Abstract:

Humans adapt, not just through organic evolutionary processes but also through innovation, technology, communication, social organization, environmental exploitation and alteration, developing complex skills passed on within and between social groups. Evolutionary theorists recognize our species has a distinctive capacity to learn across generations and share that knowledge in dynamic and cumulative ways. However, much of the theorizing in evolutionary approaches are too reductive for most socio-cultural anthropologists. We argue that approaches to culture in cultural evolutionary theory can be augmented by envisioning culture as a dynamic assemblage of entangled processes at multiple levels, not necessarily reducible to constituent parts. Using such a framework, more anthropologists would be able to engage constructively with cultural evolutionary theory, and evolutionary theorists would have access to a wider range of anthropological resources. We offer Concepts in dynamic assemblages as an approach. We argue that focussing on Concepts and the dynamic assemblages within which they interface can augment exchange between cultural evolutionary theory and anthropology. Our goal is to foster dialogue and center the nuance that anthropologists require in evolutionary approaches and encourage recognition by evolutionary scholars that the cultural resources they are modelling can be more complex and yet tractable in an anthropological sense.

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Twitter: @Anthrofuentes