The Itemic View on Culture

Since the naturalistic turn in the late 20th century the social sciences understood culture as anevolutionary process in its own right. This perspective brought new conceptual tools andmethods to our understanding of culture, and its transmission. This article reviews the mainapproaches in cultural evolution: memetics; the standard evolution approach and the epidemiology ofrepresentations. It argues that those approaches share a common view of what the subject matterof culture is. In short, these approaches have an Itemic View on Culture: they understand andtreat culture as a collection of items that are in people’s brains and environment that aretransmitted by the individuals of a population by non-genetic means, so that over time, theyare stabilized.