Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progres...

Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....

While discussions of traffic problems and the search for solutions are typically focused on traffic behavior itself, the recognition that traffic safety is a fundamentally cultural issue suggests the utility of deriving lessons from other culturally defined problems in order to inform and provide an analytical reference point for traffic safety cultural change approaches. Accordingly, instead o...

Middle Eastern countries are suddenly confronted with the problem of a severe loss of architectural heritage, which is the material manifestation of their own cultural inheritance and thus that of their identity, particularly under conditions of a sudden, rapid, radical and haphazard way of transformation as imposed over a society and its cultural geography by global impacts. This paper aims to...

At the beginning of the 21st century, museums find themselves struggling to maintain audience in competition with an increasing number of leisure and cultural attractions. Their traditional mission is leaving room to a strategic approach in which conservation and marketing harmonize to create new cultural experiences that appeal to leisure consumers and attract sponsors. The electronic manageme...

To provide effective psychotherapy for culturally different patients, therapists need to attain cultural competence, which can be divided broadly into the 2 intersecting dimensions of generic and specific cultural competencies. Generic cultural competence includes the knowledge and skill set necessary to work effectively in any cross-cultural therapeutic encounter. For each phase of psychothera...

Over the past thirty years, the concept of cultural heritage has been continually broadened. The Venice Charter (1964) made reference to “monuments and sites” and dealt with architectural heritage. The question rapidly expanded to cover groups of buildings, vernacular architecture, and industrial and 20th century built heritage. Over and above the study of historic gardens, the concept of “cult...

While current translation theory is beginning to reconcile cultural and linguistic approaches to translation, this is far from the case in translation pedagogy and curriculum. This paper will argue in favour of a socio-cultural turn in translation pedagogy and curriculum design with specific reference to the Canadian/Québec context where the social, political and economic dimensions of the prac...

This study examines the metaphoric meanings in English and Chinese and explores the similar patterns and variations. With specific reference to metaphors with human bodies and animals, the study analyzes the cultural conceptions behind the metaphors and discovers that the interpretation of metaphorical meanings lies in the different cultural values and attitudes. The awareness of metaphor usage...

This paper outlines research towards strengthening our understanding of the representation of cultural artifacts in video games. The approach described outlines steps towards utilising a framework using dimensions of cultural heritage as reference points for games analysis. This framework is then used as a mechanism to analyse two games: Assassin’s Creed I and Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta. T...