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Definitions of Metaculture
Metaculture is a versatile concept and may be defined and used in many different ways--all forms of human agriculture, horticulture and food-getting pattern may be referred to as instances of human metaculture. Human metaculture may refer as well to the characteristic style-patterning of a particular group in terms of its concrete manifestations, beliefs, ritual behaviors and customs, habits of dress, construction and organization of homes and communities, etc. Metaculture may also be used at a cross-cultural level to refer to systematic patterns of difference, sharing, contact, diffusion, change and integration of human cultural patterning at many different levels and in many different areas in which this patterning becomes manifest.
Human Metaculture is the natural and rational consequence of human behavioral response to environments that is symbolically and cognitively mediated and socially shared and reinforced, primarily by means of human language. It can be expected to occur wherever and whenever human communities organize themselves for purposes of productive survival and reproductive success. The possibility and reality of human metacultural patterning, as the descriptive explanation of human systems, historically and sociologically, has been rooted in the natural history of human evolution, and cannot be divorced from this natural contexts of its origins or anthropogenesis.
Briefly, I would define meta-culture as a systems approach to the problem of human culture, both generally defined as a theoretical and central anthropological concept, and defined in an applied and methodological sense in the various forms that metacultural application might take. I refer to metaculture as the basis of human systems because all human cultural patterning shares a fundamental basis in natural systems articulation--i.e., they are symbolically patterned based upon the common design features of the human brain, human language and the human capacity to use tools to manipulate the environment in deliberate, preconceived ways.
Technology is a form of human metaculture, and in general technology tends to know no real cultural boundaries. Technology that confers some adaptive advantage in an environmental context spreads from group to group.
I distinguish the term "metaculture" from the traditional anthropological concept of "Culture" in order to highlight the sense of holism and systems reference that the former concept has, and the latter traditional definition has only implicitly or, at worst, lacked completely in some material and analytical attempts at definition. Holism is indeed a central defining feature of socio-cultural anthropology and the anthropological perspective, but this sense of holism has always been backgrounded to other preoccupations and concerns that sought to define the phenomenon and driving processes of cultural pattern away as the by-product or consequence of some other forces or factors: i.e., as lacking its own distinguishing emergent and synergistic properties. I also use the term metaculture to emphasize the situatedness of human cultural patterning and processes in larger metasystemic contexts and frameworks, and to emphasize as well the sense of civilization that has accompanied and grown with our anthropological notion of traditional culture. At the same time, the notion of metaculture was concocted deliberately to separate the ideas it embodies from the linkages to the sense of culture history and philology that is embedded in the "traditional" notion of anthropological culture.
The concept of metaculture is also related to another notion, that of ethnoculture, that I have previously elaborated and expanded upon in relation to various groups of people in time and place, as for instance the Vietnamese American refugees of the early 1980's, the Peranakan peoples of the Straights Settlements, Overseas Chinese in general and Hokkien-speaking clan-based fishermen in particular, and the French-speaking Metis and Creoles and their descendants who were involved in the North American fur and Indian trade.
What distinguishes the concept of Metaculture from that of Ethnoculture is one of social-historical and methodological specificity and theoretical generality--the former concept tending to focus holistically on human systems in general in a theoretical framework, the latter tending to emphasize operational methods of study of people particularistically situated in both time and place. Both concepts and their related applications can be considered to be variations of the main anthropological notion of "Culture" that is generally defined through which all the notions are generally related. Each notion serves its own set of purposes in the course of their utilization.
The concept of metaculture can be said to embody in its implications a theory of human civilization. This is not an archaeological theory of state systems development, nor an historical theory of human imperialism that is associated with "great civilizational" complexes. Human civilization from a metacultural frame of reference represents a process, a process in the most general sense involving what I call "culturation" for want of a better term and as the root concept to a variety of instances found in anthropology: i.e., deculturation, acculturation, enculturation, etc. It is a systems process that has assumed many different patterns and configurations of culture.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
