[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

[Jeffrey Fisher]

iirc (i don't have it in front of me) geertz defines culture as essentially
(in a nutshell) the use of symbols, for communication and for understanding.
not just passing on of behaviors. in which case you have just explained
precisely why the passing on of such behaviors does not constitute culture
-- unless you want to disagree with this definition of culture.
on the other hand, i admit it's not entirely clear to me
(IAmNotAnAntrhopologist--although i admit i play one in class, sometimes),
that imitation doesn't require a certain use of symbols, if only in a very
rudimentary way. seeing someone else do something and then seeing how that
might be something you yourself could
do? doesn't this require at least a modicum of abstraction from the
event to the possibility of a future event, and further, the use of
the observed behavior as a model of one's own behavior?

not a rhetorical question, and i'm thinking rudy has a handy answer to this
that i would like to hear, since it keeps coming up in my own thinking when
i think about, say, geertz, on the one hand, and peter singer, on the other.

honestly, the alan-cb conversation has me thinking about the problem in
"blade runner" -- that they've got this understanding of humanity that is
grounded in the ability to feel empathy, but when it turns out that there
are other beings (namely, replicants) who can feel empathy, then that's
maybe not a god definition of humanity. and then the whole thing calls into
question the value of defining humanity at all.

sorry for the hit and run. off to meetings.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 7:27 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> If by culture one means learned or invented behaviors that are passed down
> through generations, I don't think it's limited to apes or even primates.
> It's not like those birds in Japan who drop nuts onto busy streets in front
> of nut-cracking traffic evolved the behavior via natural selection, and I
> don't think Moscow's metro-taking canines all figured out how to take public
> transportation independently.
>
> You don't need language or symboling or abstract thought (I'm not sure what
> the latter means anway -- isn't all thought abstract?) to pass on such
> behaviors. You just need imitation. Animal X figures out a good way to do
> something. Animals Y and Z observe this and think (nonsymbolically) "damn,
> that's a good idea" and copy it. Their offspring A, B, and C copy it, as do
> their offspring, etc. When X Y and Z die, nobody will remember where the
> behavior came from, but that doesn't really matter.
>
> --- On Mon, 8/10/09, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>   The point about tool-using apes
> > wasn't to argue that they have "culture", it was to show
> > the ways their tool
> > use fits, quite nicely, the quote from Marx you provided as
> > a means of
> > showing the difference between human beings and animals -
> > entities that Marx
> > calls "mere animals" because of their lack of what you call
> > culture.
> >
>
>
>
>
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