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Symbolic Framing
Symbolic Framing is a methodological approach that is the basis of the articulation of human systems theory. Human systems theory is an anthropological theory of human reality based upon the following presuppositions:
1. Human groups are naturally patterned and form communities with distinctive cultural patterns.
2. The basis for the human organization of reality is the symbolic organization and function of the human brain in cultural and evolutionary context.
3. The symbolic organization of human reality has permitted a range of possibilities for human development that has been unparalleled by life on earth, permitting human beings to construct complex cultural realities and to elaborate and bring to realization alternative systems that did not previously exist in reality.
4. Human symbolic organization occurs at many levels simultaneously, and forms the basis for understanding all human behavior, social relations and human cultural patterning.
Symbolic framing refers to systematic attempts to construct and reconstruct symbolic systems as these are behaviorally articulated in social contexts. Advertisers, fashion-designers, auto-manufacturers, Mass-communications moguls, Hollywood producers and government agencies are all into symbolic engineering, whether this is done openly or in a covert manner. American culture, vested with its materialism, its preoccupation with status, mobility and sociability, is one of the most reconstructed and deliberately manipulated cultural systems ever to have existed.
It is the legitimate preoccupation of an applied approach with Alternative Anthropolgy to study the constructive and possibly destructive processes of symbolic engineering, alternation, rehabilitation, legitimization, etc., with the purpose of understanding how our values and attitudes that lead to social action can be and are regularly manipulated.
Furthermore, its purpose is to provide a coherent and adaptive alternate system of symbolization, along with implementation of a set body of methods and techniques, that is open, satisfying and necessary for humankind within a larger global framework.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
