Keyan G. Tomaselli

Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman Children and the Origins of Human Cultural Cognition

Children are surrounded by objects that they must learn to use. One of the most efficient ways children do this is by imitation. Recent work has shown that, in contrast to nonhuman primates, human children focus more on reproducing the specific actions used than on achieving actual outcomes when learning by imitating. From 18 months of age, children will routinely copy even arbitrary and unnecessary actions. This puzzling behavior is called overimitation. By documenting similarities exhibited by children from a large, industrialized city and children from remote Bushman communities in southern Africa, we provide here the first indication that overimitation may be a universal human trait. We also show that overimitation is unaffected by the age of the child, differences in the testing environment, or familiarity with the demonstrating adult. Furthermore, we argue that, although seemingly maladaptive, overimitation reflects an evolutionary adaptation that is fundamental to the development and transmission of human culture.

‘Our Culture’ vs ‘Foreign Culture’: An Essay on Ontological and Professional Issues in African Journalism

This article discusses debates on the freedom of the press in Africa with regard to professionalism, essentialism and citizenship. The article engages Francis Kasoma’s arguments for an ethics which calls on the ancestors for guidance. It critiques the insistence by many African media academics that the media must exhibit ‘African values’, and it examines the role of authority in determining the way that the media are understood by communication students in some African countries. The deification of Afrocentricism, moralistic prescriptions and the notion that authority is beyond critique are questioned. The article argues for a greater integration of cultural and media studies with ways of teaching journalism in order to caution these kinds of essentialisms which assume that Africa has just one ‘culture’. Some suggestions are offered on how to address these issues in course curricula.

Ownership and control in the South African print media: black empowerment after apartheid, 1990–1997

This study attempts to offer a political economic framework through which to understand the complexity of media industry restructuring in terms of processes unleashed by the demise of apartheid between 1990 and early 1997. The article offers: analysis of the historical relations between apartheid language and the media discourses of opposing ideologies; brief discussion of oppositional discourses from black movements in relation to struggles between Afrikaner Nationalism and English liberalism; an historical materialist analysis of the shifts in media ownership and allegiance between the apartheid and post-apartheid eras; discussion of post-apartheid media trends in terms of the new lexicons of ‘nation-building’ and ‘empowerment’; and analysis of contested terrains in both the public sphere and political economy. The study concludes with some remarks on the political and economic significance of changes in ownership.

South African Journalism and Mass Communication Scholarship: negotiating ideological schisms

The history of South African journalism and mass communication (JMC) scholarship at university level stretches back to the 1960s. Five primary paradigms could be distinguished between 1960 and 1990. These were the German and Netherlands tradition (Zeitungswissenschaft and Perswetenschap, i.e. media history, law, ethics), positivist, functionalist, interpretative and Marxist. The last four approaches corresponded broadly to three sociological paradigms, namely: the positivist, idealist and realist. Different academic departments combined elements of the three approaches in varying proportions and combinations, each developing a preferred paradigm. This article begins with a cursory historical sketch of South African journalism, followed by a brief overview of JMC departments. The main trends in scholarship are then discussed against the backdrop of a qualitative analysis executed for this article. The authors conclude that theoretical and political rapprochement rather than division is occurring and evolving within post-apartheid JMC; that there is increasing co-operation and willingness to debate issues; that there is a recognition of the value of paradigm difference in debating issues, and that there is the need to locate South African JMC in an African and global context.

Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold: Doing Reverse Cultural Studies in Africa:

This article is a theorized diary of three field trips to a remote part of South ern Africa. It develops a reflexive argument for a reverse cultural studies in discussing problems in fieldwork, globalization, academic access, and research accountability. Academy-bound scholarship claiming to be study ing the popular is questioned. An argument is made for an empirical space in cultural studies for a greater acknowledgement of fieldwork done in the Third and Fourth Worlds vis-à-vis theory development in the Western metropoles. The narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications industry for kinds of cultural studies done in Africa, in which detail is as important as theory, in which human agency is described and recognized, and in which voices from the field, our subjects of observation, are engaged by researchers as their equals in human dignity and thus as pro ducers of knowledge. Theoreticism is questioned.

Exploring tool innovation: a comparison of Western and Bushman children

A capacity for constructing new tools, or using old tools in new ways, to solve novel problems is a core feature of what it means to be human. Yet current evidence suggests that young children are surprisingly poor at innovating tools. However, all studies of tool innovation to date have been conducted with children from comparatively privileged Western backgrounds. This raises questions as to whether or not previously documented tool innovation failure is culturally and economically specific. In the current study, thus, we explored the innovation capacities of children from Westernized urban backgrounds and from remote communities of South African Bushmen. Consistent with past research, we found tool innovation to occur at extremely low rates and that cultural background had no bearing on this. The current study is the first to empirically test tool innovation in children from non-Western backgrounds, with our data being consistent with the view that despite its key role in human evolution, a capacity for innovation in tool making remains remarkably undeveloped during early childhood.

(Afri)Ethics, Communitarianism and Libertarianism:

This article attempts to innovate an approach to ethics that treats radical justice as the raison d’être of ethical journalism. Radical justice concerns not just the treatment of the means of collecting and distribution of information but how this is accountable to the realization of the ‘talents’ of people. The approach offered holds governments accountable by proposing a form of public sphere in which ‘communicative action’ allows the maturation of the voice of the citizenry and which is anti-essentialist and audience centred. Communicative action deals with moral imperatives and the creation of freedom in which radical justice is realized. African debates on the topic are critically examined in relation to European discussions, and the idea of a specific Afriethics is critiqued, as are the concepts of ubuntu (communalism), communitarianism and African values.

Exogenous and Endogenous Democracy: South African Politics and Media

The 2007 annual congress of the ruling African National Congress, South Africa, was a watershed in post-apartheid political and media developments. This article reviews the implications of this meeting for democracy and the media in light of the history of media-state relations during and after the political transition, and in terms of the unique role of the media in acting as internal opposition to the successive ruling apartheid and post-apartheid governments.The question of rotating elites within the ruling party briefly is examined. Issues of broadcasting and the print media are discussed against then backdrop of South African history. Issues of black economic empowerment and party political economic, and media-state, relations are examined. Also discussed are other parliamentary initiatives aimed at restricting media freedom.

Recovering praxis: cultural studies in Africa The unnaming continues (Reply to Wright, 1998 and McNeil, 1998

Despite the contribution by Handel Wright (1998) in the first issue of this Journal, seminal work within Africa and other non- Western countries remains largely unnamed by the corporatizing enterprise that cultural studies is becoming in the Western North. The push to publish, linked as it is to markets, money and power, has displaced praxis, with its threats of danger, detention and death. Cultural studies has largely affiliated itself with publishing capital. This intervention therefore asks: Can the field be coherent? Why is African work de-centred? What relevance does African cultural studies have for the West and the North? Has imperialism triumphed? And, what can be done?

Ethics: a radical justice approach

This kind of preamble to any Code of Ethics overcomes all those hoary old arguments about the publics right to know, the so-called free-flow of information, and the conflict between Eurocentric and Afrocentric values.