Alternative Anthropology | home
The Global Imperative | Human Development | Alternative Systems | Metacultural Systems | Symbolic Mediation | Operations
Operations
At this time, our focus of operations has been in the development of the central articulatory platform within which a foundation for human systems approaches can be effectively and efficiently articulated. It is believed that without such a metasystems framework, operations in areas like alternative anthropology, conducted in a sense independent of academic or governmental funding agencies, would not otherwise succeed. This has hindered development of operational approaches in the general area alternative anthropology, but it has not prevented such development altogether.
This development has proceeded primarily at the theoretical and methodological level, in the elaboration and articulation of a human systems framework, with its many ramifications. We have for instance developed the following theoretical/applied frameworks:
Symbolic Linguistics: An abstract, psycho-linguistic model, preoccupied by grammatical constructions, has dominated linguistics for the last forty years, largely ignoring or downplaying either the symbolic structuration of language or the social construction of language. Language is, if nothing else, a preeminently social process and to attempt to make the social aspects of language articulation of secondary importance is to mistake cause and consequence. The basis of symbolic linguistics is the symbolic construction and articulation of the word, or morpheme as a minimal constituent of language that carries meaning, and the organization of words into phrases and sentences on the basis of implicit agreement arrived at primarily through social praxis and linguistic tradition and convention. Prototypically, the word is a symbolic "name" an indexical device for reference and inference, and the noun is the prototypical word from which may other forms are derivative.
Mental Illness: We have elaborated a central theory of mental illness and adaptive dysfunction on the basis of the elaboration of a basic form of neurosis that can become polarized from one extreme to another on a complex continuum defined by behavioral sets and response patterns at different levels. We see deeper problems of psychosis and character disorder as consequential derivatives of regression that is a function of such neurosis.
Human Growth and Development: Human growth and development includes a central theory of cognitive-symbolic interaction and equilibriation in an effective environment, culturally-carpentered, and mediated by significant others. The process of mediation is vital to cognitive development and progressive symbolic displacement of affect and transference onto externalized forms that guide patterns of behavioral response. Differentiation of the phenomenal field leads to elaborated articulation of behavioral patterning and flexibility of alternative response sets.
Social Networking and Organization: From a human systems standpoint, social networking remains a vital concern of human social patterning. The relativity of social networks needs to be emphasized, and the positioning of individuals within these differential and dynamic fields in turn helps to determine mindset, worldview, attitudes and manifest or latent patterns of behavioral response. Furthermore, social networks provide the contexts and forums for social action and for the mobilization of social interest and involvement in collective undertakings.
The Symbolic Mediation and Organization of Experience: The anthropological relativity of human knowledge entails that there is no human phenomenal experience that is not symbolically mediated or transformed through symbolic processes of cognitive apperception and apprehension--this symbolic quality of experience effectively separates humanity from other life forms of many kinds. The symbolic patterning of this experience takes expectable and even predictable forms, largely constrained and shaped by the cultural contexts in which it arises and normally articulates. It is our tendency, indeed our need, to ideological frame our experience in terms that makes such experience symbolically available to our understanding and behavioral response, in some manner or other. Experience that is not symbolically available to us in this manner is psychologically and behaviorally marginal and marginalizing.
Symbolic Cognition: Human knowledge and human thought naturally organizes itself in certain underdetermined structural patterns that may best be described as symbolic. Indeed, what is uniquely characteristic of human
Cultural Behavior and Ethnocultural Systems: Symbolic behavior or pattern cannot be understood decontextualized of some form of ethnocultural context that is primarily social upon a fundamental level. Humankind has not existed in a non-culturally determined world for at least half a million years. From a systems standpoint, the presence of culture, and of many different cultural patterns and groupings, entails a level of population organization and pattern that is transcendent of psychological or individual behavioral issues, and yet which serves to constrain and in a sense totally engulf individual behavior.
These areas are considered important, indeed critical, to the overall articulation of an authentic alternative anthropology.
It continues to be our interest to extend an applied platform for alternative anthropology that treats human systems holistically and the challenges of alternative development and problem resolution human systems as multi-level affairs that require remedial intervention on a number of levels simultaneously.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
