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EN QUESTION

Théorie cognitive de la culture

Une alternative évolutionniste à la sociobiologie et à la sélection collective
Scott Atran
p. 107-144

Abstracts

A Cognitive Theory of Culture. An Evolutionistic Alternative to Sociobiology and Collective Selection. – Sociobiological theories postulate norms as functional units in natural and cultural selection. However they overlook how norms are represented in the mind and how they influence behavior. Lacking contents or reliable limits, norms cannot be replicated so as to satisfy Darwinian selection criteria. For this reason, the idea is rather meaningless that a set of norms governing a society, or its “world-view”, might have advantages from a Darwinian viewpoint for all of a culture. A “garden experience” in the Mayan lowlands illustrates the advantages of adopting a different approach to evolution, namely cultural epidemiology, in order to analyze the causes of the formation and development of societies. This epidemiological approach takes into full consideration the distributions and variations of ideas and behaviors. It sees disagreement among persons as a signal, not as noise or deviance. Like the Darwinian species, a culture does not have an existence beyond the individuals and ecological contexts forming it.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Scott Atran, “Théorie cognitive de la culture”L’Homme, 166 | 2003, 107-144.

Electronic reference

Scott Atran, “Théorie cognitive de la culture”L’Homme [Online], 166 | avril-juin 2003, Online since 08 September 2008, connection on 16 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/220; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.220

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About the author

Scott Atran

CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris.

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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