Cultural ethology
The Kulturethologie is a field of human ethology . It deals with the biological basis of cultural developments. The Kulturethologie understands the culture ability of the people , as well as all his other characteristics, as an adaptation to its environment . The forefathers of cultural ethology were the Viennese Emanuel Herrmann , who wrote a natural history of clothing (1878), and Bernhard Rensch , who presented the “legalities of cultural development” in a separate section of his work Homo sapiens (1970). The term cultural ethology was finally coined by Otto Koenig and published in 1970 in the book Culture and Behavioral Research .
subjects
The starting point for cultural ethological considerations were numerous observations of the similarity between cultural and biological- evolutionary developments. In the development of clothing, uniforms, railway wagons and the use of eye motifs, progressive forms were found that are similar to biological progressive forms.
While this argument only points to an analogy of the forms of progression, a causal relationship between cultural and biological forms of progression can also be discussed. So culture is a product of the mind, which in turn arises from the activities of the nervous and endocrine systems . These organ systems arose in the course of phylogenesis as an adaptation to the environment. The adaptive value of cultural characteristics could be derived from this.
Sociobiology also deals with the adaptive value of cultural achievements , which is therefore somewhat close to cultural ethology. In the English-speaking world, evolutionary psychology and memetics have only recently been concerned with the similarities between cultural and biological developments. A synthesis between German-language and English-language literature is still pending.
literature
- Rupert Riedl , Wolfgang Schleidt , Uta Seibt, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt , Walter L. Fischer, Michael Freyer, Max Liedtke (eds.): Kulturethologie. About the basics of cultural developments; the founder of cultural ethology, Professor Otto Koenig (1914–1992) . Realis Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-930048-05-1 .