How Traditions Live and Die

by Olivier Morin

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view (from psychology to anthropology) was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but
because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change (from the distribution of bird songs to the staying power of children's rhymes) and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution.

Genres: Anthropology, Sociology, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 2 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Aurélien · Rating 5 out of 5]

The smartest book I have read in a while. Great analysis of how cognitive science can be used to understand social phenomena. Morin discusses the limitation of the double heritage theory (Henrich) in a quite interesting way and is great at nuancing some of the myths of social science (including the power of networks in Christakis for instance). It's a work of great width and quite humble at the same time. I can't wait for Morin's next book, would love to know how he sees the latest developments from Henrich on WEIRD people...
I found out about it on Tanner Greer's twitter feed (where I found out about Azar Gat as well).

[Nat]

Heaps of interesting stuff in here--there's a lot for philosophers of language to chew on concerning the way lexical meanings form and spread (among many other things).