Langkah-langkah menuju sebuah pemahaman tentang budaya" (Steps to an understanding of culture)

"An Ecology of Steps to a Mind" is an account of the ideas that led to formulating a neurobiological, that is, a fully materialist, theory of culture. The essay begins with a criticism of the ontology of culture and of the view that culture is a determinant of human thought and behavior by showing how determinism cannot be a feature of the relationship between culture and sociality. If cultural determinism is a specious idea, then it must be replaced if the social and human sciences are to continue addressing culture as a subject of study. Drawing on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and aspects of the theory of evolution, the paper argues that culture, rather than possessing a metaphysical force and subsisting as a thing sui generis, emerges and changes constantly in the interaction of human minds and their environment. The paper argues that human beings possess a unique capacity for consociate communication that arose in the course of our biological history and the evolution of a central nervous system evolved for enculturation. The argument concludes that enculturation, rather than culture, is a defining feature of our species' phylogeny and an unpredictably protean process in ontogeny whereby individual humans constantly create, select, and recreate cooperatively social life.