On any given day, Josh Homan, Salina graduate student, could choose to rent a motorcycle and explore obscure Peruvian villages, ride a launch (a canoe with a motor) into the jungle to observe shaman, or stay in a local market and chat with townspeople. He takes notes, records interviews, takes genetic samples, and notes cultural variation all along the way.
Josh is a cultural anthropologist. He flew to the Loreto and San Martin regions of Peru three times this semester to observe, for his masters thesis, how new medicines transform the role of shamans west of the Amazon. He uses memetics to analyze this change.
"Memetics is analogous to genetics," he said. "Just like genes, memes are trying to replicate themselves and succeed. They have to evolve."
"Memes" are defined in cultural anthropology as any distinct, self-replicating unit of culture. Josh tries to discover why some memes survive while others, like traditional shamanism, die out. He thinks understanding memes can help preserve those that are disappearing, and prevent dangerous memes from spreading.
"Memes can definitely be dangerous," he said "Think about Nazi Germany. The ideas of nationalism and purification, that everyone shared--those were memes."
The term "meme" was coined by evolutionary biologist and science author Richard Dawkins, nicknamed "Darwin's Rottweiler," in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. An atheist and scientific rationalist, he used the idea to explain the existence of organized religion.
A meme can be any idea, attitude, opinion, phrase or habit that spreads from person to person through imitation. The "fittest" memes spread like viruses, hopping from community to community. With time, popular memes like the words "crunk," "smackdown," and "sudoku" make their way into accepted English. In 2007, these words were included in the 11th edition of Merriam Webster's New College Dictionary.
Western Civilization professor Dale Urie personally witnessed the evolutionary success of a meme right here in the University. "I remember when 'hugely' became a big word in academic writing," she said. "At first, I'd correct people on it."
"Now, I use it in lecture," she said.
"I hear people say, 'It was nice', but I never know what they mean. And they say it all the time!" he said.
Academic inquiry into memetics began when University of Manchester scholars founded the Journal of Memetics, which released 17 issues between 1997 and 2005. The journal published two issues each year.
Over the years, though, memeticists became disillusioned with the field. "Meme," the central term, was too broadly defined, the comparison between genes and memes proved to be empty, and too few practical applications could be found. In his essay "Memetics: A Dangerous Idea," Luis BenÃtez-Bribiesca called the field "Nothing more than a pseudoscientific dogma... that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution."
In the final issue of the Journal of Memetics in 2005, Bruce Edmonds of Manchester Metropolitan University declared the demise of the field. "It has been a short-lived fad whose effect has been to obscure more than to enlighten. I am afraid that memetics, as an identifiable discipline, will not be missed."
Josh Homan recognizes the limitations of memetics as a science. "It's too simplistic, underdeveloped, and poorly understood," he said. "It lacks consistent terminology, and it lacks rigor."
He said although cultures around the world function according to memetic principles, the field has fallen into disrepute, and memetics serve moreso as a perspective through which he can approach his anthropology work.
Today, the word "meme" refers to online phenomena born in the dense jungle of online forums like YouTube and 4chan, each of which boasts hundreds of millions views each day. 4chan, with very few rules, is the source of such successful memes as Lolcatz, whose website icanhascheezburger.com sold for $2 million last year.
That competitive social web of ideas, images and conversation, the Internet, has appropriated the term.
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