Nature provides the setting in which cultural processes, activities and belief systems develop, all of which feed back to shape biodiversity. There are four key bridges linking Nature with culture: beliefs and worldviews; livelihoods and practices; knowledge bases; and norms and institutions.
Culture can be understood as systems by which people interpret the world around them. These meanings and interpretations are most diverse in their linkages to the natural world, with the most conspicuous links often found in traditional resource-dependent communities.
Whereas many traditional communities do not seem to differentiate between Nature and culture, many modern societies perceive them as separate or even opposing entities. Wilson, however, has said that all humans, no matter their culture, have an innate connection with Nature based on our common histories as hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists the biophilia hypothesis.
With the coming challenges of climate change and peak oil, it is conceivable that those with industrialised livelihoods may have to undergo substantial transitions in the near future. As a set of practices, cultures shape biodiversity through the selection of plants and animals and the reworking of whole landscapes.
Such landscapes have been described as anthropogenic Nature, as their composition is a reflection of local culture and a product of human history. Growing archaeological and ethnographic evidence tells us that many habitats previously thought to be pristine are in fact an emergent property of resource-dependent livelihood practices.
For instance, some North American landscapes were sustained through periodic burning and grazing regimes. These landscapes represent ecological profiles shaped by localised cultural practices.
This has now been acknowledged with the naming of our era as the anthropocene. This has led, amongst other things, to a split in attitudes to the concept of wilderness. Ingold traces some shifts in orientation that anthropology has undergone: culture was once considered to represent civilization, and in this view societies would differ according to their placement on a universal scale of progress, but the emerging commitment to the perspective of relativism , in which societies are to be understood according to their own point of view, incited the use in the plural of the word culture.
Shared systems of concepts or mental representations would then stand for what culture is. On the other hand, it has been noted Descola, that despite the richness and contingency of the relations that can be illustrated by the practice, we ought to account for its regularities. Even analyses that completely blur the lines between subject-object or between what is inside-outside the head seem not to get away with the importance of meaning. Even in these cases, meaning does not seem to be abolished but appears to become extended or distributed.
Lestel points out researchers must escape the two poles by which culture has been characterized. Social scientists have traditionally associated culture with such elaborate phenomena that the sole idea of animal cultures without human language becomes senseless. The first position refers to what can be called a super socialized culture that ends up being essentially anthropocentric. The later alludes to an over naturalized culture that evades the potential comprehension of animal cultural phenomena to the fullest.
This served for a long time as grounds for the division between social and cultural anthropology Ingold, Curiously, this distinction probably explains in part why ethologists have had no problem in studying animal societies of the most diverse classes, such as insects or mammals, without the need to ask whether social organization would not imply cultural capability.
A more process oriented view in anthropology has highlighted the relationship between society and culture beyond form and content. Instead, this perspective should induce researchers to introduce culture as a line of inquiry whenever they deal with animal societies regardless of their class.
Furthermore, this pairing leaves no space to intentional agency and consciousness or awareness, as vigilant psychologists and philosophers would discern. Primatologists do reckon with these idiosyncrasies, but more often in order to guarantee that results can be generalized to the species rather than to individualize the subjects of the study.
He McGrew, finds in Kroeber six criteria that can be abstracted to recognize cultural acts, to which he adds two more. Innovation : new pattern originated through invention or modification of previous behavior; Dissemination : acquisition of a pattern by another from innovator; Standardisation : degree of stereotypy; Durability : occurrence of behavior in absence of demonstrators; Diffusion : spread of behavioral patterns across communities; Tradition : persistence of a pattern from one generation to the next.
The two further conditions he includes are Non-subsistence : patterns that transcend subsistence activities and Naturalness: patterns in which human interference do not surpass levels exerted by human hunter-gatherers. McGrew 82 concludes that no particular population of chimpanzees satisfies all eight conditions, but that all criteria except perhaps diffusion are met by some chimpanzees in certain cases.
The chimpanzee cultural model is going to be commented further on in this section, but for now the additional criteria joined by the author are worthy of being briefly examined. In the first criterion, non-subsistence , it is not clear why cultural processes should even have to conform to this principle, since much of human activity has been based on finding solutions to basic difficulties with which we are faced, including and maybe specially, subsistence.
Therefore, the non-subsistence demand seems somewhat troublesome. The second condition, naturalness , is to a certain extent trickier than the former, because it unveils steady assumptions and methodological precepts on the part of ethologists and anthropologists. Naturalness can then be mobilized as resource in the struggle for protection of these animals, but as an analytical category it is a concept we should doubt.
Chimpanzees do not only interact with chimpanzees but with a vast variety of animals in a rich ecology which may or may not include humans. Non-human primates who experience increased contact with humans are not tainted by us, as if they would become less natural; they are in interaction with us.
The conditions under which these relations take place is the matter subject to ethical examination, not the interaction per se. Mutatis mutandis , the natural animal is a myth as much as the noble savage.
The myth of the state of nature permeates modern cosmology and it is only within Western ontology that there might be a state of nature to get out, or to get distanced from.
This dilemma is going to be detailed in the next section. Are human hunter-gatherers more natural than Americans or Frenchmen? Or symmetrically, are hunter-gatherers less cultural than Westerners? Or is it their technology? He observes that social and cultural anthropologists might not approve this enterprise for believing that the gap between human and non-human cultures is so broad as to be unbridgeable. He continues saying that no one will ever know if these comparisons are valuable unless we try.
The author was right in identifying the anthropocentrism constitutive to most social sciences, which is accompanied by a dualistic view on humans and non-human animals. McGrew founds his comparison in the necessity to search for clues upon the hominisation process.
If he acknowledges that neither is the African ecosystem intact, nor have chimpanzees and hunter-gatherers been studied in the same place by the time of his writing McGrew, , this analysis may appear even more troublesome to social and cultural anthropologists.
He carries on with a behavioral comparison of similarities and differences in diet, food acquisition and processing. Preferences of the Tasmanian human on the other side of the globe and the non-human African Tanzanian are entitled to model hominisation. As honorable as this venture can be, researchers should also take into account that these populations, both human and non-human, have a history and therefore synchronic data may not unveil straightforwardly the diachronic process that is attempted to be grasped.
Here it has been taken as an act of faith that these comparisons are not based on the alleged intermediary state of mental faculties that hunter-gatherers would come to represent between our ancestors and us. Because the consequence would be to believe that these populations are cognitively closer to non-human primates than a professor at Stanford Descola, This view would eliminate anthropocentric accounts but would install a gradation - not between other primates and humans - but between other primates and some humans, namely non-Western tribal societies.
The anthropologist cannot help but wonder why certain populations seem more eligible to such an interface than others, and on which grounds. Notwithstanding, life sciences should be attentive to the fact that the battle of anthropology ever since its beginnings as an institutional discipline has been the struggle against ethnocentrism.
Consequently, if anthropology has started to combat its anthropocentrism, primatologists ought to be very explicit about the assumptions under which they base their comparisons.
Conversely, having animality as substrate, humanity becomes an all-or-none condition. Each point cannot be discussed in detail here, but it suffices to notice the rising concern with topics on social transmission and cultural content. He proceeds giving an example of leaf clip, in which a leaf is bitten into pieces producing a ripping sound without the plant being eaten. Whereas in Gombe leaf clipping is absent, in Bossou it is responded by others as play, occasioning youngsters to attack or go after the leaf clipper with a play face.
In Mahale on the other hand, this behavior communicates courtship so that sexually active females will respond to the leaf clipper. The group contrast model , also known as method of elimination or regional contrast Fragaszy and Perry, 14 has served as basis for most discussions on traditions or cultures.
Group X performs an action in one form and Group Y either does not perform it or performs it in a distinctively different form. No obvious environmental difference limits the two groups from exhibiting the same form of behavior.
An ideal candidate for tradition is then a behavior that would display strong differences across groups that are genetically alike and who live in similar environments. Fragaszy and Perry 14 identify that this model does not include an essential feature of tradition, that is, the dependence on social context for the acquisition of a behaviour. When depicted in a three-dimensional space, X axis would inform the duration of behavior in a group, Y axis the proportion of population performing the behavior, and Z axis the contribution of social context to its acquisition.
Therefore, a prototypical tradition would be a long enduring behavior, present in most members of the group and highly dependent on social context.
A more inclusive classification of social learning enables one to account for the variations in socially biased learning that Fragaszy and Visalberghi 33 point out to take place across species. For instance, learning can occur by enhancing the interest in a stimulus or stimuli, which in turn, makes manipulation and chance of solution more likely Visalberghi, As Fragaszy and Perry notice, the group contrast model fails to identify behaviors similar across groups but dependent on social learning.
The definitions discussed here were in fact only a few examples to illustrate the apparent increasing concern on the part of cultural primatology with issues central to contemporary anthropology. McGrew comments that Ingold, in personal communication with him, maintained that socio-cultural anthropologists would be reluctant to attribute culture to apes unless these acts could be shown to have meaning to them.
The author McGrew, 89 even raises the problem of possible gender differences among chimpanzees, a question he considers not to be empirically sensible at that moment. Gender differences in non-human wild animals would certainly be the paradise for a non anthropocentric anthropology for a critique on human gendered views in the study of primates see Haraway, These are large views of disciplinary experience scientists of both areas face and that have been called into question.
Despite the increasing critical predisposition regarding these broader assumptions, methodological incongruities pose a hardship to any researcher aiming at an integrated understanding of firstly, the complex and meaningful world of non-human animals and secondly, of the multifaceted relationships established between humans and non-humans.
To that extent, ape language research has produced one of the most interesting cases of interspecies communication and methodological crossing. Savage-Rumbaugh et al. The discomfort some primatologists and psychologists may feel toward ethnographic approaches to animals is very likely to be grounded in deep rooted paradigmatic sets of interdictions and allowances displayed by each discipline.
Generally speaking, this underlying substance is the subject of science. If for a long time geography relied on nature, this was not-contrary to what a certain historiography would have us believe-because of an immoderate love of determinism , but because this nature bestowed upon it a sort of scientific legitimacy. At a different level, nature and culture have been distinguished from the standpoint of freedom of action.
Naturalness is, first of all, spontaneous, instinctive, unreasoned, that is, it makes no use of deliberative thinking, judgment or reflection, which to the contrary, characterise the use of freedom, i. To be free is to act according to a preliminary deliberation and representation, while the animal or the child, for example beings that have not been cultivated , merely reacts to solicitations from its environment.
Therefore, in line with what we have just said, naturalness is also that which is constrained, determined: the natural being behaves in relation to and is dependent upon, causes from the outside that apply to him in such a way as to permit no escape from them, or, at best, leave him little room to react.
Nature is then considered to be the operation of a strict mechanism. On the other hand, as Rousseau emphasised, freedom as well as culture are characterised by the power of the human being to escape from rules he has defined for himself, to reject them or to invent new ones.
This is still artifice, but in the positive sense of the invention of new forms of existence, which cannot be derived from nature and its defined order. From this we can conclude that, like the other human sciences, this aspect of geography that denies all natural determinism is a science of freedom, or at least, in principle, a science of culture. In fact, the theoretical framework that has just been sketched out is less rigid than it may seem.
Several transitional formulas or situations that are also related to geography might be mentioned in this connection. On the one hand indeed, according to Rousseau as well as to others, nature or, more exactly, naturalness, may have been considered to involve ethical standards or ideals.
In this moral perspective, naturalness is everything that is true, genuine, or even healthy, and whatever departs from it, in attitudes or ways of thinking, is seen as degradation or decadence. Nature and culture are often seen as opposite ideas—what belongs to nature cannot be the result of human intervention and, on the other hand, cultural development is achieved against nature.
However, this is by far not the only take on the relationship between nature and culture. Studies in the evolutionary development of humans suggest that culture is part and parcel of the ecological niche within which our species thrived, thus rendering culture a chapter in the biological development of a species. Several modern authors—such as Rousseau—saw the process of education as a struggle against the most eradicated tendencies of human nature.
Education is that process which uses culture as an antidote against our wildest natural tendencies; it is thanks to culture that the human species could progress and elevate itself above and beyond other species. Over the past century and a half, however, studies in the history of human development have clarified how the formation of what we refer to as " culture " in an anthropological sense is part of the biological adaptation of our ancestors to the environmental conditions in which they came to live.
Consider, for example, hunting. Such an activity seems an adaptation, which allowed hominids to move from the forest into the savannah some millions of year ago, opening up the opportunity to change diet and living habits.
At the same time, the invention of weapons is directly related to that adaptation—but from weapons descend also a whole series of skill sets characterizing our cultural profile, from butchering tools to ethical rules relating to the proper use of weapons e.
Hunting also seems responsible for a whole set of bodily abilities, such as balancing on one foot as humans are the only primates that can do that. Now, think of how this very simple thing is crucially connected to dance, a key expression of human culture. It is then clear that our biological development is closely tied to our cultural development. The view that came to be most plausible over the past decades seems to be that culture is part of the ecological niche within which humans live.
0コメント