Chapter XIII

Anthropological Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis

Anthropological, or human-type systems, have their basis in the organization and function of the complex brain and associated nervous system. I claim that advances of development in the cerebral cortex and associated nerve centers relating to language, speech, memory and complex thinking are the principle reasons for the symbolic resonance and creative capacity of the human brain, but this capacity and its neurological basis must be seen in both behavioral, cultural and evolutionary context that requires prolonged learning, post-partum development, even instruction and external codification that is socially shared. Even a child as young as a year or 18 months shows remarkable recognition and pattern-recognition processes and processing that is far more abstractly advanced and sophisticated than any other mammalian counterpart of the same age.

Human systems theory, to be complete, cannot be framed in only an analytical clockwork perspective. They are dynamic, inherently so, and only a holistic and developmental framework is sufficiently comprehensive to adequately represent the patterning and processes in a realistic and complete manner.

We cannot distinguish such systems as separate from other biological systems unless we do so on the basis of a comparison of the human brain and its physiological functions with the nervous systems of other kinds of animals. The fundamental functions of a canine brain are quite similar to that of the human brain, and in many ways can be said to be homologous structures within an evolutionary framework. Even more alike are Chimpanzee, Gorilla and human brains, each kind of which appears to be capable of similar levels of complex thought, logic and communication. If the human brain is different from these other biological forms, it is so more by size and degree of complex integration than it is necessarily by any kinds of qualitative differences. Only the expansion and enlargement of the areas of the frontal cortex in the human brain suggest the development of more complex processing that is associated with emotion, reason, imagination, etc.

It is possible to look upon the brain as the final biological frontier, if one does not consider the challenges of alien life forms. But understanding of the physiology and functioning of the brain is only the beginning of a scientific basis for understanding of human informational patterning and human systems that are the concern of the psychological and social sciences. While the brain may be the basis for a human science, the brain is only a central part of a larger system of informational patterning that includes human language, human conceptual systems, human information systems, symbolization, complex self-motivated behavior patterns, and social relational and communicational systems. These form a complex of informational patterns and facets of human reality that are critical to the description of anthropological systems in general and cannot be dispensed with or analytically reduced in terms of mere brain or body function. To put this issue another way, it can be said that while the brain is centrally important in making possible all informational functioning and patterns in human systems, it is the brain that is understood only in its anthropological context and development, that achieves its degree of dynamic function and super-biological informational patterning and processing. A brain that exists in social isolation is of not much use, and, even worse, may end up being a dysfunctional or diseased brain. A brain that is functioning within an organic and environmental context that achieves a high level of integration is one that is capable of achieving remarkable feats of creative, productive and intellectual prowess. In this sense at least, the brain is not that much different from a digital computer, regardless of the design differences. For both forms of complex information processing, the same general input-output feedback loop holds. We say "junk in, then junk out." What is the mechanism of the brain that processes the junk, and how do we arrive at the defintion in a formal and scientific sense of what the junk is in the first place.

The description of the brain is prerequisite but not sufficient to the description or theoretical explanation of human language, social institutions and processes, human psychology, symbolization, human behavior or any other facet of human reality. There has been significant progress in the interdisiciplinary fields of the cognitive sciences that relates artificial intelligence and robotic automation to psychological, linguistic and philosophical models of human cognitive functioning and the organization of knowledge. In terms of the organization of knowledge, we are striving for what can be called the natural order and organization of information as this occurs in the brain and becomes processed via the brain and its auxiliary organs. This can be contraposed to what can be called an arbitrary order of knowledge and information that is based primarily upon abstract or culturally defined concepts. There is an exciting convergence of various disciplines to the central issues of understanding the human brain and its central role and function in the articulation of human reality. With new imagining techniques in vivo, we are no longer confined to the placement of electrodes and the diagnostic study of traumatic aphasias.

Whatever aspect or discipline of the human sciences with which we are concerned, the study of the brain remains a central core component of any such study. We can expect that the full and complete explanation of human brain-mind function will lead to a clearer understanding of the complexities of human social and psychological realities.

In the analysis of human systems, we may again distinguish several levels of human informational patterning. These sublevels include:

1. The individual, including the cognitive, symbolic, emotional, subjective and mental functioning involving one way or another brain function.

2. The social group, involving dynamic communication and interaction between different individuals, organization of belief and behavior in cultural systems that can be said to be institutionally enduring.

3. The inter-group context, which involves exchange and interctive relationships between different groups, or between different individuals of different groups, and leading to complex historical and social formations of intergroup relations.

At this late stage in our hominid evolutionary development, it is not always clear which should come first and which follow in our analysis. We are left with a hen and egg kind of dilemma, and realize that we are dealing with conjunctive rather thant disjunctive sets of information framed between these three different levels.

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Anthropological systems stem from an understanding of the emergence of a level of natural information pattern that can be defined ultimately as cultural. I would include in these systems potential "non human" kinds of systems that would probably have similar cultural patterns and features from at least a structural framework. Anthropological systems emerged from the landscape of the African plains and forests to somehow be capable of systematically beating the odds against evolutionary constraints. Exactly how it did so remains still a mystery, though we understand in better detail now the early record of hominid emergence than ever before. What is most remarkable I think about this record is its degree of continuity of development for the past four million years at least. With but few noteworthy exceptions, we see largely a single line of allopatric phylogeny of the hominid descent from probably 5 to 6 million years before. We find the early radiative adaption and dispersion of Homo erectus throughout the Old World, from Africa across to the furthest reaches of Asia. Their tools appeared to have been in the first phase fairly primitive chopper-tools, simple river cobbles that are split and broken into well defined edges capable of doing basic work in cutting, and smashing. Limited evidence suggests the presence of oddly defined Archaic Homo saipiens in many of the same regions 1 to 2 hundred thousand years ago, and then a second or possibly third radiative explosion of modern Homo sapiens sapiens from what seems to be the perennial African homeland, probably commencing 70 to 60 thousand years BP and eventually crossing over to the New World within the last 30,000 years. The last million years especially bore witness to what can be considered overall as a unilineal line of hominid development that witnessed the enlargement mainly of human cerebral capacity to their present day proportions and the rise of the associated basic culture complexes--the discovery of fire, use of refined stone working tools, clothing, shelters, and probably some early form of language.

The understanding of human systems stems from an appreciation of the unique role that the human brain and related complex of bio-behavioral traits have played in the development of symbolic culture and human civilization. These are understood universally to be the unique hallmarks of human patterning, the integration of which cannot be fully explained in terms of biological systems theory alone. There occurs in interaction, communication and cultural transmission, both vertically and horizontally, the possibility for an entirely new level of informational patterning and for behavioral response to the environment that cannot be accounted for by biological factors alone. The human brain is of course a complex cellular organ, and the human nervous and sensory systems are of course extremely complex and sensitive systems that connect to the brain. It is apparent that human brain pattern, when tied to constructed environmental contexts, achieves a higher order intelligent functioning.

Human systems theory stratifies into three levels. These levels are the individual, the intermediate group, and the larger social system that ultimately comprises the entire human species. Again, similar processes of systemic stratification and multi-level integration appear to occur with human systems as with more basic biological and physical systems, in terms of psychological, cultural and larger sociological patterns. It furthermore is important to construe these within an historical framework of the past that informs the world in detail and explains how it is that our world came to be as it currently is.

Human systems theory is derived from anthropological theory of human systems in general. A human system can be any system that is socially constituted (including a society of one person) that has achieved some level of structural-functional and cultural integration such that it confers upon its members a separate and distinctive sense of identity that is shared. This sharing tends to occur in many different levels of interaction and communication, and commonly involves the development of unique social dialects and isolects of a language, as well as common patterns of symbolic-behavioral response. Material environment will also be shaped and shared along particular and distinct design motifs. Social customs, institutions and traditions emerge that serve to further integrate people into such systems and to perpetuate and replicate the cultural patterns that have been developed in such contexts.

Human social systems tend towards incredible complexity in an historical sense because the extension of human sociability is that social groups tend toward interrelation into larger and larger systems, and that no group or individual remains forever or always in social isolation. Thus I believe it is a clear proclivity that in general human systems are interconnected, and these connections constitute the basis for the further integration of such systems in ever larger structural patterns. There has been of course many exceptions to this general trend--isolated island, forest and mountain groups that maintain little or no contact with outsiders. Frequently, individual people may pass between different or distant groups while the groups themselves maintain fairly rigid or even hostile boundaries between one another. People tend to have a very natural proclivity, when this capacity is not repressed or arrested by psychological and behavioral rigidity and dependency, to be quite culturally flexible. The wide variation of pattern of natural, traditional cultural patterns in the ethnographic world attests to the inherent flexibility and openness of the individual human and to their fundamental plasticity that is tied to environmental adaptation. If this pattern were biologically preprogrammed, either as memes or as social genes, then it is likely that we would see a rather monothetic and monotypical formation of culture worldwide, rather than almost infinite variation.

In general, whenever acculturative contact arises, there is a trend for a sense of dynamic exchange to take place that leads to rapid alterations and changes of one or more groups at different levels. Social contact between very different groups can stimulate radical changes that can be both destructive and constructive.

Culture has been the traditional forte' of the cultural anthropologist. At the time that cultural anthropology has been elipsed as the result of ethno-political economies, the concept of culture and recognition of its importance in understanding human reality has emerged in other disciplines as a central defining dogma.

Culture as a concept of human order and social organization, as a descriptive label referring to both the style and pattern of human integration in the world, has been widely defined and there is very little close agreement as to its appropriate denotations or determinations. My own research has led me to see culture as more ofa dynamic process shaped in terms of a tradition, but made real and vital in the present, than it is a static and unchanging reality that is superimposed, like a set of rules, upon human reality. Culture is embodied in the behavior, beliefs and very being of its participants, and it is enacted and reenacted at every minute upon many different stages of social performance. Cultural process is therefore an on-going production of forms and symbolisms, materially and behaviorally manifest, that reshapes the tradition and fits it to the needs and purposes of the future.

The remarkable aspect of culture is its tremendous transparency in our own lives, and its tremendous obviousness to ourselves in the lives of people removed from us. We do not normally see it in ourselves, in what we do and how we behave, because it is so much a part of us that we take it for granted. It is expressed in the clothes we dress in, in our speech, in our attitudes and in our social relations. It is expressed in our habits and routines and in the manner that we conduct ourselves and our business both in polite society and otherwise. We find it so easily in others because it forms the basis of the differences in others that are so marked in implicit contrast to ourselves. It is clear therefore that cultural variation overlaps and is often confused with individual variation of pattern, so that it is impossible sometimes to tell the difference between the one and the other unless we have some social frame of reference for common comparison.

The notion that culture is shared is important to the definition of culture, but culture as merely frequency patterning belies some of the dynamic and variable components of culture. To a great extent, we can even say that individual variation is a form of cultural variation of pattern. Culture is often contested and the result of compromise as much as it has been a matter of sharing and agreement. Agreement implies an unconscious component of culture, and it is indeed upon an unconscious level that we find most of the agreement occuring. It is as often as not this unconscious level of conformity that individuals are reacting to in a deliberate manner when they seek to be different or to express themselves in a culturally non-conformist manner. It represents an attempt to escape the psychological constraints of culture as these serve to shape and possibly frustrate their lives. Culture becomes contestable when it is realized that different versions or patterns or models of culture come into competition with one another, when one person's construction is somehow contradictory to another's. This happens more than we may know or realize, and it is clear that culture, to be effective, cannot be a straight-jacket or even a military uniform. It is referred to as a concept of the organization of diversity, rather than as the replication of uniformity. It is also the source of a tremendous paradox about cultural patterning, for though it comprehends all individuality and individual variability of patterning, it does not invade every private space or every nook and cranny of a cultural defined reality. We cannot strictly say that individual behavior is dependent upon culture, or cultural patterning is dependent upon the expression of individual behavior. We can say that these are interdependent in a partial way but not in an incomplete way.

Cultural variability is an inbuilt function therefore of cultural pattern, and reflects the fact that culture is acquired and learned, constructed and created, in a social environment. Individual variation is a natural extension of cultural variability of pattern. In this regard, cultural pattern can be said to be the substrate and ground for individual action and choice. It defines the range and directions that individual variation will proceed in, and sets constraints or limits beyond which such variation will be defined as abnormal or anomalous. It is a logical consequence of the fact that any cultural pattern that defines a group of people over time and place comprehends a broader range of phenomena than is expressible by any one individual or even a group of different individuals. We can say that culture in this sense is a corporate and institutional reality that extends beyond the boundaries of individual variability. It is, in other words, larger than life, and it becomes symbolically so expressed.

Culture is an historically transient phenomena. As conservative as we expect traditional tribal cultures to be, from generation to generation and from century to century, it is likely that the epigenetic profile of the cultural landscape will shift and evolve continuously, in part as different casts of characters happen upon the stage, and in part because outside forces are steadily impinging upon those people to shape and erode their patterns of culture.

Culture is therefore an instantaneous phenomenon that exists in the present. Its reference to the past is as a sense of heritage and tradition that connects to the present in institutional and ritual religious forms and symbolisms.

My desire to escape a definition of culture as something that is only shared and fixed is rooted in the idea that though a basic consensus is vital to cultural transmission, this transmission is never complete nor perfect, and its information is always subject to distortion and mutation over time. Transmission can only be understood in this regard as a temporal and therefore historical process, or rather as a series of events that can be chronologically ordered and that can be attributed some form of efficient causality or determination. People are bound within a cultural system, but through their lived experience and the embodiment of culture, in their everyday production and reproduction of the cultural symbolisms and forms, they come to have a transformative effect upon culture as a whole, gradually altering the pattern of culture beyond recognition of what can be considered its original or baseline form.

This process suggests that culture in this case is anything but shared and fixed by tradition. It suggests that its sharing is not a function of its conservativism, but it dynamics, via the various mechanisms of transmission that are recognizable in the study of culture. There have been very few baselines or original cultures on earth in the past 30,000 years at least. There have been founding cultures, and abrupt hiatus of cultural vacuums that are then filled by new forms brought by new people. Original primordial hominid culture probably dates back to as deep in time as there are recognizable tool assemblages. Granted, cultural isolates occur that seem to have been frozen in time, or even to have regressed by the loss of previous cultural traits to a more primitive condition of cultural development. We cannot say that these tools or the soft culture that they represent was invented at anyone place or time, but they were repeatedly transmitted all over the place most of the time by many different individuals. These forms evolved ever so gradually out of even more original and basic forms of proto-cultural pattern upon which some model or another of anthropogenesis has been built. If we want to recognize these proto-cultural patterns, we can find them with the use of different kinds of tools by native Chimpanzee groups in the rain forests and fields of Central Africa. These patterns are recognizable by their transmission and their variation, and they lead to the conclusion that proto-cultural development in humans may have proceed relatively early in hominid evolution, possibly as much as 5 or 6 million years B.P.

If we want to apply any kind of gene-culture model of coevolution, we must recognize that this model may have worked on two levels. Culture provided a carpentered context in which some kinds of genetic patterns would have been positively selected, and others, negatively selected. At the same time, genetic selection would have led to the creation of phenotypes that were culturally dependent creatures, which can be seen in the relatively slow and advanced phases of human ontogenetic development. There is obviously no strong linkage between genetic and cultural information, nor of their modes of transmission. Whereas the first can be thought of as being genetic and biological, the second can be considered to be at best historical and social. These forms of information are only linked indirectly in terms of the human embodiment of culture and its evolved organic basis in human development.

Human beings can be said therefore to have become, sometime early in our hominid evolution, culturally dependent creatures. We cannot now survive without reliance upon cultural habits and means of adaptation. Cultural dependency is a unique mark of humankind and constitutes the basis for the paradox of cultural constraint in our lives. It is the basis for both our individual variability and for our basic requirement for cultural conformity, even in our anti-structural disconformity. We can find individual variability of personality even among different members of the same reptiles, for instance, where obvious differences of temperament and response are evident. If we refer to canines, it is apparent as well that dogs show an enormous range of expression and variability of personality traits, more than just the kinds of root emotional responses of a snake. So much more so is it for human beings.

Culture exists as a collaborative project. We can say therefore that it is constitutive of reality in the sense that it is made up of many different things at the same time, and different kinds of things through time. A culture cannot be created by one person alone--culture is created socially in the group as a result of sharing and variation of common patterns. Culture as a group process emerges with time, and is subject to the constraints of time.

The fundamental challenge of all cultural orientations is that of its survival and reproduction in time and place, and this challenge is related to the fundamental dilemma of cultural patterning, and that is the problem of achieving cultural integration. It can be said that relative integration depends upon the extent and depth of cultural sharing or transmission. Cultural patterning that is highly coherent can be said to have achieved a relatively high degree of integration. Of course, this concept of cultural integration is a slippery one to get hold of. Coherence of culture can be assumed to be achieved through symbolic consonance and reiteration of common forms. It is the case though that there can be substrate or structural sharing reflecting a high order of systemic integration, while at the same time the degree of variability of surface pattern in the expression of culture can be quite high.

The central definition of culture in the explanation of human reality brings us directly to the question of symbol and symbolisms, which can be said to be both the basic vessel and vehicle of cultural transmission and expression of its pattern. The value of any symbolism is its internalized, subjective reverberation of meaning in the lives of the culture bearer. This meaning itself is polygenic and multiply determined. It is multifaceted and has many dimensions of contrast and relation. The symbolic function of any device or even material object, is separate from and independent of the pragmatic function of that device or object, though it can be said that the symbolic function always comprehends and contextualizes its pragmatic function in a larger sphere of meaning that interrelates it to other forms of symbolism.

It can be demonstrated therefore that symbols and symbolisms do not exist as discrete and isolated entities with a specific set of functions. They are always a part of a larger system of symbolization and meaning that comprehends many different kinds of functions and forms (whether these are pragmatic or expressive or social or material or textual or abstract or iconographic) Symbols thus have an inherent effect of relating us to the world of which they are a apart and from which they derive their significance and value. They tie object, and the experience of that object, to a larger framework of order and value in our symbolic universe. At the same time, they have the effect of concretizing or precipitating that larger sense of order in the embodiment and experience of the object. This effect is never complete or total, nor is it a permanent effect. It is one that must be reiterated time and again in ritual form for its renewal and revitalization to occur. The national flag is a common political symbol of the modern world that is a clear cut example of this aspect of symbolization. Most symbols can be said to be partial symbols in that their symbolic function is more diffuse and less focused than a special purpose symbol like a flag. It is hard to see a hammer as a symbol, though in the hands of a carpenter who is quite capable it can take on a symbolic function that is shared with its pragmatic value for driving nails. If we append a hammer to a flag, as a symbol of the proletariat, of industry, of Homo faber, then its symbolic function that can be said to be intrinsic to the hammer and its history takes on a more focal and specific role.

We can see that any symbolic or any symbolic function of a device is fundamentally communicative--this is the transmissive aspect of the cultural content and integrative function of symbolism. Symbols and symbolization therefore serve to unite cultural reality into a coherent system of meaning and function. It is the mechanism for achieving cultural integration. The communicative function of symbolism is important to understanding its role in maintaining social order and in the organization of social relations and resources. As is usual with most communication systems, their efficacy and purpose become most evident in cases of error or contradiction, when symbols as communicative devices break down or come into conflict with one another upon basic levels of their articulation. If an old regime is overturned, so too must the old statues and other icons of that regime either be overturned, or else appropriated symbolically to the services of the new regime. It would be seen as inappropriate by citizens of a country to hoist a foreign flag, particularly that of a country considered hostile or a threat, in place of its own flag. This is what happens when one nation is defeated by another nation. Similarly, in our country, flag burning always raises more than an eye-brow, it is considered sacrireligious and unpatriotic by many people, though others would content it is only an exercise in one's freedom of expression. It does point up that communication is society serves an important function and is in itself of some social value as a resource. Burning the flag becomes more therefore than just a demonstration of freedom of expression. It becomes a communicative and symbolic enactment of contradiction and in an implicit sense, of denial, of the dominant social order. It becomes an insult and a way of doing indirect violence to the country and the reality that the flag represents.

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The basis of cultural integration can be said to be symbolic-cognitive integration of the informational patterns, or knowledge, that is represented and subjectively embodies that cultural reality. It follows that the breakdown of cultural order can lead to symbolic-cognitive dissonance and disintegration, and, vice versa, the breakdown of cognitive-symbolic order can lead to and signal the loss of cultural integrity. This process is invariably accompanied by the increased noise and sense of contradiction that is embodied in such systems in the first place. Because part of the function of symbol systems is the mediation between contradictory or otherwise incompatible or contraposed realities, the fact or state of contradiction is normally disguised when symbol systems are effectively integrated and functionally adaptive. We say that such symbolisms can be ideologically resolved and this is usually sufficient in itself. When symbol systems can no longer resolve internal contradictions they are intended to mediate, they can be said to be relatively dysfunctional. Sense of contradiction then becomes exposed and self-evident and the symbol systems designed to ideologically cover them no longer sufficient.

It is the case that critical systems of knowledge, including forms of science, seek deliberately to expose the contradictions contained within symbol systems in order to better understand the realities that are then exposed, and to at least temporarily or relatively expose the false realities that are the product of symbolic construction of reality. It is normal and expected therefore that these kinds of systems of knowledge seek to stand apart and alienate themselves from the everyday affairs of human society. It is also the case though that normal society does not function well if it is disinvested of its mythologies upon which its sense of symbolic order and cultural integration depend. The social sciences provide a poor substitute for the symbolic consonance such systems provide, and no one can be perennially comfortable living only with a sense of contradiction.

The intensive and extensive study of knowledge systems as these are culturally situated and symbolically articulated, reveals that their coherence and effectiveness depends upon achieving and maintaining a degree of integration between culturally received forms of belief and behavior and cognitive models and maps--those symbolic meanings that are articulated through language and thought. This integration can be said to be brain based, and knowledge systems are culturally dependent upon the context in which they are situated and articulated. The variegation of patterning between different knowledge systems is clear evidence of the difference in mental template organization that people psychologically achieve. This template patterning must be seen as a constraint of the hardwiring and functional patterning of the brain. Simply put, brains must achieve a certain consensus of its patterning within a shared cultural context in order to achieve the degree of socio-cultural integration required. The medium for this process to occur is largely through language and behavior, as well as the carpentered symbolic manifestations of the environment. Evidence from symbolic framing reveals how much meaning structures are culturally variable and rooted to different patterning of mental and psychological function. It is the wonderful plasticity of the brain, a by-product of its enormous complexity, that allows it to achieve so a broad range of variable patterning.

If we compare, for instance, the knowledge structuration of a system such as mathematics with that of a natural language, we will see that both systems will utilize many of the same and common pathways, and that the underlying kind of semantic structures and logical relations may be fundamentally similar and differ only in their details and consequences. Learning multiple languages permits the brain a plasticity and multi-modality that intensive orientation within one language system lacks.

Language systems are important in this process of integration as mediational and communicational devices. They can be said to both mediate and to symbolically encode and concretize reality through expression. All knowledge systems are ultimately based upon and depend upon the language systems from which they are derived. Learning a new kind of knowledge system requires preparation by learning the language system that defines that knowledge system and its rules of articulation and framing.

From a semantic standpoint, we can make a strong claim for the linguistic relativity of meaning structures, though this by no means connotes a form of linguistic determinancy. Without development and learning of the language, the meaning system that is embodied by and in terms of that language, and the larger cultural reality that lies behind that language, will be unavailable to the stranger. This is not to say that the structural patterns of overt behaviors cannot thereby be understood or studied--often language serves as much to obfuscate and rationalize reality as much as it is meant to express and reveal it. It is clear though, that language provides the vehicle by which the brain can organize itself, and, in times of relearning, reorganize itself to adapt to newer patterns of information received in the effective environment. Another way of looking at this is to say that language structures and frames meaning systems, without which meaning systems would be incoherent, even schizophrenic. Language disorders are a chief symptom of the development of mental pathology. This is a very human kind of trait that characterizes human intelligence for that of any other known animal or creature. Meaning systems, for their effective organization and function in the brain, depend upon their articulation in terms of some kind of language. Though the basic relationship between meaning and the term is arbitrary and symbolic, meanings that are arrived at usually by some form of orginal implicit ollective agreement and social sanctioning and participation, we cannot have the one without the other, and it is the term that situates meaning within a social world, making it a phenomenon of social construction. We can therefore say that the linguistic integration of culture and cognition is fundamentally social psychologically mediated.

Different knowledge cultures and cultural knowledges provide their own symbolic framing mechanisms within culturally defined behavioral settings, ritual contexts, and in terms of received expressions and meanings, that serve to reinforce every day in basic ways the symbolic coherence and sense of legitimate reality that these knowledge systems carry. This can be referred to as the symbolic embodiment and articulation of knowledge cultures in the everyday world in which they exist.

Achievement and learning of any knowledge system, especially to the point of mastery and expertise that is expected upon a professional level, requires years of investment in study and learning frameworks that are situated in language context and reinforced through social relations. Such mastery is not achieved overnight, in a week, or a month or even in a single year of instruction. Such learning cannot take place in isolation or even in the kind of alienation that is afforded by electronic communication. It is very much the case when were are talking about different kinds of knoweldge cultures that we can compare, for instance, the culture of physics with the culture of chemistry or microbiology, and that the consequences for each of these cultural-cognitive patterns in shaping worldview and relations is dramatic and fundamentally different. As scientific cultures, they all share a certain core of fundamental values and research priorities, just as they share a common language in terms of their mother tongue. But from that point of a similar core of knowledge structure and values, the similarities diverge in ever greater ways and increasing degrees of difference. Knowledge is becoming so stratified and hypercoherent, that even subdisciplinary boundaries within broader fields are emerging as largely mutually exclusive cultural knowledge territories.

The definition of cultural systems is central in human systems theory, as these systems exist at the core of what it means to be human and in terms of how humans organize and relate to their environments. We may say that culture defines the world of meaning for human beings, and this meaning has both subjective and objective aspects and consequences. This meaning furthermore is fundamentally symbolic in structure in a manner very similar to that elaborated by Levi-Strauss's structuralism. We can say, in othe words, that human social reality is culturally determined, and human cultural reality is symbolically determined, and human symbolic reality is linguistically and psychologically determined, in a manner that is context-bound to the environment in which it has arisen.

Cultural Anthropology has been foremost the field of inquiry that has managed to foreground and give scope and scientific significance to the problem and definition of culture and its reality. It was this early recognition of the centrality of importance of culture in understanding human reality that attracted me as a student foremost to the discipline, much to my subsequent misfortune. Before the rise of Boasian anthropology in North American and Haddon's social anthropology in Great Britain and abroad, our notions of culture were largely defined by an archaic and largely Eurocentric model of culture history and classical philology. Other views emerged on the horizon in about the same time frame, the views of Marx and Freud, for instance, and of Comte and Durkheim and Weber, that served to some extent to break the strangle-hold of an earlier European rationalism that saw all good things as coming from, and referring to, a continental frame of reference.

A century later, so much elaboration along related lines of inquiry has gone on in the relativization of knowledge, in one field of scholarship or inquiry or another, that the entire framework of critique has seemed to be carried to a logical limit beyond which logic and reason breaks down completely in a kind of narrow solipsistic language game, especially in the face of normal institutions of science that have made tremendous breakthroughs in knowledge discovery and technological advances.

In considering the structure of the development of human civilization, what can be called its cultural evolution, I cannot but help think of the perspective of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock that sees the reel of reality speeding forward at ever increasing tempos with each passing year. The rates and volumes of information communication and knowledge production has been increasing exponentially, and the degree of complexity and sophistication achieved in any one area, the requirements for expertise and specialization so hypercompartmentalized, that many knowledge systems, and the humans that articulate them, are spinning forward divisively and independently without mutual awareness or even the possibility of mutual consideration.

Worldview has become a critically important, even strategic, concern of the 21^st Century. The worldwide web emerged on the scene in the last decade of the 20^th Century just in time to create a challenge of control and freedom of information in regard to what can be considered a rising global hegemony of ideas by large nationstates and multi-national corporations. Needless to say, the worldview of the world is at best fragmentary and disparate, lacking in either wholeness or in sufficient depth. We cannot speak of a single worldview, but only of many competing worldviews, all of which are in themselves incomplete and insufficient as worldview. Worldview is perhaps the ultimate aim of any knowledge system that claims coherence and a distinct identity in the world. Of course, there are institutions, individuals, groups, corporations and even entire nation states that systematically and deliberately take advantage of the fractured state of worldview to manipulate and persuade people, often with misinformation, into some agenda of action or some relation that is assymetrical or exploitative. At times, it seems, that there may even be a majority of people in the world whose function, it seems is to be part of a larger conspiracy to manipulate and dispossess people's worldview and hold upon a sense of reality.

There have been many competing definitions of culture. The one I have come to prefer, though grounded in Anthropology, surprisingly is situated more in the field of the sociology of culture, and concerns how humans symbolic construct meaning in their lives, and construct the world in a symbolic manner.

The fact of human cultural reality that has not been easily explained or even directly dealt with is its vast continuity of culture from its origin until the present. There have been no permanent discontinuous states in human evolution that has been marked by an absence or a total loss of cultural context. Individuals may become more or less dissociated from the cultural stream of humanity, and many cultures may find themselves in isolated backwaters, but culture remains continuous and for the most part forward flowing with time.

This continuity of culture has assured an unbroken string of cultural transmission from generation to generation from the first inception and rise of culture, much as protocultural forms have been observed and studied among Chimpanzee groups in the African rainforests. It has been a part of the human heritage, and its continuity assures a common foundation of structural patterning whatever its divergent manifestations may become in one instance or another. Humankind has depended greatly upon this sense of fundamental continuity, so much so that we have evolved in such a manner as to become culturally dependent creatures who do not do well outside of the fold of its structure.

As a cultural anthropologist, a deep and fundamental appreciation of culture and its central place in our world is profoundly important and well abided. Of course it is not the only facet of our knowledge and meaning that can be used to characterize humankind and to differentiate people from one another, but without it, all other knowledge systems run the risk of falling into their own ideological conundrums and horizons.

I employ readily the concept of culture, and especially, of knowledge culture, as a mechanism for mediating between, and possibly even integrating, different and divergent knowledge systems in the world, as well as the social realities that underlie these systems. This brings to the foreground one of the central functions of culture in our lives, and that is in the mediation of stress and conflict of people in relation to their natural and social environments. Culture as a mediational concept and construct is vitally important to the application of cultural knowledge systems to various kinds of problem sets in human reality, and even beyond in the larger natural world.

The mediative aspects of culture have rarely been addressed as such, much less for its broader implications in relation to the articulation of worldview and different kinds of knowledge systems in the world. We can find in this the foundation for the integration of worldview and of different, disparate knowledge systems, and through this we can seek to achieve a new form of synthetic integration of these systems in a functional and efficacious manner in our world.

The hypothesis of a universal structure underlying the pattern variation of human culture and history has been both proposed and opposed vehemently in the literature. Some scholars would impose a completely relativistic model upon anthropological study of humankind, claiming that there are no universals by which to anchor and define a scientific paradigm of human reality. Furthermore, it is clear that human reality is exceedingly complex and multi-factorial, and, many would say, underdetermined from even a biological point of view. True exceptionless universals have been hard to find.

I propose that the universal basis for a genuine science of anthropology is in the recognition and realization of the true scope of the psychic unity of humankind, which suggests that it may not be the case that all people think the same way, but it is possible that all people may, at least in theory, think alike. Such a claim demands an empirical hook and anchor to some objective, empirical data in reality that would support such a claim.

It is in the brain of humankind that we can find, upon a deep level, structural patterns that recur in varying form across cultural boundaries, but which occur structurally in a similar manner in all cultures. If this is the case, as it appears to be, then a strong case for the psychic unity of humankind as a scientific universal can be made. One form of evidence for this strong claim is in the potential intelligibility of all natural human language--or what might be called its "inter-translatability."

The proposal of a scientific basis for anthropology being founded upon universal patterns of brain organization and function, in conjunction with other uniquely human traits, does not preclude an equally strong argument for the anthropological relativity of human knowledge and attitudes. Such a proposal also, to be complete, requires its systematic extension, in an empirically consistent manner that is equal to that stated for human cognition, to an accountable explanation of social and cultural patterning and behavior by people.

My claim is that a certain class of methods, referred to as symbolic framing devices, lends itself to a certain manner of interpretation of a wide range of human behavior patterns, the logical explanation for which leads to the conclusion that cultural patterns and differentials are tied to different patterns of thinking in the brain. Rather than support a relativist claim, this evidence strongly supports an argument for the deep brain-based psychic unity of humankind, and the influence of this noetic patterning, upon all that we see, think and do.

The anthropological definition of culture is imprecise and from a scientific standpoint leaves much to be desired. There are in fact many competing definitions of what is culture, and hence, no single received definition that is agreed upon by all anthropologists. In fact, implicitly or explicitly, definitions of culture are a big bone of contention among most anthropologist.

From a human systems standpoint, I offer the following definition of culture that is tentatively scientific:

Culture is the sum total of the integrated patterning of the human experience, both in terms that are individually subjective and collectively objective, and in terms that are both ideal in form and material in expression. It includes the language, behaviors, attitudes, institutions and symbolic systems created and maintained by human beings.

This definition is necessarily general and somewhat vague as far as the explication of specific aspects of human culture, such as various institutional manifestations in legal systems, in politics, economics or religion. Its emphasis is not in the detail or particulars of cultural life as this is experienced, but in the totality of culture as a system that is integrated, and that serves the function of integration, of human reality. I have privileged culture as something that has a central role and a pivotal force in the life of humanity, that plays a critical part in the organization and expression of that reality. Others surely would take issue with this argument. I have offered it here, as an anthropologist, from the standpoint that we cannot seek a genuine vision or version of human reality without somehow eventually coming to terms with the definition of culture and the realities that are represented by it.

And yet, culture remains an inherently difficult and slippery concept and sense of reality to get hold of. It is not enough simply to dismiss this problem to the explanation of inherent complexity of pattern, which is true but by itself rather empty of import. Nor is it enough to consign the vagueness of culture to the reflexively kind of paradox that it presents to us as culture bearers--rather what is known as its subjective transparency and invisibility in our own lives and the critical role it plays in shaping our lives.

I invoke the principle of the critical indeterminancy of culture to explain its inherent sense of difficulty in definition and explanation. I invoke the concept of cultural indeterminancy as a fundamental condition of our reality in part to demonstrate that the principle of cultural relativity, to which it is related, is not and does not imply cultural determination or determinism. Culture is not an inescapable background tyrant controlling all we think and do in the world. As Herskovits wrote, it is not even a high fence preventing us from seeing into other's cultural backyards. Culture can be said to be inherently underdetermined in our lives, because it is not inherent or biologically preprogrammed. We do not inherit it from our genes. We learn it from our social environments, and it is transmitted socially between people on a daily basis. And yet, not unlike the weak but ubiquitous force of gravity, culture does have a compelling influence upon all of us the broader dimensions of which we cannot escape completely. It keeps our feet in our shoes, and our shoes on the ground.

Cultural indeterminancy can be accounted for mainly by the fact of the social organization and patterning of culture, which entails that it is not so much a "thing" that exists as a material object in the ground (an archaeological version of culture as artifactual or textual expression) so much as it exists as tendencies and frequencies of patterning in the background of our lives, as certain predispositions, habits, reflexes, appetites and aversions that we share in the world with one another. It can be said to exist in some abstract but applied statistical sense, like the 2.5 kids in the average family, even though there may be no clear-cut demonstration of its reality in actual historical happenstance. Neither is it only an "idea" that gains some physical manifestation in the real world, rather it is a field of meaning, socially constructed and communicated, that lies behind the expression of the "idea" itself. It can be seen therefore that from the standpoint of cultural indeterminancy, neither "things" nor "ideas" are sufficient by themselves to a definition of culture. These things are products of culture, and stand as symbolic representations of culture, but they are not culture itself.

I would argue at length for the reality of culture that is independent of our own imagination and construction, but I am not sure that this is necessary any longer, and it is clear that other anthropologists have argued these issues at great length, repeatedly, to no final consequence. From a strictly scientific perspective (from, in other words, a human systems approach) we would have to say that "culture" must exist as an independent reality, else we could not conduct experiments upon it or arrive at any testable conclusions about it. Either this, or failing to falsify our definitions, throw the concept of culture out as something that just did not work from a scientific perspective. This problem may not be so much a problem of the definition of culture, which in all its indeterminancy is also therefore "indefinite" in outline or key forms. It may be more a problem of the model of the kind of science that we seek to apply to an understanding of culture. Clearly the scientific model directly adapted from the phyiscal or biological sciences may be ill-suited for a systematic explication of cultural realities.

The issue of culture and its indeterminancy I would state in relation to scientific method and theory, as something like this: Where physical science play heavy emphasis upon the "objectivity" of their empirical data-base and measurement of phenomenal reality, social scientists place an equivalent form of "inter-subjectivity" in their observational descriptions and reasoned explanations. What is "objective" from one standpoint that tends to occlude the identity and role of the observer in the process of observation, becomes "intersubjective" when this identity in the process of observation is implied and confirmed, and its social and communicative aspects are also emphasized and not ignored.

We must qualify this altered criteria with one set of limiting conditions, and this is the fact that inter-subjective substantiation or validation is achievable, at least in theory, by only independent means. By independent from a human point of view, I would include a broader but relative sense of psychological, ideological and even social and cultural independence. I would call it symbolic and behavioral independence, and this implies on some level at least what can be called both trans-personal and cross-cultural agreement.

In specifying these terms for the scientific definition of human culture, it can be seen that we have not come very far after all from a conventional definition of science that is tied to its empirical methodology and rational philosophy. And we can see that were we have arrived at is not so very different from where Thomas Kuhn arrived in his argument for the socially paradigmatic structure of scientific revolutions. Even if we more or less reject Kuhn's central thesis about how scientific knowledge becomes articulated in exclusive scientific communities, we must at least acknowledge in some minimal sense the role that scientific culture and community plays in shaping the direction of knowledge that this culture achieves by means of its normal and routine-operational praxis and its received views of the world.

Cultural indeterminancy is a critical concept underlying human knowledge systems, including those that are scientific, and the phenomenon that I have come to generally label as anthropological relativity of knowledge. We may say that culture is an inherently underdetermined pattern that prestructures both our world and our worldview, and that all knowledge we construct or derive about the world, is constrained by and grounded to the same cultural patterning. It perplexes our knowledge with a kind of existential uncertainty--we can attribute this sense of uncertainty to the fact of death and marginality of some experiences in our lives, but we can just as well apply to it the idea that cultural indeterminancy underlying our knowledge systems of whatever kind leaves us with rather shaky ground to stand upon.

The criteria of independence of observation and measurement upon which the notion of scientific objectivity (and its methods) is based, is the criteria of what can be called relative non-arbitrariness of our knowledge. In other words, if our knowledge or information or conclusions can be said to have been arbitrarily arrived at, by some means fair or foul, then it cannot fulfill the criteria of scientific objectivity. Non-arbitrary knowledge is information which exists and is confirmed independently of our own judgement about it. If a biologists runs an experiment expecting to find one kind of results, but in the course discovers another, totally different kind of result, that person is obliged then to report the result that was discovered and not merely what was expected. Of course, all too often, especially in statistical applications, expectations can have a way of influencing discovery and conclusions in ways that essentially represent a manipulation of the data in arbitrary ways. What is arbitrary can also be either unconscious or else just plain implicit to the social context of the experiment or the language within which the description, the experiment and its explanation, were derived. This is especially true when we commit in our train of thinking certain informal or even formal fallacies of logic, such as the hypostatization or reification of formal categories or typologies and the misplaced concreteness of culturally defined meanings. An entire theoretical paradigm, especially in the social sciences but even in the stricter physical sciences, can run aground on the rocks and shoals of unquestioned initial presuppositions and preconceived classifications and terminologies, especially when these notions and their implications are not carefully and critically thought out beforehand, but merely taken for granted as is.

Thus, arbitrariness or nonarbitrariness is itself a relative concept. If our knowledge were totally non-arbitrary, there would be no need for scientific curiousity and inquiry in the first place, much less the serendipity of scientific discovery. We would immediately and directly apprehend the total truth about natural reality, or else we would just be satisfied with our experience of this reality as is, without needing to apprehend its implicit patterns and structures in any larger frame of reference. On the other hand, it is the recognition, or at least the suspicion, of the arbitrariness of this or that point of view, that it is a perspective arrived at by our own means and imposed upon reality to shape it to our own devices and designs, that drives us forward to seek some alternative point of view that seems somewhat less arbitrary, and from the point of view of the natural patterning, a little closer at least to the actual truth of the natural patterning of reality, the thing in itself, and not just as we would have it be.

And cultural indeterminancy and its underlying anthropological relativity determines that for ourselves at least, the hardest realities to talk about in any non-arbitrary, scientific manner, are the realities about ourselves. By comparison it has been relatively easy, once the basic periodic table of the elements was unraveled from the evidence, to talk about atoms and their electrons and properties. Sense of non-arbitrariness about these kinds of physical descriptions, especially when set to mathematical terms and equations that work and that are empirically derivable, is far less suspect and in a sense less relative on this level that would be a similar sense of a definition of some periodic table of cultures that is based, for instance, on kinship or economic patterns. It is hard to argue the facts of measurement of a chemical reaction--it is much less difficult to argue the theoretical attributions of "facticity" to ethnographic descriptions or historical narratives of events. We can state this as a kind of fundamental principle about anthropological relativity and cultural indeterminancy of our knowledge systems:

The further removed or more distant the object of our observations and measuurement from ourselves, in kind or quality or property of pattern we observe, the more non-arbitrary hence more objective manner we can attribute "truth" to our facts.

The complementary antithesis of this is the opposite principle:

The closer our descriptions and observations are in kind or quality or property of pattern to ourselves, even in a social sense of reality, the less non-arbitrary and hence less objective the knowledge and the manner with which we can attribute "truth" to our facts.

It seems we can contrapose the mighty but small atom against the larger but weaker human upon the opposite ends of a spectrum that is defined by relative arbitrariness and certainty about knowledge. If we realize at some point that, as the only observers and knowers in town, all our knowledge is ultimately situated at the human end of the spectrum, then we can see the dilemma this results in terms of the inherent anthropological relativity of our knowledge systems. We can, as "pure" scientists pretend that this is not so, or, better yet, presume it away, but we cannot really escape its implications and consequences for our knowledge systems and the contraints that we must deal with in terms of the scientific discovery and definition of reality.

Problems of the past, present and future provide a framework for understanding humanity within a natural systems framework. The question of the Past is a kind of problem that is rooted in our own natural history, of our origins, the rise of our culture and civilizations, and their larger social context. It serves to guide us in our understanding of human systems in general, as a form of mechanical and efficient explanation for the way things are at present, and what they had been like before. It provides a larger context within which to interpret and evaluate individuals and different groups in terms of their behavior and their greater symbolic significance in the world.

Human systems are distinguished in natural systems theory by the formation of complex social patterns based upon human language and cognitive functions that result in behavior patterns the occur independently of any genetic predetermination. It is not to say that genetic factors may not have some influence in such patterning upon a basic level, but this influence is both adulterated by the heavy effect of environmental conditioning, that is a function of the basic evolved dependency of the human being in its ontogenetic development upon a human-mediated environment, as well as by the pleiotropic and polymorphic expression of complex behavioral patterns and organic structures underlying these patterns. Human systems are characterized by the invention and transmission of new information, that is culturally encoded and linguistically expressed, and that is independent of any biological mechanism of information storage or reproduction, or of selection and adaptation. This characterization entails that human systems involve ultimately a resort to the study of event structures and developmental patterns upon a level that can be said to be constituted by a form of natural and cultural history. In this way all social interactions are understood within a dynamic continuum of time and place.

Human systems theory can therefore be properly characterized as a form of historical science, and upon this level that is characterized by the derivative complexity of the phenomena in question, it is virtually impossible to formulate an exceptionless and tightly worded set of equations or propositions about them that would account for all human event structures in a sufficient manner. It appears that the best that can be accomplished in this manner in a methodological sense is the accurate recording of time and date, and of the location of the event, and an objective description of the form of the event itself in as much detail as possible. In a theoretical sense, the best that can be hoped for is a kind of historical paradigm of general rules that describe in a fairly clear manner, the main pattern of articulation of events. By paradigm, I am not referring to the Kuhnian paradigm with its theoretic, social and contructive components. Rather I refer to a kind of legal or lawyer's paradigm that governs a body of understanding and that roughly guides actions in certain fields or cases.

Social, psychological, cultural and other aspects of understanding of human systems are all contained within and referenced by the larger encompassing framework of human history, which is itself referenced within a framework of a natural history of the earth. By history, I am referring to the study of events and their structures through time, and more broadly, to the structure of the past patterns of events and their underlying determiniations. Any particular group or society is by definition found within a larger context of relations between other people, between people and the environment, and among themselves. Psychological event structures, no matter how subjectively solipsistic and idiosyncratic they may be, area also contained within the same overarching framework.

At the same time, we must understand the pivotal role that has been played by the development of human civilization and culture as a noetic event structure. At the center of this informational event patterning has been the organization of the human brain around a unique anthropomorphic trait complex that includes language, manual dexterity, human sexuality and sociality, bipedalism as well as the particular features of the human mind itself. To understand the developmental and progressive aspects of the development of human system, we must first see how knowledge structures and socially encoded informational systems have come into being, and that have allowed the integration and acquisition of new knowledge and information in reality. Human society has achieved a number of important adaptive "breakthroughs" that have led human evolutionary development in the direction of greater symbolic, cultural and social dependency. These breakthroughs have included tool technology, fire, use of habitations and clothing, domestication of various plants and animals for a variety of uses, inventions of boats, wheels, power generation of various forms, etc. The accumulative consequences of these breakthroughs has been such that they have led to the rise of human civilizations as regional structures and, more recently, even as globally integrative social patterns.

Human, or anthropological systems, present something of an anthropocentric view of such systems, and this reflects the fundamental anthropological relativity of our scientific knowledge more than any other aspect of natural systems theory. We would be hard pressed at this point to rename this basic area of stratification in the natural world in a manner that would not reflect some kind of anthropocentric bias about how such systems are organized and function. It will only be with the encounter of similar but alternative such systems, it seems now only through the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence, that we will be able to escape this problem fo anthropological relativity. We can predict that the likelihood exists that other similar systems will eventually be found and will emerge in the universe. These systems arose on earth as stochastically as the rain that falls under the right conditions of humidity, temperature and vapor pressure. In other words, given the right sequences of events leading up to such developments, and given the right set of conditional event structures, the repeated emergence of similar alternative systems should become available.

We know that biological systems are probably pretty rare in the universe, though in an infinite universe, thesesystems may themselves be infinite in number, though they are few and far between by our own standards. We can predict that for all the physical mass in the universe, only a very infinitesimal fraction of this mass at any one time will exist in the form of a living system. And we can also reasonably estimate that human-type systems are rare in biological history--after all, in the 3.5 billion year history of life on earth, they appear to have arisen only within less than a 3.5 million year framework, and the real evidence of human symbolic culture, primarily within the last 35 thousand years. The odds are probably pretty long indeed on the multiple, independent occurrence of intelligent, cultural constructing species of life within close proximity to one another in time and place. It is likely that if contact is to be made between different intelligent species in the universe, if this is what they can even be called, then it is mostly likely that the most advanced system will initiate and achieve discovery of other systems first. In our quest for alien intelligence and extra-terrestrial forms of life, if we do not receive some intelligent signal, then we can assume that the rarity value of human-type systems only increases with increasing time and space, and that we may after all be very near the top of the natural pyramid of systems, if not uniquely upon the top. The systems of life that we would encounter in such a case are likely to be those that have not yet evolved to higher forms of intelligent functioning, and which would probably be quite incapable of initiating contact with us.

On the other hand, if and when a different alien species initiates contact with us, we can assume almost by default that such a species will probably be more advanced in terms of its scientific civilization and possibly evolutionarily more intelligent than ourselves. We are then likely to find ourselves overmatched and outwitted, though I could not see why such a contest would have to lead to violence or be destructive unless such a species had imperial or colonial pretensions in mind. More likely, we are likely to find such a species more curious and fascinated with us than we are with them anyway, or at least there should be a reciprocal relationship of mutual interest and a desire to establish communication not only across species boundaries, but across the boundaries of totally different kinds of life-systems.

How exotic might cosmo-genic species be compared to species original to the earth system? There is some convincing reasons to suggest that such life-forms may not be too different after all from ourselves. Many examples of convergent evolution demonstrate functional stream-lining to standard forms that represent optimal adaptive solutions to particular contexts. It can be assumed that an intelligent creature would have large brains, and probably bilateral symmetry, such that the brains would be located in the head, and there would be sets of appendages, probably, like mammals, four in number, etc. There is reason to think as well that some form of sophisticated communication system based on sound would have been evolved, and that the creatures would be social like ourselves, etc. There is also reason to think that such a system would be carbon-based and would respire oxygen, etc., because there are chemical principles in organic chemistry that determine these to also be optimal kinds of solutions to problems of chemical energy requirements necessary for the metabolism of living systems.

The degree to which variation of pattern may be involved, and at what level, in the formation of different kinds of biological systems may depend as much upon the bio-geophysical substrate of the planet on which such forms take hold, as upon anything else. Also, it is clear that we do not clearly know the degree to which biological systems are stochastically and complexly underdetermined as systems. On a genetic level of organization, living systems in fact appear to be highly determined. Chaos occurs at each higher level, at the level of organismic systems and super-organic systems. Still, it is next to impossible to say in any definitive manner how much of the variation we encounter in life forms and patterns has been due purely to chance and how much to a kind of blind evolutionary problem solving that leads to a convergence of similar kinds of results.

We can in other words expect a broad convergence of form and function, composition and metabolism, of life that has undergone independent bio-genesis in other places of the universe. At the same time we can expect many particular divergences along certain trait lines, and this may even take some surprising and unexpected twists and turns of the evolutionary rope.

Whatever such creatures may look like, what will count will be the organization and functioning of their brains and their intelligence. In this, we must ask how much their cognitive processes will be like that of human beings, and how different may it all be. It cannot be though that the organization of brain function of such creatures would be similar or exactly like that of human beings, nor even the patterning of brain function follow the same neural pathways, etc. The critical issue, I believe, would be in what we might call the structure of thought of such creatures. Would their mental organization resemble ours in some ways and not in others? We would expect, out of necessity, that such a pattern of organization would be fundamentally symbolic as our own can be said to be, but this symbolic structure may not precisely match our own symbolic patterns of consciousness and knowledge organization.

We will not be able to describe human-type systems in any other way than by using our own anthropological examples until if and when we actually do encounter some alien form of intelligence in the universe. The best we can accomplish in the interim is to study the systems of other intelligent life forms on earth, like primates, cetaceans, and other mammals in particular that demonstrate some remarkable qualities of intelligence. This is at best a partial solution to the problem, because none of these other forms of life exhibit what can be called true language, culture or symbolic cognition. By "true" of course we are led back to the same basic conundrum of our own anthropological relativity, because whatever is considered "true" is done so only from implicit comparison to human language, culture and cognition.

We can assume that other human-type systems will resemble our own in some basic ways, and will probably be quite different from our own in many other, especially derivative respects. The model of human-type systems that we develop from an objective description of anthropological realities can be said to be more-or-less applicable to all human-type systems, to the extent that we are able to control the bias of the anthropological relativity of our own point of view. This anthropological relativity is not just a matter of an anthropocentric world-view and attitudes that overvalue our own constructions of reality. It is a matter that affects the very way we perceive and conceive of reality, and how we construct and do our sciences.

To a great extent, the mediational function of culture has largely been ignored or unaddressed in any scholarly manner. Many studies allude to it, but almost none, with but a few noteworthy exceptions, deal with the issue in any direct or decisive manner. Evidence suggests that mediation of reality is one of the principle, if not the central, function of culture in the first place. This can be justified evolutionarily in terms of natural human history and it can be found to be equally applicable today in the most advanced systems that have ever existed.

This mediation function of culture arises from its symbolic processes of integration of reality, and it can be found to occur at different levels and serving different kinds of ends. We may thus see that the mediation function of knapping a point from a core and hafting it to the end of an arrow in order to kill the next available buffalo or deer, is upon a fundamental symbolic level little different from the priest who chants a passage from the bible every night in prayer before turning into bed. The purposes and consequences may be different, but the symbolic mediational aspects of both processes are very similar in form and function.

Because I believe the mediative aspects of culture have largely been ignored and left unaddressed as serious scientific issues, the capacity and potential to "capitalize" upon these critical facets of human society and culture have been somewhat unrecognized and unrealized. These intermediative aspects of cultural integration can proceed upon different levels as well. Analytically, I will recognize four basic levels that can be further subdivided: 1. The individual; 2. The family; 3.The community or group; 4. Inter-community or inter-group relations. We can find symbolic and cultural mediational functions occurring and articulated upon each of these levels as well as between these different levels. Furthermore, we can find language in various forms as a communication medium that facilitates this mediative function. News programs and newspapers are excellent examples of communication that serves a mediative function--in this case it goes beyond merely "informing" a reader or viewer about events in the world. It serves to reinforce the individual's own psychological constructions about the world and that person's relationship to a larger world. Events that happen far away can become intensely personalized even if there is no other than symbolic connection to the event.

The mediative function of culture can be said to accomplish the following kinds of ends:

1. stress reduction, both psychologically and socially

2. to reinforce relational patterns

3. to minimize and channel aggression

4. to prevent and remedy conflict (sometimes to promote conflict)

5. to promote and organize cooperation for different ends

6. to organize knowledge, values, meaning structures and behaviors within a symbolically shared framework

The foundation for a metaculture in reality rests upon the fact that whatever the cultural differences between different kinds of knowledge systems and the fields of scholarship in which they are articulated, all of them share a common cultural foundation and substrate in terms of their symbolic structure and function. This foundation can be potentially exploited in the development of new systems, or rather, of an alternative system that does not seek to displace previous systems, but only to complement them in a constructive or at least non-destructive manner.

Metaculture in other words exploits and realizes the mediational function of cultural patterning, but in a manner that does not entail the degree of constraint and exclusive integration of composite systems in the manner that traditional or conventional cultural patterning achieves. It is not designed or designer culture, with implications of haute couture. It is rather only the development of a system for alternative symbolization that is designed to rest on top of other systems of symbolization without necessarily an destrctive interference between these different systems.

The core of the metaculture is the metasystem and natural systems theory and philosophy.