Cultural Learning and Creation

Abstract

Human children become cultural beings by learning to participate in the cultural activities and practices going on around them. Household pets grow up in the midst of these same cultural activities and practices, but they do not learn to participate in them in anything like the same way as human children. Even chimpanzees and bonobos raised in human homes and treated like human children still retain, for the most part, their species-typical social and cognitive skills without turning into cultural beings of the human kind. This difference suggests that humans are biologically adapted, in ways that other animal species are not, for becoming cultural beings by tuning in to what others around them are doing, and thereby learning from them. Moreover, on occasion, young children even create with others small- scale cultural activities and routines involving one or another form of collaboration, or even collaborative pretense. Such cultural creation would also seem to be unique to human beings, and of course cultural creation leads to ever new cultural environments in which human cognitive ontogeny takes place. We may therefore identify two sets of human cultural skills responsible, as they work over historical and ontogenetic time, for humans' unique form of social organization: cultural learning and cultural creation. These enable humans, and only humans, to have cultures which accumulate complexities in both social practices and cognitive artifacts - creating ever new cultural niches within which developing children become mature cultural beings. Tomasello (1999) proposed that underlying these cultural abilities was a uniquely human social-cognitive skill for understanding others as intentional agents who, like the self, attend to things and pursue goals in the environment. The collective aspect of cultural evolution in this theory was, in an important sense, taken for granted. Uniquely human types of social engagements such as joint attention, collaborative co-operation, and symbolic communication were seen as simply emanating naturally from the understanding of others as intentional agents like the self. However, recent

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