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Anthropological Systems Theory | Anthropological Relativity | Symbolic Transformation | The Anthropology of Knowledge | The Cultural Construction of Reality | Ethnocultural Studies
The Cultural Construction of Reality
All human reality is culturally based and defined within one cultural framework or another. Cultural frameworks shift and sometimes collide and overlap, and such transition can be the source of much confusion and symbolic contradiction for the culture bearer.
Culture is said to be transparent and effectively invisible to the culture-bearer, who largely takes for granted one's own cultural orientations and institutions as if these are naturally based in one's being. Culture is therefore subjectively experienced by the culture bearer and only becomes objectively expressed through ritual and anti-structural contexts that provide for social action and collective response.
The problem of the cultural construction of reality, from both a theoretical and methodological point of view, is the central concern of the anthropology of knowledge, and provides the framework for the implementation of methodologies relevant to alternative anthropology.
Cultural frameworks are predeterminative of one's experience, interpretation of and responses to reality, and constitute the foundation for one's attitudes and relations and even the formation of one's personality. We therefore cannot escape these frameworks, or the implications of their constraining influence in our lives, even if we wish or seek to do so. And yet this is not a strong cultural determinist point of view. The influence of culture is not total or complete, and, though strong, it remains fairly plastic and malleable, capable of being bent and distorted in many different directions. It interacts with characteriological and inherent psychological variables, with the chaos of life experiences and complex environments, to produce an endless array of possible personality configurations and orientations, each essentially unique to oneself and different in patterning than any other.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
