Explaining Culture, Sperber 1996: Book Summary

I just finished reading Dan Sperber’s Explaining Culture (1996), and have to return it to the library soon – so I thought I would digitize some of the reading notes I had jotted down. Overall, I thought the ideas were really cool. I’ve always been interested in concepts like culture, shared reality, collective memory etc, so this book was really up my alley. If anything, it game me the vocabulary to talk about the relationship between psychology, sociology and anthropology. To be clear, this isn’t really meant to be a review of the book as much as a summary of what I thought were the mains points.

The central idea of the book is to study culture as an epidemiology of representations, and to think of population-scale macrophenomena as the cumulative effect microprocesses that bring about individual events. In the context of culture, these microprocesses are the instances of inter-individual information transmission, which are in turn constrained by individual mental processes (i.e. human cognition). That is to say, cultural transmission involves the interplay of different ecological (i.e. writing, oral) and psychological (e.g., memory) processes.

There are two types of representations – mental representations and public representations. Public representations are often manifestations of mental ones. More crucially, because mental representations are private and tied to the individual, a mental representation has to be transformed into a public representation before it can be transmitted. Hence, each transmission is associated with a transformation, which leads to many opportunities for “mutations”. This is somewhat different from genetic transmission, which often has high fidelity between generations. In Sperber’s words – communication is transformation, not replication.

To push the analogy to diseases even further, there are cultural endemics (traditions) and epidemics (fashion). Cognitive processes are the different pathologies. Thus each phenomenon can be different, with different explanations. The task is to explain the distribution of representations, and not necessarily each representation. What ties the study of culture together isn’t so much having the “same mechanisms”, but rather the general approach, the types of questions asked and the ways of constructing concepts.

A representation is defined by two things – the object that it represents, and the information-processing device that processes the representation. It is important to consider the material properties of representation, because they have different effects on cognitive processing. While anthropology has focused on the causal explanation of cultural facts, and psychology has focused on the study of conceptual thought processes. The study of culture has to bridge these two frameworks, and seek to understand the psychological susceptibility to different cultural phenomenon.

On this note, Sperber makes the distinction between dispositions and susceptibility. Dispositions are adaptations (that were selected for by evolution). Susceptibility is the side effects that come with dispositions. In particular, meta-representational ability is a human disposition, which in turn makes us susceptible to cultural representations. It allows us to doubt and disbelief, but also allows us to suspend doubt and disbelief.  For example, our meta-representational ability allows us to learn half-understood ideas that build on things that are better understood. This has interesting implications for religious beliefs, where we temporarily suspend our disbelief based on respect for authority.

Sperber proposes two mechanisms for transmission – communication vs. imitation. Here, we are more interested in communication. He argues that the spread of ideas via communication should be thought of more as a process of attraction, rather than a process of selection. The outputs of which are not solely determined by inputs, but also on constructive cognitive processes that transform the inputs in a systematic, predictable way.

The last few chapters deal with the modularity of the mind, and argue that the mind is likely modular, and cultural diversity is compatible with a modular mind.