The articles that follow explore two issues. First, is it possible to differentiate empirically useful culture-bearing units from one another? If it is possible in principle, how can it be accomplished in practice? Second, are there operationalizable and empirically useful units of culture itself, and are such units necessary? Or, is it possible—and preferable—to construct a theory or theories of cultural evolution, transmission, and information management without particulate units of culture?
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries. Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.
2.
Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
3.
Blackmore, S. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
4.
Bloom, L. (1995). The Lucifer principle. New York: Atlantic Monthly.
5.
Boster, J. S. (1987). Introduction to special issue on intracultural variation. American Behavioral Scientist, 31, 150-162.
6.
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
7.
Carneiro, R. L. (1970). Scale analysis, evolutionary sequences, and the rating of cultures. In R. Naroll& R. Cohen (Eds.), A handbook of method in cultural anthropology (pp. 835-871). Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.
8.
Cavalli-Sforza, L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative approach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9.
Chick, G. (1981). Concept and behavior in a Tlaxcalan cargo hierarchy. Ethnology, 20, 217-228.
10.
Chick, G. (1997). Cultural complexity: The concept and its measurement. Cross-Cultural Research, 31, 275-307.
11.
Chick, G. (1999, November). What’s in a meme? Paper presented at the Symposium on Culture’s Units, annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago.
12.
Chick, G. (2000a, February). Cultural and behavioral consensus in a Tlaxcalan festival system. Paper presented at the session in honor of A. Kimball Romney at the annual meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, New Orleans, LA.
13.
Chick, G. (2000b). Writing culture reliably: The use of high concordance codes. Unpublished manuscript.
14.
Cloak, F. T. (1975). Is a cultural ethology possibly?Human Ecology, 3, 161-182.
15.
Cziko, G. (1995). Without miracles: Universal selection theory and the second Darwinian revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
17.
Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown.
18.
Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea. New York: Penguin.
19.
Dressler, W. W., Bindon, J. R., & Neggers, Y. R. (1998). Culture, socioeconomic status, and coronary heard disease risk factors in an African American community. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 21, 527-544.
20.
Dressler, W. W., Campos Balieiro, M., & Dos Santos, J. E. (1997). The cultural construction of social support in Brazil: Associations with health outcomes. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 21, 303-335.
21.
Dressler, W. W., Campos Balieiro, M., & Dos Santos, J. E. (1998). Culture, socioeconomic status and physical and mental health in Brazil. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12, 424-446.
22.
Dressler, W. W., Campos Balieiro, M., & Dos Santos, J. E. (1999). Culture, skin color, and arterial blood pressure in Brazil. American Journal of Human Biology, 11, 49-59.
23.
Dressler, W. W., Dos Santos, J. E.,& Campos Balieiro, M. (1996). Studying diversity and sharing in culture: An example of lifestyle in Brazil. Journal of Anthropological Research, 52, 331-354.
24.
Durham, W. H. (1991). Coevolution: Genes, culture and human diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
25.
Durham, W. H.,& Weingart, P. (1997). Units of culture. In P. Weingart, S. D. Mitchell, P. J. Richerson, & S. Maasen (Eds.), Human by nature: Between biology and the social sciences (pp. 300-313). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
26.
Funk & Wagnall’s new international dictionary of the English language. (1997). Chicago: Ferguson.
27.
Garro, L. (1999, February). Using cultural consensus theory and schema theory in a three-community study of knowledge about diabetes. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, Santa Fe, NM.
28.
Harris, M. (1964). The nature of cultural things. NewYork: Random House.
29.
Herskovits, M. J. (1945). The process of cultural change. In R. Linton (Ed.), The science of man in the world crisis (pp. 84-133). New York: Columbia University Press.
30.
Hull, D. L. (1982). The naked meme. In H. C. Plotkin (Ed.), Learning, development and culture (pp. 273-327). New York: John Wiley.
31.
Jorgensen, J. (1999). An empirical procedure for defining and sampling culture-bearing units in continuous geographical areas. World Cultures, 10, 139-143.
32.
Kluckhohn, C. (1953). Universal categories of culture. In A. L. Kroeber (Ed.), Anthropology Today (pp. 507-523). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
33.
Kroeber, A. L. (1944). Configurations of culture growth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
34.
Kroeber, A. L. (1948). Anthropology (Rev. ed.). Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.
35.
Kroeber, A. L., & Richardson, J. (1940). Three centuries of women’s dress fashions: A quantitative analysis. University of California Anthropological Records, 5, 111-154.
36.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
37.
Lowie, R. (1936). Cultural anthropology: A science. American Journal of Sociology, 42, 301-320.
38.
Lumsden, C. J., & Wilson, E. O. (1981). Genes, mind, and culture: The coevolutionary process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
39.
Lynch, A. (1996). Thought contagion: How belief spreads through society. New York: Basic Books.
40.
Morgan, L. H. (1877). Ancient society. New York: Henry Holt.
41.
Naroll, R. (1956). A preliminary index of social development. American Anthropologist, 58, 687-715.
42.
Naroll, R. (1970). The culture-bearing unit in cross-cultural research. In R. Naroll & R. Cohen (Eds.), A handbook of method in cultural anthropology (pp. 721-765). Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.
43.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: HarperCollins.
44.
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York: Norton.
45.
Rambo, A. T. (1991). The study of cultural evolution. In A. T. Rambo & K. Gillogly (Eds.), Profiles in cultural evolution (pp. 23-109). Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
46.
Roberts, J. M. (1965). Kinsmen and friends in Zuni culture: A terminological note. El Palacio, 72(2), 38-43.
47.
Roberts, J. M., & Chick, G. (1979). Butler County eight ball: A behavioral space analysis. In J. H. Goldstein (Ed.), Sports, games, and play: Social and psychological perspectives (pp. 65-99). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
48.
Roberts, J. M., Strand, R. F.,& Burmeister, E. (1971). Preferential pattern analysis. In P. Kay (Ed.), Explorations in mathematical anthropology (pp. 242-268). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
49.
Romney, A. K., & Weller, S. C. (1989). Systemic culture patterns and high concordance codes. In R. Bolton (Ed.), The content of culture: Constants and variants, studies in honor of John M. Roberts (pp. 363-381). New Haven, CT: HRAF.
50.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
51.
Stuart-Fox, M. (1986). The unit of replication in sociocultural evolution. Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 9, 67-89.
52.
Wilson, D. S. (1999). Flying over uncharted territory. Science, 285, 206-206.
53.
Wilson, D. S., & Sober, E. (1994). Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17, 585-654.
54.
Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. NewYork: Knopf.
