Page 33 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDWARD C. STEWART

It should be clear that culture as meaning defies ordinary scientific thought
and all the theoretical and methodological assumptions of any social science
that pretends to be ‘objective’. Because the mind emerges from and develops in
joint, mediated human activities, cause–effect and stimulus–response theories
simply fail to explain how culture works. Advances in neurophysiology, how-
ever, provide theoretical openings for grounding developmental theories of
human nature in biology based on a genetic template that transcends not only
the shortcomings of comparative methods in cross-cultural psychology but also
the banalities of simple-minded assertions such as, ‘it’s in the genes’ or ‘you’re
born with it!’

Mapping nuclear culture: the Cultural Trilogy

In recent years many explicit and implicit meanings of ‘culture’ have been
deployed in the social sciences and circulated in the mass media. The concept
has come to be seen as important, even romantic, but scientifically soft. Hence
it is necessary to define rigorously what I mean by nuclear culture, beginning
with the idea that ‘nuclear’ brings together the many concepts minted, and
observations made, that position culture as the foundational discipline of the
social sciences.
Culture’s elusiveness can be reduced by projecting on to the map’s cognitive
space the social, life, and physical sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Each
discipline is seen as a continent that is connected to, or separated from, other
continents, but ultimately integrated as a world. When we cross a regional fron-
tier and explore the mental activities of the human minds existing in the region,
we have entered a particular state of culture that is di fferent from, yet shares a
general identity with, all other states on the continent. The qualities of culture
that are universal throughout the continents compose the nuclear culture.
‘Nuclear’, therefore, refers to the interlinked relation of culture and biology
in which biology determines the culture of the individual through a process of
experiential development and, in turn, culture determines the biology of the
species through the evolutionary process of natural selection. In the long run,
no theory of the individual is satisfactory until it has explained development,
and no theory of the species is satisfactory until it has explained human
evolution.
Nuclear also refers to cultural differences, but only in the sense that uni-
versal principles found in all cultures, such as language and perception, serve
to identify the similarities between cultures and are also used to measure
differences in cultural practices. Functioning both as foundational discipline
and agent in evolution, nuclear refers to theoretical trajectories that link to
all the sciences, arts, and humanities. Such a system of nuclear culture is
represented in the Cultural Trilogy (Appendix 1.1), which is based on four
assumptions:
(1) Double coding of experience. The double-coding assumption asserts that

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