As discussed in a previous post, bundling ontic claims about culture have been used to argue that culture is a single kind of thing and demarcate the boundaries of cultural kinds. This can be referred to as ontic monism about cultural kinds. Thus, a theorist might say, following Kroeber (1917), Parsons (1951), or Geertz (1973), that culture is primarily ideational or symbolic. This means that it is made out of “ideal” or “symbolic” stuff (an ontic compositional claim), and the nature of this stuff makes it different from other non-ideal (e.g., “material”) stuff.

These theorists might even go so far as to say that because culture is composed only of ideal stuff, the notion of “material culture” is a category mistake. The ontic claim here is cultural kinds are disjunctive from physical kinds (a negative “culture is not” ontic claim (Reed 2017)), such that is something is material, it is ipso facto, not culture. The positive ontic claim is that being “ideal” or “symbolic” is a mark of the cultural, such that if we know something is an idea or a symbol, we also know that it is a cultural kind.

For instance, the anthropologist Leslie White (1959: 238) noted the penchant for “idealist” culture theorists in early anthropology to reach the negative ontological conclusion regarding the notion of material culture in a classic paper on the culture concept:

Those who define culture in terms of ideas, or as an abstraction, or as behavior, find themselves obliged logically to declare that material objects are not, and cannot be, culture. “Strictly speaking,” says Hoebel (1956: 176), “material culture is really not culture at all.” Taylor (1948: 102, 98) goes farther: “…the concept of ’material culture’ is fallacious” because “culture is a mental phenomenon.” Beals and Hoijer (1953: 210): ‘…culture is an abstraction from behavior and not to be confused with acts of behavior or with material artifacts, such as tools…”

Along the same lines, Bidney (1968: 130-131) observes,

The idealists…maintain that the cultural heritage consists primarily of ideas or communicated intelligence and symbolic expression since they hold that only ideas or symbols may be communicated and transmitted. For the cultural idealists, therefore, so-called material culture is a contradiction in terms, since for them the real cultural entities, or units, are the conceptual ideas, or norms, not the particular artifacts which exemplify or embody them.

A still influential definition of culture comes from the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, for whom

C]ulture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them” (1957, p. 167)

Here Goodenough makes a positive monist ontic claim (cultural kinds are ultimately mental, and consist of cognitive models internalized by people) and a corresponding negative ontic claim (culture is not things, people, or behavior).

Ontic Pluralism

Ontic monism represents a classic line of theorizing about cultural kinds. The basic message is that culture is a single kind of thing, and thus sharply contrasts, in terms of ontology, with other kinds of things in the world (Reed 2017).

But this is not the only approach we can take. A venerable tradition of cultural theory, closer to that inaugurated by the anthropologist Franz Boas (and farther back to E. B. Tylor), allows for what I will refer to as ontic pluralism in the conceptualization of what culture is. One such rendering is given by the anthropologist Roger Keesing in a once-influential review, who noted that for pluralists

[c]ultures are systems (of socially transmitted behavior patterns) that serve to relate human communities to their ecological settings. These ways-of-life-of communities include technologies and modes of economic organization, settlement patterns, modes of social grouping and political organization, religious beliefs and practices, and so on.” (Keesing, 1974, p. 75).

This perspective combines compositional multiplicity (culture is ideal, behavioral, artifactual, etc.), with qualified versions of both sharedness and systemness where these properties are made more or less likely depending on the “kind of cultural kind” we are talking about. Additionally, the ontic pluralist is perforce non-exclusivist when it comes to locational claims (some cultural kinds are “in” people and other kinds are “in” the world). In the same way, they are likely to make different claims about the historical provenance of the different kinds (different cultural kinds have distinct, but related, etiologies).

This yields synthetic attempts such as the one defended by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn across a variety of publications (Strauss & Quinn, 1997) and the sociologist Orlando Patterson in recent work.

For Patterson (2014, p. 5),

A synthetic analysis that defines both what culture is and does and the nature of the whole [cultural] beast over and beyond its favored parts may be achieved—still using the parable of the blind people and the elephant—by listening carefully to each person’s account of the part of the elephant they are touching and analyzing.

In the same way, culture and cognition scholars such as Norbert Ross (2004:8) defend a version of ontic pluralism about cultural kinds when they conceive of culture as

[A]n emerging phenomenon evolving out of shared cognitions that themselves arise out of individual interactions with both the social and physical environment. The natural and physical environments include both institutions and physical objects (natural as well as artificial).

Overall, ontic pluralism implies that things can count as cultural kinds despite big differences in physical realization, underlying properties, and worldly location. Ross’s distinction between culture that is internalized by people (in the forms of cognitive states) and that which is physically manifested in terms of physical objects and artifacts is fairly common among pluralist theorists who note that culture consists of both “mental and material” elements (Adams & Markus, 2004, p. 342). As such, it can serve as the basis for building a useful ontology of cultural kinds that acknowledges their “motley” status.

References

Adams, G., & Markus, H. R. (2004). Toward a conception of culture suitable for a social psychology of culture. The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 335–360.

Bidney, D. (1968). Theoretical Anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Goodenough, W. H. (1957). Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics, By Ward H. Goodenough.

Keesing, R. M. (1974). Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3(1), 73–97.

Kroeber, A. L. (1917). The Superorganic. American Anthropologist, 19(2), 163–213.

Patterson, O. (2014). Making Sense of Culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 1–30.

Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. The Free Press.

Reed, I. A. (2017). On the very idea of cultural sociology. In Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed (Ed.), Social Theory Now (pp. 18–41). University of Chicago Press.

Ross, N. (2004). Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method. SAGE.

Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.

White, L. A. (1959). The Concept of Culture. American Anthropologist, 61(2), 227–251.

Throughout the history of cultural theory, a number of “culture concepts” have been proposed. The standard way of thinking about these is as competing notions bound to forever stand in conflict. But it is possible to see the various proposals as more than purely “conceptual” or “definitional.” Instead, using the considerations raised in previous posts, I argue that different culture concepts are actually distinct bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds. Since the claims are about ontological issues, then they can be evaluated as to their internal coherence, as well as their compatibility with the larger naturalistic ontology animating the special and physical sciences.

In fact, as we will see, they have been so routinely evaluated, especially in the history of anthropological theory. In this sense, when people recount much-ballyhooed discipline-wide “rejections” of “the culture concept” (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Abu-Lughod 1996) this is almost always an exaggeration. What is usually being rejected, is a particular culture concept, and that “concept” is actually a bundle of ontic claims. What takes the place of the rejected culture concept is not an analytic entity that is somehow a radical alternative to “culture,” but simply a new package of ontic claims about culture that are doing the same conceptual and analytic work as the renounced culture concept, regardless of whether people decide to call it culture or not (Brumman 1999).

Importantly, most substantive proposals as to the nature of culture combine at least two, three (and sometimes more) types of ontic claims about cultural kinds. A common approach combines compositional, property, and locational claims to establish the nature of culture. Let us consider some influential instances.

Culture as an Ideational Superorganic

For instance, conceptions of culture as a “superorganic” realm of symbols, ideas, and so forth (Kuper 2009), combine a compositional claim (cultural kinds are ideal or symbolic), with two property claims (culture is systematic and shared) and a location claim: Culture is “outside” people and even “society” (e.g., people, their interactions, relationships and institutions). 

As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, one of the most influential proponents of this view (quoted in Atran, Medin, and Ross 2005:747), put it: 

Culture is both superindividual and superorganic…There are certain properties of culture—such as transmissibility, high variability, cumulativeness, value standards, influence on individuals—which are difficult to explain, or to see much significance in, strictly in terms of organic personalities and individuals. 

This combination of ontic claims invites us to see culture as, in the words of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996:12), “some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical…implying a mental substance…[and emphasizing]..sharing, agreeing and bounding.” Superorganic culture stands above and beyond individuals, who are subject to its effects. 

This conception of culture not only analytically limited due to the empirical implausibility of entitative essentialism. Also, it brings with it all of the normatively problematic “essentializing” assumptions of the older concept of “race” that it was meant to replace; thus ethnosomatic, ethnonationalist or ethnolinguistic distinctions between people are taken as indicative of the possession of internally homogeneous but externally distinct “cultures” seemingly fixed in time and place (Sewell 2005).

As the cultural psychologists Hermans and Kempen note, from this perspective, culture is turned into a “thing” endowing “nations, [and] societies…with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive objects” (1998:113). When culture is thought of as a superorganic entity attached to groups it is hard to stay away from such biases as stereotyping, homogenizing entire populations, essentializing the nature of cultural differences, and the reification of dynamic cultural patterns into a static thing (Adams and Markus 2004:337). 

Note also that a combination of ideal composition, systemness property, and (external) location yields the (ontologically problematic, from a naturalist perspective) “entitative” version of ideal culture, in which culture as a system of ideas must be assigned some type of (non-physical?) location in something like Popper’s “world 3.” This approach also leads the analyst to beg the sharing question, forcing theorists to draw too sharp a distinction between cultural symbols or ideas embedded in the cultural system and individual cultural knowledge. Ultimately, culture ends up being “a ‘free-floating entity” to which both natives and observers seem to have access but the mechanisms enabling that access remain obscure (Ross 2004:6). 

Overall, the superorganic package of ontic claims is really hard to cash in without problematic and controversial assumptions, whether they be analytic, metaphysical, or knowledge-political, which is why this is the culture concept that everyone likes to use as a foil to either reject the notion of culture altogether or, more constructively, develop a better package of ontic assumptions.

Culture as Public Symbolic Systems

Other approaches are less committed to an entitative view of culture, while still seeing it as primarily an extra-somatic, non-mental phenomenon, composed of explicit, publicly manifested cultural symbols and their interrelations. This approach, most closely associated with the work of Clifford Geertz (1973) and David Schneider (Keesing 1974; Kuper 2009), combines an exclusivist ontic locational claim (culture is by definition public and not personal) with a systemness property claim (while being coy about sharedness claims but ultimately forced to presume sharing as a key property (Biernacki 2000)), and a core compositional claim (culture is by nature symbolic). 

In contrast to entitative theorists, culture is not reified as an ideational superorganic, but it is manifestly empirical revealed in people’s actions, themselves carrying the status of readable symbols in the world. As Keesing (1974: 84) noted in this respect, “Geertz takes the alchemy of shared meanings as basic, but-following Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Ryle—not as mysterious. Public traffic in symbols is very much of this world, not (he would argue) of a Platonic reified imaginary one.” 

However, it is hard for public symbolic systems theorists to not “slip” into a quasi-entitative view of culture. As Biernacki (2000:293ff) notes this “essentializing premise” comes back through the back door, and leads Geertzian symbolic system analysts to mistake “the concepts of “sign” and “sign reading” for parts of the natural furniture of the world, rather than as historically generated “ways of seeing” (emphasis in the original). This approach thus devolves into an external entatative view of culture as a symbol system closer to the ideational superorganic ontic claim bundle. 

Culture as Distributions of Representations

Some versions of cognitive or psychological anthropology (D’andrade 2001; Goodenough 2003), reject the “superorganic” version of culture in favor of a distributional approach (Garro 2000; Ross 2004:7–8). Culture is seen compositionally, as made up of ideas, concepts, and schemas internalized by people. But distributional theorists relax both sharedness and systemness property claims while shifting location from “the world” to people. They thus make an exclusivist location claim in the other direction as entitative and symbolic systems theorists.

Instead of an entity or coherent system, culture is a distribution (and perhaps a collection) of conceptual or schematic knowledge across people. In the distributional ontic claim bundle, culture as an external (and ontologically problematic or mysterious) “complex entity” drops out. As such, this combination of claims is more compatible with metaphysical naturalism, as has been argued most forcefully by Dan Sperber (1996, 2011).

In sum, a useful way to think about culture concepts is as ontic claim bundles. When considered in this light, the fundamental deficiencies and inconsistencies in some of these (e.g., culture as an entitative superorganic) are easy to see. In this respect, emphasizing the ontic aspects of cultural inquiry can help cultural theorizing and conceptual clarification.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. (1996). Writing Against Culture. In Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. School of American Research Press. pp. 137-162.

Adams, G., & Markus, H. R. (2004). Toward a conception of culture suitable for a social psychology of culture. The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 335–360.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity Al Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. U of Minnesota Press.

Atran, S., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. O. (2005). The cultural mind: environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations. Psychological Review, 112(4), 744–776.

Biernacki, R. (2000). Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry. History and Theory, 39(3), 289–310.

Brumann, C. (1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded. Current anthropology, 40(S1), S1-S27.

D’andrade, R. (2001). A cognitivist’s view of the units debate in cultural anthropology. Cross-Cultural Research: Official Journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Sponsored by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc, 35(2), 242–257.

Garro, L. C. (2000). Remembering What One Knows and the Construction of the Past: A Comparison of Cultural Consensus Theory and Cultural Schema Theory. Ethos , 28(3), 275–319.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Goodenough, W. H. (2003). In Pursuit of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 1–12.

Hermans, H. J. M., & Kempen, H. J. G. (1998). Moving cultures: The perilous problems of cultural dichotomies in a globalizing society. The American Psychologist, 53(10), 1111.

Keesing, R. M. (1974). Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3(1), 73–97.

Kuper, A. (2009). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press.

Ross, N. (2004). Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method. SAGE.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). The concept (s) of culture. Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, 76–95.

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell Publishers.

Sperber, D. (2011). A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences. In P. Demeulenaere (Ed.), Analytical sociology and social mechanisms (pp. 64–77). Cambridge University Press.

In previous posts (see here and here) I made the case for the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture and cultural phenomena. First, I distinguished between what I called epistemic and ontic claims about culture (following the philosopher Mark Rowland’s 2010 similar argument with regard to the domain of the “cognitive”). Epistemic claims are about the best way to go about learning about a given domain, while ontic claims are about the “stuff” that is seen as constitutive of the entities or processes that populate it. In the case of culture, epistemic claims are about the best way to go about studying cultural phenomena, while ontic claims are about the nature of culture, or, what makes cultural kinds distinctive from non-cultural kinds.

Also, I argued that if we inspect the early history of anthropological theory, we can distinguish two broad types of ontic claims about culture. First, there are what I referred to as locational claims. These are claims made by cultural theorists as to where in the world cultural kinds are to be found. For instance, a cultural theorist might say that cultural kinds (e.g., ideas, schemas, beliefs, values) are to be found “in” people (these might be followed by either implicit or explicit theories as to how those things got in there; namely, internalization theories). Alternatively (and not exclusive in relation to the first claim) a theorist might say that cultural kinds are to be found in the world (as institutions, codes, artifacts, and the like). Second, there are what I called compositional claims, which is about the actual stuff of cultural kinds. Thus, a theorist might say, following Kroeber (1917) or Parsons (1951) that culture is primarily ideational or symbolic. This means that it is made out of “ideal” stuff, and the nature of this stuff makes it different from “material” stuff. These theorists might even go so far as to say that given that the nature of culture is “ideal” the notion of “material culture” is a category mistake; the ontic claim here is that cultural kinds are disjunctive from material kinds.

For instance, the anthropologist Leslie White (1959: 238) noted the penchant for “idealist” culture theorists in early anthropology to reach this negative conclusion vis a vis the notion of material culture in a classic paper on the culture concept:

Those who define culture in terms of ideas, or as an abstraction, or as behavior, find themselves obliged logically to declare that material objects are not, and cannot be, culture. “Strictly speaking,” says Hoebel (1956: 176), “material culture is really not culture at all.” Taylor (1948: 102, 98) goes farther: “…the concept of ’material culture’ is fallacious” because “culture is a mental phenomenon.” Beals and Hoijer (1953: 210): ‘…culture is an abstraction from behavior and not to be confused with acts of behavior or with material artifacts, such as tools…”

Along the same lines, Bidney (1968: 130-131) observes,

The idealists…maintain that the cultural heritage consists primarily of ideas or communicated intelligence and symbolic expression since they hold that only ideas or symbols may be communicated and transmitted. For the cultural idealists, therefore, so-called material culture is a contradiction in terms, since for them the real cultural entities, or units, are the conceptual ideas, or norms, not the particular artifacts which exmply or embody them.

Finally, I also discussed two other types of ontic claims that had been proposed to distinguish between cultural and non-cultural kinds. The first one, referred to as property claims, have to do with a special property of cultural things that distinguish them from non-cultural things. The most common version of this property claim, particularly suggestive for social scientists in general and sociologists in particular, is that the property sharedness can be used to distinguish culture from not-culture. In this respect, culture is that which is shared, distributed, or diffused across multiple people, while not-culture is that which is unique to the individual, regardless of composition (for a recent defense of this claim, see Morin 2016).

The second type of ontic claim that has been used to distinguish culture from not-culture is what I referred to as causal history claims. According to this view, what is unique about cultural kinds is that they have a specific “origin story” that is distinct from non-cultural kinds (such as biological kinds). The most common version of this origin story is that they are the product of human ingenuity, invention, or a learning process whether individual or collective. I also argued that these different ontic claims do not necessarily lead to compatible intuitions as to what counts as culture. Since something can meet the criteria for being culture according to the causal history argument but fail to be culture according to the sharedness property argument.

While the previous posts were mostly descriptive and agnostic with regard to this set of distinctions, in this post I take a stance as to what I see as the most productive mixture of ontic claims for a useful culture concept. In terms of the distinctions proposed, I will argue that if we were to arrange ontic claims in terms of the “strength” (and pragmatic usefulness) for determining the boundaries of cultural kinds, causal history claims would come out on top, followed by locational claims. Compositional claims would follow. Surprisingly, the property claim most cherished by sociologists (sharedness) turns out, in my argument, to be the least important.

Why Sharedness is a Weak Demarcation Criterion

First, I begin with negative arguments against making “sharedness” the sine qua non for distinguishing cultural from non-cultural kinds.

One problem with the sharedness criterion is that it is too broad of a distinction and thus ends up confusing important issues that end up being taken up by the other ontic claims in a more effective way. Take, for instance, the categorical distinction between “culture” and ” the individual” that emerges from the sharedness criterion. This distinction actually conflates a property claim with a location claim. So something can be “in” people but not be unique to any one individual. Critics of the notion of personal culture (a locational claim) sometimes dismiss it because they confuse it for a property claim (e.g., how can something be culture if it’s inside the person?).

This ends up begging the question for defining culture exclusively in terms of “public” behavior and performances. This was more or less the route taken by Clifford Geertz (with a helping of Rylean anti-Cartesian arguments) in the famous essays from the 1950s and 1960s published as Interpretation of Cultures in 1973. The problem here is that the analyst then immediately conflates a locational ontic claim (culture is that which is public) with an epistemic claim of dubious validity, namely, that culture has to be public because we can only study that which we have access to and we only have access to public stuff and not to “inside the head stuff” (see Smith 2016 for a deft criticism of this view).

Second, the criterion for sharing is arbitrary. This is clear if we follow White (1959) and ask the naive question: How many people need to share something in order for that something to cross the invisible boundary and go from “not culture” to “culture”?

…[I]f expression by one person is not enough to qualify an act as a cultural element, how many persons will be required? Linton (1936:274) says that “as soon as this new thing has been transmitted to and is shared by even one other individual in the society, it must be reckoned as a part of culture.” Osgood (1951:208) requires “two or more.” Durkheim (1938:lvi) needs “several individuals, at the very least.” Wissler (1929:358) says that an item does not rise to the level of a culture trait until a standardized procedure is established in the group. And Malinowski (1941:73) states that a “cultural fact starts when an individual interest becomes transformed into public, common, and transferable systems of organized endeavor.”

Singularity/plurality is a weak ontic demarcation criterion because it is implausible to suggest that the nature of an entity is radically transformed by gaining the (relational) property of being a duplicate or being shared across multiple people. And artifact remains an artifact whether it is unique or doubled and so does an idea, belief, representation, skill, and so on.

As the anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1973) once sardonically remarked:

Since there is no difference in kind between, for example, an idea held by one man [sic] and the same idea held by two or more, we are justified in stipulating that any human nongenetic phenomenon, shared or not, is a cultural phenomenon. The “group fallacy” that [for] culture to be culture [it] must be shared has only one thing to say for itself: it is widely shared (1401).

Beyond purely conceptual issues, the sharedness criterion faces insurmountable empirical difficulties. Take for instance, the only empirical program for the study and measurement of culture that came out of the mid-twentieth century functionalist theory of culture emphasizing sharedness, namely, the cross-national (survey-based) study of “values,” as pursued in the work of Milton Rokeah (1973), Geert Hofstede (2001) and Shalom Schwartz (2012). The basic idea here is that you could differentiate “cultures” (by which the authors mean “groups” of people, usually operationalized as nations or countries) by looking at shared values.

For a long time, this empirical program slogged on assuming “groups” shared cultures (because you could compute mean differences across countries, but actually never checking to see if the variance between countries was smaller or larger than the variance within. When analysts checked (e.g., Fischer and Schwartz 2011), they found (not surprisingly) that countries predicted a meager shared of the variance of values across individuals (using aggregated cross-national surveys) and there was much more consensus across a variety of values across countries than there was dissensus (except for values signaling “conformity”).

This led the authors to conclude:

Our results pose challenges for cross-cultural researchers who view culture as a meaning system shared by most members of a group. How can they justify comparing cultures on values that exhibit little within-society consensus or between-society difference? Our findings suggest that the “shared meaning” conception of culture applies at most to the internalized functional value system that regulates individuals’ conformity to social norms and expectations. Internalized values that regulate other domains of life and about which there is little within-society consensus do not fit this conception of culture. Other views of the value component of culture may therefore merit more attention (1140).

In a follow-up piece Schwartz (2014) reiterates the point that this empirical finding strikes a death-knell for approaches that build in the “sharedness” criterion into their conceptual definition of culture. Schwartz also (correctly) points out that this calls into question the use of “group” (usually country) averages to characterize this alleged sharedness, given the fact that it is actually non-existent. Yet, rather unexpectedly, Schwartz goes on to conclude that while we can reject the notion of sharedness, “there is no need to abandon the empirical side of this approach” and it is still OK to compute group means to characterize “cultures.” Schwartz does this by proposing an equally bizarre and speculative concept of culture.

According to Schwartz (2014), “societal” culture is (1) “a latent, hypothetical construct,” that “cannot be observed directly but can be inferred from its manifestations,” (2) “external to the individual. It is not a psychological variable. The normative value system that is the core of societal culture influences the minds of individuals but it is not located in their minds,” (3) “expressed in the functioning of societal institutions, in their organization, practices, and policies” (6). In other words, it seems that the only way to “save” the sharedness criterion from empirical discomfirmation is to make a radical move in cultural ontology.

In essence, Schwartz recommends adopting a non-empirical, purely externalist (non-cognitive) conception of culture, that at the same time is seen as having powers of (efficient?) causation on individuals, just to keep the methodological procedure that is licensed by the sharedness criterion. This is a conceptually retrogressive move, as these types of non-substantial but also causally powerful “culture concepts” in anthropology were precisely the core targets of more analytically perspicacious writers such as Bidney and White. I will not repeat all that is wrong with this approach (for one, it is ontologically incoherent for a non-empirical thing to exert causal power on empirical things), other than saying that if this is the theoretical price to pay to keep the criterion of sharedness as definitional of cultural kinds, it is better to reject it and move on to more plausible alternatives.

Why Causal History is a Better Demarcation Criterion

Causal history is a better demarcation criterion to distinguish cultural from non-cultural kinds. This is for at least three reasons.

First, the causal history of a thing has a stronger link to the nature of the thing than does the (ancillary) fact that it is a singularity or it is part of a plurality. That something belongs to the (biological) kind polar bear is much more informatively given by its causal history than by the fact that it is the last individual representative of its kind (e.g., due to extinction by climate change). The same for cultural kinds. That something emerges via a human creative process (for human culture) and that that something is then transmitted and learned by others is much more informative about the nature of the thing and much more useful in distinguishing it from other kinds of things than knowing whether it is held by one, two, three or fifty people.

Post-Chomskyan debates as to the status of language are useful here. When Chomsky defined “I-language” as an encapsulated, biological module in the brain that was inborn and simply matured during development without much input from the environment, he was ipso facto using a causal history criterion that removed human language from being a cultural kind. Instead, for Chomsky, language is a biological kind (Chomsky 2009). This means that Chomskyan I-language in spite of being “shared” by the human species does not count as culture by this definition. The Revival of domain-general conceptions of the origins of language and syntax that use refurbished conceptions of the learning process (e.g. Tomasello 2009), in effect, are attempts to reclaim language as a cultural kind. Note that what matters here is causal history (for Chomsky language emerging out of a biological module from a maturational process; for Tomasello emerging as a multifaceted capacity from a domain-general social learning process) not sharedness. That language ends up being “shared” in both of these (incompatible) stories, tells us that this criterion is more of an after-effect than definitional.

Second, the causal history criterion sidesteps the problematic individual/culture distinction in favor of (more tractable) binaries, such as culture/biology; see Weiss 1973: 1382ff). The problem with the individual/culture distinction is that it brings back all kinds of irresolvable dilemmas from the social theory tradition revolving around the Durkheimian individual/society partition and resultant “agency/structure” problem (in post-Giddensian parlance). These are less than helpful debates that don’t need to be recapitulated in cultural theory (Martin 2015, chap 2). Counterposing the individual to culture leads to problems related to the alleged effects of “culture” as a (possibly spurious) external ontological “thing” on individuals. This gets worse when the “sharedness” property gets linked to the “system” property so that now culture as an organized external system is counterposed to individuals, who are now faced with the task of using, internalizing, or even being completely transformed by this external system thing. The causal history criterion, by putting the genesis of cultural things in individual and collective creative activity at the forefront, avoids this issue.

Finally, the causal history criterion is compositionally pluralist. By compositional pluralism, I mean that it admits that culture can be made up of things that seem to be of different kinds. That is, a skill, a practice, an idea, a schema, a symbol, and a material artifact count as culture because they share comparable causal histories: All of these are the product of human invention, ingenuity, and tinkering, and all can be differentiated from those human capacities that have a biological or genetic history (Weiss 1973). In addition, the use of all of these can be learned and transmitted by people (in some cases, but not all, leading to the incidental property of being shared). The causal history criterion thus avoids the silly position that some compositional monists are forced to take, like for instance, denying the obvious fact that material (artifactual) culture is a kind of culture while also accommodating the “motley” nature of cultural kinds.

References

Bidney, D. (1968). Theoretical anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, Ronald, and Shalom Schwartz. 2011. “Whence Differences in Value Priorities?: Individual, Cultural, or Artifactual Sources.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42 (7): 1127–44.

Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. SAGE Publications.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking through theory. WW Norton.

Morin, O. (2016). How traditions live and die. Oxford University Press.

Rokeach, Milton. 1973. The Nature of Human Values. New York, NY, US: Free Press.

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