1.1       Enculturation

Empathy and intersubjectivity intersect at enculturation, that is, “the cultural and historical becoming of human experience within and across generations” (Thompson 2007, forthcoming p.592). Enculturation requires a generative rather than a static or genetic analysis of the ways in which culture constitutes the individual. “Human mentality emerges from developmental processes of enculturation, and is configured by the distributed cognitive web of symbolic culture” (Thompson 2007, forthcoming p.593). Enculturation rejects the dichotomisation of nature from nurture and nature from culture and draws instead on developmental systems theory.

The developmental system of an organism or life cycle is the matrix of resources necessary for its development. Any resource that reliably recurs in each generation and plays a role in reconstructing the life cycle counts as something inherited. Such resources include not simply genes, but many other elements of the organism and its niche, from cytoplasmic components within the cell, which must be passed on with the genes, to symbiont organisms, social structures, and cultural practices. In addition, developmental systems theory rejects the “master molecule” conception of genes: genes are not distinctly informational causes of development different in kind from other developmental factors that do not qualify as informational. Rather than unfolding according to a transmitted genetic blueprint or program, the developmental process of a life cycle reconstructs itself from generation to generation by way of myriad interdependent causal pathways on multiple levels – genetic, cellular, social and cultural. Evolution is not simply change in gene frequencies, but “change in the distribution and constitution of developmental (organism-environment) systems” (Oyama 2000, p.77). (Thompson 2007, forthcoming p.594)

Enculturation places the developmental influence of social structures and cultural practices on a parallel with genes or the biological situatedness of the subject. The elements of ‘nature’ do not precede those of ‘nurture’, rather, they are both sources of informational input into the developmental process and are subject to the influence of each other. In this respect, the concept of enculturation is very similar to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of karma (see section 4.9).

Enculturation begins at conception; it highlights the role of empathy in the learning of communicative conventions such as certain forms of symbolic representation and thought (Thompson 2007, forthcoming p.593-8). Language is intentional and perspectival; it is enacted through imitation and role-reversal (Thompson 2007, forthcoming p.597-9). Thompson comments:

It seems reasonable to hypothesize that the cultural environment of symbolic representation, which provides the scaffolding for the construction of complex cognitive representations and skills, can alter the neural architecture of the developing brain (Donald 2001, pp. 153, 212) … given this ‘neural constructivist’ viewpoint – and the consilient one of developmental systems theory – it seems reasonable to believe that, as Donald puts it, ‘symbolizing cultures own a direct path into our brains and affect the way major parts of the executive brain become wired up during development. This is a key idea of deep enculturation … Culture effectively wires up functional subsystems in the brain that would not otherwise exist’ (2001, p.212) … in phenomenological terms, this power of culture and language to shape human subjectivity and experience belongs not simply to the genetic constitution of the individual, but to the generative constitution of the intersubjective community. Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, as a result of the communally handed down norms, conventions, symbolic artefacts, and cultural traditions in which the individual is always already embedded. (Thompson 2007, forthcoming pp.600-1)

This process of enculturation occurs on three time scales: phylogenal, historical and ontogenal (Thompson 2007, forthcoming pp.602). Phylogeny and historicity are expressed within the individual’s ontogeny. This suggests that language as a communicative convention is embodied, intersubjective, empathic and constitutive of the functional architecture of the brain and of experience. Enculturation suggests that there is a reciprocal relationship between language and experience. I would suggest that deeply enculturated functional architectures of language would be evident in the structure of language.

The[BH1]  semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas (1979; 1987) provides one means to study the structure of language, and therefore allows observation of the effects of enculturation. Eugene Gendlin’s (1962) theoretical contribution to the understanding of how meaning derives from phenomenality provides a bridge between phenomenal data and semiotics. This bridge is the main concern of the next chapter, providing the means to observe enculturation in action. Enculturation is further explored in the model of action presented in section 12.7.