Search

The extent to which humans rely on social learning is exceptional; it is central to our understanding of how culture evolves. Research into cultural transmission has shown that transmission itself is often biased: not all forms of information are transmitted or received equally. For example, we are more likely to remember information that pertains to social and survival domains (content), and more likely to retain information depending on the transmitter (context). Although there is evidence to support such strategies, there has been very little empirical study regarding how these biases concurrently act on transmission. Additionally, language itself might be a source of bias. In order to address these gaps, this thesis exploits the potential of narrative and storytelling to embody multiple social transmission biases. Storytelling also allows language to take a causal role in transmission. The introductory chapters summarise how the related fields of cultural evolution and sociolinguistics approach content and contextual information. Experiment 1 demonstrates a novel proxy for eliciting prestige bias, motivated by the need for a widely shared mechanism of establishing prestige information. Using sociolinguistic methods, we find that accents index differential prestige. The second experiment offers a fresh perspective on the oral transmission chain paradigm, bringing together locally calibrated linguistic indicators of prestige and various manipulated content biases. This study provides an ecologically valid experimental design with the potential for cross-cultural deployment. The third study is an innovative application of the Family Problem Picture Task, previously developed by sociolinguists to elicit vernacular speech. Participants individually order pictures to create narratives; then we explore the ways in which group dynamics can influence changes in narrative, and thus, biases in story content. The fourth study uses conversational data elicited by the Family Problem Picture Task to highlight the utility of the paradigm to investigate group dynamics and dominance. Together the four studies demonstrate the utility of drawing upon parallels that exist between sociolinguistics and cultural evolution, bridging the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology.

In this thesis, I focus on two broad research questions derived from a theory proposed by Henrich and Gil-White: (i) the use of prestige cues for social learning (Chapters 2-4) and (ii) dominance and prestige as two strategies to acquire high social rank and social influence in human groups (Chapters 5-6). In Chapter 2, I review the literature on the adaptive value and actual use of prestige-biased social learning, finding mixed support. Chapter 3 tests whether information provided by high prestige sources of information is better transmitted than information provided by a low prestige source using a transmission chain experiment, finding no evidence to support this prediction. Chapter 4 presents another transmission chain experiment testing whether dominance and prestige cues are better transmitted than medium social rank cues. I find better transmission of dominance and prestige cues than medium social rank cues, but no reliable differences in the transmission of dominance and prestige cues. Chapter 5 reviews the literature on the dominance-prestige distinction and related areas of research. It proposes an integrated model to accommodate conflicting findings and extend its application to large-scale societies/groups with formal hierarchies. In Chapter 6, I find that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict both predict preferences for both dominant and prestigious leaders using data from the World Values Survey. I also find that liberal ideology is positively related to perceptions of Donald Trump as dominant and Hillary Clinton as prestigious and negatively related to perceptions of Hillary Clinton as dominant and Donald Trump as prestigious, using survey data collected prior the 2016 US Presidential Election. Finally, Chapter 7 presents an overview of the thesis, discuss its implications for further research on prestige-biased social learning and social hierarchy and outlines new avenues for research.

Languages evolve in response to various pressures, and this thesis adopts the view that two pressures are especially important. Firstly, the process of learning a language functions as a pressure for greater simplicity due to a domain-general cognitive preference for simple structure. Secondly, the process of using a language in communicative scenarios functions as a pressure for greater informativeness because ultimately languages are only useful to the extent that they allow their users to express - or indeed represent - nuanced meaning distinctions. These two fundamental properties of language - simplicity and informativeness - are often, but not always, in conflict with each other. In general, a simple language cannot be informative and an informative language cannot be simple, resulting in the simplicity-informativeness tradeoff. Typological studies in several domains, including colour, kinship, and spatial relations, have demonstrated that languages find optimal solutions to this tradeoff - optimal solutions to the problem of balancing, on the one hand, the need for simplicity, and on the other, the need for informativeness. More specifically, the thesis explores how inductive reasoning and communicative interaction contribute to simple and informative structure respectively, with a particular emphasis on how a continuous space of meanings, such as the colour spectrum, may be divided into discrete labelled categories. The thesis first describes information-theoretic perspectives on learning and communication and highlights the fact that one of the hallmark feature of conceptual structure - which I term compactness - is not subject to the simplicity-informativeness tradeoff, since it confers advantages on both learning and use. This means it is unclear whether compact structure derives from a learning pressure or from a communicative pressure. To complicate matters further, some researchers view learning as a pressure for simplicity, as outlined above, while others have argued that learning might function as a pressure for informativeness in the sense that learners might have an a-priori expectation that languages ought to be informative. The thesis attempts to resolve this by formalizing these different perspectives in a model of an idealized Bayesian learner, and this model is used to make specific predictions about how these perspectives will play out during individual concept induction and also during the evolution of conceptual structure over time. Experimental testing of these predictions reveals overwhelming support for the simplicity account: Learners have a preference for simplicity, and over generational time, this preference becomes amplified, ultimately resulting in maximally simple, but nevertheless compact, conceptual structure. This emergent compact structure remains limited, however, because it only permits the expression of a small number of meaning distinctions - the emergent systems become degenerate. This issue is addressed in the second part of the thesis, which compares the outcomes of three experiments. The first replicates the finding above - compact categorical structure emerges from learning; the second and third experiments compare artificial and genuine pressures for expressivity, and they show that it is only in the presence of a live communicative task that higher level structure - a kind of statistical compositionality - can emerge. Working together, the low-level compact categorical structure, derived from learning, and the high-level compositional structure, derived from communicative interaction, provide a solution to the simplicity-informativeness tradeoff, expanding on and lending support to various claims in the literature.

Culture is an important means by which both human and non-human animals transmit useful behaviours between individuals and generations. Amongst animals, chimpanzees live particularly varied cultural lives. However, the processes and factors that influence whether chimpanzees will be motivated to copy an observed behaviour are poorly understood. In this thesis, I explore various factors and their influence on social learning decisions in chimpanzees. In turn, the chapters examine the influence of (i) rank-bias towards copying dominant individuals, (ii) majority and contextual influences and finally (iii) individual differences in proclivity for social learning. In my first experiment, I found evidence that chimpanzees are highly motivated to copy the behaviour of subordinate demonstrators and innovators in an open-diffusion puzzle-box paradigm. In contrast, behaviours seeded by dominant individuals were not transmitted as faithfully. This finding has important implications for our understanding of the emergence of novel traditions. In my second experiment, I found that some chimpanzees are highly motivated to relinquish an existing behaviour to adopt an equally rewarding alternative if it is consistently demonstrated by just one or two individuals within a group context, but not in a dyadic context. This contrasts with prior studies which argue that chimpanzees are highly conservative and may hint at a hitherto unrecognised process by which conformity-like behaviour might occur. Finally, I performed a novel type of ‘meta' analysis on 16 social learning studies carried out at our research site to determine whether individuals demonstrated consistency in their social learning behaviour across experimental contexts. Strong evidence for individual differences in social information use was found, with females more likely to use social information than males. No effect of age, research experience or rearing history was found. This presents a promising new method of studying individual differences in behaviour using the accumulated findings of previous work at a study site.

This research was aimed at determining the ethno-ornithological knowledge of three Mushere villages close to the Dulu Forest, Nigeria to determine whether this might hold potential for developing a local conservation programme to protect the forest. The conservation objective of the research was aimed at determining the drivers of forest degradation, and possible means of mitigation. Using a mixed method approach, quantitative/qualitative data were collected in two years from different demographics (men, women, children, age differentials, occupation, urbanization). Oral interviews, semi-structured interviews, picture elicitation tasks, free-listing exercises and focus group discussions were employed in the data collection process. The findings revealed a relatively low ethno-ornithological knowledge, and a general indifference (ornitho-apatheia) towards birds. Knowledge transmission was predominantly through oral means while TEK acquisition was mainly through vertical and horizontal methods. While adults perceived birds as not valuable, children generally perceived birds as valuable. Cultural utilization and ecological salience were the main drivers of bird naming and knowledge. However, there was a high valuing of the Dulu forest, with the main drivers of the forest degradation being timber extraction. Overall, I concluded that the indifference of the Mushere towards birds revealed a lack of cultural appreciation of birds, leading to little TEK of birds, insufficient to encourage the use of TEK of birds in the conservation of the Dulu forest, and the use of birds as flagship domain for promoting conservation. However, a sustained approach towards encouraging birding activities could improve the perception of birds. I therefore suggest using an ecosystem approach in the conservation of the Dulu forest. Engaging the locals in dialogue, establishing a leadership structure for the management of the Dulu forest, providing alternative means of livelihoods are suggested as ways of mitigating the degradation of the Dulu forest.

Languages evolve, adapting to pressures arising from their learning and use. As these pressures may be different in different sociocultural environments, non-linguistic factors relating to the group structure of the people who speak a language may influence the features of the language itself. Identifying such factors, and the mechanisms by which they operate, would account for some of the diversity seen in the complexity of different languages. This thesis considers two key hypotheses which connect group structure to complex language features and evaluates them experimentally. Firstly, languages spoken by greater numbers of people are thought to be less morphologically complex than those employed by smaller groups. I assess two mechanisms by which group size could have such an effect: different degrees of variability in the linguistic input learners receive, and the effects of adult learning. Four experiments conclude that there is no evidence for different degrees of speaker input variability having any effect on the cross-generational transmission of complex morphology, and so no evidence for it being an explanation for the effect of population size on linguistic complexity. Three more experiments conclude that adult learning is a more likely mechanism, but that linking morphological simplification at the level of the individual to group-level characteristics of a language cannot be simply explained. Idiosyncratic simplifications of adult learners, when mixed with input from native speakers, may result in the linguistic input for subsequent learners being itself complex and variable, preventing simplified features from becoming more widespread. Native speaker accommodation, however, may be a key linking mechanism. Speakers of a more complex variant of a language simplify their language to facilitate communication with speakers of a simpler language. In doing so, they may increase the frequency of particular simplifications in the input of following learners. Secondly, esoteric communication | that carried out by smaller groups in which large amounts of information is shared and in which adult learning is absent | may provide the circumstances necessary for the generation and maintenance of more complex features. I assess this in four experiments. Without a learnability pressure, esoteric communication illustrates how complexity can be maintained, but there is generally no evidence of how smaller groups or those with greater amounts of shared information would develop comparatively more complex features. Any observable differences in the complexity of the languages of different types of groups is eliminated through repeated interaction between group members. There is, however, some indication that the languages used by larger groups may be more transparent, and so easier for adult learners to understand.

There is something unique about human culture. Its complex technologies, customs, institutions, symbolisms and norms, which are shared and maintained and improved across countless generations, are what sets it apart from the ‘cultures' of other animals. The fundamental question that researchers are only just beginning to unravel is: How do we account for the gap between their ‘cultures' and ours? The answer lies in a deeper understanding of culture's complex constituent components: from the micro-level psychological mechanisms that guide and facilitate accurate social learning, to the macro-level cultural processes that unfold within large-scale cooperative groups. This thesis attempts to contribute to two broad themes that are of relevance to this question. The first theme involves the evolution of accurate and high-fidelity cultural transmission. In Chapter 2, a meta-analysis conducted across primate social learning studies finds support for the common assumption that imitative and/or emulative learning mechanisms are required for the high-fidelity transmission of complex instrumental cultural goals. Chapter 3, adopting an experimental study with young children, then questions the claim that mechanisms of high-fidelity copying have reached such heights in our own species that they will even lead us to blindly copy irrelevant, and potentially costly, information. The second theme involves investigations of the mutually reinforcing relationship predicted between cultural complexity and ultra-cooperativeness in humans, employing a series of laboratory-based experimental investigations with adults. Chapter 4 finds only limited support for a positive relationship between cooperative behaviour and behavioural imitation, which is believed to facilitate cultural group cohesion. Finally, Chapter 5 presents evidence suggesting that access to cultural information is positively associated with an individual's cooperative reputation, and argues that this dynamic might help to scaffold the evolution of increased cultural complexity and cooperation in a learning environment where cultural information carries high value.

Social theorists have long argued that literacy is one of the principal causes and hallmark features of complex society. However, the relationship between literacy and social complexity remains poorly understood because the relevant data have not been assembled in a way that would allow competing hypotheses to be adjudicated. The project set out in this thesis provides a novel account of the multiple origins of literate behaviour around the globe, the principal mechanisms of its cultural transmission, and its relationship with the cultural evolution of large-group human cooperation and complex forms of socio-political organisation. A multi-method large-scale cross-cultural approach provided the data necessary to achieve these objectives. Evidence from the societies within which literate behaviour first emerged, and from a representative sample of ethnographically-attested societies worldwide (n=74), indicates that literate behaviour emerged through the routinization of rituals and pre-literate sign systems, eventually spreading more widely through classical religions. Cross-cultural evidence also suggests that literacy assumed a wide variety of forms and socio-political functions, particularly in large, complex groups, extending evolved psychological mechanisms for cooperation, which include reciprocity, reputation formation and maintenance systems, social norms and norm enforcement systems, and group identification. Finally, the results of a cross-cultural historical survey of first-generation states (n=10) reveal that simple models assuming single cause-and-effect relationships between literacy and complex forms of socio-political organisation must be rejected. Instead, literacy and first-generation state-level polities appear to have interacted in a complex positive feedback loop. This thesis contributes to the wider goal of transforming social and cultural anthropology into a cumulative and rapid-discovery science.

Psychological research suggests that children acquire cultural concepts through early developing cognitive mechanisms combined with specific cultural learning. An understudied area of cultural acquisition is children’s understanding of non-human minds, such as God. This thesis gives evidence that young children need not anthropomorphize non-human minds in order to understand them. Instead, children have a general “theory of mind” that is tailored through experience to accommodate the various important minds in their cultural environment. The intuitive default is toward super-attributes, making children naturally inclined or “prepared” to acquire god concepts. Four empirical studies were conducted with 75 British and 66 Israeli preschool-aged children. In Study 1, children participated in an ignorance-based theory-of-mind task and were asked to consider the mental states of human and supernatural agents. Children at all ages attributed correct knowledge to the supernatural agents and ignorance to the human agents. In Study 2, children participated in two perception-based theory-of-mind tasks and were asked to consider the perspective of two super-perceiving animals, God, and two human agents. Three-year-olds attributed knowledge to the animals and God and, by age four, children could distinguish among agents correctly. Also, by age four, children recognized that aging limits the perception of human agents but not God’s. In Study 3, children participated in a memory-based theory-of-mind task in which they were asked to consider the memory of God and differently aged agents Children at all ages responded that God would remember something that the children themselves had forgotten. By age five, children responded that a baby and granddad would have forgotten. These results propose that preschool-aged children regard individual constraints when considering mental states. Study 4 focused on children’s notions of immortality. Cultural differences were found. British children attributed immortality to God before correctly attributing mortality to human agents, and Israeli children attributed immortality to God and mortality to humans more consistently than did British children. Collectively, these studies indicate that children do not have to resort to anthropomorphism to reason about non-human agents but instead have the cognitive capacity to represent other types of minds because of early cognitive capacities. It appears that concepts vary in their degree of fit with early-developing human conceptual systems, and hence, vary in their likelihood of successful cultural transmission.

Researchers have long argued that ritual plays a crucial role in marking social identities and binding individuals together in a system of shared actions and beliefs. The psychological processes underlying how and why ritual promotes group bonding and influences in- and out-group biases have not yet been fully elucidated. The research presented in this thesis was designed to examine the social and cognitive developmental underpinnings of conventional/ ritualistic behavior. Because learning cultural conventions is essential for participation in group behavior and for signaling group membership and commitment, I propose that conventional/ ritualistic learning is motivated by a drive to affiliate. Experiment 1 investigated the affiliative nature of ritualistic learning by examining the effects of third-party ostracism on imitation of an instrumental versus ritual action sequence and prosocial behavior. Individuals who do not participate in shared group conventions often face the threat of ostracism from the group. Given that attempting re-inclusion is an established response to ostracism, I predicted that the threat of ostracism increases affiliative motivations and thus will increase imitative fidelity, especially in the context of conventional learning. Experiment 2 examined the effects of first-person ostracism in the context of in- and out-groups on children’s imitation of a ritualistic action sequence and pro-social behavior. I predicted that the experience of ostracism by an in-group versus an out-group has important implications for the construal of social exclusion and affiliative behavior. I hypothesized that children would be motivated to re-affiliate by imitating the model and acting pro-socially towards the group, especially when ostracized by in-group members. Based on the findings of this research and insight from anthropology, and social and developmental psychology, I will present a picture of how children acquire the conventions of their group and how these conventions influence social group cognition.

This thesis is an investigation, on the basis of three texts chosen from early Castilian literature, of the importance of thirteenth and fourteenth century Castilian as a vehicle by which information about Islam and the Muslims reached the Christian West. In the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was in a special position for the transmission of culture, for there, Christian and Muslim communities existed alongside each other. Two authors, Alphonso X of Castile and Don Juan Manuel, recommended themselves for study as they both had contacts with Muslims and produced works containing references to Islam and the Muslims. Of their work, specific texts were chosen to provide evidence of culture contact: Primera Cronica General, Calila e Dimna and El Conde Lucanor. In the thesis, three main questions are posed: firstly, what knowledge was possessed by Christian Spaniards of the Islamic culture, especially as it flourished in Southern Spain; secondly, what sort of cultural material of Islamic origin was most readily transmitted; and thirdly, what was the importance of literature as a means of cultural transmission. The facts that emerge show that religion was a controversial topic, so any cultural material relating to it was transmitted with difficulty; elements of material culture were more readily disseminated. Religious exclusiveness and polemical propaganda on both the Christian and the Muslim side prevented medieval scholars such as Alphonso X from forming a truly accurate picture of the Muslim culture. The. popular literature, as exemplified here by Don Juan Manuel, contributed much to culture transfer, by conveying to Western Europe a relatively favourable view of the Muslims, but literature which bore clerical influences projected a hostile attitude. Therefore, although thirteenth and fourteenth century Castile transmitted much information on the Muslim culture to Western Christendom, the view presented was partly truthful and partly erroneous, and attitudes alternated between' sympathetic and hostile, producing an uneven picture.

Despite various backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, the table offers a place for people to meet on common ground. With my chosen creative work, the food memoir, I invite the reader to the common ground of food so that I can share my journey of self-discovery through specific memories with my mother. This process demonstrates how the food memoir effectively reaches a modern audience by incorporating key components of the cookbook, the memoir, and narrative writing. This analysis of the academic fields and writing techniques incorporated in the food memoir reveals a key literary tradition of the subgenre—the discovery of identity through food. Representing current trends and multiple genres, the food memoir uniquely reveals a writer’s identity from a culinary perspective.

“Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy” is the first study to address the dynamics of reciprocity and collaboration between Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) and women writers, performers, and patrons. This dissertation situates Tasso’s literary and cultural activities with women within social and historical contexts, especially those informed by the disputes regarding women’s status of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly known as the querelle des femmes. Among the lines of inquiry I pursue in this study is how the fiction of “Tasso, the errant madman” is a broadly popular literary-artistic construct, a product of the Romantic imagination that lionized the poet’s documented history of disquieting paranoia. While localized episodes from Tasso’s biography—including his seven years of detention in Ferrara for his public displays of defiance against the Este court—lend some credibility to this sorely isolating depiction of the poet, the story I tell attends to other considerations. By studying Tasso through the lens of early modern sociability, this research raises awareness of the poet’s activities coordinating literary-intellectual networks. Emphasized herein is how Tasso’s socialized literary production—his nearly 4,000 letters and lyric poems sent to friends and potential patrons, dialogues with contemporary interlocutors, and epic poems about mobility and community building—reflects the cultural communities in which he participated. Essential collaborators in these settings are contemporary women writers, performers, and patrons, socially marginalized figures who shared in Tasso’s need to secure sponsorship from institutional authorities. In careful analysis of Tasso’s writings and women’s active reception of them, I demonstrate how the male poet’s sympathetic representation of fictional female characters yielded positive responses among historical female readers: professional singers and actresses designed performance programs based on the Gerusalemme liberata’s women, while female poets disseminated Tasso’s thematic and conceptual principles. The thesis this dissertation advances is that Tasso’s multifaceted connections with women shaped the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion of cultural networks—literary, musical, theatrical, and scientific—in which opportunities for women and men to collaborate as intellectual protagonists increased due to developments in the notion of collective identity.More broadly, this study underscores the collaborative networks within which early modern poets circulated, and situates questions of group identity at the forefront of the study of literary history. My findings reveal that the literary-intellectual exchanges between Tasso and women model multi-authored transmission, more than they indicate a linear process of reception. Tasso learned from women as much as women learned from Tasso. In different, though interconnected ways, each chapter challenges the dominant discourses of reception as a narrow form of imitation by shifting the critical focus from constructions of canonicity to modes of reciprocity. This attention complicates the conservative approaches to literary history that assert the dominant influence of one canonical (typically male) author. In this respect, the comparative work conducted herein avoids conveying any sense of hierarchy between Tasso’s constructed “canonical” voice and women’s marginalized “other” voices. This study further indicates how early modern women’s integration in poetic production—as makers and muses—complements the history of women’s one-sided efforts to “transcend their sex.” By offering new perspectives onto the relationship between literary and performance histories, this research brings into relief their interrelation as part of a broader, sociopolitical cultural history. Such emphases expand opportunities for critical investigation into ideas of collective authorship and audience, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.

Neanderthals are one of our closest evolutionary relatives. Molecular anthropology has shown that our species intermixed genetically, but the extent to which we interacted socially and exchanged technological information is still hotly debated, especially in the period approximately 40,000 years ago in Western Europe just prior to the Neanderthals’ extinction. This dissertation addresses elements of this question through a mixture of methodologies. This work is presented in the form of three papers. Paper 1 presents an inexpensive photography rig designed to create 3D artifact models using photogrammetry, also known as structure from motion. The second paper uses 3D models of cores generated with the system described in Paper 1 to compare Châtelperronian and Protoaurignacian lithic technology, which are associated with Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans respectively. The final paper presents an attribute-based analysis of artifacts from five assemblages from four sites linked to three technocomplexes spanning the so-called Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. This analysis applies the middle range theory of the Behavioral Approach to Cultural Transmission to both test the hypothesis that there was cultural transmission between Neanderthal and anatomically modern human groups and infer the degree of social intimacy that is most likely to have existed between them.

From the late Late Woodland period (AD 700-1000) to the Early Fort Ancient period (AD 1000 - 1300) multiple social and economic changes occurred. Small seasonally mobile groups focused on hunting and gathering and low-level domesticate plant usage transitioned to sedentary village life focused on maize agriculture. Accompanying these life style changes is a prominent shift in lithic technology, which is evident in the morphology of projectile points as well as raw material usage. Late Woodland projectile points are generally manufactured from high quality exotic raw materials and are formally shaped. In comparison Fort Ancient projectile points are expediently produced from low quality local materials. It is hypothesized that the difference in lithic technology is a result of a shift in the manufacturing process from free-hand reduction to bipolar reduction. Learning strategies, specifically guided variation and indirect bias, are thought to influence production and morphology of stone tools and may have differed between two cultural periods. This research investigates the variability in lithic assemblages between the late Late Woodland and Early Fort Ancient periods using two sites from the Middle Ohio River Valley, Clark (33WA124), a late Late Woodland site, and Guard (12D29), an Early Fort Ancient site. The analytical methods conducted are used to identify the presence of high quality raw materials, bipolar reduction, and variability in projectile point morphology. My conclusion is that there are prominent differences in projectile point manufacture and morphological variability between Clark and Guard which indicate a major shift in learning strategy and techniques from the Late Woodland to Fort Ancient periods which relate to changes in settlement structure, mobility, and subsistence.

Abstract: It was not until the later part of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century that Métis and Chicana/o authors began to create picture books as a counter-literary response to the discrimination that they faced as mixed-race peoples. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the literary contributions by Métis and Chicana/o writers to show how the bond between grandparent and grandchild shapes transcultural identities in picture books. I analyze Métis identity and nation-building elements in Relatives with Roots: A Story About Métis Women’s Connection to the Land/ Lii Peraantii avik la Rasin: Eñ Nistwaar Taanishi lii Faam di Michif E’ishi Kisheyitakik li Tayraeñ (2011) by Leah Dorion; Flour Sack Flora (2001) by Deborah L. Delaronde; Fiddle Dancer/Li daanseur di vyaeloon (2007), Dancing in My Bones/La daans daan mii zoo (2009), and Call of the Fiddle/ Li Vayaloon ka Tapypwatikooyen (2011) by Wilfred Burton and Anne Patton; and Jenneli’s Dance (2008) by Elizabeth Denny. I compare those Métis picture books with Chicana/o texts like Pat Mora’s The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe (2012); Gloria Anzaldúa’s Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y La Llorona (1995); and Amada Irma Pérez’s My Diary from Here to There/Mi diario de aquí hasta allá (2002). My disseration offers a comparison of the children’s literature of New Peoples in North America. I argue that in this self-validating literature Métis and Chicana/o authors promote visual and textual literacy to create a sense of pride in being a member of their respective nations. Picture books provide the required space for identity recovery, assertion, and transmission of their transcultural identities.

Several studies have found that homestay programs enrich cultural understandings of both host families and study abroad students; however, studies of detailed cross-cultural experiences during homestay from the perspectives of both host families and study abroad students have been missing. This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining cross-cultural experiences, particularly, forms of cultural transmission, which occurred between American host families and Japanese study abroad students during a homestay program. Adopting Engel's (2011) methodology for studying Spanish host families and American college students, this phenomenological study targeted a short-term homestay program in the U.S. with interviews of seven American host families and seven Japanese college students and four meal-time observations of four different host families. Weaver's cultural iceberg model (2000) was used as a framework for categorizing and analyzing the nature of two-way cultural transmission that occurred between American host families and Japanese students. Results showed that cultural transmission between the two parties occurred regarding general lifestyle, food practices, language, values, religion, and politics. Some elements such as general lifestyle, food practices, and language were at the surface level of culture, while others such as values, religion, and politics were at the deep level. However, the Iceberg Model's dichotomy was challenged to accommodate some elements, which were seemingly at the surface level of culture but implied complex cultural manifestations and perceptions. Finally, implications for practice, in terms of pre-program preparation of students and host families and on-site support for both are discussed.

This dissertation examines morphological variability (differences in qualitative attributes and metric dimensions) that is observed when comparing assemblages of projectile points. My archaeological case study is an evaluation of cultural historical types' of projectile points that have been assigned variously to the Alberta, Cody, or Firstview Complexes of the early Holocene from approximately 10,000 B.P. to 8,200 B.P. This analysis includes both quantitative and qualitative observations of 361 complete and fragmentary projectile points from 13 archaeological sites located in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. My analyses showed that qualitative attributes and metric dimensions of projectile points vary more through time than through space. Since projectile point styles were used for hundreds of years and were distributed over a wide geographic area, culture change occurred slowly in the Paleoindian period. This is known as conservative cultural transmission. I proposed that conservative cultural transmission confers social benefits on small, highly mobile, hunter-gatherers because it facilitated interaction among individuals and bands that manufactured Cody Complex projectile points. The subsistence and social advantages of interactions among Paleoindian bands likely included finding exogamous mates, cooperation in communal bison hunting, and conducting ritual activities. This model is supported because projectile points that previous researchers assigned to the Cody or Firstview Complexes cannot be differentiated by their qualitative and quantitative attributes. Therefore, conservative cultural transmission indicates that these bands were in contact.'

Managing language choice in speech-language intervention is increasingly an issue for speech-pathologists treating bilingual children. Frequently L2 approaches only are implemented, resulting in negative effects on L1 acquisition, familial ties, and cultural transmission. This study examined the impact of a bilingual intervention on a school-aged child and her family. Providing intervention and therapy activities in the L1 resulted in increased parental engagement, increased L1 use by the child, and increased awareness of strategies for treating bilingual children among SLPs at the study site.

Archaeological ceramics are mostly used in dating archaeological layers, but this presupposes that they should be able to tell us how and why cultural continuity or change occurs. For my research, I focus on the standardization and variability of pottery because these concepts indicate causes for change, continuity and an understanding of learning patterns and mechanisms. I concretize the role of pottery workshops in continuity and change in an archaeological context and approach transmission through Bourdieu's 'habitus', focusing on the interactions between the individual and the group. The group represents a community of practice (e.g. a pottery workshop) transmitting a certain tradition through teaching and learning. Apprenticeship in these workshops conveys these traditions within a broader process of enculturation. The workshop and the individual potters within it have a recognizable signature, which can be traced metrically. Using an anthropological approach, I concentrate on modern-day pottery workshops in Egypt and India with long traditions in pottery manufacturing for four main reasons: Firstly, interacting with present day living and working potters allows me to to ask questions to understand the role of learning by potters, the identification of a producer's work and the influence of consumers on learning and processes of continuity and change. Secondly, it allows me to observe actions and processes within main stages of pottery manufacture relating to similar vessels. This in turn enables me to trace subtle micro-variables in the actions of present day production processes (such as body movements and specific gestures) using video footage as well as the traces these actions leave on vessels. Lastly, I conduct experiments to demonstrate that transfer of knowledge/skill/learning can be detected through archaeological ceramics by comparing measurable characteristics in ancient and modern pottery. For implementing reason, the variations in movements and gestures from the video recordings were color coded using Anvil (qualitative data analysis and research software) in order to discern the patterning associated with each stage in pottery production of similar vessels. Once coded, the data is subjected to quantitative analysis. The method outlined above allows me to demonstrate that individuals from one workshop follow similar actions and leave similar traces on vessels when compared to individuals from another workshop. It also enables me to differentiate between workshops manufacturing similar vessels by body movements and usage of space. There are a total of eight supplementary files relating to video annotation from workshops located in both Egypt and India (provided with the thesis). I then transpose the method and understanding gained from the study of modern potters to the archaeological context. The essential component is that in both the present day and ancient conext, the study focuses on similar vessels. This is necessary to discern actions and processes that are a part of the chaîne opératoire through different approaches such as visual and chemical analysis, measurement of dimensions such as rim thickness, rim diameter and neck/wall thickness of vessels. This enables the definition of similarities and differences within and between pottery workshops to aid in understanding knowledge and transmission at ancient Karanis. My research suggests that by adopting a research design tested in the present and applied to archaeological ceramics in the past, one can trace ancient communities of practice and interpret continuity or change in material culture as part of an ongoing learning tradition.

The initial purpose of this study was to explore how tourism in Guatemala is affecting indigenous weavers, weaving practices, and the transmission of weaving knowledge and experience from the current generation of Guatemalans to the next. Through extended on-site study and interviews with weavers in three towns in Guatemala—San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Antigua, and Santiago Zamora—it was learned that weaving practices in Guatemala are much more culturally and socially complex than what is disclosed on the surface. This study revealed that the transmission of weaving practices between generations is influenced significantly by the growing effects of globalization. Not only is globalization shaping the emerging generation’s participation in weaving in Guatemala, but it was seen in this study that prevalent global ideas and practices are also molding education, clothing styles, entertainment, economics, technology, and social media within the current younger generation of Guatemalans. These growing influences on Guatemalan society contribute to a diminished interest in weaving and perceived need for weavers in this country, and are thus constricting the transmission of local Maya culture from past generations to the next. This research was a combination of the weavers’ stories and my own journey through the cultural complexities found in three Guatemalan towns in order to reveal a rich and purposed view of current cultural practices of weaving in Guatemala.

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of the inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. The work presented here addresses central questions in the study of the evolution of teaching through the presentation of new data and a new theoretical framework for an evolutionary approach to the study of teaching.Chapter 1 presents predictions about when teaching and non-vertical transmission may be adaptive, and uses interview data from Fijian villages to demonstrate that parents are more likely to teach in comparison to other kin, high-skill and highly valued domains are more likely to be taught, and oblique transmission is associated with high-skill domains, which are learned later in life. Chapter 2 reviews three major approaches to the study of teaching--mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist--and shows how these definitions fail to structure the cross-cultural and cross-species study 0f teaching. This chapter proposes a new framework of teaching types based on the learning problems teaching can solve, and reinterprets the existing evidence for teaching in humans and other animals in this framework. This chapter discusses the implications of this new framework, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. It also offers an explanation as to why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discusses future research directions.Chapter 3 applies this theoretical framework, develops an ethogram for identifying naturally occurring teaching behavior outside the laboratory, and presents quantitative data from focal follows with young children in Fiji to test predictions about the form and function of teaching behavior. These data demonstrate that, as predicted in Chapter 2, teaching is present in non-western societies, more common among close kin, and lower-effort teaching types are more common than higher-effort ones.

Mobbing is a common response of prey birds to aggressively displace potential predatory birds. This behavior transcends lineages and empirical evidence indicates that auditory cues from one species elicit mobbing responses in the same and/or different species. The black-capped chickadee (Pocile atricapillus) varies the number and length of D notes in the "chick-a-dee" mobbing call to denote information about the threat level a potential predator poses, with more numerous, shorter D notes designating a high threat. However, their limited natal dispersal may result in restricted transmission of culturally important vocalizations, which are known to quickly diminish in songbird populations that become isolated or are small in size, potentially exacerbating their decline. Whereas the black-capped chickadee and associated mixed flock members are common, we use this system as a model to study the cultural transmission of information important to prey survivorship and as a model of cultural breakdown in bird populations that are threatened by isolation. This project was replicated in areas containing persistent populations of Eastern screech owls (Megascops asio) and in those historically lacking them to assess whether black-capped chickadee alarm calls have a site-specific learned cultural component. Regional dialects are not hard-wired but learned in many songbirds, and locale-specific calls may uniquely convey information to members of the same mixed flock. Our data show that “chick-a-dee” warning calls differ in response to eastern screech owl presence. Where black-capped chickadees co-occurred with eastern screech owls, the average number of D notes was 5.25 but in areas lacking them, the average number of D notes was 2.25. Moreover, the length of the first D note was 40% shorter in areas with a persistent screech owl population. This indicates a breakdown in their vocal culture and suggests management that increases the connectivity of otherwise isolated populations can be of strong conservation value to many songbirds in decline.

This ethnographic study explores the role of music in cultural transmission in the Tibetan community of Toronto, Canada. Beginning with an integration of Peircian semiotics, Bourdieu's habitus and musical semiosis, I then identify certain non-Tibetan cultural elements being encountered by those in the Toronto community which are potentially creating cognitive structures foreign to those which have their generative principles in pre-exile Tibetan past, and the ways in which Tibetans are transmitting (to varying degrees) cognitive schemata which identify these non-Tibetan elements and protect against their appropriation. After exploring elements which are not Tibetan, I turn to those which are: a unified narrative of Tibetan history, an attachment to the physical land of Tibet, community, language, Tibetan Buddhism, family life and traditional music. It is argued that these Tibetan elements together constitute the conceptual core of Tibetan culture, perceived requisite for the entirety of authentic Tibetan cultural transmission to take place. Each element is examined as a representation of Tibetan culture, with the process of musical semiosis shown to correlate all elements into a conceptual whole. Following this, the study looks at the transmission and appropriation of Tibetan music in a Tibetan student performing arts troupe. I argue that as students attend music lessons, they are in the process embodying the cultural structures of Tibet past. With the correlations produced through musical semiosis, every lesson (for the students) and every performance (for the audience) has the potential to create and reinforce Tibetan structures, and fuse together any and all of the core Tibetan cultural elements in deeply personal ways. When the same performances are framed in the Tibetan Community Cultural Centre, a space permeated by Tibetan stimuli operationalizing all five senses, they provide a mirror in which the Tibetan community might see their cultural preservation efforts reflected; and when the performance agrees with the communal sense of naturalness felt through the habitus, when the performance is deemed authentic, it provides the community tangible evidence that their preservation goals have been achieved.

The Thananchai Pandit Chadok (TPC) is a long Buddhist birth story existing in Pali and Thai versions that circulated in palm leaf texts in central Thailand, perhaps as early as the 14th century. After a discussion of the nature and diversity of the Buddhist jātakas and their place in Thai art and literature, a summary and partial translation of the Thai version of TPC is presented. Its bodhisatta hero is a royal pandit who answers numerous riddles posed by the king, in this way exemplifying the perfection of wisdom. His answers, drawing on a variety of sources of Buddhist doctrine, including other jātakas and nīti aphorisms, constitute a series of discourses on moral topics, including the nature of the ideal Buddhist polity. As a result the tale has a compartmentalized structure and, given the premodern context, may have served as a kind of practical compendium or handbook for moral teaching or religious oratory. The thesis also examines the relationship of TPC to two better-known texts with a similar protagonist, the Mahosot jātaka (MJ) in the Pali Canon, and the Thai trickster legend Sri Thanonchai (ST). MJ clearly served as a model for the authors of TPC, who expanded certain sections (on the sage's marriage) and added others (his conversion of a yakkha.) By contrast, ST is an irreverent antitext, its hero an ambitious and amoral royal servant who subverts authority through puns and taking orders literally, all for personal gain. The story is well-known in Thailand, and in the modern Thai public sphere, where Buddhist moralizing plays a normative role, it has taken on added political meanings. Juxtaposition of the two texts can help us understand the interplay between didactic and satirical modes which is a salient feature of contemporary Thai public discourse.

The purpose of this study was to discover whether the phrase "men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” from John Gray’s book, had become a meme and to explore what its usage implied. Analysis of 510 references was guided by grounded theory. Coding over a decade of newspaper usage of the phrase into seven emergent themes allowed examination of usage against the theories of gender research, communication research, media research and meme theory research. This analysis revealed that this phrase meets the requirements to be considered a meme, and as a meme it has successfully assisted the survival, evolution and permeance of Gray’s premise that communication differences are inherent and immutable. While this premise is not based on established clinical and academic principles, it is an example of how incorrect and baseless ideas can displace good reasoned thinking based on research.