More than “Information in the Head”

Humans engage the world, not just through organic evolutionary processes but also through innovation, technology, communication, social organization, environmental exploitation and alteration, and developing complex skills passed on within and between social groups. Evolutionary theorists recognize our species’ distinctive capacity to learn across generations and share that knowledge in dynamic and cumulative ways. However, much theorizing in evolutionary approaches is too reductive for most sociocultural anthropologists. We argue that approaches to culture in cultural evolutionary theory can be augmented by envisioning culture as a niche, a suite of dynamic assemblages of entangled processes, not necessarily reducible to constituent parts. Using such a framework, more anthropologists would be able to engage constructively with cultural evolutionary theory, and evolutionary theorists would have access to a wider range of anthropological resources. We offer “concepts in dynamic assemblages” as one such approach. We argue that focusing on concepts and the dynamic assemblages within which they interface can augment exchange between cultural evolutionary theory and anthropology. Our goal is to foster dialogue, centering the nuance that anthropologists require in evolutionary approaches and encouraging recognition by evolutionary scholars that the cultural resources they are modeling can be more complex yet tractable in an anthropological sense.