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Re: Culture as learned behavior
Caroline Brettell (cbrettel@SUN.CIS.SMU.EDU)
Tue, 1 Feb 1994 09:04:00 -0600
On Mon, 31 Jan 1994, Erik A Mueggler wrote:
>
Why shouldn't J. Wilson's dog be
> considered as sharing in J. Wilson's culture?.
>
> One problem with many definitions of culture recently advanced on this
> list is that they are committed to an implicit definition of the "human" that
> distinguishes humans absolutely from all other species.
The dog may participate in human culture, but does it have culture. I am
sorry if I am going to come across sounding like some sort of
"traditionalist" but I believe that there is a difference between the
human species and other living species and that is the capacity to
symbolize. It is in this sense that human's have culture and other species
do not! Learning culture is different from stimulus-response learning.
Caroline Brettell, SMu
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