Rebecca Ring (York University)
Do any non-human animals have culture? To find out, some scientists have attempted to isolate behaviours or information that are caused and spread by means other than genetic inheritance or ecological factors. However, cultural, genetic and ecological factors are not always isolatable since there is an entangled interplay between them, as in gene-culture co-evolution. The problem is exacerbated by disagreement on what counts as cultural. For example, some define culture in terms of behaviour patterns or information shared within communities via social transmission (e.g. Whitehead and Rendell 2015). Others add cognitive requirements, such as theory-of-mind, which some argue is uniquely human (e.g. Tomasello et al. 2005; Galef 2001). Still others define culture in terms of its human expressions, such as religious rituals, ethnic markers and politics (Hill 2009), thereby making it uniquely human. In ordinary use, culture is a vague term. For example, what constitutes Canadian culture? Does it exist?
I argue that the definitional problem of culture stems from its socially constructed ‘nature’. Cultures are real social kinds, which are socially constructed ideas or objects that depend on social practices for their existence. Importantly, their etiology does not make them any less real, or preclude them from causal processes. Such phenomena can be grouped together as ‘kinds’ according to their causal or constitutive properties or processes, allowing reliable predictions and explanatory power. The facts of the matter for social kinds are determined (in part) by social factors, rather than (only) physical, biological, or psychological factors. I draw on feminist and critical theory on race and gender to make my case that culture is grounded in systems of social relationship. Some feminist scholars characterize gender as the social meaning of sex (Haslanger 2012). I argue that culture is the social meaning of normative practices. If this is the case, animal culture need not be precluded. Animals need not have the concept ‘culture’ to have culture, anymore than humans need the concept ‘gender’ to have gender.
If researchers frame questions of animal culture with a focus on social relationality, then they will have a clearer path to recognizing it where it exists. As a case study, I will show how killer whales are cultural beings with socially constructed group-specific norms for communication, diet, foraging, social roles and interactions. Bodies of knowledge, experience and tradition are constructed, embedded and transmitted with meaning throughout these social normative cultural communities.
