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 Research Fellow in Philosophy of Science at the “Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences at the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy. His interests range from the philosophy of biology – with particular expertise on evolutionary theory and interdisciplinarity – to the philosophy and epistemology of the human and social sciences. He has been Visiting Scholar at the Philosophy of Biology Lab Group of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney, Australia, and at the Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab of the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He also published on science education and communication, and is an editor of Pikaia, the Italian web portal on evolution. Fabrizio Panebianco is Research Fellow in Economics at the Milano-Bicocca University. He got his Ph.D. in economics at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, spending visiting periods at the New York University, Duke University and Universitat de Valencia. His research mainly focuses on the economics of cultural transmission, Network Theory, the Evolution of Cooperation, and the relations between Economics and Biology.