From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 07 Mar 2003 - 13:23:04 GMT
Hi Reed,
Your cooments about culture intrigued me. Some responses.
<I understand that the word "culture" might be useful in common
speech. But I don't
> believe that, as presently defined, it serves in the development of
> memetics
> as a theory.>
>
But isn't memetics an evolutionary theory of cultural transmission?
<But maybe "culture" means something in your mind that it doesn't
mean to me
> (which, by the way, would implicitly support my assertion that memes are
> in
> indiviual brains and not in an extrinsic context). Can you define it
> somewhat precisely?>
>
Culture is those sets of practices, behaviours, beliefs, and
values_shared_by a temporally and geographically distinct community of
people. As communication technologies have developed, so too has the scope
of the temporal and geographical boundaries of a community, such that today
many people talk (prematurely I feel) of a global culture fostered through
mass communication and ICTs (including the one we're all using now).
Aside from the definition of culture as that stuff put in petri
dishes to help bacteria grow, I don't see another useful definition of it.
I've come back to to this before on the list, but culture cannot reside
purely in individual's brains, because by any useful definition, it refers
to something shared, something communal, something societal.
That human brains are required for the generation and maintenance of
culture is fine, I've no problem with that, but to suggest it exists
entirely within individual's heads doesn't make sense to me. Regardless of
their relationship to memes, the existence of artefacts, particularly those
that do not serve as tools (in the strictest sense of that term) such as
symbolic art and ritual monuments, demonstrates that culture exists outside
of the brain as well.
Vincent
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