Culture

This note is about the notion of culture, within and beyond human groups.

Definitions

human culture as an example of a swarm intelligence that repeats processes of semiosis found at every level of life

"An environmental niche is always also a semiotic niche. Every environment is, at the same time, and necessarily, rich in "information"" sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch etc.. On this view, life is primarily semiotic. And, in the light of complex systems theory, this should not surprise us. Just as the "tree of life" which describes evolution itself is also found in other natural systems of bifurcation ... so we should not be surprised to find that the elaborated system of semiosis discovered in human cultural evolution is also found, in simpler forms, at every stage of life . The organism-environment coupling is a form of conversation, and evolution itself a kind of narrative of conversational developments."

Wheeler, Wendy. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006.

Maran, Timo. Ecosemiotics. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2020. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6691062.

Cf. Biosemiotics

"Culture: part of variation in a trait that is socially transmitted to offspring. Culture thus incorporates all the information that is inherited through social learning, such as song dialects in birds and whales, language in humans, sexual preferences as revealed by mate copying, and so on."

Danchin, Étienne. “Avatars of Information: Towards an Inclusive Evolutionary Synthesis.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28, no. 6 (2013): 351–58. https://doi.org/10/f429ff.

Wagner, Richard H., and Étienne Danchin. “A Taxonomy of Biological Information.” Oikos 119, no. 2 (2010): 203–9. https://doi.org/10/fg8455.

Animal/Nonhuman Culture

Laland, Kevin N., and William Hoppitt. ‘Do Animals Have Culture?’ Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 12, no. 3 (2003): 150–59. https://doi.org/10/dqwwr4.

Sommer, Volker, and Amy R. Parish. ‘Living Differences: The Paradigm of Animal Cultures’. In Homo Novus – A Human Without Illusions, edited by Ulrich J. Frey, Charlotte Störmer, and Kai P. Willführ, 19–33. Berlin: Springer, 2010.

Interspecies socialites and interdependencies assume coupled identities as groups engage in collective actions. The agency become co-constructed, collective.

Latimer, Joanna. ‘Being Alongside: Rethinking Relations amongst Different Kinds’. Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 7–8 (2013): 77–104. https://doi.org/10/gf377d.

Sanders, Clinton R. ‘Actions Speak Louder than Words: Close Relationships between Humans and Nonhuman Animals’. Symbolic Interaction 26, no. 3 (2003): 405–26. https://doi.org/10/dg8qf2.

Interspecies Culture

Roach, Mary, Peter Miller, and Virgina Morell. Inside Animal Minds: The New Science of Animal Intelligence. Washington: National Geographic Society, 2014.

Proposes to understand farms as examples of human-animal culture:

Segerdahl, Pär. ‘Can Natural Behavior Be Cultivated? The Farm as Local Human/Animal Culture’. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 20, no. 2 (2007): 167–93. https://doi.org/10/bhf2np.

On co-cultures, or interspecies cultures:

Sueur, Cédric, and Michael A. Huffman. ‘Co-Cultures: Exploring Interspecies Culture Among Humans and Other Animals’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2024. https://doi.org/10/gt5qqm.

Cultural co-evolution and conservation of culture:

Laiolo, Paola. ‘Interspecific Interactions Drive Cultural Co-Evolution and Acoustic Convergence in Syntopic Species’. Journal of Animal Ecology 81, no. 3 (2012): 594. https://doi.org/10/fxt437.

Laiolo, Paola, and Roger Jovani. ‘The Emergence of Animal Culture Conservation’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 22, no. 1 (2007): 5. https://doi.org/10/c7tz4g.

Gruber, Thibaud, Lydia Luncz, Julia Mörchen, Caroline Schuppli, Rachel L. Kendal, and Kimberley Hockings. “Cultural Change in Animals: A Flexible Behavioural Adaptation to Human Disturbance.” Palgrave Communications 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–9. https://doi.org/10/ggcvtw.

Types of Relationships between Humans and Nonhumans

eating
hunting
killing
capturing/enslaving
observing
skinning/processing
befriending
imagining
fearing

Evolution of Culture

Mundinger, Paul C. “Animal Cultures and a General Theory of Cultural Evolution.” Ethology and Sociobiology 1, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 183–223. https://doi.org/10/c99dqg.

Rendell, Luke, and Hal Whitehead. “Culture in Whales and Dolphins.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 2 (2001): 309–24. https://doi.org/10/dgnjpr.

Mesoudi, Alex. “Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies.” Evolutionary Biology 43, no. 4 (2016): 481–97. https://doi.org/10/gfsp3b.

Mesoudi, Alex, Andrew Whiten, and Kevin N. Laland. “Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 4 (August 2006): 329–47. https://doi.org/10/ft5h89.

In-depth discussion of culture in the context of evolution with the discussion of maladaptation, for example in Sexual Selection.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Conditions and Prerequisites of Culture

Observation
Groups

As primatologists discovered when researching macaques’ food washing techniques [17], cultural development can occur through observational learning and only in groups [18].

Kawai, Masao. “Newly-Acquired Pre-Cultural Behavior of the Natural Troop of Japanese Monkeys on Koshima Islet.” Primates 6, no. 1 (1965): 1–30. https://doi.org/10/cc363v.

Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson. The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Perception and Sensory Worlds

Ed Yong, if a whale disappears the whole set of relationships, family links, knowledge disappear too.

Sensory worlds are different for different animals or living organisms. They intersect in many ways, spatially, physically (the physics is the same for all, it is the boring universal bit as E. O. Wilson remarked), chemically, evolutionary (contingent, evolutionary pathways limit evolution and lock certain possibilities into templates, such a body plans, this is shared between forms of life as a foundation of similarity)
Sensory worlds are similar for different animals or living organisms. There is more similarity than difference.

Examples of Interspecies Culture in Places

hyenas

Baynes-Rock, Marcus. Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

Zipporah Weiseberg on Interspecies friendship

Anthrozoology

Bradshaw, John. The Animals Among Us: The New Science of Anthrozoology. London: Basic Books, 2017.

Hosey, Geoffrey R., and Vicky Melfi. Anthrozoology: Human-Animal Interactions in Domesticated and Wild Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Tobias, Michael Charles, and Jane Gray Morrison. Anthrozoology: Embracing Co-Existence in the Anthropocene. Cham: Springer, 2017.

Phytoethnography

anthropological perspective (Daly et al. 2016; Kawa 2016; Hartigan 2017; Myers 2017), a project which has been dubbed 'anthrobotany' (Daniel Moerman, pers. comm. 2005) or 'planthropology' (Myers 2017), and whose chief method we term phytoethnography

Microbial Ethnography

Lowe, Celia. “Viral Ethnography: Metaphors for Writing Life.” RCC Perspectives, no. 1 (2017): 91–96.

Abiotic Cultures/Anthropologies

Yip, Julianne. “Salt-Ice Worlds: An Anthropology of Sea Ice.” PhD Thesis, McGill University, 2019.

Responsibility

Problems with human actions, even when they are meant well is that they can be ignorant, short-lived, etc.

For example, do humans have the right to feed animals or create local interspecies communities in the conditions of precarious neoliberal capitalism when a landlord can displace a nonhuman or even a human at will?

Impact on Culture

Gruber, Thibaud, Lydia Luncz, Julia Mörchen, Caroline Schuppli, Rachel L. Kendal, and Kimberley Hockings. ‘Cultural Change in Animals: A Flexible Behavioural Adaptation to Human Disturbance’. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–9. https://doi.org/10/ggcvtw.

Beneficial and Harmful Cultures

A lot of flexibility, redundancy and self-harm in nonhuman communities also…
No species or an individual or community are perfect or in balance. They are under constant challenge, trying to catch up and developing weird things in the process that go extinct even without humans. This is the core of the process and this typically happens in the situations of abundance…

Milo, Daniel S. Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Examples

Forest and swamp cultures

John Ryan and Li Chen, eds., Australian Wetland Cultures: Swamps and the Environmental Crisis, Environment and Society (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020).

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New York: Knopf, 2021).

John C. Ryan and Rod Giblett, eds., Forest Family: Australian Culture, Art, and Trees (Leiden: Brill, 2018).