Alternative Anthropology | home
Forms of Metaculture | Cultural Spectrum and Metacultural Continuum | Earthboundness | Permaculture | Environmental Metaculture | Agrarian Metaculture | Urban Metaculture | Domestic Metaculture | Extra-Domestic Metaculture | Local or Community Metaculture | Areal or Regional Metaculture | Ethno-Political Metacultures
Forms of Metaculture
Lewis Meta-culture is dedicated to the development of alternative meta-cultural orientations in the world. Meta-culture refers to the developmental process and patterns of human symbolic and social organization that guide individual and group adaptive response to underdetermined environmental conditions. The possibility of a form of meta-cultural design engineering and construction of symbolic-behavioral social systems that transcend many of the boundaries, limitations and contradictions of traditional ethnocultural orientations exists as a consequence of the Internet and the global information revolution.
Lewis Meta-culture is founded on several key concepts:
1. The concept of meta-culture as a system of human valuation and behavior that transcends typical ethnocultural orientations and situations, and that embraces processes of trans-culturative civilization. This leads to the development of a global pan-human cultural orientation streamlined to modern adaptation and oriented towards local and regional contexts.
2. The concept of earthbound aesthetics, which is a form of naturalist aesthetics based on the vision of reality that has been extended by our scientific interactions with the world. This concept is rooted to the idea of the unity and earthboundness of life as we know it, and of our basic dependencies upon the earth's natural processes.
3. Earthbound systems refers to the challenge in human cultural adaptation of developing a sense of dynamic cultural equilibrium with the natural world in a manner that is relatively non-destructive and, if it can be said, in harmony with the evolutionary patterns of life on earth. This concept leads to the challenge of alternative environmental design systems that promote this form of adaptive equilibrium and balance in the world.
Metaculture is by definition complex and general. It may refer to many different instances of cultural pattern and relationship and to many different levels and areas of analysis of pattern. Metaculture may refer generally to the processes of culturation as well as to the general inter-cultural context in which culturation and cultural development normally occur, and by which transculturative process of human civilization take place. We may refer to forms of metaculture involving human practice and institution, for instance, agriculture or pisciculture or other food-getting or cultural selection patterns characteristic of a people in a particular time and place.
Various forms of metaculture in analytical terms of application may be identified. I provide only a few of the alternate varieties below that are of greatest relevance to the articulation of this framework:
Environmental Metaculture
Agrarian Metaculture
Urban Metaculture
Domestic Metaculture
Extradomestic Metaculture
Metaculture defined in this manner is largely defined on a continuum that ranges between natural and human systems in the first case, and from small and local to large and regional or global human systems, in the second case. In this general sense, metaculture takes on applied implications as alternative systems of human adaptation at all levels at which human systems articulate in the world, between human beings and the natural world they inhabit, and between different people.
There is a basic sense in metacultural systems that natural resources are not seen merely as chattel or resources for human consumption and exploitation. Rather, the environment and its ecological systems are natural resources in their own right--they are the basis of life and the productivity and evolutionary development of all living systems. Human systems are in the first and last instance part of this larger framework of natural systems adaptation. A meta-ethical doctrine of universal human rights is fully expandable to a larger framework of natural rights that encompasses human relationship and treatment ultimately with all forms of natural systems.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
