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Cultural Science - A Natural History of Stories, Demes, Knowledge and Innovation (Paperback)
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Cultural Science - A Natural History of Stories, Demes, Knowledge and Innovation (Paperback)
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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open
Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Cultural Science introduces a new way of thinking about culture.
Adopting an evolutionary and systems approach, the authors argue
that culture is the population-wide source of newness and
innovation; it faces the future, not the past. Its chief
characteristic is the formation of groups or 'demes' (organised and
productive subpopulation; 'demos'). Demes are the means for
creating, distributing and growing knowledge. However, such groups
are competitive and knowledge-systems are adversarial. Starting
from a rereading of Darwinian evolutionary theory, the book
utilises multidisciplinary resources: Raymond Williams's 'culture
is ordinary' approach; evolutionary science (e.g. Mark Pagel and
Herbert Gintis); semiotics (Yuri Lotman); and economic theory (from
Schumpeter to McCloskey). Successive chapters argue that: -Culture
and knowledge need to be understood from an externalist ('linked
brains') perspective, rather than through the lens of individual
behaviour; -Demes are created by culture, especially storytelling,
which in turn constitutes both politics and economics; -The clash
of systems - including demes - is productive of newness,
meaningfulness and successful reproduction of culture;
-Contemporary urban culture and citizenship can best be explained
by investigating how culture is used, and how newness and
innovation emerge from unstable and contested boundaries between
different meaning systems; -The evolution of culture is a process
of technologically enabled 'demic concentration' of knowledge,
across overlapping meaning-systems or semiospheres; a process where
the number of demes accessible to any individual has increased at
an accelerating rate, resulting in new problems of scale and
coordination for cultural science to address. The book argues for
interdisciplinary 'consilience', linking evolutionary and
complexity theory in the natural sciences, economics and
anthropology in the social sciences, and cultural, communication
and media studies in the humanities and creative arts. It describes
what is needed for a new 'modern synthesis' for the cultural
sciences. It combines analytical and historical methods, to provide
a framework for a general reconceptualisation of the theory of
culture - one that is focused not on its political or customary
aspects but rather its evolutionary significance as a generator of
newness and innovation.
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