General discussion
Authored by Mathieu Charbonneau.
First let me thank each one of you for your thought-provoking early drafts, and for the stimulating discussions we have had so far. As a first opening act of our joint project, I hope you all benefited from them as much as I did and will continue to do so as the webinar will remain open for the next few weeks.
As you know, the main objective of the webinar is to shape an edited volume that is more than a series of loosely related chapters, sharing only a cover and a few keywords. We are striving for a more thematically unified collaboration, with each chapter speaking to issues relevant to the others and to the general problem.
The contributions approach the issue of technical flexibility and rigidity from a plurality of perspectives, asking different questions and using diverse methodologies to answer them. Moreover, the very phenomena discussed themselves ranged over different scales—from infra-individual to population-level processes—, spanning over various timescales—from online problem-solving to historical and evolutionary timescales. While this plurality can be challenging, it offers a rich potential for complementarity and greater integration. Through reading your early drafts and discussing them together at an early stage, we have already seen some common grounds emerge, with some bridging between the different perspectives.
In this open general discussion, I would like to invite all of us to discuss ideas and emerging questions and interests that arose during the webinar so far, prolong our interdisciplinary dialogue and start mapping the key questions the study of technical flexibility faces and, where possible, how to answer them. You are welcome to share the thoughts reading one another’s drafts and discussing them brought to your mind, ask general questions about the themes that emerged, expand on overlaps you have noticed between the different contributions, etc. And of course, you are very welcome to react to others’ comments!
As usual, you can do this by writing comments below. I’m looking forward to the discussions.
5 Comments
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Helena Miton 13 January 2021 (23:03)
Scales?
I’ve had a great time reading and interacting with you all. I’ll share my two cents here on one possible organizing principle that I suspect might help make the volume more ‘unified’, as per Mathieu’s request. One way in which the different contributions differ from one another seems to be on which scale they focus. Some have great descriptions of micro-level interactions -and so, either from a very ethnographic or a more psychological/experimental- while others focus on larger (historical or archaeological) scales, with everything in between, and a number of possible links between these different scales. This seems to me like a potentially good way to resist falling back on more disciplinary grounds to structure the volume.
Mathieu Charbonneau 14 January 2021 (13:52)
Domains of technical flexibility/rigidity; and their dependencies
Thank you Helena for initiating the general discussion. Your suggestion will allow me to clarify a bit more the objective of the exercise. The specific organization of the volume will wait until all of us have a final draft. As we are only at an early phase, with ideas still shaping themselves, I would like to focus the conversation on shared thematic issues arising from us having read and preliminarily discussed each other’s contribution, hoping to knit a more integrated collaborative project. I would like to develop an idea related to your suggestion about the different ‘scales’ at which technical flexibility/rigidity can be expressed, and how the different contributions have approached them.
[Disclaimer: these are ideas for discussion; if I mischaracterized your contribution, you are very welcome to correct me!]
Some contributions have stressed the cognitive flexibility of individuals when facing different situations of innovation, use, and learning, i.e., the infra-individual’s capacity to recruit and exploit different cognitive mechanisms that will promote the individual’s goals in the changing environments (Strachan et al., Stout; Gergely & Kiraly). As the contexts in which techniques are learned and enacted can vary through time—both on longer terms, as in ecological change (Tenpas et al., Pope, Haidle), development of the individual (Boyette), or in online situations (Strachan et al., Miton)—this demands for the individuals to be cognitively adaptable (or flexible) to this dynamism.
However, this ‘cognitive’ form of flexibility (flexibility in terms of which cognitive mechanisms are recruited) can lead to behavioral stability in the transmission of techniques: our capacity to co-opt different cognitive mechanisms in different situations can yield the stable reproduction of technical behaviors (Stout, Boyette). Behavioral rigidity (or stability?; see discussion week 3) in dynamic contexts would then, from this view, be promoted by cognitive flexibility.
In the case of flexible technical invention/innovation [I’ll use these interchangeably as was done in the different drafts, but see discussion of week 2], the situation may go the other way: behavioral rigidity would impede the adaptability of the individual to figure out new solutions to new problems (Cutting, Pope), instead behavioral flexibility would promote flexible invention and technical problem-solving (Roux & Bril, Pope). [I take Pope’s approach to ‘cognitive flexiblity’ to focus on flexible behavioral change—flexible strategy use—rather than on the flexibility in the choice of underlying cognitive mechanisms, and Roux & Bril to discuss flexibility in skill (control of variability); both which point out the necessity of cognitive plasticity but seems to me to focus more on behavior at the individual-level as the locus of the flexibility they examine (rather than infra-individual level). Please correct me if necessary!].
Techniques per se were also characterized as being more or less flexible, depending on how constrained the techniques are by the physical modalities (both embodied and external material) of their enactment and reproduction (Stout, Manem; see especially discussion of week 7). This flexibility may open the way for technical traditions to be more evolvable, but also more adaptable when transferred between different cultures, and sub-cultures (Roux & Bril; Manem; Astuti; Venkatesh).
And then flexibility was also discussed at the group-level, in terms of social norms being more or less permissive/flexible (Ongaro, Miton, Astuti) or in terms of the groups being more or less adaptable to environmental change (Tenpas et al.).
One key insight I have taken out of the discussions and early drafts is that not only does technical flexibility and rigidity can refer to phenomena in a plurality of “domains” (cognitive, behavioral, structural, populational, etc.), but the specific relations and dependencies between any of these different “domains” can often appear paradoxical; sometimes flexibility/rigidity in one “domain” facilitate or inhibit flexibility/rigidity in another; sometimes these dependencies are symmetric, sometimes not. [Perhaps there is a better term for the kind of tentative typology I am proposing; e.g., while I use “domain”, Sperber and Ongaro discussed these relations as ‘extrinsic and intrinsic factors’; Haidle uses the term ‘dimension’ for a closely related set of distinctions. I don’t like “levels” as it suggests some form of hierarchy, with reductionistic undertones] For instance in Ongaro’s contribution, we saw that the shared and public nature of customs can fix responses to different situations within a group, but also impede the transmission of techniques between groups (and for esoteric, non identity-defining technical know-how, their absence impedes their stable transmission within the group). Miton makes the point that to produce rigid behavior in the horse, horseriders must learn rules on how to flexibly adapt to the horse’s behaviour. De Munck also discusses these sometimes apparently contradicting dependencies through the tensions between collective standards, division of labour, and invention/innovation.
It seems to me that by examining these different notions/domains of flexibility and rigidity, the different contributions are shedding some light on how they interrelate and influence one another by promoting/facilitating and constraining/fixing one another. I am sure there are alternative ways to approach these relations and that there is a richer picture we can develop to foster greater interdisciplinary dialogue in our joint project, and for the study of technical flexibility overall.
Dietrich Stout 14 January 2021 (15:31)
Scales
I agree with Helena. I’m not sure it would address all of what Mathieu is getting at with respect to domains and relations between domains, but I also find it very useful to think in terms of interactions between processes unfolding at different spatiotemporal scales. Larger scale processes are instantiated by the accumulation of smaller scale processes while the smaller scale processes are constrained by the persistent context of the larger scale processes. Much like structuration theory in sociology. This can also be thought of as a hierarchical structure (in a technical rather than valuative sense) which allows stability at superordinate levels (I do tend to talk of “levels,” sorry) to be achieved by variability at lower levels. Similar to the ideas of Bernstein that Blandine and Valentine draw on in their work, high level stability across situations often depends on lower level behavioral variability. As long as we are dealing with the valuative connotations of terms like “hierarchy” and “level” I do also wonder about flexibility (positive) and rigidity (negative). Maybe variability and stability would be more neutral?
Giulio Ongaro 1 February 2021 (13:38)
Scales
Thank you Mathieu for starting the general discussion.
Just a quick and still half-formed thought: I agree with Helena that clarifying the ‘scale’ each contribution focuses on might be necessary to illustrate how they interrelate – or not interrelate. At least in some cases, the relations between domains that are at first glance paradoxical might not be so if we realise that these belong to different – and only remotely dependent – scales or levels of analysis (micro-society experiments versus broader and long-term historical or anthropological analyses).
Perhaps a risk involved in trying to knit together the contributions is to see dependencies where it might be equally important to spell out difference of methods and scale. Like Dietrich, I think that to bring together the essays we need some conceptual work on how different scales (or ‘levels’, in an emergentist rather than reductionist sense) relate. In other words, the differences in methods and object of study are such that we should be careful in quickly seeing dependencies.
I say this just having read Osiurak and Reynaud’s much-discussed paper recently published in Brain and Behavioural Sciences ‘The elephant in the room: what matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture’ and the peer commentary. The main argument – what drives cumulative technological culture is a domain-specific non-social cognitive mechanism – and the replies are relevant to our project for many reasons. What caught my attention was a methodological issue in the original article that was highlighted by a number of commentators (particularly in Moll et al ‘Shared intentionality shapes human technical know-how’): that laboratory or micro-society experiments on tool use transmission cannot be used to directly support the main claim because they are framed in such a way that bypasses the ontogenic and cultural significance of sociality. They focus on a different scale, so to speak. Many commentators saw the authors drawing connections across different domains in an unwarranted way.
This has only indirect relevance to the point above, but it suggests that making ‘domains’ relevant to each other requires important conceptual legwork. Doing this is illuminating in itself and I am sure will emerge in the following discussion.
Valentine Roux 2 February 2021 (16:31)
mechanisms-regularities-scenarios
Re-reading all the contributions, it seems to me that it is possible to follow Mathieu’s proposals by insisting on both the questions of scale and their articulation. Indeed, it emerges first of all that we have, on the one hand, researches on the processes underlying technical “reproduction” and invention at the individual level and, on the other hand, researches on the social conditions, at the collective level, in which these processes are actualized. The former consider the mechanisms at play in learning and invention whatever the cultural context (laboratory or field experiments; comparative transmission modalities) taking into account cognitive and motor properties common to individuals. The latter consider that these mechanisms are able to generate, at the group level, either stability (rigidity) or changes (flexibility) depending on the socio-cultural context and the properties of the technical traits involved. It is at this level that we can aim to highlight regularities. Finally, there is a third area of research where the regularities highlighted by the latter explain particular scenarios (particular rhythms of change according to the history of the groups).
By articulating these three poles, mechanisms-regularities-historical scenarios, we should achieve coherence between all the interventions.