We have spent much of this inquiry asking what gets transmitted.
The question now needs to change.
Perhaps what culture inherits is not primarily a thing.
Perhaps it is a way of doing something.
A child learns how to greet someone.
A musician learns how to play a scale.
A scientist learns how to conduct an experiment.
A cook learns how to make a dish.
A student learns how to write an argument.
A community learns how to conduct a ceremony.
A speaker learns how to make a joke, tell a story, ask a question, apologise, disagree or show respect.
In each case, something is inherited.
But what?
Not merely information.
Not merely a symbol.
Not merely an idea.
What is inherited is a practice: an organised way of participating in a social and semiotic world.
This takes us another step beyond the meme.
If the meme asked us to imagine cultural inheritance as the transmission of units, practice asks us to imagine it as the continuation of participation.
Knowing how, not merely knowing that
There is a familiar distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something.
The distinction is particularly useful here.
A person can know that a particular musical scale exists without knowing how to play it.
A student can know the definition of a scientific method without knowing how to conduct an experiment.
Someone can know the words of a ritual without knowing how the ritual is performed.
A person can know the dictionary definition of politeness without knowing how to behave politely in a particular social context.
Cultural inheritance therefore cannot be reduced to the transmission of propositions.
Much of what people inherit is practical competence.
And practical competence is acquired through participation.
We learn by doing.
We observe others.
We imitate.
We receive instruction.
We make mistakes.
We receive correction.
We adapt what we have learned to new circumstances.
Eventually, what was initially effortful becomes relatively automatic.
The practice has become part of our repertoire.
This is cultural inheritance in a form that the meme metaphor struggles to capture.
The apprentice and the tradition
Consider an apprentice learning a craft.
The apprentice does not receive a packet containing the craft.
They enter a community in which the craft is already being practised.
They observe experienced practitioners.
They learn the names of tools.
They learn distinctions that matter.
They learn what counts as a mistake.
They learn what counts as good work.
They learn how materials behave.
They learn how to respond when something goes wrong.
They acquire a repertoire of actions and judgements.
And eventually they begin to modify the practice themselves.
The tradition has been inherited.
But it has not been copied.
The apprentice has become a participant.
This is an important distinction.
A cultural tradition persists not simply because its forms are transmitted intact.
It persists because new participants acquire the capacity to participate in the practice.
Practice is semiotic
The word practice might seem to move us away from semiotics.
In fact, it takes us deeper into it.
Practices are organised through meaning.
A cook does not merely manipulate physical objects.
They distinguish ingredients.
They recognise stages of preparation.
They interpret texture, smell and appearance.
They understand what counts as a dish.
A musician does not merely move fingers.
They recognise rhythm, phrasing, harmony, expectation and style.
A scientist does not merely manipulate equipment.
They distinguish observations, measurements, anomalies, controls, evidence and explanations.
A ritual participant does not merely move their body through space.
They enact distinctions between sacred and ordinary, participant and outsider, beginning and ending, appropriate and inappropriate.
The practice is therefore simultaneously material, embodied, social and semiotic.
Its meaning is not added afterwards.
Meaning is part of the organisation of the activity itself.
Language is woven through practice
This becomes particularly clear in the case of language.
Many practices are partly constituted through linguistic activity.
A teacher explains.
A student asks.
A doctor diagnoses.
A lawyer argues.
A scientist reports.
A musician counts.
A cook instructs.
A priest recites.
A judge pronounces.
A friend apologises.
The linguistic clause is not simply a label attached to an activity occurring independently of language.
Language often helps organise what the participants are doing.
In SFL terms, language functions within social activity as a resource for construing experience, enacting relationships and organising discourse.
The practice therefore cannot be separated cleanly from the semiotic resources through which it is enacted.
And because those resources are inherited, the practice itself can be inherited.
Practices have histories
A practice always comes from somewhere.
The way a laboratory experiment is conducted has a history.
The way a musical instrument is taught has a history.
The conventions of academic writing have a history.
The forms of a legal argument have a history.
The etiquette of a dinner table has a history.
Even practices that appear entirely natural may have long cultural genealogies.
We often fail to notice this because successful practices become backgrounded.
Once everyone knows how to do something, the historical work through which the practice was established becomes invisible.
The practice feels simply like "the way things are done."
But that apparent naturalness is itself an achievement of cultural inheritance.
The practice has become conventional.
Convention is compressed history
This gives us another way to think about cultural memory.
A convention is a kind of compressed history.
It embodies the accumulated results of previous participation.
When we follow a convention, we do not normally reconstruct the history that produced it.
We simply use it.
A musician follows a convention of harmonic movement.
A speaker follows a convention of politeness.
A scientist follows a convention for presenting results.
A writer follows conventions of citation.
The history has become embedded in the practice.
This is another reason why culture cannot be understood merely as a collection of explicit beliefs.
Much cultural inheritance is sedimented in practice.
We inherit ways of doing things whose origins we do not know.
The body remembers
This also gives us a more literal sense in which cultural inheritance can be embodied.
A pianist does not consciously calculate every finger movement.
A dancer does not formulate every movement as a proposition.
A craftsperson can respond to material resistance almost immediately.
A fluent speaker does not consciously assemble every grammatical choice from a rulebook.
The body has acquired dispositions through participation.
We should be careful, however, not to turn this into another misleading metaphor of storage.
The body does not contain a miniature cultural database.
Rather, repeated participation has altered the person's capacity to act.
What has been inherited culturally becomes part of embodied competence.
This is important because it shows that semiotic inheritance is not confined to texts or representations.
It can become a way of moving through the world.
Learning is transformation
There is another important difference between copying and learning.
When a novice learns a practice, they do not simply acquire the same capacity as an expert.
They become a new participant.
Their history is different.
Their body is different.
Their circumstances are different.
Their other knowledge is different.
They will therefore enact the practice differently.
And that difference can matter.
The novice may notice something the expert has ceased to notice.
They may combine the practice with another tradition.
They may adapt it to a new environment.
They may discover a new technique.
The inherited practice therefore contains the possibility of transformation.
Indeed, a practice that could only be performed by reproducing its existing form would be extraordinarily fragile.
It could not easily adapt to new participants or circumstances.
The capacity for variation is part of its cultural strength.
Teaching is not copying
This is especially clear in education.
A teacher does not literally copy knowledge into a student's mind.
The teacher provides resources, explanations, demonstrations, examples, questions and opportunities for practice.
The student reconstructs the relevant meanings and capacities within their own developing repertoire.
The result may differ considerably from the teacher's own understanding.
Yet successful teaching has occurred.
This is a remarkable fact.
If cultural inheritance required exact replication of internal representations, education would be an extraordinarily unreliable mechanism.
But education works precisely because it does not require identical internal states.
It requires participation in a shared semiotic practice.
The student becomes capable of doing something that belongs to a cultural tradition.
That is enough for inheritance to occur.
The teacher does not transmit the practice
This allows us to refine our vocabulary again.
It is tempting to say:
The teacher transmits the practice to the student.
But the phrase can obscure the organisation of the process.
The teacher participates in a practice of teaching.
The student participates in learning.
The classroom provides an institutional context.
Language and other semiotic resources organise the interaction.
The student's developing competence changes through participation.
The student later participates in the practice elsewhere.
The practice therefore persists through a network of participatory relations.
No single person is the container of the practice.
No single symbolic object is the practice.
No single transmission event reproduces it.
The practice exists historically through the ongoing participation of people in a semiotic and material organisation.
Practices can survive their practitioners
There is another curious feature.
A practice can outlive the individuals who currently perform it.
A generation of musicians dies.
The repertoire continues.
A generation of scientists retires.
The laboratory practice continues.
A generation of teachers leaves a school.
Its pedagogical conventions persist.
A generation of religious practitioners dies.
The ritual continues.
Again, this looks like cultural memory.
But the practice is not remembering.
It has been institutionalised, embodied and reproduced through participation.
Its continuity is distributed across people, texts, objects, spaces, routines and expectations.
This makes the practice more robust than any individual memory.
Culture can therefore possess a kind of distributed historical continuity without requiring a cultural mind.
Institutions stabilise practices
Institutions make this particularly visible.
A university does not merely contain buildings and employees.
It stabilises practices.
There are conventions about teaching.
About examination.
About research.
About citation.
About promotion.
About meetings.
About what counts as evidence.
About what counts as legitimate scholarship.
Some of these conventions are explicitly stated.
Many are not.
A new member of the institution learns them by participation.
They discover what people actually do, not merely what official documents say they do.
The institution therefore provides a semiotic environment within which practices can persist.
It also provides mechanisms through which practices can change.
A new policy can alter a practice.
A new technology can alter a practice.
A new generation can alter a practice.
An external crisis can alter a practice.
The institution is therefore not merely a container for cultural inheritance.
It is one of the mechanisms through which inheritance is stabilised and transformed.
Practices can carry values without stating them
There is another reason practices matter.
They can embody distinctions without explicitly articulating them.
A classroom can distinguish lecturer from student through spatial arrangement.
A courtroom can distinguish judge, lawyer, witness and audience through patterns of address and movement.
A laboratory can distinguish acceptable from unacceptable evidence through procedures.
A family meal can enact relationships through seating, serving and turn-taking.
A ritual can distinguish sacred from ordinary through repeated actions.
In such cases, cultural meanings are not necessarily stated as propositions.
They are enacted.
This is important for our account of cultural inheritance.
A culture can inherit ways of organising experience without inheriting an explicit statement of what those ways mean.
Participants learn the distinction through participation.
The practice itself becomes a semiotic resource.
The inherited practice can become invisible
Successful practices often become difficult to see.
When a way of doing something works reliably, we stop noticing its structure.
We say:
That's just how you do it.
But "just how you do it" is often the endpoint of a long historical process.
The practice has become naturalised.
Its alternatives become less visible.
Its assumptions become background.
Its conventions become expectations.
This can be extraordinarily useful.
It reduces the cognitive work required for everyday participation.
But it can also conceal contingency.
A practice that feels inevitable may once have been an innovation.
A convention that seems natural may have displaced alternatives.
A distinction that seems obvious may have a history.
Cultural inheritance therefore has a conservative dimension.
It makes the past present by making some of its arrangements seem ordinary.
But practices can be interrupted
The very fact that practices are inherited means they can also be interrupted.
A new technology can make an old practice difficult.
A social transformation can render a convention inappropriate.
A scientific discovery can make a method obsolete.
A political transformation can challenge an institutional routine.
A new generation can refuse to participate in an inherited practice.
When that happens, the background can become visible.
We suddenly notice what had previously seemed natural.
This is often how cultural change begins.
Someone asks:
Why do we do it this way?
The question creates a space between the inherited practice and the participant.
The practice becomes available for reflection.
And once a practice can be reflected upon, it can be deliberately transformed.
Reflection changes evolution
This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of cultural evolution.
Biological organisms can modify their behaviour.
But human participants can also represent their own practices to themselves.
They can ask whether a convention is justified.
They can compare alternative practices.
They can deliberately teach one version rather than another.
They can design institutions.
They can write rules.
They can criticise rules.
They can create procedures for changing rules.
Culture therefore contains a reflexive dimension.
The inherited practice can itself become an object of semiotic reflection.
And once that happens, cultural evolution can become partly intentional.
This does not make cultural change wholly intentional.
Much cultural change remains emergent, accidental or unintended.
But intentional transformation becomes possible.
The participants can intervene in the processes through which they themselves have been formed.
That is an extraordinary evolutionary property.
Practice and agency
This also allows us to return to the question of agency.
We began this series by noticing how easily the grammar of replicator encourages us to imagine an agent where the biological process does not require one.
Practice gives us a more grounded place to look for agency.
People really do act.
They choose.
They interpret.
They teach.
They refuse.
They improvise.
They negotiate.
They institutionalise.
But their agency is not exercised in an empty space.
It is exercised through inherited practices.
The participant has possibilities because a history has provided resources.
The participant is constrained because those resources are organised in particular ways.
The participant can nevertheless modify the practice.
Agency is therefore neither absolute freedom nor illusion.
It is participation within historically inherited possibilities.
That is a much more promising way of thinking about cultural evolution.
The practice changes the participant
There is also a reciprocal relation.
The participant changes the practice.
But the practice changes the participant.
Learning to play an instrument changes what the body can do.
Learning a language changes what distinctions can readily be made.
Learning a scientific discipline changes what counts as an interesting question.
Learning a profession changes how situations are perceived.
Learning a ritual changes how certain spaces and actions are experienced.
Participation therefore has a formative effect.
Culture is not simply something that people carry.
It becomes part of the organisation of their capacities.
And those transformed capacities become the basis for further participation.
The process is recursive:
practice forms participants, participants sustain and transform practice, transformed practice forms subsequent participants.
This is cultural inheritance as an ongoing ecology of participation.
The practice is more than its symbols
This also helps us avoid another possible overcorrection.
Having discovered the importance of symbols, we should not now reduce culture to symbols.
A recipe is not merely the words written on a page.
A recipe becomes a cultural practice through cooking.
A musical score is not the performance.
A legal text is not the courtroom practice.
A scientific paper is not the experiment.
A ritual description is not the ritual.
The semiotic resource provides possibilities.
The practice brings those possibilities into embodied, social and material activity.
Culture therefore lives in the relation between semiotic potential and situated practice.
The symbol matters because it can participate in that relation.
But it is the participation that makes the cultural system dynamic.
Inheriting a practice means inheriting possibilities
We can now return to the central question.
What does it mean to inherit a practice?
It does not mean receiving a fixed procedure.
It means acquiring the capacity to participate in a historically organised activity.
That capacity includes:
distinctions about what matters;
expectations about what normally happens;
resources for acting;
resources for interpreting;
ways of recognising success and failure;
conventions for interacting with others;
possibilities for modifying what has been inherited.
The practice therefore contains a history.
But it also contains a future.
A new participant does not merely repeat the past.
They enter a field of possibilities shaped by the past.
And what they do there becomes part of the history that others will inherit.
From symbol to practice
We can now see why the previous essay needed to end where it did.
The symbol preserves access to inherited meaning.
But meaning becomes culturally consequential when people do something with it.
A written law becomes a legal practice.
A musical score becomes performance.
A recipe becomes cooking.
A scientific concept becomes inquiry.
A ritual symbol becomes ritual action.
A word becomes interaction.
The symbol is therefore not the endpoint of cultural inheritance.
It is one of the means through which a practice can persist across time.
The practice, in turn, gives the symbol a living context.
The two sustain one another.
Culture as an ecology of practices
Perhaps this suggests a more adequate image of culture.
Not a population of memes.
Not a warehouse of symbols.
Not a library of ideas.
But an ecology of practices.
Within that ecology:
semiotic systems provide possibilities for meaning;
symbols provide durable resources;
institutions stabilise conventions;
bodies acquire capacities;
participants interpret and act;
practices reproduce themselves through participation;
innovations alter inherited possibilities;
some changes become conventional;
and the altered practices become the inheritance of those who come next.
This is still recognisably evolutionary.
There is continuity.
There is variation.
There is selection.
There is cumulative transformation.
But the process is distributed across an ecology of meaning-making.
There is no need for a cultural gene.
And perhaps there is no need for a cultural meme either.
The inheritance that changes us
There is one final consequence.
When we inherit a practice, we do not merely inherit something that we can subsequently reproduce.
We are changed by acquiring it.
The child who learns a language acquires new possibilities for construing experience.
The apprentice who learns a craft acquires new capacities for action.
The scientist who enters a discipline acquires new ways of distinguishing evidence from noise.
The musician who enters a tradition acquires new ways of hearing.
The participant in a ritual acquires new ways of organising social and symbolic experience.
Inheritance therefore operates in both directions.
We inherit a practice.
The practice becomes part of us.
We then participate in it.
And through our participation, the practice becomes slightly different for those who come after us.
This is why cultural evolution is neither simple preservation nor simple innovation.
It is the transformation of inherited possibilities through participation.
The living inheritance
Perhaps this is what distinguishes a living culture from a dead archive.
An archive preserves traces.
A living culture provides practices through which those traces can continue to matter.
The distinction is subtle but fundamental.
A dead language can remain beautifully documented.
A living language is spoken.
A musical score can remain perfectly preserved.
A musical tradition is performed.
A legal text can remain unchanged.
A legal system interprets and applies it.
A recipe can remain on a page.
A cuisine cooks it, modifies it and teaches it.
The cultural inheritance is alive when people can still enter into it.
And when they enter into it, they necessarily alter it.
That is the paradox we have been approaching throughout this series.
A tradition survives not by remaining unchanged, but by remaining available for participation.
From inheritance to becoming
We began with Dawkins's replicator.
We have now arrived somewhere rather different.
The biological gene offered a powerful image of inheritance through replication.
The meme extended that image into culture.
But culture has shown us something the analogy struggles to accommodate.
Cultural inheritance is not simply the preservation of forms.
It is the preservation of ways of participating in meaning-making.
Symbols make inherited meanings available.
Semiotic systems organise possibilities.
Practices embody those possibilities.
Participants enact them.
And in doing so, they transform what the next generation can inherit.
The cultural process therefore has a distinctive temporal structure:
the past provides the resources through which the present can act; the present transforms those resources into the possibilities of the future.
This is not copying.
It is not mere transmission.
It is not even simply reproduction.
It is becoming through inheritance.
And perhaps that is why the question of the meme has led us, almost inevitably, away from the search for a cultural particle and toward something much more interesting:
the evolving ecology through which a culture learns how to continue itself.