Page 89 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

a culture. In more contemporary vein, feminism has often stressed that it is focused
upon the distinct experience of women. Thus experience is a crucial category to
feminism.
66 Yet, constructionism suggests that experience is a discursive construct so that
feminism generates ‘women’s experience’ by creating a language rather than by
finding what it is to be a woman. That is, experience cannot be accessed, and thus
does not exist, outside of the way we talk about it. Hence, discourse constructs our
experience since it is only through discourse that we can know experience or
understand it as meaningful. What we have is not so much experience but
discourses of and about experience. Indeed, reflexivity can be understood as
‘discourse about experience’ so that to be reflexive is to engage in a range of
discourses and relationships while constructing further discourses about them.
Links Constructionism, culturalism, discourse, poststructuralism, representation, truth

Evolutionary psychology Evolution is the processes of adaptive change made by
organisms in order to survive and which structure the long-term development of
species. Natural selection, the driving force of evolutionary change, is the inevitable
outcome of the interaction of phenotypic variation, differential fitness and
heritability. Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the evolution of the
cognitive mechanisms that arose as fitness-enhancing effects in the context of our
ancestral environments.
The significance of evolutionary psychology for cultural studies lies in its claim
that the foundations of culture are to be found in our evolved psychological
mechanisms that subsequently utilize and work over social and cultural inputs. It
is the differential activation of these psychological mechanisms by divergent inputs
in varied contexts that accounts for cultural diversity. For example, the class of
possible human languages – so important to culture – may depend on a single
‘language-acquisition device’ within the brain, yet its different operations in
divergent settings explain the range of human languages available to us.
The fundamental argument of evolutionary psychology is that domain-specific
modules in the brain contribute to the shape of culture by providing the template
for human thinking and the parameters of solutions to problems that we are likely
to face. This would include the existence of specialized inference mechanisms that
allow for the representations of culture to be transmitted from one mind to another
through observation and/or interaction. Of course, some aspects of culture such as
art, literature, film, music etc. do not seem to have much to do with survival and
reproduction. Nevertheless, it can be argued that people take pleasure from shapes,
colours, sounds, stories etc. whose mechanisms evolved in relation to other
evolutionary tasks faced by our ancestors but which now enable us to appreciate
and develop artistic endeavours.
Thus, evolutionary psychology rejects the division of labour between
evolutionary and cultural theory. This is because they argue that not only is human
cultural diversity less profound than it may at first appear, but also that diversity
itself has evolutionary explanations. Further, the human social group constituted