THE STUDY OF CULTURE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF DEFINITIONS
There is currently a great debate over the nature of culture, and by extension, whether aspects of behavior shown by nonhuman primates can be called evidence of culture. There are two basic schools of thought on the topic. One group argues that culture is by definition human,, while a second group believes that examples of social learning by apes and monkeys are proof of distinct simian cultures. The gulf between these two camps is caused by problematic definitions. Definitions are crucial to language and reasoning, but also to science (Babbie, 1986, p. 93). The debate over ape culture will not be resolved until a unified definition of culture is accepted within the scientific community.
Recently, a number of books have been published describing what the authors= call primate culture. These studies argue that evidence that certain types of apes and monkeys not only learn as individuals, but also pass learned behavior to their fellows, and that this is proof that these species have a culture. Taking this position farther, some scientists find cultural behavior in other species beyond primates, one even tracing cultural activity to creatures as simple as slime molds (McGrew, 1998, p. 1).
On the other side of the debate, the extreme view is held by those who ask the rhetorical question AAre humans the only species to build spaceships?@ (P. 2). More moderate, but still anthropocentric approaches, place the definition of culture according to a number of human artifacts such as written language and technology.
The differences both between and within these positions on culture have to do with what some might see as a basic flaw in the scientific approach to the study of culture. A crucial first step in the study of anything is explication, or the process of defining the object first as a concept and then as a thing that can be measured. The former p
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