Andrew Buskell (University of Cambridge) - Empirical approaches across the natural and social sciences assume well-individuated cultures; that is, that cultures are individuals that differ in key features. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, highlight kin structure, marriage customs, means of exchange and reciprocity, and folk taxonomy as salient dimensions for distinguishing and comparing cultures. Biocultural conservationists study the correlations between cultural and biological diversity, and argue that the "traditional knowledge" of different cultures plays a vital role in stabilising biodiversity hotspots around the globe. And within cultural evolution, researchers increasingly rely on cultural group-selection models, many of which assume that cultures vary and compete in their fitness. These empirical research programs explicitly or implicitly take a stand on what Mclaurin and Sterelny (2009) call the problem of "units and differences": how to individuate cultures on the basis of principled differences among populations. As Mclaurin and Sterelny note, these two questions go hand in hand. Decisions on the important differences among populations determines the units that one will find in nature. Thus when cultural anthropologists distinguish between Hawaiian and Omaha kinship systems, they are not only saying something about how family relations are perceived, they are also saying something about what it means to be a culture—namely, a regulated system of social exchange. Individuating cultures matters for empirical research. Carving up the complexity of human populations into distinct groups reveals patterns that researchers may be able to project forward into the future and backward into the evolutionary past. Issues of cultural individuation also matter for philosophers of science. Philosophers of science interested in normative accounts of "well-ordered science" worry about the representation of individuals from different demographic groups in situations of value-laden judgement. These situations include policy decisions regarding scientific funding as well as epistemic decisions concerning the nature of evidence. The worry is that without representativeness, decisionmaking bodies or whole epistemic communities may fail to adequately track the goals and values of populations as a whole. In this paper, I assess the empirical literature that assumes well-individuated cultures. I argue that there is a major fault-line in empirical work between ideational criteria and socioecological criteria. The cultural group-selection models of cultural evolutionary theory exemplify an ideational criterion: cognitive mechanisms perpetuate a core collection of ideations (beliefs, norms, values, and the like) over others. It is this "core culture" that serves to individuate cultures. Socioecological criteria offer a contrast. Seen in economics, biocultural conservation, and cultural phylogenetics, this approach identifies cultures with their distinctive ecologies. Here, geographic location, linguistic barriers, and ritualistic behaviour all serve as means of maintaining distinctive webs of socioecological exchange— and these webs serve as the basis for individuating one culture from another. Though these criteria can overlap in diagnosing populations as cultural individuals, I show that they are nonetheless distinct, and explore the ramifications of this for understanding cultural individuality and cultural diversity.
