Historisk Tidskrift. Utgiven av Svenska historiska föreningen
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Historisk tidskrift 123:2 • 2003

Innehåll (Contents) 2003:2

Uppsatser (Articles)

Kulturens natur – några utgångspunkter för en syntes om långsiktig kulturell förändring

Arne Jarrick

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

The Nature of Culture – Some Starting-points for a Synthesis on Long-term Cultural Change

In order to develop conceptual tools for the writing of a history of long-term cultural change, I address some theoretical issues concerning the relation between humankind, culture and nature. My point of departure is the belief that, instead of subscribing to some perspective attached to this or that scholarly field, all research pretending to be scientific should be guided both by common basic rules of logic and by common basic principles of empirical observation.

Here, culture is defined as the ability to make and transmit all kinds of innovations between and within generations through deliberate teaching, learning and imitation. Culture is considered a species-specific trait, resulting from a uniquely human ability to imagine as well as processing problems and phenomena that are neither present nor visible. Of particular importance is the ability of humans to trace the invisible intentions of other humans, first by decoding what lies behind their behaviour and the attention they direct towards others – in turn triggering those others to reflect even about their own intentions – and secondly by grasping the meaning of the artefacts they produce and leave behind them. This ability is strategic in explaining the fact that the history of humankind has taken the course of cumulative, incessant change.

Although it should be considered an integral part of nature and not something external to it, the evolving culture is itself one of the most essential causes behind further cultural change, in turn having profound repercussions on those parts of nature that we consider non-cultural. Yet, this does not mean that culture is a matter of free will or the result of some curious decision taken by prehistoric humans to acculturate themselves. Rather it is the result of blind evolutionary processes that in a distant past gradually transformed early noncultural hominids into culture-producing humans through the improved capacity of their brains.