From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu 06 May 2004 - 00:20:38 GMT
After doing some reading of Dan Sperber's _Explaining Culture_ and Sir
Frederic Bartlett's _Remembering_ I'm tempted to revisit the trailer
park and empty the "black water" tank again from the RV (recreational
vehicle) theory I had driven around a little last year.
Sperber holds that transformation is more prevalent than replication in
culture. Exact duplication during transmission is the exception to the
rule or a case when transformation of representational content is near
zero.
Bartlett holds that memory processes are constructive, not involving
passive recollection of memory traces. His work on the recollection and
transmission of folk tales (eg- the ""War of the Ghosts" story) is a
great example of how memory and culture could mesh. Even if one reads a
copy of a book, a more or less perfect copy of the original manuscript,
this person's memory of what they read is going to transform the details
as it fades over time. Recollection will involve distortion and adding
details not in the original or forgetting the exact chain of events in
the book.
It looks like the recreational vehicle notion might be a fruitful one
with a lot more work on polishing the details and pointers from Sperber
and Bartlett's books. Replication (sensu memes) looks like its too
idealized to apply to many real world scenarios. where the rubber meets
the road.
Humans are vehicles for transmission of ideas, but instead of
replicating these ideas they are engaged in an active process of
recreating these ideas using a fallible memory and these ideas are thus
transformed, much like the stories passed between participants in
Bartlett's experiments.
In trying to formulate this post I'm transforming ideas I've received
from reading Sperber and Bartlett. My notions are far from being exact
replicas of either author, since I do not have either forementioned book
stored perfectly in my noggin. I am a recreational vehicle.
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