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Mission
The primary concern of Alternative Anthropology is the recuperation of comparative, holistic anthropology as a scientific study of human systems and the teleological application of operational methodologies to the productive innovation of global human society. The focus of Alternative Anthropology is in alternative human development emphasizing education, institutional innovation and social reform, and the achievement of intercultural mechanisms for the mediation of conflict in human society.
The capacity of conventional anthropology to remain relevant and viable in the 21st Century will be directly related to its capacity to render itself productive and applicable to contemporary human situations, processes and problems, and to be capable of forecasting into the future prospects for humankind in a realistic manner.
The line of departure for Alternative Anthropology from conventional academic anthropology has been in the emphasis and recognition of the following points:
1. Human ecology is founded upon the ecology of the biological organism and of the human population, intermediated as this has been in the past through processes of cultural selection and intervention, or trans-culturation.
2. Human social patterning organizes itself in systematic and organismic ways and constitutes a form of natural system.
3. Human systems are distinguished most clearly because they are symbolic systems--our reality and sense of reality is articulated symbolically in the organization of our conscious awareness, perception and behavioral response to our world.
4. The Human brain may be construed as an apparatus of symbolic mediation of experience and behavioral adaptation to everyday life-worlds.
5. Human culture is a developmental outcome of this process, socially expressed and defined by the sharing of similar traits at multiple levels of articulation and integration.
5. Human cultural systems permit a degree of complexity, flexibility and variability not found in other life-forms, and this wide behavioral latitude provides a platform for the construction of alternate realities, and alternative systems in the world that did not previously exist.
The goals to realize our primary mission are to achieve a stable human metacultural system at global, regional and local levels of stratification; to systematically address central and contemporary human and environmental issues affecting alternative development of human systems in the world; and to articulate a cross-cultural paradigm of alternative human systems in the world theoretically, methodologically and developmentally.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
