ABSTRACT
Memes are a wonderful teaching device for the student who wants to learn about human beings in general. Talking of ‘memes’ bypasses the trap of making culture seem transcendental, mysterious and immaterial. The great majority of sociocultural anthropologists would not even recognize the word and, when it is explained to them, they are invariably hostile. Some other difficulties are caused by a lack of understanding of the work of anthropologists by memeticists. This chapter shows what some of these difficulties are, in order to show why memes, as they are presented, will not do. If memes were only a new way of talking about what anthropologists have meant by culture, the lack of acknowledgements would still be annoying to us, but the educational value of the enterprise would remain. The chapter discusses the ontological status of memes and the coherence of culture. British anthropologists see culture as existing on many levels, learnt implicitly or explicitly in a variety of ways.
