Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, and societies, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans. Visual anthropology, which is usually considered to be a part of social anthropology, can mean both ethnographic film as well as the study of "visuals", including art, visual images, cinema etc. Oxford Bibliographies describes visual anthropology as "the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological".
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual. Critics contend the theory is "untested, unsupported or incorrect". It has been labelled as pseudoscience by many scholars, making memetics unable to establish itself as a recognized research program.
Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts of musical behavior, in addition to the sound component.
Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects create or take part in. Some scholars also include other intangible phenomena that include sound, smell and events, while some even consider language and media as part of it. The term is most commonly used in archaeological and anthropological studies, to define material or artifacts as they are understood in relation to specific cultural and historic contexts, communities, and belief systems. Material cultural can be described as any object that humans use to survive, define social relationships, represent facets of identity, or benefit peoples' state of mind, social, or economic standing. Material culture is contrasting to symbolic culture, which includes nonmaterial symbols, beliefs, and social constructs.
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".
Memetic engineering is a term developed by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol, and Gibron Burchett based on Richard Dawkins' theory of memes.
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.
Cultural selection theory is the study of cultural change modelled on theories of evolutionary biology. Cultural selection theory has so far never been a separate discipline. However it has been proposed that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and "the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution". In addition to Darwin's work the term historically covers a diverse range of theories from both the sciences and the humanities including those of Lamark, politics and economics e.g. Bagehot, anthropology e.g. Edward B. Tylor, literature e.g. Ferdinand Brunetière, evolutionary ethics e.g. Leslie Stephen, sociology e.g. Albert Keller, anthropology e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski, Biosciences e.g. Alex Mesoudi, geography e.g. Richard Ormrod, sociobiology and biodiversity e.g. E.O. Wilson, computer programming e.g. Richard Brodie, and other fields e.g. Neoevolutionism, and Evolutionary archaeology.
Mentifact is a term coined by Julian Huxley, used together with the related terms "sociofact" and "artifact" to describe how cultural traits, such as "beliefs, values, ideas", take on a life of their own spanning over generations, and are conceivable as objects in themselves. This concept has been useful to anthropologists in refining the definition of culture. For instance, Edward Tylor, the first academic anthropologist, included both artifacts and such abstract concepts as kinship systems as elements of culture. Anthropologist Robert Aunger explains that such an inclusive definition ends up encouraging poor anthropological practice because "it becomes difficult to distinguish what exactly is not part of culture". Aunger goes on to explain that after the cognitive revolution in the social sciences in the 1960s, there is "considerable agreement" among anthropologists that a mentifactual analysis, one that assumes that culture consists of "things in the head" is the most appropriate way to define the concept of culture.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations in the former. Sperber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.
Sociology is the study of human behavior. Sociology refers to social behavior, society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture that surrounds everyday life. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociology can also be defined as the general science of society. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter can range from micro-level analyses of society to macro-level analyses.
Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.
Universal Darwinism refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics.
Nonkilling, popularised as a concept in the 2002 book Nonkilling Global Political Science, by Glenn D. Paige, refers to the absence of killing, threats to kill, and conditions conducive to killing in human society. Even though the use of the term in academia refers mostly to the killing of human beings, it is sometimes extended to include the killing of animals and other forms of life. This is also the case for the traditional use of the term "nonkilling" as part of Buddhist ethics, as expressed in the first precept of the Pancasila, and in similar terms throughout world spiritual traditions. Significantly, "nonkilling" was used in the "Charter for a World without Violence" approved by the 8th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates.
Epidemiology of representations, or cultural epidemiology, is a theory for explaining cultural phenomena by examining how mental representations get distributed within a population. The theory uses medical epidemiology as its chief analogy, because "...macro-phenomena such as endemic and epidemic diseases are unpacked in terms of patterns of micro-phenomena of individual pathology and inter-individual transmission". Representations transfer via so-called "cognitive causal chains" ; these representations constitute a cultural phenomenon by achieving stability of public production and mental representation within the existing ecology and psychology of a populace, the latter including properties of the human mind. Cultural epidemiologists have emphasized the significance of evolved properties, such as the existence of naïve theories, domain-specific abilities and principles of relevance.
Conscious evolution refers to the theoretical ability of human beings to be conscious participants in the evolution of their cultures, or even of the entirety of human society, based on a relatively recent combination of factors, including increasing awareness of cultural and social patterns, reaction against perceived problems with existing patterns, injustices, inequities, and other factors. The realization that cultural and social evolution can be guided through conscious decisions has been in increasing evidence since approximately the mid-19th century, when the rate of change globally began to increase dramatically. The Industrial Revolution, reactions against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of new sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, the revolution in global communication, the interaction of diverse cultures through transportation and colonization, anti-slavery and suffrage movements, and increasing lifespan all would contribute to the growing awareness of social and cultural patterns as being potentially subject to conscious evolution.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.
There are two main approaches currently used to analyze archaeological remains from an evolutionary perspective: evolutionary archaeology and behavioral ecology. The former assumes that cultural change observed in the archaeological record can be best explained by the direct action of natural selection and other Darwinian processes on heritable variation in artifacts and behavior. The latter assumes that cultural and behavioral change results from phenotypic adaptations to varying social and ecological environments.
