Nonhuman Cultures

Nonhuman Cultures
Recentering Cultural Analysis Beyond the Human
https://utexas.academia.edu/JohnHartigan
Mediums of culture
vocalizations (as communicative systems) and foraging (behavioral interactions with a larger environment).
Many cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and birds develop "local" dialects—patterned forms of vocalization that help groups cohere and reproduce, and that are not inherited nor transmitted biologically.
Resonating bodies (horses, dolphins): broader sensoriums of the social.
Interpretive dimensions, both environmental contexts and conspecifics interactions with that same context.

Domestication (other species do it too!)
Dugongs & sea cows (Sirenia), herbivores that cultivate and graze specialized seagrass communities.
Ambrosia beetles (subfamilies Scolytinae and Platypodinae) are fungiculturists, carving intricate tunnel systems or "galleries" where they raise fungi.
North American marsh periwinkle (Littoraria irrorata), a mollusk that farms salt marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora).
Hosts of termites, wasps and ants that domesticate other species. Leafcutter ants fertilize fungus & apply fungicides in the form of antibiotics from their own bodies to limit unwanted life forms. Notably, too, these species all manifest sociality in the form of division of labor.
Nonhuman Sociality
Some species also learn and transmit social knowledge that changes evolutionary dynamics; geographically patterned, even arbitrary or "maladaptive" (Whiten & Laland, 2011).
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. "The Culture of Chimpanzees," (2001); "Chimp Theory of Mind, 30 Years Later," (Call et al 2008).
and the most globally dominant invertebrate genera: ants and termites, bees and wasps, and even some spiders.
Not just human…
"Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals."
During the 16th century—the word's "next stage of meaning, by metaphor"—"the tending of natural growth was extended to a process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning of husbandry, was the main sense until the 18th and 19th centuries" ( Raymond Williams, Keywords, 1976:77).
Biological uses; medium not meaning; more like yogurt after all! (Landecker, Culturing Life, 2009).
Species Turn
Theorizing culture from multispecies perspective, @aesopsanthro & http://www.aesopsanthropology.com/blog/
Host of efforts to breach the (conceptual) "Golden Barrier."
Kohn, How Forests Think, via biosemiosis; all life signifies.
Ontological, affective, New Materialist turns
"We did not invent culture. The common ancestor of chimpanzees and prehumans invented it," E.O Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012
Culture Concepts, pt 2
"Understanding culture across species," Byrne et al, 2004.
"'patterns' can emerge as near-automatic product of social learning, whereas transmission of richer information reveals a distinctive 'sign of mind' in certain species."
The physical products of culture [i.e. material culture] are a sign of niche construction [i.e. place], a reservoir of knowledge with potential to aid the ratchet of cumulative change [i.e. collective memory]; and investments of meaning in physical objects transforms them into token of societal obligation, changing the culture itself and thus the environment of cultural learning"
Horses
Nonhuman Cultures, part 2
our version of culture was largely developed entirely through engagements with or attention to nonhumans.
Pat Shipman, "the animal connection"—underlying tool-making, symbolic thought and behavior, and domestication of plants and animals—is the basis for humanity.
Tool-use developed in conjunction with carving up of animal carcasses; symbols arose in prehistory to represent animals (numerous cave paintings); and domestication, predicated upon transformations of nonhumans.

Post-dualist definitions
Culture shapes the plasticity of species
Culture generates locally adaptive behaviors w/ the power to transform environments ("niche construction" or place-making) and can funnel the flow of genes in a species through mating rituals and kinship dynamics.
A view of culture not formed principally by an anthropocentric attachment to meaning. "Animal culture is much more than a window onto humanity: it is an evolutionary player" Whiten and Laland.
Cultivation: "always already" of practices and intuitions that entangled humans and nonhumans.
Horses
Long-lived social animals, in societies of several small bands that share space and resources; relatively stable membership.
Bands have large, overlapping ranges = regular contact w/ many other conspecifics; inter-band dominance (w/in larger herd established social relationships exist); fission-fusion dynamics, variation of the same complex social organization in humans, bonobos, chimpanzees, etc; elephants, spotted hyenas, many cetaceans.
"Group life in these societies is determined by complex, long-term social relationships that must be maintained, suggesting effective communication would be adaptive", EquisFAC.

Gains?
following "culture"—as ethnographers have learned to follow metaphors—we can engage in a different mode of interdisciplinarity, with the life sciences especially.
we can develop new capacities to challenge reductionists evolutionary forms of thought, exactly by attending to culture's biology-bending capacity.
"culture" becomes a powerful means of analyzing multispecies dynamics today exactly because it bridges lines drawn around the human over against nonhumans.
Culture Concepts, pt 1
"Culture is (1) that relational (ca. 1848), (2) complex whole…(1870s), (3) whose parts cannot be changed without affecting other parts (ca. 1914), (4) mediated through powerful and power-laden symbolic forms (1930s), (5) whose multiplicities and performatively negotiated character (1960s), (6) is transformed by alternative positions, organizational forms, and leveraging of symbolic systems (1980s), (7) as well as by emergent new technosciences, media, and biotechnology (ca. 2005)." M. Fischer, Cultural Anthropology, 2007
Bibliography
Byrne, Richard W, Philip J. Barnard. 2004. "Understanding Culture across Species." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (8): 341–46.
Call, Josep & Michael Tomasello (2008) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(5): 187-192.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 2012. "Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems." Cultural Anthropology 22 (1): 1–65.
Shipman, Pat . 2011. The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human. New York: Norton.
Whiten, Andrew, Robert A. Hinde, Kevin N. Laland, and Christopher B. Stringer. 2011. "Culture Evolves." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 (1567): 938–48. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0372.
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master subtitle style
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click icon to add picture
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click icon to add picture
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
11/17/2015

#
"
"
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Second level
Third level
Fourth level
Fifth level
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#
Click to edit Master title style
Click to edit Master text styles
Click icon to add picture
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Click icon to add picture
Click to edit Master text styles
Click to edit Master text styles
Click icon to add picture
Click to edit Master text styles
11/17/2015

#