Abstract
Every discipline poses its research questions in specific ways and thus uses concepts that are suited to find answers in its well defined disciplinary frameworks. Accordingly, the idea of cultural trait has been used and developed in several disciplines, often without any reference to each other. The result has often been non-communicability across different fields. We first show, by means of two examples, that the lack of deep interdisciplinary dialogue and reciprocal understanding has generated some harsh controversies. We argue that our book Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity tries to overcome not only the gap between cultural traits specialists and other scientists, but also the barriers among the researchers who are not specialists on cultural traits but that nevertheless directly or indirectly use cultural traits in their different disciplines.
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Notes
- 1.
Even in fields where “cultural traits” are not systematically cited, we may recognize the use of some analog notion. Comparative approaches in anthropology, history, and cultural studies, for example, make extensive use of the idea of a cultural trait. A famous example is Diamond (1999, 2005, 2012) and Diamond and Robinson (2010). Other, less historical, methodologically relevant texts are found in the ‘ecology of culture’, with authors such as Ingold (2000, 2011), or Sperber (1996, 2000) with his “epidemiology of culture” approach. Cross-cultural studies have specific methodology texts such as Hofstede (2001) and Minkov (2012). Beyond methodological and theoretical literature, we find many studies on the importance of cultural diversity and cross-culturalization for facing the challenges of our time, often promoted by United Nations and other political organisms. An example among many others can be Johnston et al. (2012).
- 2.
Memetics is elaborated in books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Richard Brodie, Robert Aunger, Tim Tyler. For a critical approach, see Distin (2004).
- 3.
On evolutionary archaeology see Tëmkin (this volume), Carignani (this volume). Theoretical frameworks and findings are published in books such as O’Brien and Lyman (2000, 2003), O’Brien et al. (2005), and Shennan (2003, 2009). The relevance of phylogenetic thinking to linguistics is addressed in Da Milano and Puddu (this volume), and extensively exemplified below in Sect. 1.1. Carignani (this volume) provides examples of evolutionary thinking in engineering and technology studies.
- 4.
Performing several tests and considering some potential objections and overlapping clines, Atkinson maintained distance from Africa as a significant predictor of phonemic diversity. Just like the much more marked pattern observed in neutral genetic markers, the gradient of phonemic diversity would be a ‘serial founder effect’, i.e., the signature of a series of population size reductions (bottlenecks) during the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa, dating 50–70,000 years ago according to the model used by Atkinson.
- 5.
A whole special issue of Linguistic Topology (Bybee 2011) was published to discuss Atkinson’s method and results, and their implications. Cysouw et al. (2012), Van Tuyl and Pereltsvaig (2012), and Wang et al. (2012) responded on Science, then Atkinson (2012a) addressed their criticisms. Then there was one more exchange between Jaeger et al. (2012) and Atkinson (2012b). Afterwards, Hunley et al. (2012) published a “rejection” on the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Statistical methodologies, in particular arbitrary choices and errors, were discussed as the same data got re-analyzed making the trend disappear and yielding different and multiple origin points, but here we are more interested in discussions on phonemic data themselves.
- 6.
- 7.
Just as cultural traits are the real building block of Mesoudi et al.’s proposal, they are also a major point of contention in the clash with Tim Ingold. See for example the following passage: “…Mesoudi et al.’s […] characterization is not merely anachronistic. It is also an affront to the millions of intelligent human beings for whom traditions are real and important but who are not, on that account, trait-bearing cultural clones whose only role in life is to express – in their behaviour, artefacts and organizations – information that has been transmitted to them from previous generations, only to have their performances observed and recorded in their natural habitat, along with other forms of wildlife, by intruding scientists. The genealogy of cultural traits that Mesoudi et al. propose, under the rubric of ‘comparative anthropology’, is a parody of history in which agency, power and social relations are but the ephemeral effects of proximate causes whose ultimate source is supposed to lie in capacities and dispositions bequeathed to individuals as an ancestral legacy, independently and in advance of their life in the world” (Ingold 2007: 14, emphasis added).
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Acknowledgements
Our first thank goes to Luca Stanca, Director, CISEPS Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology, and Social Sciences at the University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy, whose support was so precious during these years. Thanks to his true engagement in interdisciplinarity, we had the necessary support to go along with this project. We also want to thank CISEPS for financial support, along with “Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences at the same university.
Then, we would like to thank Luigino Bruni and Telmo Pievani, who had, more that 5 years ago, the first intuition of letting people from different disciplines meet in the University of Milano - Bicocca, sharing the interest in evolutionary studies. We took up their heritage by promoting a new wave of seminars, more focused on the concept of cultural traits, from which this book was born.
It was possible to realize this book thanks to all participants to the seminars we held. We thus want to thank all presenters and, especially, those who then agreed to become authors of this book. We want to highlight the fact that this is really a collective work, in which authors did not simply agree to write chapters assigned by the editors; on the contrary, almost all authors participated in the book creation process, constituting a research group, reviewing each others’ work, and stimulating interdisciplinary debate.
We also took advantage of cooperation with AppEEL – Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab, University of Lisbon, in particular with its greatly interdisciplinary research and dissemination project “Implementing the Extended Synthesis in Evolutionary Biology into the Sociocultural Domain” funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Fabrizio Panebianco kindly aknowledges the financial support of the ERC project TECTACOM – 324004. Emanuele Serrelli kindly acknowledges support from the John Templeton Foundation in the framework of the 2012/2013 project “Implementing the Extended Synthesis in Evolutionary Biology into the Sociocultural Domain” carried out at the Lisbon Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab (grant ID 36288).
At last, if this book appears as it is, this is greatly due to Springer’s referees and staff, and to the precious external referees from the many disciplines involved, who donated their time to ensure the scientific correctness of this book. On top of the overall referee process, they acted as an additional stimulus during the book construction process.
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Panebianco, F., Serrelli, E. (2016). Cultural Traits and Multidisciplinary Dialogue. In: Panebianco, F., Serrelli, E. (eds) Understanding Cultural Traits. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_1
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