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Anthropology
Anthropological Theory

Cultural learning and creation

Profile image of Henrike MollHenrike Moll

Abstract

Human children become cultural beings by learning to participate in the cultural activities and practices going on around them. Household pets grow up in the midst of these same cultural activities and practices, but they do not learn to participate in them in anything like the same way as human children. Even chimpanzees and bonobos raised in human homes and treated like human children still retain, for the most part, their species-typical social and cognitive skills without turning into cultural beings of the human kind. This difference suggests that humans are biologically adapted, in ways that other animal species are not, for becoming cultural beings by tuning in to what others around them are doing, and thereby learning from them. Moreover, on occasion, young children even create with others smallscale cultural activities and routines involving one or another form of collaboration, or even collaborative pretense. Such cultural creation would also seem to be unique to human beings, and of course cultural creation leads to ever new cultural environments in which human cognitive ontogeny takes place.

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