening, or reading a story
means to experience situations that elicit joy or sorrow, hope or fear, grief or relief,
tears or laughter, admiration or pity: and all this, together.
Of course, modern culture has accustomed us to exalting individual subjectivity
of responses to works of art, the idiosyncratic characteristics and circumstantial
relativity of aesthetic responses. Almost in equal measure, it has celebrated the
value of ambiguity and polysemy, sometimes just recognizing in it the distinctive
quid of literariness. But we must not forget that differences and nuances are formed
on a shared foundation. In the first instance, the function of literature is to artificially
induce (artistically) responses that are common, shared or at least comparable. If, in
principle, it is not forbidden to laugh at the fate of Antigone, regret the fate of
Tartuffe, or hope that the ogre for once manages to eat that annoying brat, Tom
Thumb, no one escapes the anomaly of these attitudes. Moreover, forms such as
parody and caricature, used to overturn the symbols of value, prove the existence of
normal kinds of reception and interpretation. I realize that the word normal is
insidious; indeed, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Here it is enough to say that
it is not a synonym for dull, uniform or unambiguous: it simply intends to
designate compliance with a set of rules that are intrinsic to the text (not reducible,
of course, to the authors intention).
12
Dickens (1854), ed. 2002, p. 50.
399
In short, in the actions of the characters, in their feelings and behaviors and in
their words, the audience (i.e., a human community) is trained to recognize what is
desirable and what is praiseworthy and blameworthy and what is to be avoided,
what is worthy of admiration and imitation and what merits disapproval and condemnation. One trains oneself to verify what consequences (auspicious or inauspicious, clear or ambiguous, promising or random) derive from the actions, decisions,
reactions or responses of the characters to the circumstances in which they find
themselves, and questions what should be considered adequate, appropriate, or
advantageous, and what should not. All this explains two opposite connotations and
characteristics of literature. On the one hand, literary works always speak more or
less about the same things: love, hatred, offenses, expectations, fears, suffering and
misunderstandings. As Italo Calvino wrote in his 1955 essay, Il midollo del leone
(The Lions Marrow), there are few but irreplaceable things that literature can
teach:
the way you look at your neighbor and yourself, to interrelate personal and general facts, to
give value to small or large things, to consider ones own and others limitations and vices,
to find the proportions of life, and the place of love in it, and its strength and rhythm, and
the place of death, the way to think or not to think of it; literature can teach toughness,
compassion, sadness, irony, humor, and many more of these necessary and difficult things.
The rest we will have to go elsewhere to learn, from science, history and life, as we all have
to continually do to learn the rest.13
On the other hand, this set of imaginative content is continually revised and
reshaped, as if it needs systematic or periodic updating. A collection of stories
resembles a survival kit: it is a toolbox that is used to quickly identify situations and
provide the most profitable behavioral responses, in terms of benefits, for the individual and for the group. This survival kit is in relation to unexpected events and
unforeseen circumstances, and also for events and conditions that are far from
unknown, being often typical and recurring. Nevertheless, they are relentlessly critical, or rather such as to cause confusion, hesitation and perplexity. The point is that
the existence of every human being takes place within an environment characterized
by exceptionally intense and articulate social interaction. Understanding the feelings and intentions of others is a task that is done with a frequency comparable
perhaps only to that of the life of certain Hymenoptera at the cost of committing
the sin of anthropocentrism, I assume that the behaviors of sapiens are somewhat
less standardized than those of bees or ants. Hence, there comes the need to refine
the skills of intuition, to increase the range of hypotheses and to multiply the repertoire of possible responses.
Simply put, the matter may be summed up in the apologue, known as the hedgehogs dilemma formulated in 1851 by Arthur Schopenhauer in his short philosophical essays (Parerga und paralipomena: kleine philosophische Schriften, vol.
II, cap. XXXI):
A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they
began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the
13
Calvino (1980), ed. 1995, p. 21.
400
M. Barenghi
cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many
turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining
at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human
porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable
qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only
tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness and fine manners; and those who
transgress it are roughly told in the English phrase to keep their distance. By this
arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people
do not get pricked.14
Of course, the variables involved within a human community are much more
numerous: there is not only the low temperature and the danger of getting pricked.
For this reason it is important to adequately interpret the attitudes of others. One of
the main positive effects that literature can induce is an increase in mental flexibility
in cognitive, emotional, practical, and of course, expressive and communicative
aspects thus, even linguistic aspects.
Concerning the third aspect, literature provides a very broad repertoire of verbal
behaviors. It makes evident the many, endless ways in which we can speak about
reality, about external events and psychological issues of human relations; it shows
the effects that discourses produce among individuals, exemplifying them through
the words of the characters. Given a certain situation, the question asked to the protagonist of a story is not just what should or should not be done, but also what is best
to say or not to say, along with how and when. Through the literary experience, the
human community practices language and is trained to act and interact with words.
If the evolution of singular sapiens was characterized, from a certain point onwards,
by a tremendous investment in verbal communication, then non-instrumental uses
of words must have functioned as multipliers of exceptionally effective skills.
Telling stories, repeating proverbs, reciting poetry or prayers, staging dramatic
actions, handing down heroic deeds, and recounting memorable events can produce
benefits (albeit non-material ones) even in the short term; in terms of aesthetic pleasure, moral support, encouragement, fun and diversion, and according to the type of
use, they can strengthen the sense of belonging and group solidarity, self-awareness
and ones role. In the long term, they also offer the opportunity to improve our linguistic grasp on the world: to strengthen and to improve the ability to capture events
and situations through words, understanding the details more accurately and encompassing everything in an effective synthesis. Language, then, allows us to transform
experience into facts that would otherwise remain opaque, trivial or insignificant,
distilling a common heritage that is shared and transmitted for the benefit of
cohesion among the members of the group and of the continuity of generations. In
a word, literature is used to humanize the world as does building a village, or tilling the land.
14
Cited from the nineteenth century translation by Thomas Bailey Saunders of Schopenhauer
(1872).
401
In conclusion, I would like to quote another of Audens shorter poems, Shorts

from Thank You, Fog.
Among the mammals
only Man has ears
that can display no emotion.
Again, I have to correct the illustrious poet. Literally, what he says is false: there
are many mammals with expressionless ears. Auden obviously has in mind dogs,
cats, horses and elephants, and ignores the gorillas, groundhogs, opossums and
hedgehogs, too. But there is no doubt that language has been invested with relational and communicative tasks that other species entrust to different means, from
the movements of the ears to olfactory impulses. Even the quills were replaced by
words that can, yes, prick and in a very painful way, but they also allow an extraordinary proximity for their frequency and intensity, which results in a capacity of
interaction and adaptive flexibility that is unparalleled and without example. Of
course, when someone withdraws to read a book, it may look like they want to isolate themselves from others, and in a certain sense this is true, however, whether we
like it or not, reading means savoring alternative experiences virtually. It is then up
to the will and conscience of each reader to draw from the pages that he reads the
reasons and tools to improve his relationships with the world around him (the human
world, first of all).
A final consideration, which presents a new set of problems is that all uses of
language were developed at a time when our species was, like every other species, at
risk of extinction due to external factors, predators, climate change and natural disasters. The danger of predators has long gone, though probably we still risk attacks by
micro-organisms. In addition, there is a new risk that of self-destruction. From this
point of view, literature not only maintains its original raison dtre, but we need it
now more than ever before. Surviving is in fact a serious affair, as always and for this
you should read novels, short stories and poems and meditate on the meaning of
what you have read, with or without the help of a glass of sherry or vodka.
Authors Note Thanks to Julia Weekes for Italian to English translation. These pages, intentionally conversational, do not aim to give an account of the evolutionary literary studies, which in
recent decades have increased considerably in Anglo-Saxon countries. Jonathan Gottschalls fresh
and original book (2012) has recently been published in Italy under the title Listinto di narrare.
Come le storie ci hanno reso umani (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri), and summarizes a series of
reflections on narration developed by the so-called Darwinian literary studies. In this fascinating
field of multidisciplinary investigation, which is sustained by contributions from biology, neuroscience, pedagogy and aesthetics, the names of Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton and Brian Boyd should
be also be remembered with Gottschall.
I agree quite firmly that evolutionary studies represent a crucial area of research for the future
development of literary theory. In any case, since the domain of the narrative is the most extensive
one of literature, it is essential to bear in mind that not all literature is narrative: and that the origins
and destinies of literature are always intertwined with those of language. If the analogy (made
here) between the concepts of recycling and exaptation seems to me to merit investigation, it is not
only for its theoretical importance, but also because it prevents the risk of flattening the role of
literary experience to simple story telling. Simple, of course, so to speak. But things are always
inevitably shown to be more complex than any of our theoretical simplifications.
402
M. Barenghi
References
Auden, W. H. (1973). Thank you, fog. Last poems. London: Faber & Faber.
Brioschi, F. (1983). La mappa dellimpero. Problemi di teoria della letteratura. Milano: Il
Saggiatore.
Calvino, I. (1980). Il midollo del leone. In Una pietra sopra. Torino: Einaudi. Reprinted in
Calvino, I. (1995). Saggi 19451985 (Ed. M. Barenghi). Milano: Mondadori.
Darwin, C. (1865). On the moving and climbing of plants. Journal of the Linnean Society of
London, 9, 1118.
Dehaene, S. (2007). Les neurones de la lecture. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Dickens, C. (1854). Hard times (2012: 50). London: Sovereign.
Escarpit, R. (1958). Sociologie de la littrature. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. English
edition: Escarpit, R. (1971). The sociology of literature (trans: Pick, E.). London: Frank Cass
Publishers.
Escarpit, R. (1958). La dfinition du terme littrature: projet darticle pour un dictionnaire international des termes littraires. In R. Escarpit & C. Bouazis (Eds.), La littrature et le social. Paris:
Flammarion. 1970.
Falk, D. (2009). Finding our tongues. Mothers, infants and the origin of language. New York:
Basic Books.
Gottschall, J. (2012). The story telling animal. How stories make us human. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt.
Gould, S. J., & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation. A missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology,
8(1), 415.
Hernadi, P. (2002). Why is literature: A co-evolutionary perspective on imaginary world making.
Poetics Today, 23(1), 2142.
Lausberg, H. (1967). Elemente der literarischen rhetorik. Mnchen: Max Hueber.
Maeterlinck, M. (1907). LIntelligence des fleurs. English edition: Maeterlinck, M. (2007). The
intelligence of flowers (trans.: Mosley, P.). New York: State University of New York Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Poetic justice. The literary imagination and public life. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (1872). Studies in pessimism. A series of essays (trans: Saunders, T. B.). London:
Swan Sonnenschein, (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimism/index.
html)
Schulz-Buschhaus, U. (1979). Considerazioni storiche sulla Trivial literatur. In Trivial literatur? Letterature di massa e di consumo. Trieste: Lint. Reprinted in Schulz-Buschhaus, U.
(1999). Il sistema letterario della civilt borghese. Milano: Unicopli.
Tattersall, I. (2012). Masters of the planet: The search for our human origins. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Vargas Llosa, M. (2011). In praise of reading and fiction (trans: Grossman, E.). New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
Chapter 22
Concluding Remarks
Removing Barriers in Scientific Research: Concepts,
Synthesis and Catalysis
Emanuele Serrelli
So what? At the end of a book on cultural traits which includes 20 contributions

from the most diverse disciplines, from cultural anthropology to archaeology, from
psychology to history of science, from economics to musicology, from philosophy
to linguistics and evolutionary genetics what have we learned about cultural
traits? Well, much. But perhaps many readers will feel unsatisfied by an incomplete
vast interdisciplinary venture without some sort of synthetic conceptual framework,
some new understanding of cultural traits, or at least some good taxonomy of what
is meant by a cultural trait, or minimally a list of conceptual problems. I will devote
a few lines here to an analysis of cultural traits as a putative scientific category
emerging from our collection. But I need to make clear in advance that a precise
conceptual synthesis is not here. We have been as thoughtful as we could, and we
have tried to follow all the connections, but there is no such thing as a magic paragraph able to capture such interconnectedness. Indeed, this concluding note is actually a critical comment against what I and Panebianco see as a hurry to close the
discourse in a given logical scheme.
In Chap. 1, we summarized in our words the contents of all Chapters, with particular focus on what the authors mean by cultural trait, and on some conceptual
problems that, however, are much better explained in the Chapters themselves. We
provided three ways of navigating the book: spontaneous interdisciplinary links,
guided Connections that help the reader jump between different points to deepen
concepts and issues, and the criteria we embedded in the Chapters sequence. Let us
review these latter criteria. A first block of Chapters presents two takes in cultural
anthropology on cultural traits: the first inviting generalizing attempts, the second
E. Serrelli (*)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_22
403
404
E. Serrelli
showing the reasons for locality. Then two essays show how societies and nations
educate their people, explicitly and implicitly, to their own typical cultural traits and
by means of cultural traits (typical institutions and objects). Two contributions
address the psychology of the trait, emphasizing its nature of evocator of something deeper or larger. Two Chapters show the importance of geographical meeting
points and melting pots, and a third Chapter problematizes the ideas of trait, of
culture, of geographical map, and of maps and diagrams in general, exposing our
obstinate hunt for origins. Two authors demonstrate the importance of mathematical models, the plurality of modeling strategies, and the influence of modeling strategies on ways of thinking, and two more essays show how these ways of thinking
can be applied to understand concrete situations of cultural contact, between countries and between generations. Three contributions, revolving around archaeology
and material culture, show how lineages of artifacts can be traced, and what mechanisms govern their change. Another essay introduces the important repository and
historical record of cultural traits: language. Three more Chapters formulate theories of why traits such as visual art, aesthetic preferences, and the passion for literature exist in the first place, being, in the second place, domains of circulation of
cultural traits such as styles, preferences, genres.
Synthesis, integration, unification and similar phenomena have long gained
important place in philosophy of science. Philosophers actively seek examples of
interdisciplinary and inter-field coordination, and ask: how do different areas of
science combine or integrate their divergent methods and conceptual resources?
What are the limits and facilitating conditions? There was a time when philosophers
reasoned in terms of theory reduction, using conceptual analysis to identify the
most fundamental theory other theories would get reduced to. Now philosophers
talk about theories pluralism and mechanisms heterogeneity (Mitchell 2003; Craver
2009). Yet, they typically continue to see conceptual analysis as the main tool and
clarification as the ultimate goal. Their urge for conceptual grip can, I claim, divert
their attention away from their own goal, and perhaps from the meaning of the experiences they are studying.
In 2010, philosophers Brigandt and Love (2010) urged philosophers to study
integration in action in order to understand the nature and dynamics of interdisciplinarity. To set a good example, they organized a meeting of 20 experts in different
fields of biology to work on the non-trivial concept of evolutionary novelty, with
the perspective of a time-extended research on the same topic. In biology, evolutionary novelty is an elusive concept just like cultural trait: it is a false friend,
full of conceptual pitfalls. It means different things to different specialists (geneticists, morphologists, phylogeneticists etc.), and nothing to many others. How do
you delimit a novelty? Is a new gene a novelty, even though it makes its carrier
organism only slightly different? Sometimes an unchanged gene in a new context
can be much more innovative than a new gene in a familiar context. Are birds
wings innovative even though they are just modified limbs? Probably they are, but
exactly at what degree of modification do they become a novelty? Evolutionary
novelty can be a framework for interesting questions, or a source of confusions and
dead ends. During the 2010 meeting, definitions were elicited, and participants were
22
Concluding Remarks
405
stumbling and striving for single, unambiguous definitions, under the assumption
that conceptual clarification would have brought about some kind of coordination
among them and their fields. Brigandt and Loves brief account illustrates their firm
focus on concepts: philosophers hunt for conceptual clarification as a priority, as a
primary and ultimate goal, loaded with bright scientific expectations. The evolutionary novelty concept was considered interesting just in it being the focal point of
opposite conceptual tensions, that were expected to be solved in some way. The
concept was thus both the assembling criterion of a 20-people research group and
the transactional object in the group. To the philosophers eye, concepts are the
domain-delimiting factor, and, within the domain, they are the positive or negative
measure of coordination. But this unconditional confidence in concepts is insensitive to evidence that concepts are often followers in scientific community processes.
For example, they are subject to fashion and to economic pressures: Brigandt and
Love themselves cite workshop participants reporting that they used to mention
evolutionary innovation just as a rhethorical device in the process of grant writing, despite their conviction of its biological unimportance. Scientists use concepts
they dont find useful in order to set up a research project and get some funds, and
later they are forced to maintain that same troublesome word, incoherent with their
research assumptions a semantic curse. Concepts are also cruxes of identity
fights, so that putting conceptual convergence as a goal may be exactly the move
that shuts up the dialogue (see the Mesoudi et al. vs. Ingold case in Chap. 1). In sum,
my impression is that concepts are often a way to close rather than a way to open a
discourse. The philosophers insistence on concepts can eventually do harm or be
just tangential to the directions of science.
In search for insights about synthesis in science, I recently visited the
U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, North
Carolina.1 I will say something on the more general ideas, and then describe
NESCent catalysis meetings. In fact, if our book cannot absolutely be compared to
a working group or a synthesis project, it may bear some similarities to NESCent
catalysis meetings.
At NESCent, synthesis is not at all considered a conceptual phenomenon in the
first place. Synthesis is, first of all, the combination of data collected by many people working in different ways, fields, approaches, regions of the world, in order to
answer new, bigger, and pressing research questions. Genomes can be an easy
example. Whole genome sequences that are periodically announced in the news
the human genome, the platyus genome, the carrot genome are assembled by dozens of labs in the world. Genome data can then be combined, for example, with
medical data which are collected in a completely different but systematic way.
Further on, these syntheses can be compared cross-species, and so on. As for cultural data, an example can be seen in the combination of linguistic, cultural, geo1
The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) is an American NSF-funded collaborative research center operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
and North Carolina State University (see Cunningham 2005; Sidlauskas et al. 2009; Rodrigo et al.
2013).
406
E. Serrelli
graphic world databases like those we cited in Chap. 1. Now, for synthesis to
happen, researchers have to be willing to share and to combine their data, seeing the
advantage of doing that, and they need to know how to gather, store, and share data
for them to be useful to others. In other words, they need to have a certain culture
of data (notice the importance of databases and informatics). To do all this,
researchers may need common concepts, but concepts are secondary and instrumental to answer their communal, new, pressing research questions.
In 2009, NESCent published a paper formalizing the synthesis idea (Sidlauskas
et al. 2009). Question-driven data synthesis is the fundamental idea, but there are
actually four modes of synthesis, depending on the kind of elements getting combined. Multiple modes can coexist in any particular synthetic study. As the genomes
example shows, synthesis does not coincide with interdisciplinarity2: intradisciplinary syntheses, which are surprisingly rare and most needed, combine elements from multiple studies. There are also barriers to synthesis, and ways to
overcome them.
The first mode of synthesis, Data aggregation, reinterprets raw data underlying
prior investigations to answer questions at new and typically larger scales
(Sidlauskas et al. 2009: 873). While this may look simple, in fact the vast majority
of data supporting previous studies are unavailable, often because the data are lost
or preserved in inaccessible forms (ivi: 876). The second mode, Reuse of results,
focuses, indeed, on results of other studies used as data in a new context. But results,
too, are scarcely available in standardized and compatible forms. These two first
modes of synthesis both undergo publication problems, since many mainstream
journals emphasize primary data collection over synthesis (ivi: 875), and publication of results over publication of datasets (in spite of the fact that datasets demand
a remarkable number and degree of technical skills). For Sidlauskas et al. to promote data aggregation and reuse of results
solutions are reasonably straightforward. Journal editors should encourage the publication
of synthetic datasets and analyses and should make an effort to invite objective reviews
from scientists who are also engaged in synthesis.
The third mode of synthesis, Methodological integration, links two or more

methods to create a new analytical pathway (Sidlauskas et al. 2009: 873). Finally,
Conceptual synthesis does not resume elements from previous studies, rather
bridges the theories or paradigms of thoughts that underlie and motivate prior studies (ivi: 873).
Obstacles to synthetic research lie, for Sidlauskas et al. in training, job search and
tenure evaluation, grant review, publication policies, and language barriers. Not only
should scientists be given a more interdisciplinary early training, but it should
become easier for scientists to develop skills in aggregating and reusing information at every career stage (ivi: 874). A proper synthesis training should address not
only specific skills such as software programming, but also basic skills: information
2
Interdisciplinary syntheses exist, and they may eventually erode disciplinary boundaries or create new fields of study.
22
Concluding Remarks
407
literacy (the ability to locate relevant information and assemble a knowledge base),
statistical literacy (understanding how statistical manipulation affects data and inference), and data literacy (the skills required to manipulate and present data)
(Sidlauskas et al. 2009: 874).
The current lack of training reverberates upwards to the level of panels who
evaluate grant proposals, where a few synthetically minded scientists, if any, are
present. Notice how the synthetic scientist is presented as a specific profile, corroborated by published official guidelines3 that still lack incorporation into the hiring criteria of research institutions. But many points made by Sidlauskas et al.
concern another, very important issue: that synthesis can never ever be an exclusive
concern of synthetic scientists. On the contrary, for synthesis to happen, all the scientific community must be involved in it. Journals and funding agencies have their
part to do, by requiring all data to be shared at the time of publication. Data
repositories and their hosting organizations should standardize formats, develop
vocabularies, and establish minimal reusability requirements. Software developers
should ensure the longevity of softwares (for example, by using software repositories) because, even when data endure, analyses cannot be repeated if tools are not
stable. In fact, technology can also hinder synthesis if a proliferation of methods,
data standards, languages, and protocols hampers communication and interoperability. While synthetic scientists, experts and managers work at all these levels, at
the same time a culture of data sharing has to prevail, along with a different culture of science as a collective, rather than individual enterprise. Only in this way
the deposition of data can become a normal part of the research flow, and all other
necessary changes can happen. For synthesis to happen, scientific communities
must embrace a culture in which sharing is normative, methods exist to be combined, and the potential longevity and utility of data exceeds the life span of the
scientists that create it (Sidlauskas et al. 2009: 877).
Synthesis the purposeful and innovative combination of existing data requires
specific working groups and meetings among scientists who concretely develop
the common project. But, in the cultural context just described, the ground needs to
be prepared for synthesis. In fact, sometimes synthesis cannot even begin because
suitable data havent been collected at all, or havent been treated in systematic
ways conducive to synthesis. This lack of preparation may affect particular
questions:
assembling existing data is not enough. For many questions, it is too early to attempt a
grand synthesis, and in many cases the data has not been collected in the coordinated manner needed for a grand synthesis. A mechanism is needed for networks of scientists to form
among scientists in very different disciplines to coordinate their primary research efforts.
(NESCent 2004: 5)
Pre-synthetic activities are those activities that potentially shape the involved
peoples data collection activities and data sharing practices, by influencing their
3
Also in consideration of these documents and official declarations, Sidlauskas et al. are however
optimistic that a new cultural shift is leading synthetic science to receive more support than ever
(Sidlauskas et al. 2009: 874).
408
E. Serrelli
culture of data. Here come catalysis meetings, which, as I put forth above, can be
seen as a model for our cultural traits book.
In chemistry, catalysis is the increase in the rate of a chemical reaction of one or
more reactants due to the participation of an additional substance called a catalyst.
Importantly, the presence of the catalyst lowers the energy that is required to reach
the transition state of the reaction. A foundational document of NESCent explains
that catalysis meetings bring together diverse groups of scientists on a wide range
of subjects, not only to inspire cross-disciplinary collaboration, but to inspire the
large scale of scientific vision that can only come from cooperation and coordination (NESCent 2004: 2). Several themes are recognizable in this statement. One
theme is a culture of data, which is enclosed in the broader theme of the large scale
scientific vision. Another theme is the generation of scientific collaborations.
Catalysis meetings are expected to trigger large cooperative ventures necessary to
collect primary data in the coordinated fashion necessary to synthesis (NESCent
2004: 1, emphasis added). Catalysis meetings are also specifically organized to
attract and engage fields that, for example, are distant from informatics tools and
related data-collection methods. As Joel Kingsolver, one of the original NESCent
leaders, told me:
we realized that there are several important fields, areas, questions where you are not quite
at that stage yet. You know there is something interesting to synthesize, but you are not sure
of what it is, or what different data or tools are available, what actual focused research questions can be addressed. (Kingsolver 2014)
Catalysis meetings are also generators of scientific collaborations. I remark this

role because I think it is fair to maintain scientific collaboration distinct from the
construction of common data flows. The two phenomena dont seem to be completely overlapping, although tightly related. Indeed, according to my reconstruction, catalysis meetings at NESCent were never thought as just functional to
motivating people to learn to use informatic tools and to start using them. Many
other kinds of scientific collaboration are possible.
Catalysis meetings are also seen as a factor in changing the scope and vision of
primary research. The NESCent foundational document (2004) remarks that
the members of a pilot project, By dramatically increasing the scale of their scientific vision to encompass the historical ecology of an entire biota [] quickly realized that this vision offered them a chance to make rapid progress on their own
scientific agendas as well as advancing their scientific careers (NESCent 2004: 2).
Along this line, catalysis meetings were aimed at this dramatic increase of ambition, scale and vision of primary research (ivi: 6, emphasis added), even before or
in absence of direct collaboration.
In sum, being in a catalysis meeting can lead to synthesis, but also to other kinds
of scientific collaborations, or even only to a widening of scientific vision in ones
own everyday research. Catalysis meetings allow heterogeneous disciplinarists to
learn each others languages, to see if they are talking about the same things, to
understand what their data are, what their theoretical frameworks are, and to ask
whether they can identify some clear questions and a research setting. If not, they
22
Concluding Remarks
409
will anyhow be more aware of each other, recognize the others in their expertise,
and be curious about other ways of knowledge. It is clear that synthesis cannot be
demanded a priori from a catalysis meeting, least of all can conceptual synthesis. As
Director Allen Rodrigo told me very effectively:
if you are bringing people from different disciplines, you cant just Skype! You really need
to engage, to have people there, over beer, over wine, talking about their differences, really
struggling to understand what the other person is saying. Maybe getting frustrated, maybe
going away and thinking this is rubbish, but then coming back the next day and saying
ok, now I think I understand what you are talking about. You need that kind of passion
and energy and enthusiasm What we try to do in our catalysis meetings is to share those
vocabularies and make those vocabularies explicit, so that what was previously incommensurable [] between two disciplines becomes commensurable: people understand what
they are talking about. Thats the first step towards at least understanding the differences in
different disciplines. Now, that doesnt really solve the problem to synthesis because, of
course, if we agree with what Kuhn was talking about, there are still underlying beliefs
about utility, about which way science should progress, how science should be done, and
those things may still be different enough that youre not going to reconcile disciplines. But
at least what we try to do is make sure that people are talking about the same thing. (Rodrigo
2014)
All of this is similar to what we have tried to do in our Cultural Traits project.
As a final remark, I want to get back to the possible negative effect of a philosophers obsession for concepts, conceptual clarity, conceptual summaries, conceptual change and the like. As Rodrigo continues:
I also feel that there is going to be some instances where because of the differences in
beliefs about utility and the like were never going to achieve and overall synthesis. And
I think as a Center what we havent done is give enough guidance to accept that that might
be an outcome, that at least they get people talking about the same thing and knowing what
they are talking about: that might be a good outcome in itself, rather than try to force a situation to a synthesis. (Rodrigo 2014)
Even within biology, and even within evolutionary biology, scientists who aim
for synthesis like Rodrigo agree that we shouldnt always aim for synthesis,
but rather recognize that discordance and disagreement can be fruitful as well,
particularly if they lead to greater understanding down the road. The pressure to
close down a catalysis meeting with some kind of conceptual outcome goes against
the goal of curiosity for opening new explorations, to which concepts are often provisional and instrumental. In the project that led to this book, and in the book itself,
we wanted to maintain cultural traits as a key to open up interdisciplinarity, and so
it worked. We see no hurry to shut up now. We showed that it is possible to publish
interesting things on this topic. We removed some barriers. We gathered people in a
virtual (and actual) room to try to make the incommensurable commensurable.
The best continuation of this book would be someone starting scientific collaborations of various kinds. And you, readers, may be those who will.
Acknowledgements I thank all NESCent leaders and staff, in particular Allen Rodrigo and Joel
Kingsolver, for their great generosity in letting me interview them. My research on NESCent,
synthesis and catalysis was supported by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent),
NSF grant #EF-0423641.
410
E. Serrelli
References
Brigandt, I., & Love, A. C. (2010). Evolutionary novelty and the evo-devo synthesis: Field notes.
Evolutionary Biology, 37(23), 9399.
Craver, C. (2009). Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cunningham, C. (2005). The right time for synthesis in evolutionary biology. BioScience, 55(2),
99.
Kingsolver, J. (2014). Interview to Emanuele Serrelli. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
Mitchell, S. (2003). Biological complexity and integrative pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
NESCent. (2004). A place for evolutionary synthesis in North Carolinas Research Triangle.
Original grant proposal to NSF [not online, courtesy of Jory Weintraub and Cliff Cunningham].
Rodrigo, A. (2014). Interview to Emanuele Serrelli. Durham: NESCent.
Rodrigo, A., et al. (2013). Science incubators: Synthesis centers and their role in the research
ecosystem. PLoS Biology, 11(1), p.e1001468.
Sidlauskas, B., et al. (2009). Linking big: The continuing promise of evolutionary synthesis.
Evolution, 64(4), 871880.

Understanding Cultural Traits

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Understanding Cultural Traits

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

FabrizioPanebianco EmanueleSerrelli

Understanding Cultural Traits

Fabrizio Panebianco Emanuele Serrelli

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933026

To the memory of our colleague

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue...................................

Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture, Cultural Traits

Cultural Traits and Identity ...................................................................

The Diffusion of a Museum Exhibit:

The Incompetent Subject in the Kingdom of Technical

The Unary Trait of Psychoanalysis. Identification,

Cultural Diversities Across and Within Cultures:

Birth and Evolution of Jazz as Effects of Cultural Transfers ............. 135

Geographical Boundaries as Places of Meeting

Maps, Diagrams and Charts: Making the Cultural

Evolutionary Genetics and Cultural Traits

Cultural Traits in Economic Theory ..................................................... 201

International Cooperation and Cultural Transmission ....................... 221

Rethinking Organizational Culture: The Role

From Material Remains to Culture: The Possibilities

Homology and Phylogenetic Inference in Biological

On the Origin of Technologies: The Invention

Trees, Languages and Genes: A Historical Path .................................. 341

Signaling in Style: On Cooperation, Identity

Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach.............................. 375

Nothing But Survival: On the Origin and Function

Concluding Remarks .............................................................................. 403

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2 November 2001) defines

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

a mailing list of researchers and students, we did discussion meetings, and we

Scientific Controversies Over Cultural Traits

Evolutionary genetics was the source of an original discourse on culture, named

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

A response to Mesoudi et al.s attack came from anthropologist Tim Ingold on

On the same issue of Anthropology Today, Mesoudi et al. responded:

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Attitude of This Book

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

Contents and Interdisciplinary Links

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

The next three contributions represent an interdisciplinary dialogue made up by

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

F. Panebianco and E. Serrelli

Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture,

Conceptualizing Culture: From the Simple

A special epistemological tension characterizes anthropological knowledge. It has

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Understanding Cultural Diversity. Culture, Cultural Traits and Cultural Changes

It is something like this waddling in that marks the analysis of Culture.

Because of his incompleteness, man cannot do anything but produce culture,