I have some additional thoughts regarding the issue of social facts as defined by Durkheim, but might save them for after your following post. In the meantime, here’s a thought that I keep wondering about. If you do want to expand the range we commonly associate with culture beyond the text-based, meaning-focused analytics, what then do you intend to call this layer which sits upon a foundation of affect and Daesin (being-in-the-world)…or am I not interpreting you correctly? Is there a hierarchy to your understanding of culture? A heterarchy? How are these features interacting with each other? Should we give primacy to one aspect over another? Or are you simply just stressing the way maize or dolphins exist in the world because there is a prevalence among anthropologists (not to mention the rest of the academy) to privilege those aspects of “culture” which are meaning making? Finally, again I look forward mostly to your consideration of what we might be losing out on by shifting the focus away from meaning-making and into the realm of ontology and psychology?

I’m also very excited with the ways that ecologists and environmental engineers (who I study from time to time) have been expanding their range of interests into the social and cultural. However, when at the AAAs a few years ago someone asked me to describe the subjectivity of the landscape in my talk, that most certainly was not an ecologist speaking. Moreover there is also no way I could use ethnography to make such a description as the people I was studying don’t think, talk or act in such terms. I don’t fancy myself a relativist by any stretch of the imagination, but some concepts just don’t travel well outside their cultural context.

You’ve been describing a good deal of the recent attempts to understand the intersection of culture and nonhumans, but surely we can trace many of these ideas back to the early attempt at this problem by Gregory Bateson. In Bateson’s work there is a far more nuanced and empirically formulated understanding of learning than what you’ve described here and it most certainly did not place the symbolic nor meaning as the sole starting point for cultural analysis (keep in mind that this is also the starting point from which Deacon begins, as his work is very much in conversation with Bateson). Bateson threw his concepts into this very debate through the study of dolphins only to come out with essentially the argument that Al (and to a certain extent TNT) has made: you cannot write an ethnography of dolphins (of course I’m simplifying here). Now granted I know the ontology, nonhuman species and ANT folks have argued against this position in various articles and books, but I certainly am not convinced that any of them have even remotely approached the level of sophistication found in Bateson’s writing from 50 years ago. Perhaps the problem truly is that we are using the wrong methodology, I am not sure why that is such a difficult proposition to consider. Ethnography was not meant to be an all purpose tool just as culture was not meant to be a black box catch-all concept (which is, unfortunately, often the case). I think in this series you have provided some fascinating theoretical propositions and of course in a blog post it is impossible to engage with them all on a deeply empirical level, so, needless to say, I look forward to the book. But I also don’t see the harm in admitting what your project cannot do. Think of how powerful the theoretical proposition of the “double-bind” was not just for anthropology but even more for psychology. To be able to convince a field other than your own that you’ve discovered something truly ground breaking is not easy…but then to admit that you have not succeeded 100% is perhaps even more difficult to say…particularly in a way that will make people say “but there must be something more here, if only I could…”. Now that is Science.

Nonhumans form mental representations, so arguably they engage in some forms of symbolism

Key word: arguably. My computer arguably forms mental representations, too, so it arguably engages in some form of symbolism as well, but only if we stretch these things out a bit.

Surely symbolism is about the capacity to interpret the acts of other beings – that’s got to be the most basic and fundamental part of it. It’s the ability to hear someone shout ‘Duck!’ and know whether to crouch quickly or ready your gun. It’s not just mental representations. There’s much more to it, as TNT has pointed out.

To do this as humans do it, you’ve got to use multiple orders of thought – thoughts about others’ thoughts about your own thoughts (and so on, potentially ad infinitum). Humans are very good at recursive processes; they automatically think recursively, and it has been argued, I think persuasively, that the ability to process multiple recursive orders is the defining aspect of human thought. (See e.g. Michael Corballis, The Recursive Mind).

A few other animals can process a couple of orders: corvids are reasonably good at thinking in terms of multiple steps in order to achieve goals, and they can make tools to make tools to get food (for example), which is incipient recursive thinking. In principle they could think about one anothers’ thoughts, too, I suppose. So it’s not an absolute difference between humans and other species. It’s just that humans are much better at it.

That’s why humans have culture, with songs, dances, prayers, architectural styles, books, internets, armies, non-violent protest, and so on, and why other species only have kind-of-sort-of-not-quite-culture. It’s also why anthropology, the study of humans, tends to focus so much on cultural products instead of more elementary biological processes. It’s also why definitions of ‘culture’ that are too broad and rudimentary aren’t much use.

What I find problematic with your work (and anyone else’s who shares your line of reasoning) is the way that you define culture. Had you not excluded a symbolic aspect of culture from your definition then it would be interesting to see whether or not there are other organisms on this planet (aside from humans) that possess culture.

Yet you exclude symbolism and retain in your definition only the means of transmitting culture. If behavior is all that is transmitted than we do not have much of an understanding of culture. Where are the particulars? One may counter my statement by stating that to state that culture is also symbolic is unnecessary because this process has to be transmitted, hence, it stands that there is no need for anything more than the social transmission of behavior. Yet this collapses much behavior as if it is all equal–the fact is that we already know that it isn’t.

To state the fact that sparrow songbirds have what are basically dialects only demonstrates that humans and some organisms share a means of transmitting behavior–social learning. You will conflate the social transmission of behavior with culture (because you exclude symbolism). Yet, what could be said of the songs from a symbolic standpoint? That is the much more interesting question to ask. Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (1997) takes this issue of symbolism head on by attempting to explain the differences between different forms of communication: there are some forms of communication that rely on a particular kind of reference–such as a Vervet monkey producing a vocal call for a certain predator– and some that rely on what he calls symbolic reference–such as a human, let’s say urban youth in the US, whom say the “business” and can mean an enterprise that sells some type of goods or services in exchange for funds, some type of rip off, or something of exceptional quality. The implications between these differences are vast. While a song bird can in fact produce its song, what else does the song, the song’s production do? I’m sure very complicated and important things. Yet, how is it similar and different from any human songs? In what ways are the two equivalent and distinct. Basically, my point is that if you remove symbolism from a definition of culture then you lose too much. With such a malnourished notion of culture it even becomes a rote exercise attempting to understand human life ways.