Daniel W. VanArsdale uses a corpus of over 350 examples from the Paper Chain Letter Archive and an Annotated Bibliography on Chain Letters and Pyramid Schemes to produce an analysis of the means by which chain letters change with use over time. Rigorously mathematical yet entertaining.
At the Toronto Semiotic Circle’s symposium on “Imitation, Memory, and Cultural Changes: Probing the Meme Hypothesis”, Michael Chazan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, presented a talk about whether artifacts — such as the handaxe — could be classifiable as memes.
Abstract
If the meme is to be conceived of as analogous to the gene then it must be a unitary phenomenon whether the ‘phenotypic’ expression is a handaxe or a poem. This paper will consider whether identifying handaxes with memes offers a conceptual basis for empirical research. This paper extends the proposal made by McNabb, Binyon, and Hazelwood (2004), based on an analysis of the form of South African Acheulian handaxes, that handaxes were individualized memic constructs. The nature of handaxe manufacture and the variability of handaxe form will be presented to raise the question of what exactly it means to identify this artifact type as a meme.
This discussion highlights the complexity of the interaction between memory and action in the production of artifacts. The question that emerges from this discussion is whether the nature of memory involved in handaxe production is of the same kind as the memory involved in other activities that have been linked with the concept of the meme. This question is particularly interesting because the handaxe is a technological phenomenon which lasted for over 1 million years and was produced by a pre-modern hominin (Homo erectus).
The Toronto Semiotic Circle organized a symposium on “Imitation, Memory, and Cultural Changes: Probing the Meme Hypothesis” held at Victoria College (University of Toronto), Northrop Frye Hall, Room 205, on May 4-6, 2007.
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