In the decades since the idea of nonhuman cultures was broached, the notion has taken hold through recognitions that they also learn and transmit social knowledge. As Andrew Whiten and Kevin Laland et al explain, the presence of social learning as well as “traditions and other culturally related phenomena” among nonhumans has “proved to be far more widespread across the animal kingdom than imagined a half-century ago and more complex in their manifestations” (2011: 938). That’s partly because the list of such creatures is sprawling: numerous vertebrates—horses and hyenas, bats and crows, dolphins and dogs, all kinds of cats and rodents, and of course, our closest cousins, the primates—and the most globally dominant invertebrate genera: ants and termites, bees and wasps, and even some spiders. But this also reflects shifting sensibilities among researchers, that what we observe other species doing is not a matter of anthropocentric projection but rather a fairly accurate perception of homologous activities.

Thinking this way requires a simple, mobile analytic that applies widely across species and foundationally to humans, as well. Gabriel de Tarde’s work, which has seen a recent surge of new interest, is useful because he equates the social with two basic capacities: innovation and imitation. These are also the two prominent units of analysis for considering nonhuman forms of culture today (Lehmann et al, 2010). Mimesis, that long running concern in cultural analysis, is directly applicable as a trans-species dynamic; the question is largely, what are the mediums through which imitation both operates and is socially transmitted? The answer is ready at hand: researchers working with nonhumans tend to focus on vocalizations (as communicative systems) and foraging (behavioral interactions with a larger environment).

There is increasing evidence that these are learned and passed on within certain species. Many cetaceans (like dolphins and whales) as well as birds develop “local” dialects—patterned forms of vocalization that help groups cohere and reproduce, and that are not inherited nor transmitted biologically. These calls or sounds are acquired by conspecifics and play a role in where and how groups forage. Their vocalizations convey patterns of information acquired from and applied to environmental settings. Presumably, such communication also involves an interpretive dimensions, both by interpreting environmental contexts and conspecifics interactions with that same context. But as this brings us close to meaning, does this perspective, in focusing so keenly on modes of communication, rely upon or risk inscribing an anthropocentric definition of culture?

The answer will depend on how all of this works vis-à-vis biology, that long-running foil for articulating the social and our well-ensconced domain for identifying the real. What matters here is the realization that culture—which we’ve largely equated with the generation of symbolic thought and the operation of meaning, in a mentalist-bound sensibility—may be far more deeply entangled with biology than the “mind” imagined. Think of the various “turns” today in—ontological, affect, non-representational: none of them open up the biological in the way that culture potentially can when viewed in this trans-specific frame. But the capacity for doing so is where cultural anthropologists may get squeamish. Underlying all this research on the culture of nonhumans is an evolutionary notion of culture, one that “recognizes and exploits parallels between biological and cultural change,” a “rigorous science of culture” that draws upon evolutionary biology yet is directed at “the specific and unique processes of culture” (Whiten and Laland 2011:939). But wait, isn’t “culture” that which separated humans from determinate forms of biology and that freed us from strictures of natural selection? Maybe not. But if not, the gain from this line of thought is a much more plastic—that is, less deterministic sense—version of either biology or evolution.

The possibilities and options for thinking and deploying culture across species lines are just too many and too generative to foreclose by maintaining the uniqueness of humanity through retention of culture as a singular possession. What do recognitions of nonhuman cultures allow us to think? Many things, in tandem. First, it presents a means of regarding nonhumans as part of a continuum we share with them, of greater and lesser degrees of enculturation. Second, this is an opportunity to think comparatively about the capacity of culture both to respond to and to alter ecologies and biologies. In breaching the “golden barrier” that construes culture as a unique possession of humans, we can begin to think more broadly about the power and pervasiveness of culture—that force or condition that has altered the globe, as seen in the emergence of the Anthropocene. Together, these reasons generatively combine to give social theorists a means and cause to reconsider culture, as something more than that befuddling medium through which ideology operates.

The gain for cultural analysis is that we begin to get at something that has bedeviled social theorists for decades: how do you succinctly define culture? Culture generates adaptive behaviors that have the power to transform environments (“niche construction” or place-making), but that also can funnel the flow of genes in a species through mating rituals and kinship dynamics. In this formulation, we also gain a view of culture that is not formed principally by an anthropocentric attachment to meaning. In this view, Laland explains, “Animal culture is much more than a window onto humanity: it is an evolutionary player”. Studying “cultural processes in a broad range of animal species exhibit a number of properties that change the evolutionary dynamic, including detaching the behavior of animals from their ecological environments, generating geographical patterns in phenotypic characters, allowing arbitrary and even maladaptive characters to spreading, influencing evolutionary rates and trajectories, and modifying selection to precipitate and direct evolutionary events.” Not only is this an important insight, it is also an impetus to take culture more seriously among humans as well. We need to know more about this powerful dynamic or capacity, and we are best served if we open up the inquiry beyond the human.

As Rex recently pointed out, Durkheim’s elder and rival Gabriel Tarde is experiencing a “reinvention” or “revival” at the hands of Bruno Latour and assorted posthumanist authors. They’re studiously reworking Tarde’s ambitious argument that invention, imitation, and opposition are the elementary forms of social life (human, animal, and other). Of these three elements, Tarde most thoroughly explored imitation. A now-established trope among neo-Tardians is that Durkheim’s success in securing sociology’s autonomy as a discipline relegated Tarde’s “microsociology” (as Gilles Deleuze called it) to the margins of the human sciences. Contributors to the edited volume, The Social after Gabriel Tarde, assert that anthropologists haven’t worked through Tarde’s ideas. The editor, Matei Candea, states, “Until recently…Tarde was almost entirely absent from anthropology, with the notable exception of the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” It might come as a surprise, then, that in 1964 Margaret Mead could write, “Since Tarde’s original publication, the idea of imitation has been worked to the bone.” What on Earth could Mead have meant? Wasn’t Tarde forgotten?

The short answer is no.

Many early U.S. anthropologists, and particularly students of Franz Boas, read, discussed, and were impacted by Tarde. It’s true that Tarde had less influence in England, though George Stocking does quote Bronislaw Malinowski describing Tarde as “the starting point of the most important investigations in Social Psychology.” Boas was even more committed to some of Tarde’s ideas. Before the publication of Elsie Clews Parsons’ translation, he referenced Lois de l’imitation in his 1894 address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and his 1899 report on fieldwork in British Columbia (both reprinted in Stocking’s A Franz Boas Reader). In his discussion of Boas’s place in anthropology, Alfred Kroeber noted that his mentor “was definitely influenced by Tarde’s Lois de l’imitation.” Robert Lowie put it even more forcefully in his 1937 History of Ethnological Theory: “[Lois de l’imitation] profoundly impressed Boas and, through him, dozens of anthropologists in the United States.” How many dozens were there in 1937?

Through Boas and Parsons, Tarde’s concept of imitation pervasively shaped early anthropological work. Admittedly, neither scholar frequently references Tarde. But Boas, particularly, invokes him in key passages. He likens the invention and dissemination of northwest coast traditions born out of ritual fasting and hallucination to phenomena discussed by Tarde and by Swiss ethnologist and linguist Otto Stoll. And in the AAAS address, later revised and included in The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas argues that all humans, regardless of their society’s complexity, are influenced by zeitgeists produced by imitative acts:

Unconscious and conscious imitation are factors influencing civilized society, not less than primitive society, as has been shown by G. Tarde, who has proved that primitive man and civilized man as well, imitates not such actions only as are useful, and for the imitation of which logical causes may be given, but also others for the adoption or preservation of which no logical reasons can be assigned.

Tarde’s concept of imitation fit cleanly into Boas’s understanding of social groups as contingent accretions of cultural elements acquired through innovation and diffusion. Tarde also resisted moral judgments based on social evolutionist frameworks. Ultimately, it’s difficult to say how much Boas’s subtle and supple historicist theorization of cultural processes owes to Tarde. But it probably owes quite a lot.

Like Tarde, Boas and the early “Boasians” shared skepticism toward the Comtean emphasis on general sociological laws that guided Durkheim. But they were not a unified bunch. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they didn’t all accept Tarde’s ideas with equal fervor. In fact, in The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians, Leslie Spier (whom Stocking classifies as a “strict” Boasian) notes, “[Tarde’s thesis] that imitation…proceeds by the acquisition of the ideas, wants, and sentiments before the means of objectifying and satisfying them are duplicated…is at variance with the facts in the case of the sun dance.”

Spier’s account shows how his “strict” Boasianism was a commitment to empirical work questioning the grand sociological and psychological syntheses of the nineteenth century, including that of Tarde. In the same vein, Parsons opened her 1919 address as the retiring president of the American Folk-Lore Society (after several years of collaboration with Boas) by noting how the paucity of ethnological data available to Tarde limited his ability to explain why imitation succeeds or fails.

In his introduction to a collection of Tarde’s essays, sociologist Terry Clark suggests that Tarde’s influence faded because it “could provide stimulation both for partisans of cultural diffusion and those of independent invention in the debate that so divided anthropologists between the wars.” More broadly, U.S. anthropology’s (temporary?) turn away from Boasian principles after World War II left Tarde’s ideas in the unsteady hands of sociologists and economists concerned with the diffusion of innovations.

So, decades before posthumanism, Tarde had, indeed, been worked to the bone. Though Latour and Boas read Tarde in some tellingly different ways, Boasian concerns with innovation, diffusion, and personality have risen again in research on science, networks, and affect. Perhaps Tarde’s theory of imitation wasn’t so much forgotten as normalized or (to borrow a term from Latour) blackboxed. I imagine that, sooner or later, we’ll “forget” Tarde once more. I hope that when we “remember” him the next time, we’ll remember Boas and company alongside.