"Cultural Constraints: an approach to the transmission of unconscious cultural information"

Josu Acosta (ILCLI)

September 21, 2023. 3:00 pm.

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 3.

Abstract:

Over the last decades, when offering a characterization of culture, naturalistic explanations have used paradigmatic examples of cultural items that are explicit, like recipes, artifacts, ideas, beliefs, and tales. However, it is important to acknowledge that not all cultural items are explicit. Some are unconscious to us, like grammar, know-hows or implicit norms. Although naturalistic explanations of culture acknowledge the presence of implicit cultural items, there is a gap in explaining the mechanisms underpinning the unconscious transmission of cultural information. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts of "cultural constraints" and "attunement to constraints" as possible candidates for explaining the transmission of unconscious cultural information.