Heraclitean Rivers: Zulu Cultural Transmission

Rituals are part of all religious systems and their transmission and stability have exercised many scholars for decades. Within cognitive anthropology competing views of cultural transmission have emerged in recent years in terms of the mechanisms by means of which cultural forms, including rituals, are transmitted and persist (or not) within societies. Two schools of thought focusing on (1) the “epidemiology of representations” and (2) memetic cultural evolution have informed this study’s goal for gaining insight on the plausibility of cultural learning models as opposed to Sperber et al.’s emphasis on meta-representational processes of representation generation. This study examined 11 life-stages Zulu rituals in terms of participants’ (a) knowledge of them; (b) performance of them; and (c) direct observation of them in order to make some initial judgments about the importance of various forms of direct observational learning for ritual transmission. It was found that while knowledge of rituals was high, observance rate was significantly lower, and performance rate was substantially lower. These results tentatively suggest that an emphasis on understanding those cognitive systems (Hazard Precaution, Action Representation) that might constrain ritual representations (and fit within the Sperberian framework) would be the best way to advance justifiable explanations of ritual transmission.