Transmitting symbolic concepts from the perspective of cultural cognition - the acquisition and transfer of folk-biological knowledge

The papers prepared for this meeting concern the transmission of sets of concepts so complex and diverse that it might be thought an unlikely assemblage from which to draw productive comparative generalizations about how knowledge is acquired and transferred. However, issues relating to how knowledge moves around the anthroposphere are in theory much the same regardless of whether we are dealing with movement across the generations (temporal change) or between different groups separated geographically (spatial change), or whether it is technical or symbolic. In this presentation I use my own ethnographic data on ethnobiological knowledge to illustrate how an examination of one domain that permits ‘radical simplification’ through the identification of elemental units can highlight some problems in current models of cultural knowledge transmission, and the extent to which it might also help us make sense of systems of complex symbolic knowledge.