Open AccessParís, California y la búsqueda por una teoría del cambio cultural
Author(s) -
Lorenzo Baravalle
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
revista de humanidades de valparaíso
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.102
H-Index - 2
eISSN - 0719-4242
pISSN - 0719-4234
DOI - 10.22370/rhv2019iss14pp223-240
Subject(s) - analogy , cultural inheritance , inheritance (genetic algorithm) , field (mathematics) , sociology , humanities , dual (grammatical number) , epistemology , ethnology , philosophy , genetics , biology , mathematics , linguistics , poetry , pure mathematics , gene , digital library
The debate on the possibility of an evolutionary theory of cultural change has heated up, over the last years, due to the supposed incompatibilities between the two main theoretical proposals in the field: dual inheritance theory and cultural epidemiology. The former, first formulated in the 1980’s by a group of biologists and anthropologists mostly hosted at Californian universities, supports an analogy between genetic inheritance and cultural transmission. Cultural epidemiology, more recently formulated by Dan Sperber and his collaborator (mostly hosted at Parisian universities), denies the defensibility of such an analogy and put forward a partially alternative model. But how much do these proposals actually differ with each other? In this article, I shall argue that less than what cultural epidemiologists use to think.