Download Technology as Human Social Tradition: Cultural Transmission by Peter Jordan PDF

By Peter Jordan

Know-how as Human Social culture outlines a singular method of learning variability and cumulative switch in human technology—prominent study issues in either archaeology and anthropology. Peter Jordan argues that human fabric tradition is better understood as an expression of social culture. during this strategy, each one artifact stands as an output of a particular operational series with particular offerings made at every one degree in its creation. Jordan additionally explores assorted fabric tradition traditions which are propagated via social studying, components that advertise coherent lineages of culture to shape, and the level to which those cultural lineages express congruence with each other and with language history.

Drawing at the program of cultural transmission concept to empirical learn, Jordan develops a descent-with-modification viewpoint at the expertise of Northern Hemisphere hunter-gatherers. Case experiences from indigenous societies in Northwest Siberia, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and northern California offer cross-cultural insights on the topic of the evolution of fabric tradition traditions at diversified social and spatial scales. This ebook supplies new methods of exploring many of the basic components that generate human cultural range within the deep earlier and during to the current

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Additional info for Technology as Human Social Tradition: Cultural Transmission among Hunter-Gatherers (Origins of Human Behavior and Culture, Volume 7)

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The same goes for all the skills and knowledge that humans have relied on over many millennia to undertake their routine subsistence activities like hunting, fishing, gathering, or the ability to process animal skins and make tailored clothing or store up resources for the lean season. In fact, becoming an accomplished practitioner of the many cultural traditions that individuals rely on in every sphere of their daily existence can require literally years of close pedagogic interaction, and during this time, infants must also be fed and sheltered until they can make their own active contributions to subsistence activities; only later will they become both independent members of the population.

2). , 1997, 2001; Welsch et al. 1992; Welsch and Terrell, 1994). According to this perspective, cultural evolution is argued to be a fundamentally different kind of process than macroscale biological evolution. It has a much faster tempo due to very high rates of cultural innovation, and it also has a fundamentally different mode—horizontal transmission—that creates reticulation. These features prevent deeper branching histories from forming and reduce the cultural landscape to little more than a blur of interrelated forms.

This means that independence can be maintained between the study of cultural and biological evolution (Bentley et al. 2008:112). However, humans clearly inherit both genes and cultural information, generating a “swirling dance” of genetic information and cultural traditions that are reproduced among individuals and across generations (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1990, 1991. 1992; Richerson and Boyd 2005:191– 95; and see chapter 6). In other words, biological histories of people and the histories of cultural traditions are linked to one another, but they are certainly not the same thing (Shennan 2004:25).

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