ABSTRACT
The conscious acquisition and use of the kinds of behavior that are perceived as separable parts of the culture are facilitated to the extent that these behaviors are embodied in persistent objective forms, separable in space and time from their makers and users. The act of inventing a spoon, rather than responding imaginatively to an unknown artifact, begins with a willingness to think of something new—which involves both a new act and a new object. But there is enough material on the use of simple tools and weapons to construct plausible stages of cross-tribal cultural transmission mediated by artifacts and man-made objects. In this chapter, Eskimo culture has been discussed as one which was conducive to many small innovations. The Eskimo were able to see the usefulness of certain artifacts of European culture and willingly adopted these; when parts broke or were lost, they showed great ingenuity in "inventing" replacements.
