we will find that quite a lot of what they do and think can be observed
outside these groups. Many norms and ideas of American farmers are
more common to farmers than to Americans; many norms and ideas of
Yoruba businessmen are more common among businesspeople than
among the Yoruba. This confirmed what anthropologists had long
suspected, that the choice of human groupings for cultural compar-
isons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a politicalone.
Finally, quantitative models of cultural transmission replaced
mythical notions like "absorbing what's in the air" with a concrete,
measurable process of transmission. People communicate with other
people, they meet individuals with similar or different notions or val- [37]
ues, they change or maintain or discard their ways of thinking
because of these encounters, and so forth. What we call their "cul-
ture" is the outcome of all these particular encounters. If you find
that a particular concept is very stable in a human group (you can
come back later and find it more or less unchanged) it is because it
has a particular advantageinside individual minds. If you want to
explain cultural trends, this is far more important than tracing the
actual historical origin of this or that particular notion. A few pages
back, I described the way a Cuna shaman talks to statuettes. This
seems a stable concept among the Cuna. If we want to explain that,
we have to explain how this concept is represented in individual
minds, in such a way that they can recall it and transmit it better than
other concepts. If we want to explain why the Cuna maintain this
notion of intelligent statuettes, it does not matter if what happened
was that one creative Cuna thought of that a century ago, or that
someone had a dream about that, or that someone told a story with
intelligent statuettes. What matters is what happened afterward in
the many cycles of acquisition, memory and communication.^10
In this account, familiar religious concepts and associated beliefs,
norms, emotions, are just better-replicating memes than others, in the
sense that their copy-me instructions work better. This would be why
so many people in different cultures think that invisible spirits lurk
around and so few imagine that their internal organs change location
during the night, why the notion of moralistic ancestors watching
your behavior is more frequent than that of immoral ghosts who want
you to steal from your neighbors. Human minds exposed to these con-
cepts end up replicating them and passing them on to other people.
On the whole, this may seem the right way to understand diffusion
and transmission. However...
WHATISTHEORIGIN?