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The aim of this is to shun such evasion and to sketch a theoretical model applied to a particular case, in other words to seek how a possible explanation might be framed in the case of a particular example of one of these "obvious" regularities, in this case the varied but similar peculiar relationships of the mother's brother and the sister's son in different societies. We want to do this without either exaggerating the unity of the phenomenon, or avoiding the problems discussed above concerning misplaced realism, which recent theoretical criticism has well illuminated. What is involved in explaining a cultural phenomenon? Here is a way of framing the question. All members of a human community are linked to one another, across time and space, by a flow of information. The information is about themselves, their environment, their past, their beliefs, their desires and fears, their skills and practices. The flow is made up of rapid and slow currents, narrow rivulets and large streams, confluence and divisions. All information in this flow is subject to distortion and decay. Most information is about some here-and-now situation and does not flow much beyond it. Still, some information is more stable in content and more widely distributed. It is shared by many or even most of members of the community. When anthropologist talk of culture, they refer to this widely shared information. What explains the existence and contents of culture in the social flow of information? An answer of a sort is provided by modern interpretive anthropology, which aims to show that the elements of a culture (or of a cultural subsystem) cohere together and constitute an integrated worldview (in particular Geertz 1973). This is not the approach we favor. Without denying the insightfulness of such interpretive scholarship and the relative systematicity of culture, we are among those who have argued that this systematicity is often much greater in the anthropologists' interpretation than in the culture itself (e.g. Leach 1954, Bloch 1977, Sperber 1985a)-and hence is exaggerated (as is acknowledged by James Boon 1982:3-26, who speaks approvingly of the "exaggeration of cultures"). More importantly, even if cultures were as systematic as claimed, this would fall quite short of explaining the spread and stability of these coherent wholes, unless one takes as given that there are factors and mechanisms in the flow of information that somehow promote systematicity. Rather than assuming their existence, we favor studying the factors and mechanisms actually at work in the spread and stabilization of cultural phenomena and leaving here as an open question the degree and manner in which they may indeed promote systematicity. Our explanatory approach to this flow of information in society is that of the "epidemiology of representations" (Sperber 1985b, 1996). It is naturalistic i.e. it aims at describing and explaining cultural phenomena in terms of processes and mechanisms the causal powers of which are wholly grounded in their natural (or "material") properties. More specifically, the kind of naturalistic explanations of cultural phenomena we favor invokes two kinds of small scale processes: psychological processes within individuals, and processes of physical, biological, and psycho-physical interactions between individuals and their immediate environment (including interactions with other individuals) and that we call "ecological" processes. Typically, the scale of the processes invoked is much smaller than that of the cultural phenomena described and explained in term of these processes. It is the articulation of large numbers of these micro-processes that allows one to redescribe and explain cultural macro-phenomena. This contrast with more standard social science accounts that explain cultural macro-phenomena in term of other social and cultural macro-phenomena. (note 3) We view, then, the flow of information as a natural process occurring in the form of causal chains of micro-events that take place both in individual mind/brains and in the shared environment of the individuals involved. Inside minds, we are dealing with processes of perception, inference, remembering, decision, and action planning and with the mental representations (memories, beliefs, desires, plans) that these process deploy. In the environment, we are dealing with a variety of behaviors often involving artifacts, and in particular with the production and reception of public representations that can take the form of behaviors such as gesture or utterances, or of artifact such as writings. We call these representations "public" because, unlike mental representations, they occur not within brains, but in the shared environment of several people. Thus not just discourse addressed to a crowd, but also words whispered at someone's ear are "public" in the intended sense. Mental events cause public events, which in turn cause mental events, and these chains of alternating mind-internal and mind-external events carry information from individuals to individuals. A simple example is provided by a folktale, where the main mental events are those of comprehension, remembering, recall, and speech planning, and the main public events are tellings of the tale. What makes a particular story a folktale is the fact that repeated sequences of these mental and public events succeed in distributing a stable story across a population over time. All these events taking place inside and outside individual minds are material events: changes in brain states on the one hand, changes in the immediate environment of individuals on the other. As material events, they possess causal powers and can be invoked as causes and effects in naturalistic causal explanations. They differ in this respect from the abstract meanings invoked in interpretive explanation (see Sperber 1985a: ch. 1). That meanings can be causes is contentious, and what kind of causal powers they might have, if any, is obscure (see Jacob 1997). For instance, attributing to a folktale a meaning that coheres with, say, basic values of the culture in which it is told may, in a way, "make sense" of the tale, but it does not come near explaining its distribution, and hence its existence as a folktale in that particular culture. It could be objected that the micro-events invoked in an epidemiological approach are at the level of individual minds and behaviors. How, then, can their study help explain cultural macro-phenomena that exist not on an individual but on a societal scale? We have already suggested that these macro-cultural phenomena are made up, at a microscopic level, of these causally linked micro-events. To this, it is sometimes objected that the vast majority of these micro-events cannot be observed: anthropologists will never witness more than a very small sample of the public micro-events involved, and mental events cannot be observed at all. Here, however, the comparison with medical epidemiology should help dispose of this objection. Epidemiological phenomena such as epidemics are macro-phenomena occurring at the level of populations, but they are made up of micro-phenomena of individual pathology and interindividual transmission. In most cases individual pathological processes are not directly observable and are known only through symptoms and tests, while the vast majority of micro-events of disease transmission go unobserved. This, however, has been a challenge rather than an impediment to the development of medical epidemiology. In the epidemiology of representations, the situation is, if anything, better than in the epidemiology of diseases. Our communicative and interpretive abilities give us a great amount of fine-grained information about the representations we entertain and about the process they undergo, whereas pain and other perceptible symptoms, generally provides much coarser and hard-to-interpret information about our pathologies. Also, most events of cultural transmission require the attention of the participants, whereas pathological contagion is typically stealthy. Hence cultural transmission is much easier to spot and observe than disease transmission. In spite of the limited evidence at its disposal, medical epidemiology has provided outstanding causal explanations of epidemiological phenomena. It has rarely done so by following actual causal chains of transmission, and much more often by helping identify the causal factors and mechanisms at work both within and across individual organisms. Mutadis mutandis, the task of the epidemiology of representations is not to describe in any detail the actual causal chains that stabilize (or destabilize) a particular cultural representation (although, in some cases, it is of great historical interest to be able to do so), it is to identify factors and processes that help explain the existence and effect of these causal chains. For instance, showing that a particular folktale has an optimal structure for human memory and that there are recurring social situations in a given society where people are motivated to tell it or to have it told, helps explain why the tale is told again and again with little or no distortion of content in that society. The central question, which an epidemiological approach focuses on, is: what causes some representations and practices to become and remain widespread and relatively stable in content, in a given society, at a given time?(note 4) In so framing the question, we depart from the goal of generally explaining all or even most sociocultural phenomena in one and the same way, either as fulfilling a function (a coarse functionalist approach), or as contributing to reproductive success (a coarse sociobiological approach). True, from an epidemiological point of view, all explanations of sociocultural phenomena will have to invoke both mind-external ecological factors linked to the transmission of cultural contents, and mind-internal psychological factors linked to the mental representation and processing of these contents. However, the particular factors at play and the way they combine vary with each case (just as, in medical epidemiology, a different combination of organism-internal physiological factors and of organism-external environmental factors characterizes each disease). Because of this multiplicity of co-occurring causes, we aim only at identifying some of the factors that contribute to explaining particular instances. These factors play a causal role only in specific historical and environmental circumstances and therefore can never be sufficient to explain fully the local cultural forms. Caused in part by the same factors, these forms have recognizable similarities-which we aim to help explain. On the other hand, we merely identify a couple of important and recurring factors among many other diverging factors: each cultural form in its full local specifics is therefore unique to its particular historical context. This, of course, is, first of all, simply to return, though more explicitly and critically, to the general type of multi-factorial explanations that were typical of anthropology before its recent relativist turn. Two things may be new, though. Rather than accepting implicitly some nondescript naturalism or objectivism about kinship, we appeal quite explicitly to naturalistic considerations about evolved, genetically transmitted, psychological predispositions. The result of this explicitly naturalistic account is, however, weaker in its predictive pretensions than the type of accounts found, for example in Goody's functionalist thesis. There the sister's son's privilege appeared as an almost necessary solution to a structural problem found in certain patrilineal societies. Similarly, this solution was to account for the particular form of the institution: e.g. snatching of significant property. According to our more explicitly naturalistic, but at the same time more modest account, there are some factors that increases the chances of the sister's son privilege stabilizing as a cultural form in these societies and we can expect, and not be disturbed by, a wide range of unaccounted variation in practices, since these will always be combined with many other factors and many different histories. We avoid, or so we hope, both the too strong explanations of functionalism, old style cultural evolutionism, or of sociobiology, without giving up on causal explanation either. A few easy examples will give an idea of the range of factors that an epidemiological approach would consider relevant and the complex interrelation between mind-internal and mind-external factors. Density of population is a mind-external factor in the stabilization of drumming as a means of communication. The fact that percussion sounds tend to pre-empt human attention is a mind-internal factor in the culturally stabilized uses of percussion instruments. The ability of human memory to retain more easily texts with specific prosodies is a mind-internal factor in the stabilization of various forms of poetry; familiarity with specific, historically evolved, poetic forms is a mind-internal factor in the acceptability, learnability and therefore chances of cultural stabilization of new poetic works. The effectiveness of internal combustion engines for moving vehicles is a mind-external factor contributing to the stabilization of the techniques involved in constructing and maintaining these engines; however, untutored human minds do not spontaneously or even easily acquire these techniques; hence the recognition of the effectiveness of internal combustion is a mind-internal motivating factor in the setting up of appropriate institutional teaching without which the relevant technologies would not stabilize. Institutional teaching itself involves a complex articulation of mind-internal and mind-external factors. Languages, Chinese, English, Maori, and so forth, differ because they have different histories, with a variety of factors such as population movements, social stratification, the presence or absence of writing, affecting these histories in subtle ways. However, these mind-external, place-and-time specific factors interact at every generation with the language faculty found in every human. It is this interaction that determines the relative stability and the slow transformation of languages and that puts limits on their variability. For a variety of sociohistorical reasons, topics of conversation, preferred words, socially valued patterns of speech, and so on, vary continuously over time in a manner such that every generation is presented with a somewhat different sampling of linguistic inputs, to which it reacts, in the acquisition process, by unconsciously bringing about minor changes to the underlying grammar. Generally, whereas day-to-day cultural changes in language use may introduce new idiosyncrasies and difficulties such as hard to pronounce borrowed words, the language learning disposition operating at the generational time scale pulls the mental representations of these inputs towards more regular and more easily remembered forms. For instance, the more difficult phonology of borrowed words, or the more difficult semantics of meanings stipulated as part of sophisticated theories are likely to be normalized by language learners in the direction of easier forms. This determines a slow evolution of languages that is constrained both by the necessity of inter-generational communication, and by the universal constraints of language acquisition. The case of language learning, therefore, illustrates how the existence of a genetically inherited disposition is a factor in the stabilization of cultural forms, not by directly generating these forms, but by causing learners to pay special attention to certain types of stimuli, and to use-and sometimes distort-the evidence provided by these stimuli in specific ways. This leaves of course room for much cultural variability. Moreover, dispositions capable of affecting cultural contents may be more or less rigidly constraining, the language acquisition device envisaged by Chomskyans being on the more constraining side. In general, cultural representations departing from those favored by underlying dispositions, though possible, don't stabilize as easily. In the absence of other stabilizing factors counterbalancing the dispositions (e.g. institutional support), hard to learn representations tend to get transformed in the process of transmission, in the direction favored by the dispositions. The epidemiological approach to culture provides a way of understanding the relationship between psychology and culture that neither denies the role of psychology, nor reduce culture to mind. In a nutshell, the idea is that psychological dispositions in general (whether evolved basic dispositions, or culturally developed dispositions) modify the probability-and only the probability-that representations or practices of some specific tenor will spread, stabilize, and maintain a cultural level of distribution. How might all this help explain the regularities in the relationship between mother's brother and sister's son in patrilineal societies that are the topic of this article? 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