Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity

This volume constitutes a first step towards an ever-deferred interdisciplinary dialogue on cultural traits. It offers a way to enter a representative sample of the intellectual diversity that surrounds this topic, and a means to stimulate innovative avenues of research. It stimulates critical thinking and awareness in the disciplines that need to conceptualize and study culture, cultural traits, and cultural diversity.   Culture is often defined and studied with an emphasis on cultural features. For UNESCO, “culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group”. But the very possibility of assuming the existence of cultural traits is not granted, and any serious evaluation of the notion of “cultural trait” requires the interrogation of several disciplines from cultural anthropology to linguistics, from psychology to sociology to musicology, and all areas of knowledge on culture. This book presents a strong multidisciplinary perspective that can help clarify the problems about cultural traits.

Emanuele Serrelli is a philosopher of science interested in interdisciplinarity within and across the natural and social sciences. He works with several Italian universities. He was visiting scholar at the University of Utah, and visiting fellow at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, at the Lisbon Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab, and at NESCent National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, Durham, NC. As a member of the scientific board of CISEPS Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology and Social Sciences, University of Milano Bicocca, he leads the “Cultural Evolution” research program. As a philosopher of biology, he is trained in evolutionary theory, where he also studies interdisciplinarity and modeling. Fabrizio Panebianco is an economist working on the economics of cultural transmission and on the role played, in this process, by the network of social interactions. He fosters a highly interdisciplinary research agenda merging different evolutionary approaches. He worked in several italian and european universities and now works in Bocconi University. He is member of the scientific board of CISEPS Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Economics, Psychology and Social Sciences, University of Milano Bicocca, and worked in the “Cultural Evolution” research program.