Sánchez-Villagra Marcelo R
Paleontological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich, Karl Schmid Strasse 4, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland.
Evol Hum Sci. 2022 Jul 12;4:e31. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2022.30. eCollection 2022.
Cross-cultural studies of humans using methods developed in evolutionary biology and comparative linguistics are flourishing. 'Cultural macroevolution' has great potential to address fundamental questions of cultural transformation and human history. However, this field is poorly integrated with core cultural anthropology, although both aim in part at addressing similar issues. Claude Lévi-Strauss established a comparative approach searching for universals and documentation of diversity to bring understanding to cultural phenomena. Recognizing the nomothetic nature of Lévi-Strauss' work, his abstraction and modelling, provides an example within anthropology of the search for universals and the study of big data, akin to cultural macroevolution studies. The latter could benefit, beyond the sophisticated analyses of big data mined from ethnographic work, from the integration with the intellectual legacy and practice of core anthropology and thus propitiate the synergistic interaction of disciplines. Attempts at rapprochement of disciplines from the natural sciences that lack pluralism and present a narrow view are deemed examples of 'Wilson's effect'.
运用进化生物学和比较语言学中发展起来的方法对人类进行的跨文化研究正蓬勃发展。“文化宏观进化”在解决文化转型和人类历史的基本问题方面具有巨大潜力。然而，尽管这两个领域部分目标都是解决相似问题，但该领域与核心文化人类学的整合程度很低。克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯建立了一种比较方法，通过寻找普遍性和记录多样性来增进对文化现象的理解。认识到列维-斯特劳斯作品的法则性本质、他的抽象和建模，为人类学中寻找普遍性和大数据研究提供了一个范例，类似于文化宏观进化研究。后者除了能从对民族志工作挖掘出的大数据进行精细分析中受益外，还能从与核心人类学的知识遗产和实践的整合中受益，从而促进学科间的协同互动。缺乏多元性且观点狭隘的自然科学各学科间的和解尝试被视为“威尔逊效应”的例子。
