ABSTRACT
O What is the relationship between culture and other attributes that have been claimed to be uniquely human, such as language and other symbolic abilities?
Introduction Culture – both its nature and its relationship to other contenders for what it is that makes us human – has been a theme running through earlier chapters of this book. In Chapter 1, for example, we noted Dunbar’s (2007) claim that ‘... [it] is in humans’ capacity for culture, to live in a world constructed by ideas, that we really differ from the other apes’. This capacity for culture, in turn, is one manifestation of our status as symbolic creatures, with language being the ultimate symbolic activity (Tattersall, 2007). Language enables us to stand back from the real world and ask if it could have been otherwise than it is. Literature and science, both fundamental features of (Western) culture, are prominent examples of the human ability to imagine different worlds; religion is another example. In Chapter 8, we discussed religion in relation to terror management theory (TMT), where it’s given a major role, both as a cultural institution and as a personal belief system. As a cultural institution, religion may represent a major component of cultural worldviews, which provide beliefs about the nature of reality that function to reduce death-related anxiety (the mortality salience/MS hypothesis). The MS hypothesis is, in turn, related to worldview defence (see Chapter 8, page 228). According to Baron-Cohen (2006), second-order (and other meta-) representations equip us with the ability to imagine and are essential for mind-reading or theory of mind (ToM) (BaronCohen, 1995). In turn, ToM is essential for both face-to-face social interaction and, more broadly, the development and maintenance of culture. As we also noted in Chapter 5, the making and use of tools were once taken to be defining features of human behaviour. Goodall’s pioneering observational studies of wild chimpanzees showed that ‘deep chasm’ argument to be mistaken (see Chapter1). Based on de Waal’s (2001) definition of culture as ‘knowledge and habits [that] are acquired from others’, which may explain
why ‘two groups of the same species may behave differently’, many animal species can be regarded as having culture. However, some ‘deep chasm’/exceptionalism theorists remain; these include Malik (2006), who claims that ‘All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history’ and Blackmore, who challenges Malik’s claim by arguing that human brains are inhabited by memes (units of culture), which strive to get themselves copied: what makes humans unique is that they are ‘meme machines’ (e.g. Blackmore, 2007: see Chapter 1).
