COGNITIVE CULTURAL STUDIES

The Cognitive Cultural Studies Project (CCSP) was founded by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama in 1995 at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UC Santa Barbara. She continues to direct the project at the University of Oregon. The CCSP traces universal human symbolic and aesthetic behaviors–such as storytelling, visual art, song, dance, games, and ritual–to their evolutionary roots in our hunter-gatherer past. The goal of the project is to understand how and why these behaviors emerged: the cognitive capacities that made them possible, the ecological constraints and affordances that shaped their form and content, and the role they played in early human societies.

The ecological niche to which humans are adapted is the foraging niche. This niche is characterized by a pronounced reliance on information: hunter-gatherer survival depends on the ability to acquire, store, retrieve, and apply detailed local ecological knowledge to solve problems posed by the physical and social environment. This presents a formidable data management problem: in the absence of modern record-keeping technologies, how do hunter-gatherers maintain these vital information sets? Symbolic and aesthetic behaviors appear to be integral to this task, enabling foragers to establish, maintain, and augment communal knowledge bases across time and space. As Megan Biesele writes in her book, Women Like Meat, “Basic to the adaptation which solved the problem of living successfully under these conditions are first, detailed knowledge and second, devices for remembering and transmitting it.”

Accordingly, the Cognitive Cultural Studies Project investigates the evolution of the instrumental use of information in our species. To this end, it (1) maps the skill and knowledge sets requisite to survival as a hunter-gatherer, (2) tests hypotheses regarding the knowledge and skill sets developed by specific symbolic/aesthetic behaviors, and (3) elucidates the mnemonic and pedagogical strategies used to maintain these databases. These research foci are described in greater detail below.

RESEARCH FOCI

Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Forager Curriculum

This component of the CCSP seeks to reconstruct the basic knowledge kit that was requisite to survival in the foraging niche, and the means used to acquire, store, refresh, retrieve, and transmit it. These processes constitute a curriculum: a body of accumulated knowledge that is actively curated and transmitted from expert to novice. Research on traditional ecological knowledge is integral to modeling this curriculum. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) refers to the body of ecological knowledge, practices, and philosophies developed by small-scale, oral cultures through direct contact with their local environment for hundreds or thousands of years. TEK also includes pedagogical methods. In forager societies, knowledge is acquired and transmitted visually (e.g., through art, mimicry, observation of others), orally (e.g., through conversation, storytelling, song), and kinetically (e.g., through dance, play, ritual). Additionally, the landscape and its non-human occupants are recruited as mnemonic pegs to reinforce and refresh this knowledge. Elucidating the forager curriculum is critical to understanding the evolution of social learning and natural ontological categories, as well as the emergence of cumulative culture.

Literary Prehistory

The study of art history typically begins with art prehistory—the earliest examples of art objects and the contexts in which they occurred, such as the cave paintings produced in Upper Paleolithic Europe. In contrast, the study of literary history typically begins with the earliest examples of written literature, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics, despite the fact that poetry and prose began as oral media. Accordingly, this component of the CCSP seeks to understand literary prehistory: why and how storytelling developed in our species. To this end, it examines the foraging context in which storytelling emerged, the narrative corpora produced by foraging peoples, and the cognitive capacities that scaffold story production and processing.

A main thrust of this research involves testing the hypothesis that stories are used to transmit generalizable knowledge: information applicable beyond the original learning context to other places, times, and situations. Cross-cultural patterns in story form and content are key to addressing this question. Traditional ecological knowledge provides a road map for identifying critical knowledge domains demanded by foraging life, which can be used to generate predictions regarding specific types of content encoded in different genres, themes, and motifs. A complementary line of inquiry examines story form—particularly, the use of ostensive communication—to elucidate mnemonic techniques and rhetorical strategies used to engage attention and arouse emotion. These inquiries are key to understanding how, when, and where teaching occurs in forager societies.

The Human Animal Lab has published a bibliography of forager folklore collections that can be used for cross-cultural studies of oral narrative and related phenomena.

Evolution of Play

Play is hypothesized to be an adaptation designed to build skills and/or supply knowledge needed later in the lifespan. However, human play research looks almost exclusively at children in Western industrialized societies: little is known about play behavior via-a-vis learning and skill development in hunter-gatherer childhood. The role of play in adult forager life is also poorly understood, despite the fact that athletic games and contests feature prominently at feasts, trade fairs, and other social gatherings. This component of the CCSP surveys play behavior across forager societies to identify the types of games that are characteristic of our species, delineate their developmental trajectories, and test hypotheses regarding their function.

SYNERGY

Estudios Lingüísticos, Socio-Culturales Y Etnohistóricos Sobre Pueblos Del Gran Chaco Sudamericano

This interdisciplinary collaboration combines the talents and interests of researchers from the Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad Nacional del Nordeste), the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad Católica Argentina), and the University of Oregon. One of the primary goals of this collaboration is to collect, analyze, and archive the oral traditions of indigenous groups in the Gran Chaco region of South America. Drawing on insights and methods from ethnohistory, linguistics, and anthropology, we seek to better understand the means by which wayfinding and other types of traditional ecological knowledge are encoded and transmitted through myth and other forms of storytelling.