Interaction Rituals in the Evolutionary Origin of Symbolic Culture

Abstract

Recent debates on the relative importance of competitive or altruistic inclinations in human nature have tended to reduce it to its biologic dimension. Its most exceptional, defining and characteristic feature, nonetheless, is its symbolic capacity. This skill is an evolutionary development whose biological basis is a complex sociality that has fostered a big brain with enhanced capacities for multifunctional analysis and integration. Its social basis are chains of standardized, but potentially very open and flexible collective behaviors, the interaction rituals, where certain objects, mostly words, are collectively invested with meaning and an emotional charge, so that they become symbols and, by that very same process, become catalyzing elements of their instituting group identity, solidarity and moral and power order. A set of those symbols forms a primary culture which is common to all human groups (which elaborate from it their several secondary theories). Its central terms are those proposed by natural semantics methodology. Analysis of these shows that their origin is natural-adaptive, but they only become operative when socio-culturally specified. Human species is inherently symbolic: it distributed and collectively creates, posses and transforms, its collective universes. A complete explanation of any social fact may require combining biological, psychological, social and cultural elements, but the dynamics of the semantic realm is autonomous.