Culture, Cognition and Interaction: What the Study of Interaction between Humans and Animals Can Tell Us?

Research on culture in anthropology, sociology and ethology has largely favored the study of a particular category of trait transmitted by social learning: the traits that pass directly from an individual A to an individual B of the same social type (or the same species), either without transformation – copy (Tarde, Laland) or reproduction (sociological tradition) paradigm – or with some transformations – cultural attractor paradigm (Sperber). The study of human/ animal interactions draws attention to another category of traits, largely neglected in research on culture. These traits are propagated in populations over time by social learning - which is, in a broad sense, a widely shared definition of culture - but 1/ without direct interaction between individuals of this population and 2/ without direct transmission sequence of the trait between two individuals - neither by copying nor with transformations. The conclusions drawn from this analysis will be extended to examples of human interactions and to the theory of human culture.