Cognitive Predispositions and Cultural Transmission

Abstract

We call those concepts and norms that seem to be shared within a group and differ from those of other groups “cultural.” We call concepts and norms “cultural” if people have them because other people in their group have them or had them before. This suggests that transmission of concepts and norms is at the heart of what constitutes human cultures. To what extent does cultural transmission require memory? The answer of modern cognitive anthropology is slightly surprising. If we understand “memory” in the ordinary sense of information about past situations that we can access and consider explicitly, the answer is that cultural transmission does not actually require as much of that kind of memory as we would generally assume. Indeed, a great deal of cultural transmission takes place outside of explicit memories, as I explain here. But memory, for psychologists, includes more than just explicit memories (Roediger, Wheeler, & Rajaram, 1993). It comprises systematic information about the social and natural environment, what is called “semantic memory,” as well as the many skills and habits known as “procedural memory.” Once we understand memory, as psychologists do, as including all these processes beyond conscious inspection (Roediger, 1990), then memory really is the crux of cultural transmission. In the pages that follow, I will justify these statements on the basis of a few examples of cultural domains where the work of memory (in the wider sense) has been extensively studied.

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