A atribuição de cultura a primatas não humanos

A Controvérsia E a Busca Por Uma Abordagem Sintética

Bibliographic Data

ID5773004
AuthorsMurillo Pagnotta (0000-0003-2276-0935, corresponding author)
Year2012
Publication date2012-04-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeTHESIS
PublisherUniversidade de São Paulo. Agência de Bibliotecas e Coleções Digitais (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.11606/d.47.2012.tde-25072012-092135
OpenAlexW1554331138
LanguagePT
Citations received1
References cited52

The Western ontological distinction between nature and culture, and the idea that the human (cultural) condition makes us radically different from other animals, are evident in the historical separation between the natural and social sciences.In parallel to other critics of this dualist view, some animal behaviorists have been using the term culture in relation to nonhumans, starting a controversy that is still far from cooling down.In this study, I investigated the meaning of the term culture as used by anthropologists, and also its recent use by ethologists (limiting myself to primatology), in order to better understand the controversy and identify possible paths that might lead to a consensus.In Anthropology, the modern concept of culture developed between the 19th century and the 1950s.It came to be seen as an emergent phenomenon exclusive to human social life.It was dependent on our capacity to use symbols and corresponded to behavioral patterns and norms, artifacts, ideas, and values that individuals acquire in the process of socialization.But this conception of culture, and the dualist epistemology supporting it, have since been largely criticized and intensely debated.Although contemporary anthropologists do not share a common ground or framework, virtually all of them agree that human cultural behavior is fundamentally symbolic.Recent attribution of culture to nonhuman primates started with Japanese scholars who, from the 1950s onward, have followed closely the spread of novel behaviors in Macaca fuscata, which they described with expressions such as ‚pre-culture‛, ‚sub-culture‛ and ‚infrahuman culture‛.Since the 1960s, field studies on wild populations and experimental research on learning in a social context, have led to the establishment of ‚Cultural Primatology‛, and the prefixes were abandoned.Among primatologists, the term culture refers to behavioral patterns that depend on the social context to develop and that might be recurrent through generations.I suggest that it might be analytically useful to distinguish the matters of a disagreement between descriptions, explanations, theories and worldviews, and argue that this controversy goes all the way up to the highest reason of disagreement (worldviews).Still, one cannot divide those involved in it into a few homogeneous groups (say, primatologists contra anthropologists).Primatologists' redefinition and use of the term do not alter the foundations of the criticized nature/culture dichotomy, and that might at least partially explain the maintenance of the controversy.It is possible to reach a consensus, but the search for a synthetic framework for animal behavior that includes humans might lead to the abandonment or reconstruction of the related dichotomies of nature/culture, innate/acquired and gene/environment, as well as of the causal primacy attributed to genes.It is also necessary to discuss how to include symbols and meanings in a comparative perspective

Epistemology · Primatology · Sociology · Anthropology · Child and Animal Learning Development · Philosophy · Primate Behavior and Ecology · Social Representations and Identity

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