The Origin of Cultures : How Individual Choices Make Cultures Change.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Puzzle -- What's This Thing Culture? -- Directional Change in Productivity -- Revolutions Produce Qualitative Change -- Names Aren't Cultures -- Many Cultures Intersect to Make a Person -- A Thing, Sui Generis -- Galton's Problem -- The Argument in This Book -- Selected Bibliography -- 2. What Makes a Door? -- What Exists Now Shapes What Comes Next -- New Things Come from Old Things -- What Exists Now Could Not Exist Without What Went Before -- Why Cultures Must Evolve, Unexpectedly -- What Sets Us Apart? -- Selected Bibliography -- 3. Sensory Fields and Cultural Outputs -- Different Experiences Produce Different Cultures -- Sensory Isolation and Information Flow -- We Take Our Cultures with Us -- We Learn from Our Neighbors -- Information Volume Regulates How Much We Learn -- Two Rules for Cultural Design -- Cultural Dynamics -- Selected Bibliography -- 4. Why We Don't Learn What We Could -- Why We Tell Good from Bad -- Winnowing the Good from the Bad -- Winnowing Makes for Incremental Change -- How We Tell Good from Bad -- What This Means -- What Makes Consequences Change? -- Cultural Evolution Shifts Course when Consequences Change -- Selected Bibliography -- 5. Consequences Depend on the Distribution of Power -- Consequences Elicit Cultural Assumptions -- A Fish Rots from the Head -- Lower Level Power Concentrations Also Unleash Violence -- Subordinates Find Ways to Empower Themselves -- A Shift in the Distribution of Power Elicits New Cultural Assumptions -- Selected Bibliography -- 6. Lessons Learned -- A Thought Experiment -- People Do Violence to Defend Themselves -- More Often than Not, Different Does Mean Better -- How New Things Acquire Immense Power -- What about the Future? -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author.

In this provocative and important book, renowned anthropologist W. Penn Handwerker shows that individual choices, from the fatal to the mundane, are fundamentally questions of culture--what it is, where it comes from, and the complex ways it changes and evolves.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.