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<body> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="6"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHROPOLOGIA</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Essays in the Anthropology of Knowledge</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Brush Script MT" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">If you touch the elephant,</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">feel all over.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">It's greatness is more</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">than one hand may reach.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">It's body is too much</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">to hold in both hands.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">By these human standards</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">of measurement,</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">perhaps it is fitting</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">that the proverbial Elephant</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">should be old, wise</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and have a long memory.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">By Hugh M. Lewis</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">This is another e-publication by Lewis Micro-Publishing.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright 2000 by Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">(Copies of this text may be printed for personal, professional or classroom use only)</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Outline Of Contents</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#one">INTRODUCTION <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropological Construction of Reality</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#two">PART I <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Human Construction of Anthropology</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#three">I. Anthropology as Anthropologia</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#four">II. Anthropology as Philosophy</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#five">II. Anthropology as Academia</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#six">IV. Anthropology as History</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#seven">V. Anthropology as Biology</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#eight">VI. Anthropology as Mind</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#nine">PART II <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Human Construction</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#ten">VII. The Anthropology of Language</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#eleven">VIII. The Anthropology of Psychology</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#twelve">IX. The Anthropology of Abnormality</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#thirteen">X. The Anthropology of Culture</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#fourteen">XI. The Anthropology of Society</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#fifteen">XII. The Anthropology of Humanity</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologia.htm#sixteen">XIII. Conclusion: <p ALIGN="CENTER">An Outline of a Theory of the</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropological Construction of Reality</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="one">INTRODUCTION</p> </a></font><a NAME="one"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION of REALITY</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This collection of essays comes to focus upon the Anthropology of Knowledge;, including theoretical problems of the differential distribution of knowledge and ways of knowing in our world, how knowledge may be historically and culturally situated, how it may change in some ways and remain unchanged in others. It concerns the problem of human acquisition of cultural knowledge, and the influence of our biology upon how we know, and even what we may know. It also deals with the so-called "worldview problem" and the related problem of the epistemological status of "common sense." It treats the problem presented by artificial intelligence, the problem of "mind" and the possibility of different "mindscapes." It also broaches the problem of the anthropological construction of reality, the problem of "collective representations," of symbols, symbolization and symbol systems, mythology, ritual, religion and magic, the unanswered question of the relativity and universality of structures of knowledge. It deals with the problem of the representation of knowledge versus the presentation of experience, the problem of the "history of knowledge," the role of emotion, alternative states of consciousness, and pathology in knowledge. It concerns the problems of structure and meaning, the strategic, evolutionary and cultural status of knowledge, its function, its natural design, and how human knowledge systems may constitute "complex adaptive systems" that are cybernetically self-sustaining and evolving.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though there are, have been and will long continue to be many unanswered questions, there has been significant research achieved in many different fields of inquiry which provide many critical insights into the general problem of human knowing and knowledge. The anthropology of knowledge is not just interested in the myths, taxonomies, kinship or superstitions of exotic indigenous cultures. It is a uniquely interdisciplinary approach that offers a means for tying together the work in many separate areas to coherently address the more central problem of "what is human reality" as this is defined as a product of our human knowledge and capacity to know.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The Anthropology of Knowledge thus offers an unprecedented degree of systematic integration of the wealth and confusing complexity of information and understanding which is only available if one crosses many academic boundaries. It offers the additional advantage of achieving such general theoretical order while remaining as close as any discipline has gotten to its central object of empirical study, the human being and its human-made world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The purpose of these essays then is not only to suggest that such an order may be possible, but that it is already available in a roughly recognizable, if unfinished, state. The object of these essays then is to provide in a systematic, succinct and "objective" manner a set of theories and insights that are or strongly seem to be supported by empirical evidence drawn from different fields of inquiry. Except for one section of essays treating the issue of the paradoxes and reflexivity of human knowledge, these essays stay away from currently fashionable questions regarding the "post-structuralist" and "post-positivist" or "post-humanist" critique of "objective human knowledge" as well as the problems of the a-historicity of anthropological knowledge, or its anti-subjective character and the lack of a ground for "subjective" knowledge in the human sciences. Though these questions are interesting and important in their own right, and cannot be ignored in a larger view of the anthropology of knowledge, they remain unresolved and irresolvable within the framework of the objectives of this collection of essays, and tend to muddy up what otherwise may be a rather clear picture of human knowing and knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These are designed to suggest new insights and possibilities of thinking about some very old and complex problems which have been at the center of much spilt ink in anthropology and related disciplines of psychology and social science, not to forget philosophy, linguistics, history, literary theory. Though the currents in the field have been shifting, as the world rapidly develops towards its own ends, these essays represent some 'problematical issues' in the field which remain perennial, if not classical, favorites.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As an anthropological concern, the problem of making sense of Human reality is infinitely complex. There are no simple solutions or pat formulas that will cover all cases and explain all possible facets. We cannot simply say that all human reality is symbolic or metaphorical without thereby being over-reductionistic. It is not satisfying enough to leave the issue with the answer that human reality is inherently ambiguous or paradoxical and is therefore unresolvable in terms appropriate to science. It is not enough to claim that anything or everything in human reality is relative, without then stipulating precisely what it is is relative to.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is little hope of progress in our ideas or our world if we hold that the principle of progress is intrinsically evil or that all ideas are equally interesting and equally representative of the reality they claim to explain, and if we refuse to acknowledge the validity of any and all criteria, or claim that because no criteria can be completely, purely objective, no criteria for the evaluation of our ideas are available or acceptable. Our minds are not well served if we leave problems of understanding human realities as irremedially political, asymmetrical or ideological.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, our science is not well served either by simplistic notions which reduce the complex subtleties of human reality to simple schematic diagrams and to highly hypothetical and eidectic 'Structures' or 'Systems' which are claimed to be directly invisible and yet to underlie the patterning of all our experiences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To claim that there are no simple solutions is not the same as saying there are no possible solutions whatsoever. What is called for is sophistication, not simplification, and elaboration, not reduction. To say that our human sciences lack the same level or criteria of absoluteness of objectivity of knowledge found in the physical sciences is not to say that such criteria of relative objectiveness is not possible. To claim that all knowledge is bound by hermeneutic horizons of ideological representation and psycho-social construction is not to conclude that our human sciences lack any empirical foundation or any kind of objective coherence independent of those who know of it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To reverse what is rapidly becoming a trite cliche' of the post-structuralist critics of the social sciences, "the possibility of translation is its impossibility." Anthropology, with its panoptic anthropologos, may have been born and brought up within a colonial mentality, and contemporary anthropology may remain a post-colonial compromise. Colonial imperialism of our bygone era has been supplanted by a new kind of economic imperialism of a hegemonic capitalist world system that promises to generate greater and greater social asymmetries in the process of its modernization and development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But not all anthropology is the handmaiden of modern development, and not all development anthropology is equally the servant of USAID. Those who want to destroy anthropology by their destructive criticism somehow fail to appreciate the point that anthropological knowledge can be a tool as much as it may be a weapon, that it can be used for beneficial purposes in combating human evil as readily as it can be employed for the perpetration of evil in the world. We must take the contemporary critique of anthropology seriously, but we must not take it so seriously that it stultifies our anthropological sense of balance and proportionality about human reality. Taken as a lens or a mirror it can be used to sharpen and clarify our field of view, to assist us in exercising our judgement about what is right and wrong with the world. But taken as a scientific substitute for our humanity it can only blunt the edge of our vision.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If Anthropology has somehow failed, it has done so in its inability to keep pace with the amount of change happening in the modern world epoch. Its empire has come home, and all those people who were once upon the periphery of civilization have instead become incorporated if unequal citizens of a world system that is completely impersonal and increasingly exploitative and consumptive of both human and physical resources. The peasant of the countryside has now become the urban migrant of the city-scape, and social entities once described as "cultures" have become but ethnic enclaves and ethnically organized social institutions competing with one another for increasingly scarce resources.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology can no longer afford the elite snobbery of dealing exclusively with the foreign, the exotic and the bizarre to the neglect of the immediate, the familiar and the commonplace. Anthropology can catch up with all the changes of its world, and can amend its practices, methods and theories to better serve the understanding of human reality as it is and has become, instead of what it might have been or is supposed to be. Anthropology, always an ambivalently mixed discipline, can still be servant to both science and humanity at the same time.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural psychology is a relatively new and emerging orientation within anthropology that nevertheless is the direct descendent of a long tradition of an older Culture and Personality and psychological anthropology, as well as those ethnoscientific approaches that fall under the rubric of 'cognitive anthropology'. As such, cultural psychology reiterates a basic theme that has been the unifying impetus of these anthropological sub-fields--the theory of cultural relativity as originally espoused by Ruth Benedict, and the related linguistic relativity hypothesis. But it does so with a renewed awareness of the shortcomings of the old concepts of modal personality or basic personality structure, of the possibilities for organically based universal structures of cognition and perceptual awareness and for the important limitations of the conception of relativity in cross-cultural contexts and comparison.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural psychology emerges as a fertile and renewed interest in old problems that have plagued cultural anthropologists for several generations and which had served as a unifying focus for those anthropologists who distinguish themselves as "cultural." It plays with new conceptions of cultural cognition and cultural models, of post-modern notions of relativism, of culture and psychology as construction. It also deals with the reflexivity of an anthropology of knowledge, a new sophistication and interest in ethno-semantics and general basic categories of cognition in naming and classification, in applications of artificial intelligence, and in methodological problematic of hypothesis testing and empirical verification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural psychology emerges as a field that is of central and focal theoretical interest for general anthropology as a whole. It is neither a residual category of study to be defined away as merely a cross-cultural variant of scientific psychology, the purview of a "transcultural psychiatry," or the derivative of either structuralist or post-structuralist theory. Cultural psychology has come to represent the primary field of convergent interests at the theoretical and empirical center of rather diverse fields of study such as cross-cultural psychology, trans-cultural psychiatry, ethno-science, social psychology, symbolic anthropology, psychological anthropology, artificial intelligence, systems theory, and sub-disciplines of linguistics including psycho-linguistic, socio-linguistic, ethno-linguistics, the ethnography of speaking and communication, discourse analysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, constructivism and critical theory, Gender studies, psychic and psychedelic anthropology and the study of paranormal psychology, the anthropology of power, hermeneutics and textual studies, philosophy, history, including psycho-history, ethno-history, social history, oral history, life history, the study of ethnicity, transactional anthropology and the anthropology of performance, psycho-geography and cultural geography</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural psychology contains and effectively combines elements from many different fields of study, but it is not exclusively any one of these. It stands on its own as inherently complex, cross-disciplinary, multi-dimensional and multi-faceted in its concerns--and yet it also stands as a unified and systematic study of the foundations and varieties of the human experience and the human condition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural psychology also takes as its central concern the problematic interconnections of what is glossed as 'The World View Problem," including the problem of human acquisition, cultural conditioning and constraint, interpersonal variation, intercultural variation, problems of personality, or personal identity, individuality and psychology, the study of emotion, cognition, perception, imagination, reason, creativity, etc., the question of the centrality of the role of language in the articulation and inter-mediation between culture and cognition, status-role positioning, the problem of normality/abnormality and "deviance," the problem of cross-cultural contact, acculturative processes, the related problem of change, the role of environment and the ecological foundations of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The study of cultural psychology can be effectively entered from any number of different directions, and can take as thematically predominant any of several basic dimensions. But the value of understanding cultural psychology is best gained from a generalist point of view that considers synthetically many different possible perspectives as if forming a central paradigm of study.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The study of cultural psychology has wider implications that reach into many important facets of the world. Its value extends beyond its own interdisciplinary matrix to include general and regional issues of political economy, social structure, world history and civilization, and the problematic of understanding human evolution, global ecology and changing social relations within a world-wide context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The perspective of cultural psychology is proffered as an alternative form of science and as an anthropological antidote to anthropology--its claims are to a basically scientific status, but one that is not directly derivative of a physical sciences model or of a biological basis in reality or human nature. Theoretically and methodologically, it constitutes a third culture which may be defined by its inbetweenness as "part-science" and "part-humanity," but which also stands separately on its own.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must either accept a broader, more basic definition for what constitutes science, or else risk jettisoning our strictly positivistic notions of science for the sake of maintaining a vital and productive understanding of the principles and process of human action in the world. We may say that cultural psychology is at once an historical science of humankind and a theoretical and empirical philosophy about the human condition. It has scientific as well as metaethical implications. It is based upon a general orientation towards knowledge that fits science into a larger, inclusive "meta-paradigmatic" framework, which it shares with other general approaches. It is based upon a different framework for science than is conventionally recognized--a science of such scope and power that it can cross disciplinary boundaries without the loss of resolution that accompanies narrow specialization and sub-specialization.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">My experience as an anthropologist of academia has led me to conclude that a distinction between the "Two Cultures" may be an important one that nonetheless frequently gets overlooked for what it may actually imply, as well as the possibility of some "Third Culture" with characteristic aspects like that of Anthropology a d other social sciences that rest uncomfortably upon both horns. There is much evidence to suggest that people in the sciences and humanities are doing very little talking to one another, and a great deal of talking past and through each other. Scientists and poets are not only dealing differently with the same reality, but they are dealing with different realities. Not has it only and simply been a problem of translation, but there often seems to be no common ground upon which commensurable terms or understandings can be based. As an anthropologist, I've frequently enough felt the loneliness of being of neither camp, and in the sometimes hopeless effort to mediate between them, often being treated as a traitor in both.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These basic differences of Worldview must be taken as fundamental, and as underlying many of the other differences due to narrow academic specialization and disciplinary sub-specialization. But the issue of these basic differences becomes especially acute when it becomes a matter of trying somehow to desperately resolve them and strike some kind of conciliatory compromise when members of both encampments sit upon the same dissertation committee.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The more traditional academic boundaries no longer best serve the best intellectual interests of the academic community--thus we may find an academic world order in which physicists practice philosophy, philosophers preach science, anthropologists do biology, biologists attempt sociology, etc., etc. Perhaps everything would be best if everyone just stayed well within their proper places, but human beings seem unable to do so for very long. The larger, deeper currents of dialectic which are threatening to pull Academia apart at the seams, are sweeping through entire programs and departments across the country like some kind of disease or, worse, civil war. And in such conditions, the only loser is one who comes between.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These essays treat diverse topics, but they are unified about a central theme of the interdisciplinary structure of objective anthropological knowledge. The question of anthropology as science will be left aside, because it will be presumed to be so, from the presupposition of an "objective" anthropology, though indirectly this question will be implicitly addressed in each one of the essays in relation to the bearing that its interdisciplinary relation may have upon such a question.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must reserve a notion of what is generally scientific in a broad-based field like anthropology until a wider field of view can be had that necessarily embraces all the interdisciplinary horizons of its knowledge. We cannot because of this seriously entertain a "paradigmatic" conception of a "mature", theoretically unified, "puzzle-solving" science of Anthropology. We must find anthropology situated somewhere between the strict "puzzle-solving" orientation of the mathematical sciences and the "paradox-resolving" orientation of the literate humanities. We must look for a "problem-posing" orientation which combines some of each.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may find such social dialectics at the level of sub-disciplinary specialization within the field, but when we refer to Anthropology in general, we are challenged with a level of conceptual organization and diversity that must be managed in a more suitable manner. If the social dialectics that prevail at this cross-disciplinary level of interchange is to be called "paradigmatic," then we must seek a modified conception of what such paradigmatic process at this level must entail. If we cannot broaden our notion of scientific paradigms, then perhaps we should abandon it altogether, at least in the special case of anthropology. And if we abandoned the label "paradigm," then what more appropriate designation can we find to take its place?</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="two">Part I</p> </a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"><a NAME="two"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The HUMAN CONSTRUCTION of ANTHROPOLOGY</a></p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We are all anthropologists under the skin.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot clearly separate the question of the anthropological construction of reality from the construction of anthropology. How we construe the world anthropologically will define and be defined by how we construe our anthropology in the world. Anthropology defines its own region of knowledge and collective mentality, one that is situated strategically amongst other regions of understanding and study. In however relative a manner, we must locate this region and mark out some of its borders.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="three">I.</p> </a></font><a NAME="three"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology as Anthropologia</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">If we see an egg as essentially round, then it won't matter what end it is broken on, but the real dilemma is trying to imagine what's inside the egg without breaking its shell at all.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">"Anthropologia" about Anthropology suggests a kind of reflexiveness that is often heard about, but nowhere fully explained, within the corridors of anthropology during the last decade. But the kind of reflexiveness that the title of this essay refers to is a special case which must be considered separately from the more general issues of a "post-modern" perspective upon anthropologos. The title refers to a necessary point of entry in this work, the doorway upon the world of anthropology that is both part of the larger world and yet which simultaneously constitutes its own separate world of knowledge. The two worlds which anthropology embraces--the anthropology of the world and the world of anthropology--comprise parallel but only partially contiguous planes of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropologia of anthropology attempts to construe, in as objective a manner a possible, the relationship of anthropological knowledge to anthropology as part of the world itself, especially where there may be a strong sense of "discontinuity" between the two. It confronts what may perhaps be the ultimate relativity of our knowledge in the sense that when we refer to the anthropological knowledge of the anthropology of knowledge, or to the anthropological construction of the anthropological construction of reality. We thus are attempting to "push the bus that we are riding on." We must somehow study the contents of our anthropological egg without breaking its shell.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">How is this possible? It is something which only people, as the creatures of ineffable paradox, seem to be capable. It entails the acquired skill of passing back and forth between the thin membrane separating the external world of anthropology and the internal anthropological world. It is something that most anthropologists as field workers are supposed to be doing some of the time--while being able to transfer some of the objective sense of the one back into the subjective realities of the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It entails an ultimate form of "betwixtness" that most professional anthropologists, as professionals, seldom fully achieve. It entails the skill of remaining a marginal observer of the inside world of anthropology, while also being a marginal participant in the outside world. From the fully insider's point of view, it is like someone standing on the outside of a window looking in upon the life of the anthropologist--from the fully outsider's point of view it is like someone at the inside of a window looking out. It is the kind of reflexive perspective that one achieves upon the very threshold of anthropology as both a science of the world and a way of life in the world. This is not to merely expose the soft subjective underbelly of the hard-shelled back of anthropological objectivity, but also to render hard-edged and objective what otherwise remains softly in the shadows.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The reflection we bear in the mind's eye is not always isomorphic with the image in the mirror we bear in mind.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology as praxis, as "discourse" is always "situated" somewhere in the world. Because of its inescapable sense of being situated it must always confront and cope with the paradoxes presented by its own "historicity" in both the "linguisticality" of and "facticity" about the world. In other words, it must construe its anthropological knowledge in and of and about the world as inherently ideological, and therefore always tainted by many possibly unpleasant political implications.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can concoct different theories about the ideological status and character of the knowledge of anthropology in the world, whether it is politically intentional or functionally unavoidable or structurally ambiguous or ethically ambivalent--and we can thus reject anthropology as a "legitimate" science (but maybe not as a "science of legitimation") on the basis of these theories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Of course, anthropology can effectively reconstruct and integrate the marginal other as an artifact, as specimen, as a sideshow, as a token of lost worlds, or even as knowledge embodied, while simultaneously serving to help "nihilate" the other as a human being, and anthropology can submit itself to all kinds of those mythological reversals of realities which only anthropologists seem capable of understanding. Only anthropologists can accomplish the cultural contortion of estranging the familiar at the same time they make familiar the strange. But we must ask if this is really all that anthropology can do in their constructions of the world, if anthropologists should limit their activities as ring masters of the circus of cultures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must legitimately inquire about our own legitimacy as anthropologists--and all humans are at sometime in their lives anthropologists--we must seek the legitimacy of our illegitimacy rather than the illegitimacy of our legitimacy which our critics seem quick to point out.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A blink may not always be a wink, but a wink must always also be a blink</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The internal world of anthropology must be seen as always a special case built upon the external anthropology of the world. A science of anthropology must acknowledge and submit to the same "hierarchy of determinations" that ultimately controls the natural order of the world. This sets up for anthropological knowledge a certain sense of precedence and priority for its understanding of both the world and of itself--certain basic "facts" must fall into place before more elaborate data and relations can be derived. Human culture and human beings may not simply obey all the "laws of nature" very well, but they certainly cannot contradict them without suffering the consequences. And perhaps in the achieved wisdom of our post-modern era we are finally beginning to realize some of these anthropological convictions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The "hierarchy of determinations" that we attribute scientifically to the natural order of the world may be a necessary predicate to our objective anthropological knowledge, but by itself it is always insufficient for our understanding of the world. In this sense, in anthropology the Difference always makes a crucial difference. To deny the significance of such difference is to commit the common anthropological fallacy of reductionism, a form of oversimplification of complex realities which leads us to see people as machines, as animals, as ants, as cells, as genes, as anything but human, and to regard society anatomically and physiologically as a biological organism. This fallacy of reductionism assures anthropology of its own lapse into the world of theoretical trivia.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The only solution to the error of over-simplification that occurs when anthropology submits itself to the hierarchy of determinations is to advance a kind of sophistication, and concomitant sophistry, which conveniently side steps the entire clash of contradictory levels of determination. A wink may, in the final analysis, really only be a blink, but it is the inevitable difference that the wink makes which is most interesting for anthropologists--any mammal with eyelids may blink, but only humans, and perhaps hominids, wink.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sophistication with which anthropologists must strive to overcome scientific simplification, is that which is tied up with the sense of the critical "human difference"--and it is the sophistry about this difference with which anthropologists can effect the transcendence of their own anthropological, "human-bound" horizons.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The only assurance that the "hierarchy of determinations" guarantees for anthropology is that its knowledge will always consist of an intrinsically interesting and internally infinite subset of a larger world of "things" and their relations. In the world of anthropology, we will always be faced with the paradox of having nothing but a wink, and something more than a blink.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The anthropology of knowledge is situated within the knowledge of anthropology-- the limits of human knowledge itself constitutes the horizon of anthropological knowledge.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The situation of the anthropology of knowledge begins with the situatedness of the formal, informal and pragmatic knowledge of anthropology in the world. We must inquire therefore into the nature of the boundaries that mark out that region of mindscape we call anthropology, and its relationship on a larger map of Mind with other fields of knowledge. Furthermore, we must ask whether this entire conceptual cosmos which we refer to as "mind" including all the fields and sub-fields that it contains, has some underlying structural sense of order about it, or whether it is not just the long-term product of a long, highly elaborate historical tradition of "geist" in the production and "modes" of information about the world. Every field of knowledge has its own separate sense of history, of its "founding fathers" and main pinnacles of achievement, as well as some sense, however solid or implicit, of where it stands in relation to other fields of inquiry.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must seriously consider the anthropological possibilities in the boundaries of our knowledge, the dialectics that maintain these boundaries, in the patterning and order of our knowledge in the world. There is a sense of growing institutional specialization of sub-fields and intersections between fields. The basis of specialization seems rooted in the inherent limits of the human capacity to maintain a sufficient expertise over a restricted domain of information in the world. Has the institutionalization and specialization which has accompanied the expansion of knowledge in the world, and the way that this knowledge has become organized, been an entirely fortuitous consequence of historical tradition. Do the boundaries of our knowledge reflect anything important about what we know of the world and how we know it. In this sense we must see Mind and the cumulative stock of knowledge in the world as preeminently a socio-cultural phenomena--we are born into a human-constructed universe of meanings and symbolism that we transmit and modify in their reconstruction.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropological knowledge rests on the foundation of knowing that we do not know.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is the anthropology of knowledge, what is its importance in the anthropological understanding of human reality? The anthropology of knowledge takes its cue from the sociology of knowledge as this has been developed into a distinctive sub-discipline of Sociology, as well as from its own background of a tradition of interest in the "mind of the native" and the native point of view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The viewpoint which the anthropology of knowledge; critiques is the received structuralist notion of the "psychic unity of humankind". It has been empirically demonstrated that even on the level of the biological functioning of the brain, there are major differences between the way males and females may think, or between how children and adults, or how mentally normal and abnormal individuals may think. These differences have to a limited extent been carried to the level of cultural differences. What the notion of the "psychic unity of humankind" was devised to defeat was the ethnocentric fallacy of "primitive mentality" and the genetic determinism that attempted to link innate intelligence and human capability to false notions of race. In the former sense the notion of the "psychic unity of humankind" has some validity when we consider humans as a single species sharing the same basic organic physiology, or when we consider that all human languages are, structurally, equally complex, sophisticated and potentially expressive. We have some evidence that suggests basic cognitive or developmental universals--the acquisition of color terms, for example, and perhaps of other "basic" conceptual categories. Likewise we know that all humans have an equal capacity for language and culture, and for symbolization, capacities which they may realize in many widely divergent and equally interesting ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In short, we may say that the anthropology of knowledge is interested in the differential distribution of knowledge and human ways of knowing worldwide. It is especially interested in the ways in which such knowledge may be biologically predetermined and constrained in basic ways, culturally "constructed" and "situated" within a larger continuum of change and social interaction. It is interested furthermore in how different peoples may come to construct different cognitive, conceptual and symbolic realities, and how this may even influence the "presentation" of knowledge upon the level of human perception. In this regard, the notion of the "world-view problem" and of "common sense" are construed as central problems around which the anthropology of knowledge are focused.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of knowledge is also, perforce, concerned with the "psychological construction" of reality, the "psychology of knowledge" and of the nature of the relationship between the individual human being and its world. By extension it must also be concerned with a wider-based "socio-cultural psychology" which is concerned with the way human beings, as members of certain groups, come to define their social relations and interactions. This leads back to the traditional concerns which involve the problems of ethnocentrism and the culture boundness of knowledge, the problems of acquisition and the nature-nurture dilemma, the questions of the function and structure of collective representations, mythology, magic, ritual and human symbolization may play in how human beings impose order upon their world, and keep out disorder. In all of this, we must yet resolve the more basic question of the anthropological relativity versus human universality of knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology must unmake a world of its own making in order to then remake it.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Theory about the Anthropology of Knowledge comes to focus upon what can legitimately be called the anthropological construction of human reality. Borrowing from the notion of the social construction of reality, we may locate several important general themes of this theory.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language as an ongoing discursive phenomenon, and as the physical embodiment of conceptual knowledge, is at the center of this process of construction of reality--knowledge is deposited in language, and language is the principle means for the communication and maintenance of the subjectively construed validation of knowledge in human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The flow of experience in the anthropological construction of reality is phenomenologically and temporally ordered, and from this standpoint must be considered in terms of "praxis" and process that is historically patterned.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropological construction of reality is analytically separated into three phases of these processes that conjoin in the same moment at which socio-cultural reality reproduces itself in the individual via acquisition. These phases are anthropological externalization of reality, social institutionalization of the externalized reality, and the psychological internalization of the human-made institutional order. As previously asserted, language is the principle mechanism mediating these different processes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The externalization of reality involves the principle of human-openness, the notion of the basic natural unfinished aspect of human character that permits the possibility for externalized development of culture. Humans make themselves in the world by constructing an external order in the world. The process of ritualization and habituation, in which individuals come to reinforce one another's patterns of externalized activity, tends to ossify and embed the process into a corporate form. These basic processes of human activity become bound within and defined by the development of a traditional order and the processes of social institutionalization that reinforce the primary external order. Secondary processes of symbolic integration and legitimization, based in the process of reification, reinforce the level of primary institutions. Reification permits humans to construe the human-made reality as if it were the necessary and natural scheme of things--i.e. as if it were other than human-made. Internalization and subjectivation are attended by the processes of acquisition and socialization of the individual, and the creation of a subjective coherent order of reality that also embodies the externally constructed and reified universe. Because humans are by nature unfinished, these process of subjectivation, involving identification and integration of the individual in society, is never perfect or finished business.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is in these processes a basic dialectic involving the force of human culture and the biological being of the human being, as well as another dialectic between the processes of individuation involved in the internalization and the process of externalization. These basic dialectics set up the basic anthropological process which are referred to as socio-cultural dynamics. There is a continuous tension between the efforts of culture to become embedded in the character of the individual, and for the nature of the human to exert it self in a significant, vital way in the effective world. The depth of the process is attested to by the extent to which cultural appetites and aversions can become rooted in the individual to the point of physical consequences, and to the extent that psychological processes that have an internal source in the biological being of the individual can become displaced and inextricably entangled in the external scheme of things--in fetishes and emblems of identity.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The sea of reality in which we must all swim for survival is composed of the currents and tides of meanings we have made.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological process refers to those basic dialectics in the anthropological construction of reality, and the resulting patterns of human history that they order. We can recognize in these dialectics the basic elements of world-openness and a sense of being unfinished, of externalization, institutionalization, symbolization, reification, internalization, identification, etc. But we must also see that anthropological process is composed, at different levels of social order, of different processes that are dialectically interactive with one another to create the kind of stochastic complexity that we know as human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These levels can be referred to as organic process, involving the evolutionarily defined, and culturally modified process of human growth and development, the process of culturation involving both primary and secondary processes of enculturation, social process which is linked to institutionalization and the transmission of culture, and what can be referred to as "transculturation" or the process of human historical civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to understand each of these processes as separate and yet also interrelated in the reproduction of human reality. The overall patterning of relationship which is referred to as anthropological process must be considered as the integrated and synergistic conjunction of the other processes. Its understanding can only be approached from a point of view that is holistic and synthetic, and therefore requires a theory that adequately incorporates these principles. The patterning of this overall process must also be seen to be constitutive of the principle horizon of our anthropological knowledge, in the sense that we cannot easily set ourselves beyond the stream or scope of its historical influence in our lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a critical sense in which the reality of the individual figures in the center of anthropological process, as determined by it and also as an influence within it. Theory of anthropological process comes into sharp focus in the manner that the separate processes become bound up within the life of the individual--the larger historical streams of the world come to concentrate their force in the biographical stream of the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Our window upon the world is the veil of our own consciousness.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are confronted with a central, basic paradox in our knowledge of anthropology. This is the inherent transparency of the constructs in which our knowledge and experience of the world is embedded and becomes expressed. We lead lives in a kind of necessary illusion of the order of the world. Our vision of the world is always distorted by the lens through which its light is diffracted and diffused. Experience comes to us filtered through our senses, our cognition and our language, and we cannot easily undue this filter or step beyond its purview in order to clearly experience reality in and of itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The screens of consciousness are not the only horizon which we must strive to penetrate in our anthropological window onto the world, because consciousness itself is embedded in a much broader and deeper unconscious and cultural stream which channel the flow of our world beyond our control. These horizons lie beyond the bounds of our own awareness, and must also be penetrated before we can gain an anthropological window upon the world. It seems as if the mechanism for doing so is nevertheless the same in all cases. As consciousness is the mediator between our cultural constructed world and our unconscious nature, it consists in bringing to awareness those components of both our culture and our unconscious which constrain and obstruct our vision of the world, and then to deal with them on this level as if they were conscious, in the same manner that we deal with the distortions of consciousness itself. In such a way we can hope to bring under rational control and the constraint of reason what otherwise would remain in control of our reason and rationality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be emphasized that only the individual can accomplish this feat, and that it is accomplished only in the sense of perspective that can be gained idiographically and longitudinally from the individual's lived experience. It is in terms of the individual's biography that the diverse processes and confluences are conjoined, integrated and interwoven in a way that, as anthropological process, makes sense. From this point of view, discovering incidences of suicides or frequencies of stress, or correlation between social factors and facets of personality, are only of partial and "cross-sectional" perspective that cannot address the larger problem of the history that lies behind these phenomena and accounts for them in every case. Such statistics allow us to see how the experiences of an individual may be shared and representative of experiences of an entire population, and by doing so may reveal relations with broader factors that remain, from the individual's point of view, beyond the horizon of consciousness. But it remains exclusively in terms of how these factors come together and make sense of an individual's unique experiences in life that we must understand the problem.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Myth may be the mother of all meaning, but math is the father that makes sense.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">We are led to a formula for the anthropology of knowledge and the knowledge of anthropology in the world. It comes from the recognition of the role that certain basic fallacies of anthropological knowledge have played in the anthropology of knowledge. The most basic form of anthropological fallacy, as mentioned previously, is that of reification--the fallacy of misplaced concretization or of hypostatization. It turns a being, a relation, into a thing, and a thing into a being. It misconstrues those aspects of reality which are human-made as if these were a priori and natural, and those aspects which are natural as if they cultural artifacts. This fallacy can be construed as the crystal of consciousness through which the light of the world is refracted and diffused. But we must see that this structure of the veil of consciousness is composed of symbols that are capable of the feat of displacement of meaning from one thing to another, and that the symbol-logic in which symbolism is ordered, is fundamentally 'mythological' in the sense that Claude Levi-Strauss had delineated so well. The fallacies which mythology are prone to, in the mediation of the basic anthropological contradiction between nature and culture, are those of anthropomorphizing the unanthropomorphic, and of over-emphasizing, or of reductionism or oversimplification, of those anthropomorphisms as if they were non-anthropomorphic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can go a little further and find the foundation of all ideology in this mythological substrate of consciousness--ideology that is believed true until the fallacies upon which it depends can be shown by the demonstration of history to be false. We can see the basis in prejudice and ethnocentrism which regards one particular cultural orientation as "human" or as "godly" and another as beastly or less than human. We commit the same fallacies of consciousness when we attribute to others qualities which are somewhat less than human, and too ourselves those which seem somehow too human.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And the problem of digging itself out of the fallacies in which it is embedded, constitutes the central paradox for an anthropology of the knowledge of anthropology. Anthropology should not be too criticized if it frequently falls back into the same fallacies from which it has just emerged. In the resolution of this paradox we call upon the mathematical precision of our statistics to rescue us--to the extent that statistics can be realized as the a voice of history, and not as a means which ideologically obfuscates, or takes the place of history. Statistics that are tied to history allows us to separate within a conscious margin of error the possible from the impossible, and the likely from the unlikely. We come to rely upon our numbers because we know we cannot rely on our values alone.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="four">II</p> </a></font><a NAME="four"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology as Philosophy</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The philosophical premises of anthropological knowledge are the anthropological premises of philosophical knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></a></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All refutation in philosophy takes the same course. To refute an argument one must attack its premises for its tacit presuppositions or implicit ignorance. If one attempts to take it on in its finer, logical points, one is bound to become entangled in the elaboration of its arguments and thus to implicitly affirm its premises even while taking issue with their conclusions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If all philosophy can be undermined at its roots, then one must inquire as to whether or not there is a single set of premises which can prove to be "a priori" acceptable and irrefutable, upon which we should proceed to found our philosophy. We must also face the seemingly irresolvable paradox that if we say that no such a priori premises are possible, then even this constitutes a kind of absolute premise which refutes itself. In other words, is all philosophical truth to be ultimately based upon self-contradiction and uncertain, non-absolute premises. The question as to what are the first, non-relative premises of philosophy, if any, remains unanswered if not unanswerable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The knowledge of anthropology and the anthropology of knowledge are not without some bearing upon this question--for a little bit of authentic anthropological awareness can go a long way as an antidote to untested and unquestioned philosophical rationalizations. The question that philosophers steeped in a western tradition of rationalism ask of anthropologists is whether or not their are any "universal" structures of mind or value which hold true for all humankind, and if not, then how might we explain the differences we encounter to still leave room for the precedence of one point of view over all others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By and large the only real reply that anthropologists have given to philosophers has been the doctrine of cultural relativism; that most philosopher's and anthropologists bound within the rationalist tradition find unacceptable. Despite a few empirical jewels, the notions of the "psychic unity" or "moral equality" of humankind seems taken more on the basis of faith alone than cross-cultural validation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relativity of values, beliefs, language and world-view seems to contradict the idea of a "psychic unity of humankind" or of a universal structure of mind which is similar for all people. The hypothesis of a "deep structure" for language, mind and world-view has always presented an important and insuperable paradox--intuitively there must be some biological basis to language, thought and collective representation, and this biological substratum of Mind must be the same for all people. But such a notion runs aground in the surface complexities and the myriad apparent differences. A firm faith in the notion might allow us to take a leap of faith and dismiss out of hand the relevance of surface patterns of expression as but epiphenomenal by-products of the working structure of the mind. But we are still begging the question of what exactly, from a scientific standpoint, such a universal structure of Mind might be, how precisely it is biologically grounded, how much the surface variation of patterning constrains and is constrained by this structure. Though no one is likely to soon have any definite answer to this important problem in the understanding of human reality, an honest assessment and thinking through of the issues and evidence at hand are not impossible to attempt, and may even prove to be profitable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a common misconception of the problem of relativism and of universal rationality to assume from the outset that the two notions are inherently inimical and mutually contradictory--that the adoption of one set of ideas necessarily entails the rejection of the opposite set. It is of utmost importance in understanding both the problematic of world-view and of relativity that the two sets of ideas are in fact not only mutually complementary, but may even necessarily entail one another in a larger frame of reference. How is this possible? The same deep structure of mind may undergo an infinite variety of shapes and yet retain the same basic structural features--regionally defined topographies of Mindscape which are quite unique and different from one another may yet be traversed and transfigured in terms of a basic universal structure of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to distinguish in this regard different terms that are sometimes conflated or used interchangeably. Perception, conception and cognition are separate but interrelated processes. Under cognition we have imagination, mood, reason or ratiocination, rationality, common sense, knowing, counting, acquisition, communication, expression, dreaming, memory. It is important to distinguish what may be quite normative and evaluative processes of reasoning from more mathematically non-arbitrary processes of being logical and mechanical processes of computation and counting. We must sooner or later come to terms with symbolization, pattern recognition, naming, reference and inference, language, collective representations, emotion, and that always vague but ever powerful monstrosity of the human unconscious. Somehow we must account for complex processes of creativity, analysis and synthesis, as well as for possible rational structures of typology and topography, taxonomy and classification, as well as synaesthesia, intuition, alternative discrete or continuous states of consciousness, and possibly even extra-sensory perception and paranormal cognition. If we gloss all these distinctions under a single heading of 'rationality' we are taking a great deal for granted, and yet so many complex processes are contained and co-occur simultaneously all within the cramped space of the average persons skull. Human psychology has its work cut out for it. And if this is not enough, then we might also want to consider the problematic of sociability, instinct, heritability, experience, intelligence and basic ability, special talent, individuality, identity, personality, psycho-somatic connection between the body and the mind. Given such astronomical complexity, it is not difficult to understand why we have only just scratched the surface in our understanding of the human mind, and yet such humility makes seem all the more absurd so many premature proclamations for the bottom-line on human consciousness--simple solutions or sophisticated confabulations to enormously complex problems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The general problem is not uncomplicated by basic theoretical and philosophical problems which are definitional, terminological. We might distinguish between rationalist and empiricist approaches, between a-priori and noumenal presuppositions of rational ideals and solipsistic conceptions about trees falling in silent forests. On top of all this we must also distinguish between presentationalist and representationalist accounts of our philosophical epistemology.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The only "absolute" may be the anthropological paradox that everything is relative.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relativism has been considered a cornerstone of the anthropological defense against blind ethnocentrism and a deterministic ideology. It has been considered by many to be the ultimate threat to a science founded upon the quest for universals, the prerequisite of an empirical science, which presents an insuperable philosophical dilemma. But it may also conveniently provide a general answer for philosophical paradox. Relativism has been considered to be many different, often contradictory things, and yet has remained resistantly none of these things. The academic war for and against relativism has been waged for years in spite of the fact that the central doctrine of relativism has never been thoroughly investigated or explicated, and remains today, despite a great deal of rhetoric, fundamentally misunderstood. This gap in our understanding has been convenient for many who want to make of the doctrine of relativism a straw man against which they can favorably promote their own anti-relativistic bias. In other words, relativism has been defined antithetically and in negative contrast to what it is not, and this has led to general misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the doctrine of relativism as just about anything other than what it really is.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relativism as a general theoretical orientation is not synonymous with relativity. Relativity is a basically descriptive statement about: 1) A general condition of relationships between things in the world; 2) A general and inherent condition and limitations of human knowledge and understanding about the world; 3) Both 1) and 2) above are inseparably and dialectically combined such that the world is inseparable from the conditionality and limitations of our knowledge and understanding about the world. Given this basic, rather formal, paradigm of general relativity, any doctrine of relativism can be said to be a general statement purporting to explicate the implications of general relativity in the understanding of human reality. It can be said that the problem of general relativity concerns primarily 1) above, while the problem of general relativism concerns mostly 2), and that relativism and relativity are dialectically interrelated in terms of 3). It is important to emphasize these otherwise pedantic distinctions because it is important not to confuse the terms of relativity and relativism as interchangeably referring to one and the same thing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is also important to distinguish between the notion of "general" relativism versus possible specific kinds or expressions that may be relative or relativistic in some way. In a technical and completely logical sense, "general relativism" is a kind of self-contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, if what is relative is taken to infer the particular and to emphasis the differences between things, and what is 'general' implies what is the same for many things. This kind of fallacy points up the inherently paradoxical nature of relativistic ideas if they are considered from a completely formal, logical point of view. There is no form of relativity or relativism identifiable which does not embody implicitly its own formal contradiction. What this kind of fallacy highlights are the natural, normal limits of our own deterministic rationality, as well as the inherently ambiguous, paradoxical and hence informally 'slippery' nature of all relativistic reason and knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What the possibility of relativistic understanding contradicts is not the possibility of general knowledge or understanding, but the possibility of its unconditionality, its absoluteness, its a priori structure, and its presupposed universality, hence unity and comprehensive homogeneity. If science is presumed to be inherently and necessarily non-ideological, then there is nothing scientifically inimical to a well-grounded doctrine of general relativism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is hoped that what will be demonstrated is the mutual complementarity and compatibility of relativistic and general understanding, of idiothetic and nomothetic forms of discourse, relativism and generalistic thinking are mutually limiting and dialectically interdependent--in fact each presupposes and entails the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The notion of generally relativistic understanding also fosters the illusion that there is just a single broad kind of relativism that is applicable to many different situations and cases of reality. Such a notion exists as a possibility, and for the sake of a theoretical essay on the top, this possibility is presumed to be likely, but it also tends to hide more than it reveals in glossing over so many different kinds of relativistic knowledge that are possible. Whether these different kinds of relativistic understanding are but different facets of the same general form of relativism, or if they are fundamentally different or even possibly incompatible or contradictory forms, is not a simple or straight forward problem to solve. These different forms of relativism include scientific relativism, historical relativism, social relativism, cultural relativism, linguistic relativism, interpretive relativism, psychological relativism, epistemological relativism, cognitive relativism, existential relativism, philosophical relativism, eastern religious relativism, rational relativism, humanological relativism and a final category of miscellaneous relativism that do not quite fit any of the other categories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While the actual ontological status of such a typology of relativism remains a moot point, and the matter of which kind belongs under that heading is mostly a matter of splitting hairs, it is nonetheless readily obvious that given so many alternative varieties of relativistic ideas, however ultimately fictitious or ontologically tautological, the question of whether or not there is such a thing as relativism or relativity becomes a rather trivial and pointless debate. It is more interesting and important to inquire into what kind of relativism applies to what aspect of world, and what are the different limitations and implications of different kinds of relativism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another important dimension to the problem of general relativistic understanding, and this is to distinguish between varieties of relativism which have been made explicit and those kinds that remain mostly implicitly, left to be inferred from general concepts and theories about different aspects of reality. Not all relativism has been explicitly identified, and it is likely that not every form of relativity is even completely explicable. Much that is relative in the world remains hidden beneath the veil of our perception and conception of reality, and it it likely that we will never come to grasp even a portion of the subtle implications which the condition of relativity imposes for our experiencing and understanding of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is also the case that some forms of relativism are more relative than other forms, and that some kinds which are called relativism or considered to be relativistic are not really relative at all, but are either rationalistic, deterministic or else are to be considered false or spurious forms of relativism. From this standpoint, nothing is absolute, not even relativism. There is nothing that is not relative, including relativism. Thus it can be seen that the possibility of relativism implies its own impossibility, and that all kinds of relativism are inherently paradoxical, and by extension, because all forms of understanding and knowledge are relative, all knowledge and understanding is also inherently paradoxical. If there is nothing that is not relative in the world, it is also the case that some things are necessarily more, or less, relative than other things, and in these critical differences lies the possibility for different values of certainty and ambiguity of knowledge about the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relativism has been confused and conflated with the notion of determinism, an idea of strong or absolute causality. Nothing can be more antithetical to a general relativistic doctrine about human reality than a case for strong or absolute determinism. It has been the rationalistic predisposition of the Western mind that tends to strictly dichotomize the world in terms of its truth-value logic, and which tends to equate the notion of an extreme form of relativism with the idea of determinism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From a broader dialectical point of view, the doctrine of general relativism actually complements quite well a Rational orientation towards reality, and there is no necessary or inevitable contradiction in considering the complementary and mutual entailment of fundamentally relativistic notions about the world and generally rationalistic theories and ideas. The efficacy of a rational and empirical science of the world depends upon such a dialectic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relativism then is a doctrine that all knowledge about the world is conditional, and it is the conditionality of our understanding about the world that renders it relative. This conditionality is the product of the interrelationship of things in the world that constitutes its complex patterning. In the broadest sense, everything is related to everything else, no matter how indirectly. What it is important to specify is the degree and nature of the relationship between things. Just as there is a general relatedness of things in the physical world, there is a corresponding relatedness of ideas and percepts in the universe of the mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is never enough that we call something relative, to claim that language is relative or that all cultures are relative, is by itself a meaningless statement, unless we then go on to specify precisely what it is relative to. It is in the specification of the relatedness of one thing to another that the efficacy and general importance of a relative understanding can best be grasped, as such relativistic specification constitutes the critical empirical criteria of our sciences, for it opens the general proposition to the possibility of verification or falsification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A general doctrine of relativism subsumes several interrelated notions: the notion of likelihood, possibility and impossibility, knowability and unknowability, interrelationship in interdependency; contextuality; difference and identity; relevance, salience and meaning; metaphor, symbol and significance; paradox, antinomality and dilemma; dialectics; ecology; universality and uniqueness; generality and particularity; infinity and nothingness.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">All people are part-time anthropologists-- the anthropological imagination is a universal human trait.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What has been the raison d'etre of a field of inquiry into the human condition? What drives young people into such a profession--what motivations do they share? We may say that money or renown or security are not the primary factors, because there is so little of any of these to be found in an anthropological career. Nor has anthropology merely been an ideological substitute for religion, a prop, a support, or crutch for the weak willed and dependent spirit. If anything, the willpower and independence required to walk the path of an anthropologist is extraordinary.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Some skeptics or casuists might claim that anthropology lacks any single or higher purpose. In one regard it may be non-paradigmatic, or poly-paradigmatic, and in another regard it may merely be composed of a host of people who enjoy doing anthropology, each with their own sense of reason and purpose.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We could rattle off a textbook definition about the science of humankind, and claim that anthropology is the science that seeks to understand the truth lying behind human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology has its claim to reality a strong sense of critical skepticism of the received truths about the world. It has never been satisfied to rest contented with any one or other particular theory or world view, but has always sought to seek cases in the world that might challenge or disprove all such claims. It is this strong dissatisfaction with easy and simple solutions to complex problems of human reality that has been one of the primary intellectual motivations behind a great deal of field research. And if anyone would claim that motivation can be virtually anything except intellectual, then they are denying the organic sense of curiosity which humankind seems prone too--a curiosity to explore, experiment, learn and create from their environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A great deal of the romantic spirit that has led many bleary eyed anthropologists to their first culture shock may not in fact be a case of vicarious flirtation, but may be an expression of the general sense of dissatisfaction with the received versions of the world, and desire to experience and learn about differences in the world. In a sense, anthropologists take their cue from the social construction of reality in its recognition that not only may the native's reality be a "false" illusion of superstition, but also might be our own versions of the world. Having come eventually to this realization--an inevitable awakening if we have questioning and seeking natures and a basic sense of honesty about seeing reality. It is only a matter of time before the desire to find the "truth" about reality takes us over--if it is not the others, and it is not our own, then whose is it? This is a door through which we pass in life, but from which we do not return.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a sense, the production of knowledge in other fields of science made the anthropological construction of reality a necessity. If Darwinian evolution came to undermine the doctrine of creationism, we could no longer accept on faith alone the doctrine that the whole of human history was only several thousand years old, or that God made man in his own image, or locked him immovably upon the Great Chain of Being. If Freud could claim that the Oedipus myth provided an universal explanation for human religion and social structure, then few anthropologists with any real curiosity could pass up the challenge it provoked to their sense of realism and naivete'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Contact with different peoples and their strange cultural traditions must have been the greatest stimulus to the curiosity of the anthropological imagination. Accounts of such differences were numerous enough that they could not but help to undermine the credibility of our received truths, and to cumulatively "relativize" our collectivizing beliefs and world views. Acculturation went in both directions, and if the natives formed weird cargo cults, then western scientists formed similar strange ideas about "going native."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can say that the progress of scientific knowledge in the world created a niche and demarcated the territory upon the conceptual landscape, a region of mind that was later to become claimed by anthropologists as their own. Hence, anthropologists evolved into their roles as seekers of human difference and identity in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But the promise of anthropology has been something more than just a vague sense of intellectual wonderment at the human variety in the world. The search for the universal core of human identity in the world has been an acknowledgement of the uniqueness and exceptional nature of the human condition. So unusual has our cultural creativity been among the many kinds of life on earth that it has provoked a profound and deeply sublime inquiry into its source and its consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, the promise of anthropology has been rooted in an enlightenment tradition that equated knowledge, discovery and truth with the betterment and social reform of the human condition. There is implicit about all anthropological research, whether it is acknowledged or not, an ethical agenda about the possibility of anthropological understanding contributing to the creation of a better world resolved of many of its chronic diseases. There is hope that better understanding of our selves and our reality will show us how to live better and more fulfilled lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This promise has made itself felt in different ways upon different levels of anthropological articulation with the world. At one level, anthropological enlightenment will hopefully dispel ethnocentrism and the boundaries that are the cause and consequence of prejudice and discrimination in the world. Take away many of the biases and chauvinism that keep people isolated into their separate, exclusive communities, and the realistic possibility comes into being of fostering a peaceful world free of such prejudice. In another way, anthropology threatens to dissolve many of the illusions of our ideas, common sense and theory, in rendering a more realistic understanding of the human condition, one which would allow rational decision making, social innovation and strategic social planning more effective and feasible. Finally, there is a sense in which anthropology has provided at times a critical voice for the voiceless, a practical and working defense for the repressed and the impoverished, representation for the underrepresented, as well as to help mediate relationships not only between different groups of people, but top-down relationships in the articulation of power and authority in the world, and not always on the side or in the service of the most powerful.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whether or not these things may be true or not, or how, the promise of anthropology remains to fire the anthropological imagination. Once infected under the skin and in the bloodstream, the prognosis for the anthropological imagination cannot be reversed.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Common conscious awareness is rooted in the anthropological imagination of the possibilities of human difference</font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2">.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"><font FACE="Book Antiqua">Not every philosophical system in the world is as resistant to the doctrine of relativism as those of occidental rationalism seem to be. In fact many find no problem in the paradoxes which the rationalization of the logic of relativism inevitably lead us to--for these philosophies the problem lies not in the relativity of knowledge, but in the unreasonableness of reason. In the history of western rationalism we might legitimately refer to a kind of imperialism of ideas that seeks to conquer and control all imaginable diversity in the world, in a way parallel to how the consciousness can be seen as a mechanism for controlling and mediating the diversity of difference. It is to somehow integrate different versions to produce a single, unified, coherent sense of reality. It is the challenge and confusion of diversity which sometimes threatens our sense of conscious control and which undermines the superficial coherence we have established in the world. We must seek our common philosophical premises in the anthropological identity of difference that we discover in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It does not seem satisfactory to simply say that universal good or reason exists in the world because it is an imaginable possibility and a possibility of the imagination--this does not seem like the solid kind of premises upon which to basis an anthropological philosophy of humankind. But this is precisely the kind of paradox we are eventually led to conclude if we accept the premises of an anthropological philosophy based upon the notion of a common human consciousness of and in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The identity of difference lies in the recognition that some differences seem to make more of a difference than others.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Philosophers and anthropologists alike, of the western tradition of rationalism, have found it fit to discover the basis of the fundamental differences separating people, especially those that separate the "primitive mentality" from the "civilized mind". Whatever the particular points of such an hypothesis, it has served as a "great divide" of both human history and human consciousness. If we look deeply enough into this question, we may discover that the basis of this great divide is not to be found in the differences between ourselves and other people on the other end of the earth, but is actually rooted in the very foundation of our human being and condition in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in this regard that I refer to the possibility of a fundamental dichotomy of human nature, and to two main types or "modalities" of being in the world which are fundamentally opposite and to some extent mutually exclusive of one another. But together they exist in an interesting kind of dialectic of difference which underlies the kind of "mind-body" and "rationalist-relativist" and "nature-culture" or "nature-nurture" dialectics of both philosophy and anthropology. We may see both anthropological and philosophical knowledge as continuously revolving around the central axis of this difference in a kind of dialectical dance that brings to realization the creative possibilities rooted in such difference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">How to clearly define this basic Difference that seems to make the difference is difficult, to say the least. Maybe it is left brain versus right brain, maybe it is male versus female, maybe it is analytical versus synthetic, or maybe it is nature versus culture. But whatever its basic forms, we must recognize the dialectical structure of difference as being somehow fundamental to our knowledge and being in the world. Put from another point of view, bilateral symmetry seems to be a fundamental design principle underlying the recurrent patterning in the natural order, of which our own human-made world partakes. Such symmetries are rarely perfect or balanced, but always complementary. Humans, in both their anthropology and their philosophy, seem to not only need both identity and difference, but to delight in the possibilities the basic difference makes.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="five">III</p> </a></font><a NAME="five"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology as Academia</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p>Our paradise has many poisons and much pollution--beware the bite of the forked tongue serpent who proffers you the fruit of knowledge, and the sting of the spineless jellyfish that drifts with the changing currents, and the venomous scorpion that crawls in many moccasins and the vicious Minotaur that hungrily awaits you behind the wrong door.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropology of the knowledge of anthropology must eventually take into account the contextuality of this knowledge within the confines and context of its academic institutionalization. Academia comprises a long and conservative tradition which has a very uneasy and at times contradictory relationship to change. It can be argued that functionally the one of the primary roles of academia is to mediate change for the greater society. In this sense its scholars, as visionaries, are thought to "lead the way" as a person using a torchlight or lantern in the darkness. But academia as an institution steeped in its own traditional boundaries remains in many ways the most conservative and resistant to change of all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any such anthropological perspective must eventually also broach the basic questions of the anthropology of education, and, more specifically, the anthropology of academia itself. In modern societies founded upon principles of mass mobilization and democratic decision-making, the function of the education system becomes critical as a the mechanism of indoctrination and secondary socialization, as both a marketplace of ideas and as a marketplace for social mobility within a "techno-bureau-merito-media-cracy," and as a clearing house for the institutionalization of change policy. The contradictions inherent in the knowledge of anthropology cannot be understood if anthropology itself is taken outside of its institutionalized place within this larger System that has been bent upon global modernization and development.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the springtime of 1989, I attempted a "mini-ethnography" of an Anthropology department in the Northeast. The small group dynamics and kinds of social interaction, or noticeable lack of it, which I had observed the previous fall semester, prompted me to look more critically, and "reflexively," at American Anthropology as forming its own kind of community with its own distinctive culture, and ethos. Subsequent experiences with other departments, and subsequent research and reading in educational anthropology, has served to bolster and confirm my original views of the matter. As a matter of fact, very little if any substantial evidence has come my way which would tend to disconfirm these views--and this has not been for a lack of looking.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I think several elements in my personal life predisposed me to take such a radically "reflexive" turn of mind. I have always remained upon the periphery of our great society. I have conducted ethnography previously among Vietnamese refugees in the states and abroad among overseas Chinese in Malaysia. Since returning from Malaysia, I have never fully reintegrated with the mainstream--but have remained aloof with the support of my Malay Chinese wife as a kind of perennial, self-alienated stranger. This existential state of being has been a mixed blessing. On one hand it has meant an interminable liminality, accompanied by severe chronic poverty, lack of opportunity, and desocialization from any kind of support network. On the other hand it has afforded me to chance to adopt a critical perspective upon our own culture as a kind of "professional stranger."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is especially in the area of cultural anthropology, which deals directly with the dynamics of cultural differences and identity, that we need to consider the substantial role and influence that may be played by the domestic community ethos of the anthropology department upon the professional work of its constituency. If a cycle of seasons in a foreign field has been likened to a rite of passage for the professional anthropologist, the several years spent in a graduate program working interminably upon vague requirements toward an uncertain degree can be seen as another kind, and often more influential, rite of passage.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is from this perspective that we need to consider a variety of different, but related, points. The first is the articulation of class structure, and the mediation of the process of class mobility, within the graduate professional setting. Secondly, there is the role played by characteristically American cultural values as these are implicit in the background of the ethos and the egos of the anthropology department. Third are the important social dynamics occurring within a small community, a community nonetheless strictly divided along lines of class, professional status and sub-disciplinary affiliation. Especially important in this regard are the patterns of interrelation between professor as mentor, or "significant reference other" and the student as undergoing secondary socialization or "professionalization," as well as the patterns of informal social sanctioning and gossip as a means of social control between students, professors and other important members of the department. Fourth are the structural-organizational dynamics of any kind of corporate organization, enmeshed as it is within a larger political-economy, and fraught as it can become by cross-cutting ideological commitments and practices--who gets funding, and who doesn't, who speaks to whom, and who doesn't and why. Fifth, and finally, are the kinds of dialogical patterns, the professional jargon, the involvement in professional publishing circles, the command presence over which is the primary distinguishing mark of a professional anthropologist versus a student anthropologist-to-be.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Finally, if many programs, and the field as a whole, is to be regarding as consistently failing to reproduce itself in the way that many would want to see it go, at least a part of the blame must be put upon its necessary but suffocating affiliation with a larger Academic system that is becoming increasingly strangled by administrative overhead.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An administrative class has come to appropriate to itself both the political authority and rewards of the public educational system, a form of power which is not reciprocally subject to public purview or control. This group has come to write, circumscribe and proscribe the charter for endowment and restriction of research for Academics, and this has led to a failure for the Academic system, as academics, to reproduce itself in a healthy way. Such a class must be seen as a kind of parasitic group attached by ties of dominance and dependency to its larger host. If many anthropologists are seeming to behave more like administrators than as professional strangers, then it is because they are caught within a vicious political-economic system in which viable avenues for research and academic career advancement have been severely curtailed by the administrative agenda of cutting the budget and, implicitly, making more money.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot clearly separate these elements one from another, and in daily encounters in a variety of departmental settings any number of different and variable influences may be operating. It must be seen from the outset, a lesson I had to rather rudely relearn, is that any departmental context, like any small community of one hundred or so people, represents at least one hundred or so different sets of realities, problematic situations, concerns, experiences, involvement etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The department must be seen as the daily forum for the articulation of American Academic Anthropology. There are more than one hundred such "islands" in the US that feature Ph.D. programs. It is an anthropological archipelago that are crisscrossed by many intersecting networks upon different levels. It is not a large community--the number of active anthropologists, with their more serious students, probably numbering under ten thousand. People know or know of other people in other programs, but the number of people from the West Coast who know people from the East coast is probably less, and then there is a whole mid-Western region which cannot be forgotten. Individual programs do suffer some measure of isolation, and loyalty to one's own program can sometimes override reciprocal obligations in wider ranging lateral networks. There is even regional and local variation in style and social pattern that seems to correspond to some extent with the regional variations of culture and dialect to be found in the United States. Programs acquire reputations--good or bad, friendly or hostile, difficult or easy, mediocre or well endowed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One dimension of American Academic Anthropology to be reckoned with is the implicit, almost casual sense of hierarchy that is pervasive throughout its structure. Professors are ranked according to the size of grants they are getting, their record of publication, their success in dealing with students, their aggressiveness, etc. Students are similarly ranked, both by the professors and more informally between themselves. There are those who come from the Peace Corps, those who are wealthy, those who have had previous anthropological experience, those with foreign backgrounds, those with high G.R.E. scores and those with 4.O's and those who get assistance and those who do not. Departments and programs are similarly ranked within local, regional and national scales. Departments may be big or small, prosperous or poor, conflict ridden or tight-knit, those with big-names or those that are obscure, those that are "all in the family" and those from which hardly any students graduate, those that are materialist and those that are hermeneutical, those that are Africanist and those that are Southeast Asian, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Like the American political system, the hierarchy replete in Anthropologia is hardly ever set in stone. It is relatively open, negotiable, subject to the vicissitudes of climate and clouds. It is a multi-factorial hierarchy whose components are neither rigidly structured nor specifically defined. It is heterogenous and many of its elements remain subject to individual evaluation. What seems good for one anthropologist may not be good for another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One aspect of this hierarchical system is that it guarantees the authority and is protection of the prerogative of those that are higher from forces below. A professor may undermine her/his own status-identity by sloppy conduct, perennial failure to publish, or by being squashed like a bug from a more divine entity, but for all those students or junior professors below, the professors reputation remains for most intents and purposes untouchable and unquestionable. There is in this a paradox, because one of the principle strategies employed by students and young professors in "getting ahead" and moving up the ladder of professional success is to take strategic and tactical snipes at other students or professors, sometimes more senior. One's gains are frequently measured in terms of others expenses and losses, and this remains the best way for the genuinely mediocre to climb to positions of authority within the field. It is not surprising that it sometimes happens that these strategies sometimes backfire, or simply go awry, by misjudgment or poor calculus or failure to anticipate the unpredictability of others in the field.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This brings to focus the principle point of the Academic forum--the issue of social mobility, and the role of the department as the marketplace and clearing-house for upwardly mobile people. This aspect of Academia rests in an uneasy tension with the more scholarly and scientific aspects of career building. Rarely is it sufficiently to simply or sublimely love what one does, and never is it enough to sophistically navigate the social web.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is unfortunate that so little account has been taken of this side of anthropological praxis in the formation and articulation of its interests--from a daily and cumulative point of view, it remains the one of the main forces in its dynamic unfolding. We can count a kind of professional conspiracy of silence, perhaps an unspoken price for admission into anthropological paradise, that yearly allows professors to dupe students into being their clones, and then to secretly make self-centered career decisions which leave their students in a kind of limbo. It is all too frequent that the decisive factors affecting what may get published, or what gets signed, or what becomes noted, or who gets funding or who graduates or who lands the tenure-track line, are hidden from public scrutiny, as part of the "back region" of anthropological culture, and may have little or nothing to do with the advancement of science or the gleaning of truth from reality. Remaining part of the gray area, the back-region, the hidden side of anthropology, does not make this aspect of anthropology any less interesting or important from an anthropological perspective.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It can be unequivocally stated that Anthropology as an institution, as a culture, a way of life, as a community of scholars, must continue to face certain rather severe limitations to its own academic advancement until it finally comes to honestly and openly face its own heart of darkness. The anthropological commitment to reality demands this.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">American Academic Anthropology struggles to free itself from under the yoke of the Authoritarian American.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Institutionally, we can distinguish between American Anthropology and British and French Anthropologies, and Indian Anthropology--now there are many national anthropological institutions to contend and compete with in the world. And this comes as something of a paradox in a anthropological world which is rapidly loosing its principal object of study--human diversity. The history of anthropology, as an institution, remains rather shallow--hardly more than a century and a quarter from its first inception in the university. This inception corresponded well with the second phase of Western European colonial imperialism which sought to carve up the rest of the remaining world for its industrial markets, and the resulting need to institutional specialization of the knowledge of and about the Rest. We collected the symbols of the Other as an Artifact of our Museums of Man and our anthropological textbooks, at the same time that we were bent on destroying the Other as a Man and as a vital text. And now anthropologists are left to put back together the leftover pieces of a shattered and guilty ego. The British struggle to bring time and history back into an a-temporal and sterile functionalism, Americans struggle to regain the reflection of the subjective other lost beneath the fetishes of a gross materialism, the French struggle to reconstruct the destruction of their ideological structures in the many pathways of the world, and the Germans, let's not leave out the Visigothic Supermen who must now learn universal tolerance for dispirited, Dionysian underdogs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The case of the American anthropologists is perhaps the most exemplary because it seems as though no one else in the world can quite do it up on such a grandiose scale as the Americans can. The wealth of the Americans has been proverbial, though it is now overcast by the materializing shadow of the Japanese Miracle. The main obstacle which academic anthropology has to struggle with now is not money, but its own ruggedly individualistic, egocentric American character that becomes compulsively bent upon achievement at any cost. The source of this ardent culture of egoism may well be tied up with the puritan spirit, but it is reinforced on a daily basis by a militant and fanatical form of materialistic capitalism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is apparent to any observer of the American scene, but what are its implications for the way Americans have come to institutionally define their anthropology. In this regard, anthropological achievement, like all forms of achievement in American anthropology, is based upon a cut throat competitiveness which often valorizes the success of the victor by the victimization of its many losers. American children learn to garner the attention of their busy parents by pointing out the errors of their siblings. They are rewarded with toys and candy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In academic anthropology, one's status, prestige and power is directly tied up with one's position in a hierarchical, class-stratified pecking order, and with one's capacity to navigate up the ladder above one's compeers and before one's superiors. The ethos and pathos of conspicuous consumption entails that the successful professor who wins the grant by behaving herself will garner a status of untouchability, of "godliness" and moral purity, that comes attached to generous monetary endowments. One's academic character will become directly correlated with the length of one's bibliography of publications, or of the renown or significance of one's major contributions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The critique of such a system is based on the spurious emphasis it places upon certain social markers of achievement and identity, the implicit denial this often entails of human weakness and also of inner circles of deceit which work to capitalize and monopolize the acquisition of resources to the exclusion of others. There is a resulting need to publicly and professionally present oneself as if one were the embodiment of a false and hypocritical form of perfectionism. This system is held to promote institutionally a kind of paternalistic authoritarianism that is the complement of the competitive authoritarianism that is the by-product of the industrial marketplace, which values intellectual conformity and temporal, anal compulsiveness, above all else. Within such a system, genuine human individuality, creativity and talent is often stifled and systematically frustrated, if it does not fit the dominant voice of the System.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The extreme development of this has been to turn the university into a business, a profit-making, capitalistically organized institution, in which the inflation of one's ego is directly measured by the size of one's paycheck. The pursuit of knowledge that is regarded as nontrivial and non-peripheral becomes strapped by the "user-pay's principle." One's research must go in the direction of where the money is, or else it will starve to death. All of this of course is justified by an ideology of the "marketplace of ideas" in which the fittest will survive. The important question to be answered is whether the system itself is fit enough to survive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The entailments for professional anthropologists has been a kind of money-faced hypocrisy and a contradiction and complex of failure to put into practice what one preaches, because doing so would entail self-sacrifice at the hands of impersonal agents of policy. The other alternative has been realized by a whole generation of young career anthropologists who seem to have learned how to respect the hand that feeds them. The dilemma of Anthropology has been to struggle with a tremendous inferiority and identity complex, with a chronic and unsatisfied need to justify its intellectual and moral existence in the world, and with the kinds of ethical contradictions inherent to capitalist life-boat ethics. In such a System, it is the good conformist who is also the rugged individualist, that survives, while the humble shall die young.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The contradiction of the American system has been based upon the incorporation of this inherent ambivalence, between the individualist and the conformist, between the freedom of the frontier and the order of the organization, and the strong imperative for survival and success that it inevitably produces in people. This critique of American Anthropology may seem particularly harsh and unforgiving, and may be in part so much sweet lemons from an anthropologist who has been deemed by most professional compeers as an abysmal failure. But we must somehow take into account in our understanding of the knowledge of anthropology the place which anthropology has in academia, and which academia has in the world, as well as the ramifications and consequences of this positionality of its knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Our cognitive maps reconstruct basic cultural models</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is perhaps fitting that the notion of substantive cultural models that define our identity and relationship within a certain cultural tradition has been centered in the anthropology of education, and in seeing how basic models of class stratification and values are daily reproduced in the praxis of the educational system, reinforced by the mutual expectations and negotiations its many agents and participants. The shared models we have of our cultural order, and of our place within it, provide for us a basic mindscape by which we navigate in the social world. The notion of internalization and identification which is intrinsic to secondary socialization and professionalization through the educational system entails that we assimilate within our character to some effective degree those values, beliefs, habits, and attitudes which reinforce the particular social role with which we are becoming identified. It entails that we adopt the predominant normative and cognitive orientation of that group or role, and that we accept as well, some of its attendant contradictions and pathos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It goes without saying that some people will assimilate themselves more successfully to a particular orientation than others, largely owing to their basic primary orientation achieved in childhood, and that others may fail at the same orientation miserably.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is through this process of secondary socialization and professionalization that we regenerate and reproduce the socio-cultural order, along with its mindscape of knowledge, with each successive generation. It also becomes the principle mechanism by which modification in the patterning of this knowledge and order is effected, as individual stylization and reinterpretation repeatedly enter into the process to alter the received form. There is a sense of structural order in the direction of more basic changes that may affect these cultural models and mindscapes, in the similar way that all language proceed inexorably along certain directions of systematic morphological and phonetic alteration. Some changes will proceed as a consequence of policy and power, others will proceed in spite of such influence. But it is the long-term and wide-spread consistency and continuity of the basic forms of cultural orientations and its cognitive mapping which is the most remarkable--nowhere within the boundaries of a cultural orientation and tradition is there a sharp break or abrupt transition which is endogenous in origin. Such models and their maps always tend toward a conservative resistance to change, even while changing themselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological knowledge, as well, is subject to the same kind of process.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Borders were made to be trespassed--a rule is defined by its exceptions, and a law, by its violation.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To be a successful, a researcher in the halls of Academia today should expect to have to cross many conventional boundaries. The truth rarely follows the outlines of academic discipline--sometimes the crossing is counter-intuitive and unexpectedly serendipitous, more often it is frustrating and meets with a great deal of resistance. There has been growing encouragement of students to practice and get used to such crossing, but structurally the system is still tightly bound to its conventional boundaries, tending to penalize rather than promote those who smell the flowers in too many foreign fields. The narrow specialist is still the most highly rewarded, with the fastest and furthest career trajectory. Crossing boundaries has taken more the form of small, organized raids into the intellectual candy stores and granaries of other kingdoms, entailing the appropriation of the value and the nihilation of the people. Practically everyone else other than anthropologists have been practicing ethnography lately, with mixed results, at the same time that they have been putting down the anthropologist as ethnographer. Often one over hears the appellation about an archaeologist or physical anthropologist who is really a cultural person interested in bones, genes or artifacts. And cultural anthropologists, to be respectable, are often expected to conduct raids of their own into many different fields. There is intellectual and material capital to be found in the separation of others from their ideas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The point is, though, that in terms of interdisciplinary crossing and boundary integrating, Americans have done a notoriously poor job. We are by our heritage monolingual and poor code-switchers. Though we work hard to play hard, we are really best on the straight and narrow path. This is because we are culturally obsessive-compulsive--our exaggerated need for achievement, perfectionism, for ego-identity, leads to patterns of chronic frustration and indirect expression of aggression which can only be channeled in one direction at a time, toward a single target. Dabbling in foreign fields is at best an avocation, a vacation, a recreation not to be taken too seriously as anything more than therapy for the imprisoned soul and our repressed nature. Part of the American romance of the cultural anthropologist is the chance to explore foreign fields and to realize in an advantageous way all those things which, in the context of our own cultural constraints, we have learned how to repress. "Otherness" becomes the token of this repression and the needs that it produces.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To date, though the future of anthropology and of academia seems to be defined all along its margins in the rise of new hybrid fields and upon the intersections between traditional boundaries, we yet lack an overarching sense or know how to cross boundaries, and to integrate the differences we encounter into a new kind of synthesis--a kind of cross-disciplinary generalization which complements the growing over-specialization and hyper-compartmentalization of knowledge. As a community of scholars, we cannot and should not expect a nation of compulsive MBA's to do it for us.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The boundaries of knowledge are a map to the world of the mind--ideas are the trees of its many forests, and intuition our compass.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question of "mindscapes" and "meta-paradigms" that define in some ordered way the boundaries and "structure" of relations between the otherwise disparate fields of knowledge is a legitimate and important one to ask. In anthropology it recalls the perennial paradox of the relationship between culture and character, such that the individual personality internally maps the external cultural world in a way that reading from the map allows an effective interpretation of experience and effective navigation in the cultural world. It brings up the question of whether different "maps" may yield different configurations of personality, such that we may speak of some kind of prototypical personality of a philosopher versus that of a theologist, or an anthropologist versus a psychologist, etc. Within the context of professional forums in which proper conduct is defined, in terms of "secondary acquired characteristics" this is perhaps a legitimate and worthwhile question to ask.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It brings to view another kind of boundary which is important to academic anthropology, this is the internally and individual defined boundary that leads to the compartmentalization, and the resulting need for reintegration, between personal and private and professional and public domains of behavior, belief and being. And this ties in with the earlier criticism of a soft-underbelly of professional praxis that doesn't normally like to be exposed to public scrutiny. We may refer to front and back regions of different intellectual and cultural orientations--practices and traits and their patternings that may be distinctive for different fields of inquiry or ways of life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Certainly it is so that the demands of a particular field of inquiry may reinforce certain characteristics or orientations of personality over others, such that some more innately predisposed toward these orientations will be more successful than others who are likely to feel more frustrated in the system. And there are some basic traits that are highly regarded everywhere in Academia--perfectionism, cognitive conformity, high I.Q. scores, high achievement scores, class status, strong competitiveness, egotism and intellectual hubris.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The other question as to what a "meta-paradigm" of knowledge might look like remains open to speculation and unlikely to be answered in any satisfactory way. But we can perhaps answer the question as to what a basic relationship might be between any particular patterning of knowledge and the underlying psycho-cultural dynamics that reproduce such patterning. Art, whatever its particular cultural forms and processes, is everywhere recognized as art, as are religion and science. The map of the Mindscape of humankind may be very different among different parts of the human population in the world--though the elements we recognize as art, religion, science, differently arranged, remain apparent. Art, Science and Religion may mean different things to many different people in different cultures, though the basic human dynamics underlying these mindscapes may remain fundamentally the same.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It comes as something of a profound paradox when we consider the possibility that the only thing which holds this entire universe of mind together in a social sense may be simply the intuition we rely upon to find our way through its forests, and to fill in the gaps in our understanding. It is no wonder that we make many mistakes, and remain, in spite of our Academia, so imperfect.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Third Culture of Anthropology may be permanently marked by its marginality between the other two.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropologists must learn to live with the possibility of two academic cultures that are by definition fundamentally two different, incommensurable worldviews neither of which are they a part. Whether we choose to define anthropology as either a history or a science, we are still left with this unresolved sense of marginality between the two cultures, and a sense of anomie about what our own, "anthropological culture" may really be about. The best that we can hope for is to strike some kind of compromise in our marginality--80% scientist and 20% philosopher, for instance, or 75% historian and 10% biologist and 5% chemist or physicist--but never can we completely consider ourselves to be fully hybrid "scientist/humanists" unless, by the definition of our own culture, we can come up with the formula which effectively results in such a synthesis. In other words, we will always be plagued by the problem of having to cross and exist upon a basic boundary that separate ourselves as well as our world, until we can finally, ultimately ameliorate any such boundary once and for all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we cannot define ourselves as distinct from either the humanities or the sciences, then we must endure the consequences of an identity marked more by what it is not, by its ambivalence between two separate orientations, than by what it is. The predominant orientation towards "science" by anthropologists has been as much a reflection of the fact that "science" pays more than the humanities--if big money were to be had by calling oneself history or a branch of literature, then many anthropologists could be expected to do so.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But being an intermediate and marginal field of inquiry is not always disadvantageous, for it permits a kind of freedom that comes from being a switch hitter--there are many circumstances which arise in which it proves more convenient to call ourselves scientists than humanists, and vice versa.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="six">IV</p> </a></font><a NAME="six"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology as History</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">To refer to Anthropology as an historical science or as a scientific history might seem somewhat like a self-contradiction--but it may not be very far from the truth.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">History has always remained firmly within the humanities, though it has always been rooted to the empirical substantiation of its primary data and has always sought general laws and theories with which to explain the regularity of historical patterning. And yet history has never suffered itself the pretension of calling itself a "science" in the sense that the natural sciences are construed. And we must therefore inquire as to why history has kept itself so securely a position in the humanities, indeed, as one of the most human of fields of study.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the reason must no doubt be that it has never let go of its important sense of temporality of events, in the way that the space-oriented sciences have. Another is that it had never let the notion of human intentionality become obscured beneath deterministic theories and laws--the human actor in the dramas of history have always taken center stage, while the vagaries of the social climate has always remained perhaps where it belongs, in the background. History has never been very far away from ideology as well, and though it has often forgotten of this in its constructions of the past, it has also usually kept its relationship to ideology in full awareness--partly because the past has as often served as a mirror reflecting our own ideological involvement as much as it has been a study of past ideologies. Ideology has worked in our past as well as it works today, and the historian is the first person to remind us of this.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But all of these reasons do not add up to a satisfactory answer to our question of the a-scientific character of historical inquiry and knowledge. History has been concerned with human action in the world, and the consequences of decisions of actors. It has depended upon written records of events which were told from a particular point of view. From this perspective, its theories never are far removed from its central role of hermeneutic and critical interpretation. There is often a paucity of corroborative evidence and a lack detail that will make the stories it tells about the past seem complete. History is always well aware of the rhetorical and artistic character of both its primary documents and its second-hand interpretations of events, and thus only with difficulty can convince itself of its own objective scientificity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, we may point up the critical difference between a more scientific archaeology; of prehistory and a more humanistically archaeology which tends to rely more upon historical corroboration. A scientific archeology interprets its evidence without the rhetorical uncertainties of a sense of human voice from the past. Its evidence remains silent, and though this silence is the source of grand uncertainty, it is, when it speaks for itself without the aid of a human interpreter from the past, also a source of a grand scientificity. Scientific archaeology did not come into its own until the discovery of empirically substantive dating techniques which allow it then to firmly fix a global time-line in which to tie together the diverse strands of evidence from many different sites. Scientific archaeology remains today close to the facts--as data-bound as possible--its biggest concern has been the non-scientific role of the human voice that the archaeologist her/himself has given to the material. Thus the complaint heard among academic anthropologists is not that it is not a science founded securely upon firm empirical foundations, but that it is not scientific enough.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The historian does not have the privilege or the pretense of the archaeologist to assert the same legitimating claim of science. The historian therefore appreciates the telling of a good story, and welcomes the challenge of a different version of the same story. The historian knows that the real truth is forever lost in the depths of the past--only parts of the picture are possible. No matter how skeptical the archaeologist, as a scientist s/he will still hold in the final analysis to the one final version that invalidates all other versions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sense of general theory and kinds of "law" that the Historian deals with are fundamentally different in character than are those of her/his more scientific cousin. The best the historian can do is to select and muster a set of clear examples that serve to illustrate her/his theory--this is unacceptable from a strictly scientific point of view. The theory that the historian creates is more of a synthetic, than an analytic variety, and is much looser with filling in around the details.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A clear example of how historical theory works is the "indirect approach" elaborated by Liddell Hart and dealing with how great generals have been strategically successful. Israelis and Germans alike adopted its theoretical principles, instead of the classical theories of set-piece strategy that reigned before, and achieved great success. The French and British alike ignored it to their own great loss in the opening phases of World War II. The theory itself is rather simple, and yet a stroke of genius in making sense of a long military history. This kind of theory is very different from the theoretical approach that has been adopted with game theorists who work from the basis of the abstraction of conflict--the most such an approach might teach us is how to wage war efficiently and minimize losses while maximizing gains. But it cannot tell us how to win a war and what the human psychology of military strategy might be.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such a theory is very different also from say an archaeological theory of state development that practically excludes the consideration of historical events and instead paints a picture in purely abstract terms of impersonal processes and "dynamics" which create history. With the latter kind of theory we develop analytical concepts such as circumscription, prestige, hyper-coherence, meddling, information, stratification--interesting and useful in their own way but they do not tell us much about the actual events which occurred.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A much clearer picture emerges when the two lines of theory and their evidence can be effectively combined, as in the case of the early history of state development in North Vietnam, for example, and the rise and subsidence of dynasties and the coming and going of warfare and prosperity and corruption. In such an example, documentary evidence revealing the identities of specific actors and events supports archaeological and other lines of evidence to create a pretty thorough picture of the past of that region--a past as rich in legend and folklore as it is in documentary and artifactual evidence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this consideration, it seems that there should be a way of systematically combining separate lines of inquiry and different forms of evidence and different kinds of theorization in such a way that a firmer picture of the past, its events and processes, can be worked out. I suggest that this is in part the missing role of anthropology in history--the role that should be played by an anthropological history, or an historical anthropology, but for the most part, has been filled.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The call for bringing history back into the fold of anthropology, and the critique of anthropology as an a-historical science, has been felt sense the mid-70's, but most anthropologists would not consider the alternative of bringing anthropology back into the fold of history, because that would suggest for them that anthropology would no longer carry the legitimacy of a committed science. The call is still being made, and for the most part has gone unanswered, except for a few notable exceptions. And there has been one noteworthy exception to this rule--ethnohistory, regarded as marginal to the field of a firmly entrenched science of anthropology, nevertheless it remains well within the purview of the historical approach, and its example for a more authentic anthropology is not to be lightly dismissed or disregarded.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A History without a narrator, a stage, a dramatic plot, a central cast of characters, a poetic conclusion, or a willing audience, is doomed to become forgotten. It may be retold, but not for very long.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question remains as to what a historical anthropology or an anthropological history would consist. In this we have one clear example in archaeology, but we must wonder whether this is all there is to the problem, or if it is enough of an answer. An alternative example might be the kind of culture history which sought a "science of culture" and which was rooted to a classical notion of the "spirit" of a people and to the diffusion of cultural traits from some center of origin. Culture historians were detailed and competent ethnographers, but failed to ask critical questions of their informants regarding critical notions of change and influence, notions that concerned the construction of historical theory. Environmental determinism was often enough a satisfactory conclusion that did not need any questions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">More recently we have a materialist version of the older style culture history in the guise of a scientific political economy according to Marx. This form of history amounts to trying to fit the facts of historical happenstance into a preconceived framework of abstract modes of production and social relations--in short it is a form of historical descriptivism which allows us to speak of different peoples histories as if these were in fact global history.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left, in all these approaches, with an essentially subjectless, unpersonified History in which time is seen as some series of steps or stages towards some transcendent state of affairs. People remain essentially replaceable parts of a large machine which follows its own design, and in relation to which the designs of people are mostly inconsequential. A great deal of lip service has been paid to practice and to process, and an attempt has been made to bring the subjective speaker back into focus, but so far this approach has not yield the kind of fruit it has promised.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">So we are still left with a sense of absence of an anthropological history History is largely self-organizing, anti-chaotic, complex and stochastic as a system of individuals attempting to adapt and impose some sense of order upon their world. There is a need to take into account the unfinished character of human nature, with perhaps the attempt to see history as the business of this nature "finishing itself" in the world. There is a need to take into account the critical, existential indeterminancy and doubt with which the human actor must deal with--humans must make decisions even though they cannot know the outcome of these choices. Then history becomes one of the accumulation of unintended consequences. It also becomes the bringing to consciousness of the sense of wisdom with which people successfully negotiate and achieve in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There has been a sense also of a need to bring into account the pathways and binding action that human networks have over time. Networks are sort of pre-institutional phenomena that somehow endure through time. They are defined by social reciprocities. But networks are historical phenomena--trace patternings of the different movements and transactions people have made. Networks do not have themselves their own sense of history as do institutions--as soon as networks become corporate and gain a sense of corporate history, they cease being networks and become institutional phenomena. A great deal of networking history lies behind every event and every great person in history. We see in the synchronic happenings of networks the wheel of history itself in motion, slowly turning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beyond this level, we are faced with the kind of social history that deals with corporate institutional phenomena and the kinds of social events that such phenomena lead to. At this level we are faced with a sense of super-organic history--the growth and development of social groups in some integral sense, with its own sense of history. An anthropological history must approach the entire problem of history from a holistic and comparative perspective.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We end up with something like the history of the changing institution of slavery in Southwestern Europe in the early Middle Ages. In such a history, the individual voice of the actor may be drowned out in a chorus of many actors or a generalized voice of the historian--of their responses and adaptation to the existential dilemmas presented by the dominance of certain forms of institutional practices. There is a sense of an anthropological worldview that is an intrinsic part of this picture. A classical world view, a slave class regarded as fully dehumanized and desocialized creatures, and the gradual humanization of this view via Church Doctrine which first changed, and eventually, undermined the institution of slavery in the world, even though the clergy at few points opposed, and often supported, the institution.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Time's arrow has no beginning, middle or end. It flies in every direction at once, and yet ends nowhere.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As Melville Herskovits so aptly pointed out, to understand change we need the baseline of stasis, and to understand stasis we need to compare it to change. Our very notion of scientific causality and determination is bound within a classical conception of Universal time as itself a steady-state. Geo-physical history deals with processes and patterns of change which are very different from Biological history, and the latter deal with processes which are also different from Human historical patternings of change. The history that is so situated within the humanities, is "human history" as opposed to "natural history". In this regard any general history must come to grips with the phenomena of change</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this we can recognize a basic relationship between history and anthropology--history has traditionally dealt with change through time in a similar way that anthropology deals with differences across space that imply change. In this way history is seen as diachronic in a way complementary to how anthropology is viewed synchronically. It has been this rupture with time that has allowed anthropology to substitute humanly a-historical evolutionary frameworks upon spatially distributed differences of cultural groupings, implicitly excluding a sense of local history or person-centered time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a sense the study of tradition as institution is the study of a kind of embedded history--but a sense of history which lacks the linear ordering of a time line. Thus an anthropological history must be seen as a kind of comparative history that studies the processes of change in different places at the same time and in the same places at different times.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In regard to the notion of change, we must see the conception of time as being intrinsic. We live in a tradition in which time is Universally homogenous, perfect, cyclical in its calendrical, astronomical rhythms, and that unfolds in a linear, absolutely continuous fashion. This tradition does not consider the possibility of alternative times, of asynchronous time, or of subjective time that flows at different rates, that accelerates or slows down, or of nonlinear, non-cyclical time that nevertheless curves. If we can consider that our spatial perception is hyperbolically distorted and that we superimposed upon this distortion a classical, Euclidean conception of space, we might suffer the same kind of hyperbolic distortion of our temporal perception, such that events of greater distance have a fundamentally different value than more proximate occurrences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an historical perspective of the anthropological construction of reality, we must recognize how time and temporality constrain and order the biographical and social ordering of our lives. Our lives either unfold upon some schedule or else fail too, when our time is out of sync with others, or with some "standard" time, we are left in a period of actionless "waiting"--all are projects are ordered by the constraints of time. The temporal ordering of life is intrinsic to consciousness and phenomenological experience--a sense of temporality is suspended in sleep. Temporality confronts our everyday lives with an overarching facticity that we must contend, and it becomes coercive in the ordering of our experiences and life events. The basic aspect of human time, and the history that is based on this time, is its subjective temporality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropological history is human-made history.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropological history is rooted in the synthesis that comes from a dialectical engagement between change and stasis, culture and nature, means and ends. As such it is holistic and mythological in the sense that it is based upon the same symbolic processes as are the production of human history itself. It is comparative in the sense that it seeks the difference of change and identity of stasis over both space and time. Any historical science must come to grips centrally with the phenomena of change in our reality--the human experience of change, and its objective facticity in the world. The over-determination or indeterminancy of change is only one question we can ask of it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Change seems to be a universal phenomena which relativizes our universe. We measure change by time, and we mark time by the changes it produces. If we live in a universe in which everything in it is continuously changing at some differential rate, then we are left with no non-relative ground upon which to anchor our historical science. We do not really understand the significance or possible structure of change itself. We only know it as entropy and chaos that is guaranteed by our laws of thermodynamics. From the standpoint of chaos, change is the inherent contextual tendency towards randomization--or "disorder". Whatever the finite structure that is bounded, it is always situated within a larger universe that is held to be essentially chaotic and entropic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words, from this perspective, order is always local, and chaos is always global, unless we see chaos itself as a kind of ordering phenomena--the order of disorder--something which by definition is statistically highly improbable if not impossible. Such randomization amounts to a certain threshold of "background noise" which precludes maximization of the carrying capacity of our systems of transmission and communication. But change is only disordering from a fixed point of view. Change can also lead towards greater order and efficiency, or else down an alternative pathway or direction that is effective neutral to the order. All systems permit a certain amount of internal looseness or flexibility that is regarded as vital dimension of their adaptability in a larger world. Furthermore, change that leads an entity up the hill toward a higher level of adaptation, whether it is blind or intentional, must be construed from the standpoint of local order as being "anti-entropic."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All complex systems demonstrate this "anti-entropic" character. Such systems augment information upon increasing levels of integration, and thus are regarded as cybernetic and dialectical systems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, an anthropological history must be regarded as the documentation of the historical patterning of "anthropological process" as it has occurred upon its several different analytical levels, in relation to the anthropological construction of human reality. From the standpoint of human history, we might consider its principle interest as being the complexity of human process--of human change over time upon its many levels of significance. At one level, processes which are fundamentally subjective and phenomenological in orientation, are upon another level "trans-cultural" and civilization--almost completely impersonal except inasmuch as this level is represented by human actors with parts to play and as much as this level has certain subjective human entailments for the adaptation of the individual in the person's biographical location. Between these two levels is a range of intermediate levels in which different kinds of transformation is effected. Anthropological history is interested in the process of human transformation, of anthropological change, with a continuum of experience defined at one end by the personal subjectivity of the individual, and at the other end by the transpersonal relations of the entirety of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We can peer only so deeply into the well of time.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological History must recognize the reflexive horizon of its own myopic scope-- the surface of the present obstructs our view into time, such that we can view both the past or the future by occasional glimpses of what lay just beneath the surface. From our anthropological standpoint, we approach an historical horizon of virtual infinity at which 10,000 years might as well be 100,000 years that might as well be a million, even though the difference in magnitude may be tenfold. In other words, there is some optimum depth of temporal view beyond which darkness and distortion occludes our view, shrouding even the little evidence we may have in silent mystery. For people who have a science which is hardly a century old, and whose own experience may hardly span a half or a quarter of a century, we have a tremendous difficult time imagining the differences that a millenium or a million years can make.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus, as mentioned previously, we then seek scientific or mythological substitutes to fill in for our lack of a true sense of historical happenstance--and in such filling in we often come to confuse science that depends upon history with a science based upon mythology. And if this seems threatening to some whom hold dearly to their anthropological theories of human evolution, we must consider the role that historical documentation places in scientific method. Scientific empiricism is rooted in the public record of historical patterning of phenomena. Such patterning is held to be predictable, and therefore able to be manipulated. The historical baseline of scientific research is of course the universal, atomic history that is considered "perfect". In other words all scientific phenomena, as empirical "happenings" to which we bear public witness, are by definition "historical phenomena".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem anthropologist's face in studying either deep history or the great differences between people is that we rapidly reach a point at which our scientific methods of corroboration give way, and we are faced with a need to invent a science which will somehow take over in the face of the lack of historical evidence. When the historical record becomes fragmentary and sketchy at best, and absent at worst, we then need to find some satisfactory kind of "scientific" substitute that will take the place of history. We rely on theory to make sense and fill in, but we can never be very sure that the theory we rely on isn't itself as tied to our own present as we are. We have fine-tuned and developed many ingenious techniques in this quest for a science of deep time, but we have not yet solved the essential problem of history which it presents to us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have fallen back upon the biological theory of evolution as our basic model in this regard--for it has been the one effective solution that science has offered to the problem of time and change. But the anthropological dilemma with this is that humans, by definition, have sort of side-stepped and at least momentarily stepped beyond the purview of biological evolution, so that we cannot be too sure yet how much evolutionary process has impinged upon the making of human history. We have not yet devised a satisfactory theory of human cultural development in anthropology that might take the place of evolutionary theory in biology</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">To deny a people's history is to deny their humanity--ideologically we all live with such denial--thus we momentarily suspend time itself and step beyond the purview of history in the making. But this is part of the historical conundrum as well.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One of the most profound and insightful criticisms of anthropology has been its implicit denial of the history of the other, and its ideological complicity in the subjugation of the other to our own sense of history. The other is treated as an artifact that enters our own historical stream at the very moment that it is detached from its own history. The sense of the rest of the world as having its own history separate and other than the history of the west has been late to dawn upon the anthropological horizon. There was a sense that great socio-cultural distance or difference could be somehow directly translated into evolutionary distance as well. We have come to blindly impose our own conceptions and structures of temporality upon the divergent temporalities of the rest of the world without the slightest regard to the possibility that other people's may order the temporal structure of their experience in ways fundamentally different from our own. A great deal of "scientific" anthropology remains sacredly rooted to this basic proposition of Western rational time that is also, necessarily, universal time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Foreignness and Strangeness, perceived as difference which is threatening and disorderly to our local sense of order, has been equated to temporal disorientation, or to the suspension of "normal time" and therefore carried an implicit presumption of error or abnormality about it. To bring the other into the purview of our normal frames of temporality was in effect to "orient" and "reorient" their temporality in such a way that it made sense and no longer "disoriented"--it was a means of rehabilitating the strange in order to render it familiar. We had to bring them ideologically into our own ideological sense of history, whether they belonged there historically or not. In a sense, we sought the secular "scientific" salvation of the "spirit" of people in a way comparable to how missionaries have sought the religious salvation of their souls through conversion.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our appropriation of the "essence" of the other, and our nihilation of their history, amounts to no less than the denial of their humanity, of their subjective temporality, such that we thereby legitimate policies which eventuate in their victimization, exploitation or destruction as a separate and distinct people. And we continue to do so today.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="seven">V.</p> </a></font><a NAME="seven"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology as Biology</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Human nature alone cannot determine culture, because it is itself biologically underdetermined.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">There are many "scientists" in anthropology today who identify themselves as of a "biological" orientation--what this amounts to is that they have "solved" the paradox of the scientificity of anthropological history by the adoption of the biological paradigm of evolutionary theory. Their claim, in one form or another, amounts to the premises that biological nature must somehow underlie and therefore predetermine cultural patterning, and that therefore a genuine science of anthropology must be founded upon a human biology, and a biology of culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From a logical standpoint this view makes sense if we accept that human biology is a panhuman universal and that humankind ultimately evolved, along with our culture, from a biological background. This viewpoint also entails a necessary form of bio-cultural functionalism which would assert that cultural institutions and practices must ultimately be explained on the basis of how they meet basic biological human needs and predispositions--reproduction, physiological maintenance, organic health, etc. This viewpoint, when appealed to on the basis of common sense, seems to make supreme sense because, not only is it coaxed in the kind of direct language of causality, but also it fits deep-seated folk beliefs dealing with attributes and requirements of "human nature," with "blood" being thicker than water, about evolutionary progress, and so on.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because the people who adopt such a viewpoint also tend to be politically aggressive, this orientation within American Anthropology has achieved a certain ascendancy and predominance over other perspectives within departments across the country, so much so that it has largely come to be the "received" view of anthropology in spite of radical discontent and opposition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though the specific formula for how the causal connections between nature and culture were established varies considerably, there is common consensus which way the causal arrows point--that human biology must underlie and determine culture and that what ever is pan-human must, by definition, be natural.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A common presupposition of this orientation is that there must exist some form of social selection, or set of selective factors, which are genetically and evolutionarily based, which predetermines cultural patterning. It used to be applied rather unreservedly to "races" until the entire notion of "race" was shown to be untenable and false. More recently it has been applied to poor single mothers and their children, prostitutes, homosexuals, the mentally ill, alcoholics, socio-paths and chronic criminals and other people are socially "marked" in some special way. A common prescription for such an approach has been to hypothesize a genetic trait or "linkage" which accounts for the disproportionate frequency of some personality trait among a certain group of people--though few if any such linkages have been clearly and unequivocally demonstrated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An inversion of this entire chain of reasoning is to presuppose the existence of such a linkage without the need to demonstrate it, and then to propose a selectionist regime and evolutionary formula for the entire history of humankind based on this presupposition. In this account, there is such a thing as an "altruistic gene" which makes one person sacrifice her/himself, or someone else, for the fitness of the group. Of course, there should be some a priori way of knowing whose genes will be selected and whose sacrificed. There is kin-fitness and group-fitness--inferior genes should know enough to discount themselves out of the game of selection when and if the rules of competition, of survival of the fittest, no longer apply. From this standpoint, though biological evolution is essentially blind and random, human evolution has been based upon a genetic sentience that guides humankind in its cultural selection.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The popularity of this kind of account in academia is surprising when we consider its essentially nonscientific basis, and the lack of direct empirical corroboration of its central linkage--but the popularity of the belief in creationism and in anti-abortionism is also surprising in modern world dominated by a secular scientific orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems necessary, if unfortunate, to have to point out yet another time the extreme social dangers of this kind of thinking in the legitimization of policies which discriminate and exclude certain social groups or categories from participation or normal involvement in society. If we can define the probability of inferior genes in single unwed mothers and their offspring, then it makes supreme social sense from an evolutionary standpoint that we should not support these people and encourage their reproduction. Eugenic policies that try to propagate the genes of the best and the brightest are also based in the same form of social racist reasoning. It is a small step from such an implicit social policy to more systematic policies of sterilization, or even genocide of out-groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is also a formulaic kind of prescription for writing so many "just so" stories detailing the critical events of the history of human evolution in orderly and necessary fashion--despite the fact that for the most part these stories contain few certifiable facts and many mythological conclusions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All of this has been promoted in spite of the actual situation that nowhere has the specific boundary between human nature and culture been clearly defined, and it seems more reasonable to consider such a connection to be more "fuzzy" than focused--underdetermined rather than determining. Most theorists today reject a strong nature-nurture dichotomy, and see human nature, if anything, as unfinished nature. The reductionism of the complexity of cultural phenomena to the point of rendering its explanation as a mere end of a long chain of causality ultimately stemming from mystical, sentient, altruistic genes, and the implicit denial of human history which the embracing of a theory of biological evolution entails,</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Biological anthropology has done wondrous feats when it has remained close to the evidence and not strayed too far in foreign fields. It has given us a glimpse of the humanness of Lucy that is remarkable, and it has slowly begun filling in some of the missing pieces of the grand puzzle of human origins. But when its priests venture somewhat monopolistically into the field of culture, it invariably founders in deep, and troubled, waters.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">If we wish to find the roots of our nature, then we must seek the heart of our culture.</p> </b></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The counter arguments against this kind of biological determinism are based on a number of different lines of evidence. One of the most revealing are the few unfortunate experiments in extreme cultural deprivation of young children, who subsequent seem to lose most of the capacity for cultural acquisition, and remain in a severely retarded state of underdevelopment. These cases strongly support a theory for the critical role that an effective cultural environment plays in early infant development. Children will simply not "fill" in the deficits of their environment by falling back upon their genetic resources--normal development of human nature has come to depend upon the continuous presence of a cultural environment in order to fully realize its capacity. An extension of this is the early presence of principle care takers and role models who serve as the principle mediators of primary identification--a process so important for normal, later secondary socialization</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Nature and nurture are not connected in any simple, determinative way--they are seen to be interdependent and inextricably entangled in the ongoing reproduction of the social world through the reproduction of the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Recent evidence in the effect of basic hormones on early brain development shows that the presence or absence of certain levels of hormone will determine how the brain will subsequently become organized. There is apparently a significant difference in brain function between women and men as a result of this early influence in development. Indeed, much of the significant brain development toward a fully human state of consciousness takes place during the several years after birth, and depends very greatly upon the relative presence or absence of appropriate environmental stimuli. Factors of social class are seen to have played a significant part in behavioral development in neonates as young as 12 weeks old--no doubt similar factors continue to play an important part throughout an individual's life-time, and into the next generation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must acknowledge the genetic linkage with some forms of disease, and the possible genetic predisposition of some character traits of personality, but the extent to which we can generalize from these few instances to elaborate models about socio-cultural patterns of behavior, institutions, collective representations or attitudes and beliefs held by adults remains most tenuous.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If genes can be demonstrated to lack the necessary prescience to direct cultural selection, it can also be shown that institutions and people in society also generally lack an ability to deliberately direct selective processes in its social reproduction and transmission. Surely there is a correlation between class status, body stature, nutritional wellbeing and general health, and surely those with a monopoly on material resources will tend to be endogamous to assure their posterity the same advantageous monopoly. This should not be interpreted as a deliberate selectionist strategy of human cultural evolution. Such people may and probably will entertain some superhuman ideology about the innate superiority of their own group or class over other peoples. But there is no reason why we should claim for this ideological ethnocentrism a privileged evolutionary status.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is also no reason why we should claim the historical proclivity for bloodshed and war as rooted in an innate aggressiveness. Though humankind may be innately aggressive, the promotion of aggression has been clearly demonstrated to be the consequence of war-proneness of a violent society, and not the cause of its militaristic orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What this leads us to is a sense of human evolutionary history in which the ongoing presence and propagation of basic cultural traits came to be increasingly implicated in organic human development. The unusually long period of infant-dependency for the purposes of cultural acquisition, and the concomitant reduced rate of maturation, was a unique development of human evolution which made the primary acquisition of culture not only possible, but necessary. What we seem to be preprogrammed for is not culture itself, but the acquisition of culture. Whether this acquisition takes place and how is a function of the environment we are raised in. It is possible that in terms of the ontogeny of the child acquisition of basic cultural skills--walking, talking, drawing and writing, etc. We might claim a kind of 'cultural ontogeny recapitulates biological phylogeny. This is highly speculative and unsupportive, but strongly suggestive of the role of culture in human evolutionary development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It can be expected that other facets of human socio-cultural organization have their origin in the kind of basic human trait complex that marks humans as apart in the animal kingdom--language, tools, bipedality, etc. Certainly human sexuality is a distinctive trait that can be the focus of a great deal of cultural conditioning and social organization. The place of the biological family as a basic reproductive unit--especially the mother/child relationship, and the peripheral place of the father--must be seen as having been focused upon this early imperative of cultural acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the early phases of human evolution, selection for bigger and better brains, social organization and cultural acquisition was probably a constant process in human cultural development. Dumb humans probably just did not survive to reproduce themselves. But at some point--probably not too long ago--humankind effectively freed itself from the biological imperative of survival of the fittest by virtue of its acquired culture and innate cultural capacities. From this point, cultural development began its own historical development untied to natural selective forces. At some unknown point of our remote past, human history began to take over the process of cultural development. Today we maintain as part of the reproducible and reproducing population in our society many individuals who by even the most relaxed of selective regimes would probably have faced extermination. As biological beings, we are still surviving under some kind of modified regime of natural selection--we will likely go on evolving in one direction or another, or else face extinction. But the kind of selective regime that led over a few million years to the creation of humankind complete with culture essentially no longer exists. There may be other selective forces at work today--but these are almost guaranteed not to be the forces of survival of the fittest or the most beautiful--except among the most deterministic of peoples.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Again, to reiterate a basic theme, to posit a strong causal relationship of biological determinism precludes the complexity of culture and the evidence of human history--is at best a basic fallacy of reductionism, and amounts to a dangerous denial of human history that also implicitly constitutes a denial of humanity.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The arc of human variation includes the possibilities of being both very good and very bad.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question of the role of instinct, and more broadly, of nature, in the constitution of human personality and culture has long been of interest. Beyond the most basic rooting and nursing reflexes of the neonate, and perhaps basic expressions of crying and laughter, it can well be argued that human beings have lost all traces of instinct from their character. But it is also the case that if human beings do not suffer from the world-closure that instinctual constraint demands upon behavior, they have left over a hypertrophied instinctual apparatus which has come under the controlling regime of not genetic inheritance, but of primary cultural acquisition. If humans have not inherited from their progenitors the actual sets of instincts themselves, they have inherited at least the basis of the instinctual apparatus, and the consequent need for some form of constraint which instinct provides within the fold of nature.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The interference of cultural constraint in the developmental process of the young human, particularly the cognitive-ordering processes entailed naming and word-association, have worked to release the grip of instinct over human nature and to break up its fixed patternings into a set of potentially infinite rearrangeable 'behavioremes'--minimally distinctive constituents of human action which carry significance in the world. Aside from the first neonatal instincts, instinctual patternings in human beings are left dormant--they are never turned on during human development, but instead their expression depends upon the process of internalization of cultural schemata that are available in the environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This has enabled the behavioral acquisition of stimuli which is not organically original to the extinct that acquired behavioral traits and arrangements take on the force and potency of natural, innate instinct, of basic needs, of basic appetites and aversions, of basic identities, of habits, all of which become so ingrained in the organic organization of the individual that they are virtually reflexive and automatic in their physiological responses.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are creatures of habit because it is only through habit that we can order our world in a manner sophisticated enough to cope with its complexities, and yet simple enough to be easily understandable. In our learning, as in typing, driving a car, riding a bike, we become so habituated in our fixed action patterns that we are not required to think them through step by step, but respond reflexively after a brief lag. The young child fumbles in all it attempts because these sophisticated habits have not yet been acquired or mastered. We depend so much upon our habitual action patterns in order to free our decision-making consciousness to provide a homological and overall purposefulness to what we are doing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Similarly, our need for ritual in everyday life, in discourse, as well as in more formal aspects of our cultural worlds, is based upon this dependency and possibility for habit formation that is quite complex. And so much of our ritual is so taken for granted, that it remains in our lives so unmarked and out of the awareness of our critical attention. We tend to tune out the ritual patternings of our life as so much background collage--we are able to focus our scrutiny upon those aspects of our environment that are less predictable and involve change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words, cultural constraint, through the process of internalization of habit, and externalization of ritual, is mostly indirect constraint that remains mostly 'sub-conscious'--below the level of our conscious awareness. Such indirect constraints channel our lives along the grain because they confer a sense of regularity, predictability and subjective inevitability and efficacy to all that we think, say and do, and without which our lives would be made to seem haphazard, chaotic, uncontrollable and somewhat contrived.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible that basic instinctual patterns are most evident, and combined with cultural schemata most directly, at a level of non-verbal activity, including passive phenomenological perception and pattern recognition, basic affective responses, motivations and moods, body language, and some forms of proto-linguistic vocalization. These levels are functioning concurrently with more conscious and active processes of speech, cognition and coordination and volitional activity, but always at a level that is normally background, perhaps 'pre-conscious' if not quite 'unconscious'. We are responding and initiating these signals simultaneously and synchronously with our more directed actions, and communication is achieved at this level along with messages at the linguistic and meta-linguistic levels. Such meaning is unexceptionally context-dependent, except where learned cultural schemata has become embedded upon this level. This level also interacts with 'higher' levels of consciousness in definite ways--helping to contextualize, embed, and constrain or condition such messages. Our verbal signals may be contradicted or reinforced by these signals--our tongues may be saying yes, but our eyes, our bodies, our voice quality, may be implying no in no uncertain terms. Because these constraints are mostly indirect, they normally function implicitly and tacit in our communication. Thus they are normally difficult to read and ascertain.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now it sometimes occurs that our conscious control is temporarily suspended, and this unconscious level of experience and behavior is left to fill in the gap of our awareness--at this point, we become out of control, or rather controlled indirectly by basic forces which we can scarcely recognize in ourselves. In such episodes, our actions become automatic and reflexive--something remotely akin to instinct, but quite uncontrolled and out of order, seems to take control of our bodies, responding in situations in ways which we cannot consciously help.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible that in some crowd situations, in which the respondent's and participant's capacity for self-control, and for voice, is ritually or anti-structurally overridden by a predominant social presence. When anonymity, muteness and blindness are reinforced and individual identity denied, then the appeal is made to these unconscious forces always lurking in the background of our personalities. It is not surprising that crowd responses, panic, rioting, mass mania, entrancing, etc., resemble the actions of herd animals or of a battlefield than of responsible, willful human beings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because of the fundamental world-openness of our human condition, because the force of our instincts have been blocked and sublimated via the condition of our cultural world, human development and human character remains perpetually unfinished, partial and incomplete. It provides us with the promise of learning, correcting and improving, as well as with the ever-present risk of error, mistake, and evil. In giving up the security of instinctual control, we received both blame and blessing. We are always susceptible to falling comfortably into the artificial and illusory security of our acquired rituals and habits, and we are always walking a tight rope between self-control and loss of control. Loss of control and making mistakes always bring with it embarrassment, shame, guilt, and it is the internalized force of these negative sanctions which give us the incentive to improve our sense of control.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The embedding of habit and ritual to the point of seeming as if it were natural and integral is its power to take over and behave at a level which is instinctual. In this way, common sense and concrete logic can take on the appearance of being built in and ingrained.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In these ways, social structure becomes internalized within the personality as if were natural law, while the internal drives and motivations of the individual becomes externalized into the social patternings in the same naturalistic way. Consciousness can be seen to deal with those elements of the environment and the self which are not completely internalized, which remain problematic within the relationships between the self and the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The possibility for the internalization of social ethos and pathos also concomitantly creates the possibility for the development of internal conscious control by the self. Cultural patterning was built dialectically upon the basis of an internalized sense of self, and internalized self became a possibility only when culture was constructed as an externalization. In this way, the consciousness of self and the self of consciousness intermediate between internalized environment and externalized body.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In human evolutionary terms, it was the soft tissue that made the critical difference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">To speculate about whether humankind had to free itself from certain basic instincts and natural constraint upon its basic identity before it could open the door to let culture in, is to suggest that we might have some privileged knowledge about what proto-human "instincts" may have been like, as if we could measure these by comparing them to primate instincts or Prosimian instinct. Nature may have loosened its grip on early humankind, without the introduction of culture--or alternatively, it may have been the introduction of culture that pried humankind away from its natural chains.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What might these constraints and chains have been like? We have the example of the prototypical wild wolf, complete with a generalized range of instincts as a social predator in a harsh environment, from which every breed of dog has been selective bred for its special traits like herding, birding, hunting, etc. Might our human cultural precursor have been a kind of generally adapted creature in which a unique set of evolutionary circumstances prompted a self-organization for crude cultural traits--a sort of selective breeding regime in which this precursor became bred for rudimentary cultural acquisition?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At this point we must seek clues in our fossil record for a sense of the progression of human evolutionary development. We have a sense of a step-wise development occurring in several stages. The first led to the gracile australopithecine, probably in a mosaic environment, that was "general adapted" to survival in a range of diverse environments. This early hominid gradually radiated out from its birthplace in Central Africa to cover perhaps most of the African continent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The end of this period witnessed the gradual transformation of the species, and the emergence of a new hominid--Homo habilis, who was ready to possess a very crude cultural complex. A few all-purpose tools, perhaps a few words like this or that and help and hello, and maybe a rudimentary sense of socio-cultural organization. This transitional type stabilized in the form of Homo Erectus, a very adaptable, robust human who carried its crude cultural context to the four corners of its world, adapting it to the special surroundings wherever it went. A second long period of stability last for almost two million years. The culture of Homo erectus was geared for one exclusive purpose, survival in the wild, and procreation of the species. Women who had a need to sire several children need to attract and attain the services of available, but probably unstable males. The end of this long era in turn saw the emergence of a new kind of hominid, and a new evolutionary matrix.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By the end of this period, the evolved Erectus was primed for another transition and a succession of forms. A new culture and a new type emerged which was more adapted to circumscription and to the problem of environmental specialization. A new culture of circumscription had to develop strategies and schedules of resource exploitation in wide, but bounded geographical areas. Furthermore, it had to face the increasing problem of competition and relation with other neighboring groups. The ice-ages probably helped to precipitate this new type, and it is understandable if the succession of forms was not in part based upon competition within similar, generalized environmental niches, and displacement by a better adapted culture over a cruder "survival" orientation. We get another transitional form--archaic Homo and Homo neandertalensus-- and the emergence of the new prehistoric, traditional cultural complexes of Homo saipiens saipiens.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The transition itself may well have taken over previous 100,000 years, which is short enough by evolutionary standards to be called a fairly abrupt speciation episode. At the end of it we have the relatively rapid emergence, especially over the last 30 thousand years, of human culture as we know it anthropologically today.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What began as an unusual evolutionary matrix within an environmental mosaic somewhere in central Africa, ended as a full blown adaptive radiation of a generalized cultural orientation that eventually spread to every significant, habitable piece of land on earth. That the original proto-hominid form was generally adapted to an environmental mosaic--an adaptation which fostered bipedalism and the use of the hands for more than walking or climbing--seems to be a likely and well accepted scenario. This species, Lucy in the flesh, though of much shorter stature, remained for all intents and purposes a basic human being. It was more than a chimpanzee--it moved about and made itself a home where ever it could find the right environmental elements to procreate and survive, and it used its cunning little brain in a way which allowed it to outwit the laws of nature.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The rainbow of human possibility had its origins in the lion's roar and the wild cock's crow.</p> </b></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">My just so story would not be complete if I did not include the dynamic transformational effects that cultural acquisition and transmission played as a slow but inexorable new selective force guiding human evolutionary development. The survival value and competitive advantage of basic inventions and innovations would be immediately realized and would eventually spread. The spread of such cultural traits from one human group to another had a stimulus effect in the transformation of humankind's relationship with the world. This transmission was not genetic, but cultural. Its basic traits can be put into a simple list or inventory. There is no doubt that such cultural traits had and continue to have a transformational effect upon the human being. Because phenotypical traits are not passed from generation to generation, we must refer to a form of cultural selection created by cultural acquisition and transmission of new traits--the causal arrow clearly points in the direction of bigger brains, but exactly how this happened remains a mystery. It must have favored those individuals with better acquisition and transmission capabilities--and a developmental delay in an increasingly sophisticated cultural environment. It would tend to select out accident-prone children, or the children of caretakers who did not take care, otherwise children would not survive to a reproductive age. It favored the creation of a kind of home environment and stable social relations that permitted both the protection and development of the young infant. It must have favored innovation and innovators. It also must have favored those with a superior intellectual capacity to communicate with others, and to learn from others. The acquisition processes between parent and child require the same basic abilities as those between adults of different groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In these dynamics of cultural selection, we must see an important linkage between the innate capacity to learn, map and respond in sophisticated ways to a complex series of environments, and the gradual creation and enlargement of a basic cultural environment that eventually came to replace and contain the natural world. No doubt the survival of early hominids required that these people be finely attuned and responsive to the signals of their natural environment--the ability to recognize calls and sounds, to remember the lair of lions or to read the tracks of wild game, to seek protection from rainfall. Selection probably favored those who could remember, plan, and coordinate activities in these environments. Survival of a rather short creature not well endowed with strength or tooth and claws depended upon such abilities to rapidly recognize and respond to complex signals in the natural world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The most basic and fundamental aspect of early child acquisition is the passive pattern recognition and synaesthetic, emblematic concatenation of signals into complex associations that allows the child to recognize, imprint, process and respond to a complex cultural environment. This forms a basic substrate of consciousness upon which all subsequent cognitive development is based. At this early age, even within the womb, the brain is encoding the environmental signals it is receiving in complex ways. By the time children are two years old the imprint of their cultural background is firmly, organically established in their minds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can consider that Lucy and her kind were still working out their basic human relationship with their natural world. They were learning how to survive in a world in which the selection regime was complex and problematic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this order of things, we can speak of the early self-organization of the anthropological "complex" upon which subsequent cultural development became founded. The human relationship with its environment has always been one characterized by exploitation--by human's acquiring survival skills and learning how to take advantage of a hostile world. I do not wish to suggest a Horatio Alger origin myth of a capitalistic pleasure-seeker pulling themselves up by their hamstrings. But the transformational effects of culture must be seen to lie in the exploitative character of the human being to its environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may want to see primitive man as caught in some kind of ecological symbiosis with a world, taking only what it needs, and leaving the rest for the next generation. But it seems that early man may not have been aware of basic world ecology, and took whatever he could whenever he could find it regardless of the consequences for the adaptation of other species. Humankind had probably hunted many species to extinction before the gun came along. Numerous local examples are available in the archaeological record of local overexploitation of environments and irreversible degradation of the ecosystem. In this regard Easter Island stands as a parable, not only for our modern world, except for humankind more generally. And we must recognize the great success of the Modern Capitalist system as based upon its ability to take advantage of this basic human trait of taking advantage. It has effectively tapped into the very deeply rooted sense of self-interest, achievement and survival success that carried the first humans from its natural bondage.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If this kind of relationship holds, then it may be worthwhile to speculate about what our modern capitalist world system may have to teach us about ourselves and our beginnings. The media has become the primary tool of the capitalist system in tapping into the mind of the human being, and in this manner it effects continuous series of a basic mythological dialectic and reversal between nature and culture--endowing natural entities with superhuman forces and humans with bestial qualities. There is something mysterious and magical in this basic mythological transformation which catches hold of the human imagination.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A child of one or two is distinctly human in its nature. It has a natural curiosity and need to explore its environment. It also has an inherent proneness to accident. The child develops at a very early age manipulative strategies by which to achieve those things within its small scope. We can speak of a kind of superman mythoi about our origins in which our rise to humanness was an overcoming of the bondage of nature by the cunning of our reasons--sometimes our success entailed running away at the slightest sign of danger.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must recognize the thin boundary between fear and awe-inspiring feeling, the flow of adrenaline and heightened, acute awareness. I can imagine a young boy, a Mowgli, ever hungry, huddled in a nest upon a tree limb, listening to the unseen roar of a distant lion in the nighttime, and, in fear and awe, imagining a wild demon. Soon that boy is asleep, and dreaming of running from a beast, half-human and half lion. In reflection upon this dream, human sentience was born.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Our nature is the price we've had to pay for our culture. Our culture has become our nature.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any form of biological determinism requires an unnecessary and reductionistic dichotomization between "nature" and "culture" and the fallacy of failing to recognize how entangled our culture has become with our natures. This is so much so that we might be inclined to reverse the causal errors and speak of a kind of cultural determinism of our nature--if this were not equally, if oppositely fallacious. The boundary between our nature and our culture is clearly blurred and indefinitely defined. There was a human world before culture, and the evolution of culture has meant different things for different kinds of human beings. The basic, crude culture of Homo Erectus must have been fundamentally different in certain respects from the more sophisticated culture of Homo neandertalensus.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must ask the question of what might have been our precursor to culture--a "proto-cultural complex" or "pre-cultural context" which was also prototypically, uniquely anthropological. And in this regard, we are, in spite of our sophistication and our evolutionary development, not so different from our first forebearers who walked in the world. To live at one with the natural world is the price we've paid for our cultural acquisition and adaptation. It was the cost of admission into humanness. The source of our humanness is to be found buried deep in our heart of darkness.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eight">VI.</p> </a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"><a NAME="eight"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology as Mind</a></p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">From an anthropological perspective, the mind is a priori human--the most objective knowledge we can have is of the relative anthropological subjectivity of our world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We do not really have an anthropology of "Mind" as the seminal anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote about. We do not have an anthropological theory about theory, about information, about design, order, "structure" and system. We do have notions about cybernetic systems, about chaos and anti-chaotic systems, about information and constraint, about stochastic systems and complexity, about the design features of languages, etc., but we do not really comprehend the "structure of structure." Why should this be a concern of anthropology?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The Greeks saw the cosmos as ordered by a rational principle, or Logos They believed that logos governed not only the relations of the universe, but between humans and their relationship with the world as well. Modern science has been founded upon this same principle of an underlying rational order of the natural universe. It has guided their search for mathematical like laws which govern the phenomenal and material patterning of the universe. And to a large extent, they have been successful.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of knowledge can look at the question another way. Because our science and our sense of scientific Logos of the universe, as a rational, mathematical and law-like order, is the human order we have brought to this knowledge and superimposed upon our vision of the world that makes it an anthropologically important question. It has been human beings making rational sense of the order that is implicit and intrinsic in the universe--it is an inherently human capacity to abstract, reason and make sense of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of the structure of "structure" and rational order is necessarily founded in the idea of the human reflexivity of such order. The order we have come to impose upon our universe is in some important way of the structure of our own minds, and it is this symmetry of order between abstracting mind and abstracted world that makes such "logos" possible in the first place. This is an anthropological theory about the anthropology of "theory."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint we need to consider science as "natural Systems theory", aspects of "information" theory as constraint and coherence, transmission and communication, and as interference and inference/reference; "design" theory as the basis of interpretation, description, explanation and "understanding;" "relational" theory as somehow important in how human beings comprehend their world; and the role of artificial intelligence and its bearing on the anthropological question of "alternative intelligence." Finally, we must address the problems of chaos, anti-chaos, change, complexity and stochastic systems that "explore", learn about and adapt to their unknown environments.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The anthropological paradox has not been the problem of programming a computer to think like the mind, but of programming the mind to think like a computer.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">The Greek conception of logos had been founded upon the conception of a "pure" idea, or relation, of the kind we find in mathematical laws. These are held to be a priori and analytically true, and in a sense are the noumenal essences upon which phenomenal reality is based. In young children, learning to count and to manipulate mass is a rather straightforward, almost mechanical cognitive operation. The computer also performs rather complex, but similarly mechanical operations, with surprising speed and efficiency. We hold this kind of cognitive process to be the highest order of intelligence possible to human beings--and we have been constructing our computers with these ideas of speed, efficiency and memory capacity in mind. What I am referring to are the simple binary operations of identity and negation, and the later process of conservation, from which we can derive a Turing machine and all forms of mathematically based machines. We seek to base our understanding of the structure of language, and by positivistic extension, of all of reality, upon a similar mathematical theory of knowledge. It would be difficult to imagine a corner of the universe in which the basic principles of mathematics did not hold.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These principles have their basis in the notion of a "perfect" identity and a "pure" relation--they are from a "purely" rational and logical standpoint "a priori absolute", "universal" and "necessary." But there is something peculiarly human about this mathematical business--I would contend that in a larger context the natural universe rarely if ever obeys such perfection without some perturbation of the random error. The kind of physics envy that characterizes the somewhat squamous mind of the positivistic scientist is an expression of a desire for a perfect world--a "paradise" without the muddling effects of change. This is not to denigrate the power and elegant beauty of mathematical sciences, without these we could not have built our human world, but it is to attempt to put these back within their proper human context--as ideological human constructions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I contend that mathematics, the sciences, and the construal of a rationally ordered universe reveals something fundamentally important and intrinsic about abstract human thought, and imagination as well. In other words the brain may not really function in terms of binary processing in the manner that a computer does, but it performs a certain feat, a trick, if you will, of converting the mind into such a binary processing phenomena. It is useless from this standpoint to try to teach a computer to process language in a natural way, because natural language processing may not necessarily depend upon the mathematical structure we try to attribute to it. We can perhaps design a computer to perform certain "mental operations,", which we call higher order thinking, in a way that reflects the occasional facet of the human mind, or else redesign a computer to function in a different way, or else to write complex programs which "trick" the computer and superficially mimic natural human process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must distinguish between natural, organic brain function and natural mental processes which are defined functionally, intrinsically and implicitly, and formal theories and formally defined programs that function on the basis of formal constraints. The first has been a living process of long, deep evolution; the second has been a hypothetical product of the human imagination.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mental trick that the brain performs to think logically and construe the world mathematically is itself embedded in a culturally constructed conceptual universe. The universe of zero's and real numbers and case logic, which has introduced certain constraints into the normal, natural processes of thought that permit the higher order abstractions of mathematics. These basic constructs are acquired relatively late in child development, and, though encoded neurally in the brain in some unknown way, are built upon a foundation of previously acquired cognitive skills--one of which among others is the skill of natural language. The feat of thinking logically is not natural or automatic process of the human brain. It comes as the result of a long and complex process of acquisition and organic brain development, and they are complex skills that the brain can perform, quite mechanical from one point of view, based on language, but independently of linguistic expression. This is the trick--the trick of "pure thought" disconnected from its organic, functional context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a basic kind of anthropological fallacy associated with this cognitive feat of the human mind. It is a special form of reification because it construes as if natural, processes and skills which are culturally constructed. It is perhaps complementary to the notion of "misplaced concretization" that transforms an idea or an abstraction into a "thing"--we might call it "displaced abstraction" or "symbolic idealization," and consists of transforming "things" into "ideas" or "fictions" or "essences."</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Discourse and dichotomy have gone hand in hand in the dialectical development of Mind.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are faced with a fundamental relativity of rationality. We cannot clearly separate or mark the boundary between what is "truly" rational from a logical standpoint and what is merely "rationalized" from a linguistic standpoint, because language underlies logic. We must see that from a rationalistic standpoint, the Christian conception of a biblical order of the world is as rational and reasonable as a classical Greek conception of a natural logos underlying the cosmos, unless we stipulate certain logical constraints and empirical proofs upon which our modern science is founded, that is itself rationally tied to a relative, rationalistic frame of reference. In other words, the abstract order of the Christian universe is from an insider's point of view as rationally coherent as the rational Logos of the Classical cosmos of the Greeks--in as much as both are founded upon order-imposing language systems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropological theory of theory be capable of revising our conventional and classical notion of the relation between rational order and knowledge in the world, and to see that rational order, as a form of rationality, does not underlie the natural universe as much as it is the residuum of reflective human consciousness rooted in language about that natural order. Logos is based on language, and language upon logos. This entails that our search for a rational structure of language is itself a search for the kind of rational order made possible by language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see human reason and cognition as being a derivation of a natural language for which the human organism became evolutionarily specialized, as a generalized structure of the brain. In other words, the entire organic complex which we identify as uniquely human, is centered upon natural language, and more specifically, upon the relationship between natural language and manual manipulation involved in tool making.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Tool making accomplished two things--the liberation of the human from the constraints of natural selection, and the externalization of the internalized sense of human reality into the world. The close relationship between language, and the speech-production capacities of the pharyngeal-lingual complex, and manual dexterity is clearly demonstrated in the case of sign language, writing and typing. Bipedalism was the evolutionary platform for this development, for it freed both the hands and the mouth to develop in other directions than walking, climbing, feeding and biting. The subsequent development of the brain was focused upon the elaboration of this basic complex.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, we must see that rationality and rationalization are rooted in the discursive production of human speech as a social phenomenon that allowed for the externalization of human knowledge in the world. More to the point, such discursive aspects of speech-production allowed people to mark the difference, to create a sense of difference between the internalized conception of reality and the externalized construction. Pointing out the difference became the basis of the acquisition of subsequent skills such as counting piles of stones, beads on a string, an abacus, tallies with a stylus in a clay tablet, or pencil marks on a piece of paper.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The effect of this was the possibility for dichotomization between the internal and external order, dichotomization which can be found to underlie our classical conceptions of logic as it underlies our mythological process. Dichotomization has become more apparent in our world--we marked the scientific distinction between the sacred and secular in a way that our "pre-logical" ancestors apparently failed to do. It was not that they lacked the "reason" for doing so, but they lacked the cultural constructed context as a "reason" for doing so. It allowed for the dialectical development of human reason and rationality. In this regard, we must understand that the possibility for marking the difference, for dichotomization of reality, allowed for both the possibility of discrepancy, and the fallacy, error and deceit inherent in discrepancy, as well as for the kind of "coherence" we like to call "truth".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The focus of our anthropological construction of reality, has been the evolutionary development of our natural language, which lies at the center of both our cognition and our cultural order. The basic anthropological complex is centered upon human speech production and language processing, and is itself intrinsically tied up with the manual dexterity involved in tool making and tool using. If we wish to characterize the predominate order of determination in our "worldview" problem, then we must consider a perspective that sees language, and more centrally, speech as social discourse, as being at the base of the dialectical dynamics of organic human development, of cultural development and of the development of the rational mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectical dynamics of discourse consists of the testing of generalized frames of reference that have been internalized with those which exist in the external social world. This possibility is itself an extension of an internal dialectic which occurs between a more primitive perceptual processing and pattern recognition system which is largely passive, non-reflexive and a-temporally ordered, and a derivative, secondary system of conceptual organization and active emblematic processing is reflexive and temporally constrained. The two dialectical systems create the possibilities of discrepancy and coherence, of difference and identity, in an internalized and externalized sense that dynamically reinforce one another in the anthropological construction of reality. In both cases, language is the principle mediator of the same process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are thus left with a sense of an important difference of identity between information in the natural order that is functionally implicit and yet that fails to know itself as such, and the form of information that is somehow aware or self-reflexive in its encoding of the relationship of difference and identity. We may in this regard distinguish between the criticality of anti-chaotic patterns and the complexity of adaptive systems. Knowledge must be aware of change--information merely encodes the process of change.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In natural information, physical processes and properties underlie chemical processes and properties that underlie biological processes and properties that underlie anthropological properties--each antecedent is necessary, but none are sufficient, in being able to account for the Human consequent.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science is an attempt to explicate the natural logos of the universe. Science is essentially "natural systems theory" concerned with creating valid and realistic information about natural processes of change and stasis, structure, order, pattern, and development. As natural systems theory, science operates upon different informational levels. The relations and factors that function upon one level of integration are different from those functioning at other, higher levels. Three such informational levels have been recognized--the physical, the biological and the human. Events and processes occurring at one level cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of processes and events at the other level, and the kind and structure of theory and conceptioning predominant on one level is different than on another level. The physics and chemistry at the physical level does not completely explain the evolutionary processes of the biological level or the socio-cultural or linguistic phenomena of the human level. The kind and quality of science practiced upon each level is different from the others, and the criteria used for validation vary substantially between the levels.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, laws which apply at a more fundamental level, apply as well on the super-ordinate levels, though the laws and principles obtaining upon a super-ordinate level do not obtain on more fundamental levels.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak of a covering law model, or rather of general information theory that applies upon all levels. The laws of thermodynamics, which guarantee the entropy of the universe, apply upon all levels. Similarly, principles of chaotic systems also apply equally upon all levels, as do relational principles and the general relativity of information.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sense of time and scale of patterning are different upon each of the three levels--geophysical history, evolutionary history and human history each involves different levels of predictability and controllability. We must see that the factors and forces that go into the making of a tornado upon the mid-western plains are fundamentally different in their sense and quality of time and order than those factors and forces governing the occurrence of a riot in Los Angeles, or of a devastating plant virus in the southeast. But in all three sets of circumstances the random role of chaotic patterning must be acknowledged. Upon a human level we speak of volitional systems of interaction, while upon a biological level we can refer to organic or animated systems. Upon the physical level we can speak of mechanical or automatic systems of action and reaction</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Similarly, the quality and kind of information that is ordered, transmitted and modified is fundamentally different upon the three levels. The information contained upon the physical level has to do with the frequencies and relatively discrete values contained in subatomic particles, quanta, etc., as well as in larger units such as in chemical molecular compounds or solutions. Information upon the biological level is almost exclusively contained in the DNA structure of the genome. There must be forms of transmission upon a higher social or behavioral level among different species of animal--by and large these forms consist of chemical or mechanical signals. Information contained upon the human level is uniquely linguistic and paralinguistic in structure and function--one which combines emblematic, symbolic, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and behavioral dimensions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is interesting to speculate whether the ordering and patterning of basic information upon each of the three different orders may share in some basic, universal structure--something which Gregory Bateson refers to as stochastic systems and the unity of mind and body. In this we might speculate on the role and functioning of dual parallel processing systems, upon a kind of bilateral symmetry between two complementarily arranged sets of signals. A cybernetic dialectic, one that is order-maintaining and meaning creating, becomes established between two sets of signal arrays to produce a complex moire patterning of information.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such a system is most readily apparent in the genetic structure of DNA. Similar systems may be found in the bilaterial functioning of the brain, in the two-tiered structure of the Mind, as well as in the split-level structure of psycho-social process. We might further speculate about the hypothetical possibility of finding a similar kind of informational structure upon the subatomic level of the quantum-we have long sought to understand the causes and principles of gravity, and its relationship to the electromagnetic spectrum.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This line of reasoning forces a reconsideration of the role and importance of "information" in the universe. Information is created by redundancy. Such bilaterality of dual-processing systems effectively draw a "slash mark" across a field such that information upon one side of the mark enables a measure of prediction about information upon the other side.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must ask if and what broader significance "information" may have for the universe. Is it a "force" that accomplishes something? Buckminster Fuller talks about anti-entropy as a kind of "more for less" creativity which comes about when we successfully combine knowledge with energy. Information can be seen to order and constrain, or to modulate, the flow and directionality of energy in ways which lead to the maintenance of higher orders of complexity--or what effectively amounts to more efficient systems of energy transmission and/or conservation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must also ask what the relationship may be between energy, information and change in the natural order. Energy can be defined as the potential for change, and the cause of change. Change can be seen as the expression of energy. In this regard, Information can be construed as the process of the mediation of energy to effect or control change. Information "predicts" change because it predicates the patterning which energy shall take in its expression. It is information which pushes the release of energy away from the totally random and entropic, toward systems which tend toward greater determination and productivity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Information is contained within and involves the interference of the transmission of energy in nonrandom, anti-chaotic patterns. Information, upon whichever level of its expression, is constrained by certain, universal features of design--bilateral or split fields, parallel-processing, dialectical and cybernetic in functioning, relative structural symmetry.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Is this all there is to be said about natural informational theory? Information occurs upon many different levels in reality. On whichever level on which it occurs, it is constrained by certain basic features of structural, or informational design. Informational systems are self-organizing, and as such they have a natural life-cycle of sub-critical, critical and super-critical development, in each stage of which certain structural patterns and principles predominate and are predictable. The scale of history in each system, upon each level of information, is different, as is its inherent complexity. Time and space, which may be thought of as a universal standard by which all change is measured, may have different qualitative and quantitative values upon different levels of information.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Natural information, including human knowledge, "functions"--it does something important, or else it is a product of an important function. We can refer to this natural informational function as communication--the transmission of the boundary between order and change through time and across space.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The general concept of communication has been important in the understanding of human cultures, social systems and of human reality. Without extremely sophisticated and virtually instantaneous systems of communication which span the entire globe in a vast and intricate and invisible network, the development of the World System as it is today would not have been possible.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Communication, the transmission of significant information, remains a rational, abstract idea that glosses a very complicated behavioral and linguistic process, by which the understandings, motivations, interests, expressions, intentions, feelings of one person are made available to another who may be at a considerable distance from the source of the 'information'. Information is the principle metaphor of our modern era. The greatest, most recent and most revolutionary advances of modern science and technology have been on the frontiers of information processing, production, retrieval, manipulation, recording and storage. The impact and implications of these recent advances have not yet been fully realized in the world, but they are transforming modern world society in ways that we can barely conceive or control. Not only has a new class of criminal been created, but a new breed of professional specialist is now at the helm of control and change in the world. Information has proven to be great power, to both corrupt and create.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Gregory Bateson, a seminal anthropologist and an early pioneer of the cybernetics of culture, wrote in his essay "Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art" in <u>Steps to an Ecology of Mind </u>that meaning was the synonym of 'pattern, redundancy, information, and "restraint" within a general paradigm....</p> </font><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain "redundancy" or "pattern" if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a "slash mark," such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can <u>guess</u> with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is one side of the slash contains <u>information</u> or has <u>meaning</u> about what is on the other side. Or, in engineer's language, the aggregate contains "redundancy." Or, again, from the point of view of a cybernetic observer, the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (i.e., reduce the probability of) wrong guessing...</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is something of a paradox that effective communication demands both a measure of openness and a degree of constraint. Information is inherently chaotic. It emerges upon the edge of the random by the ordering of elements in a kind of fixed pattern. It is remarkable that increasing degrees of constraint along a specific dimension creates boundless potential for the information carrying capacity of a communication system--the advantages of an alphabet based upon a phonetic transcription of basic sounds over a clumsy syllabary or a much more context-bound ideographic or pictographic system of writing is an archetypical example of how increasing orders of constraint along one dimension of a communication system can lead to increased efficiency and almost boundless productivity along other dimensions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such communicative constraint abstracts the principle of information from out of the concrete context in which such information is embedded in the world. In this sense, the elaboration of scientific theory, and the development of its non-ideological sense-making of the world, has been just such a process of increasing communicative constraint that effectively and efficaciously abstracts the underlying 'structure' from out of the physical universe--achieving a degree of 'Logos' about the ordering principles of the world, and of ourselves as part of that world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Communication systems are rule-governed, and are therefore reducible in terms that are explicitly propositional. Communicative constraint is not achieved without some cost, and no system is a perfectly non-entropic one. The process of communicative abstraction of signals entails the incursion of the principle of arbitrariness in the structural separation of the signifier and the signified, to the point that the only connection between the term and the thing may be only a purely logical or hypostatic one. While abstraction increases the internal coherence of a communication system, it creates a closure or boundary between elements external to the system. Such systems are very brittle and such brittleness is the likely source of continuous or expectable error that cannot be controlled within the system. A sign system may be so abstractly separated from its original context of reference that it bears no real or recognizable relationship with the empirical world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Communication depends for its effectiveness upon the systematic reduction of contradiction such that a signal cannot stand for the thing signified as well as its opposite, or negative meaning. The systematic reduction of internal contradiction along its dimensions of constraint represents the attempt to reduce the possibility of noise, or of random disorder, within the system. Such noise results in the destructive interference with the system. The significant elements of such a system can stand for a limited range of things, but not for anything or everything, or for nothing. Such elimination of contradiction or noise reduction is seen to enhance the information carrying capacity, or channel capacity of the system along other dimensions, such that each unit is capable of carrying more and greater significance of a specific kind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Decreasing destructive interference increases the possibility of constructive interference, which is the intervention of the principle of the possibility of arbitrariness of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, such that the system may become conventionally constrained and deliberately controlled. It is at such a point that we have a genuinely "cybernetic system." With the independence of the signifier from the signified, and with the relative neutralization of the sign as icon, the possibility for intentional manipulation of the relationship is introduced, with the resulting modification and modulation of the information that the system contains. Such a system becomes potentially open and infinitely productive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But there is no such thing as a perfect communication system that is completely without noise or contradiction--to such an extent all systems remain minimally closed. Context must interfere with the signal, and though it is never desired, contradiction is bound to happen--such contradiction occurs if only implicitly, subconscious or out of the directly awareness of the communicators.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">There is a critical difference between the semiotic organization of information in the natural world, and the symbolic organization of information in the human world--human information is always "about" something else, natural information is only "about" itself.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we define a relational system as one in which the value of anything within the system is a measure of its relationship to other elements within the system, in which a thing is determined by other things within the system, then we are faced with the dilemma that we can have no external hook by which to anchor the value of something in some fixed way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The doctrine of relativism maintains that all human knowledge in this sense constitutes a "relational system". Meaning then is the measure of the relatedness of one thing in a system to other things--it is in a basic sense "referential". This forces a paradox that we cannot therefore have no externally "objective" or "non-arbitrary" foundations for our knowledge which rests beyond the scope of the relational system, the values of which are set in some absolute and non-arbitrary way. There are in essence no "atoms" of knowledge which are immutable, indestructable, eternally unchanging.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A relational system entails also that all elements within its purview are subject to change, change which is the consequence of other changing relations within the field. It implies that the meaning of anything is always, in the broader, relational sense, continuous and non-discrete, and therefore qualitatively underdetermined. Meaning in a narrow sense is discrete and discontinuous, only within the boundaries set for its conditionality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human symbolization is ordered upon a very basic level. The principles for the organization of human symbols can be said to be relational in patterning. Relational logic is one in which any one thing is not defined in terms of itself, rather its identity is a function of the many other things to which it is related. Everything in a relational system is defined in terms of everything else, so there are no boundaries marking categorical differences between things or sets of things. A relational system is indeed a complex one. There are no fixed boundaries to things or measures of things. The index of thingness is the degree of affinity or likeness or of lack of affinity or unlikeness. What matters in such a system are not things per se, but the relations between things. In other words, thingness in a relational system is defined in terms of the whole system--identity is transferred, via relational configurations, upon the status of the system as a whole defined by the number of interrelations that it encompasses. Thus identity, or the principle of non-contradiction, is not the primary element of its logic--rather it is the principle of relationship, or affinity--a thing is not either or, but more or less. Values in a field are not fixed--they are variable and relative within a field of interdependencies. The status of one thing within the field depends upon the conditional status of many other things, such that minor changes in one part of the field may result in a chain reaction of altered values in other areas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speculate that one of the main distinctions between a relational system and a classical or rational system is that the former is a notational system based upon a continuous field of elements that can be thought of as being symbolic and qualitatively determined, while the latter can be thought of a mathematical system dealing with discrete entities quantitatively defined.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Both types of system may be employed to describe the same sets of things, but some kinds of phenomena in reality may be better described in terms of one system than the other. The virtues of the one system may represent the limitations of the other system. Mathematical systems may have a rational precision and facticity which relational systems may be lacking, while on the other hand relational systems may be able to better represent the complexity and transformations inherent in natural systems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our orientation towards Science with its emphasis upon a mathematical system has by and large precluded our understanding of the alternative kind of system, its potential and strengths, and its alternative criteria of validity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It may also be the case that the predominance of a mathematical system is tied to the rise of literacy and the subordination of more basic forms of orality. It is a tendency in which the wide publication of a print medium has tended toward the precipitation of words as things which stand for themselves, as discrete entities, rather than as relational in structure. Such a literate modality fosters the illusion of a single noumenal "Truth" or "Logos" which is thought to underlie or predetermine all phenomena. In an oral modality, which is more basic, schematic chunks cannot precipitate or ossify into permanent form in the same way. Broadcast transmission guarantees that a word, once uttered, will be ever fleeting--We can't get the word back except by an echo, a parrots repeat, or recorded replay.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible that human pattern recognition is basically relational in design, and that a relational system is normally employed in order to configure or recognize patterning of phenomena. From this standpoint, a relational system is a rather "passive background" one against which a constricted logical system is actively fore-grounded or configured. As a derivative system, a mathematical system cannot exist separately or independently of an at least implicit background relational field. Active foregrounding requires the conscious application of one or more principles of restriction to background relations in order to yield a finite, bounded problem set. Foregrounding entails the act of explicit denotation, definition that brings the background patterns into sharper focus.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basic orality is constituted as a relational system that underlies literacy. Literacy is a derivative system that is more mathematically constrained. The logic attributed to such mathematical systems are not fundamentally different than the kind of logic underlying relational systems--rather it is more constrained by being subject to more specific criteria of validity. Whereas a relational system is multi-dimensional, a mathematical system becomes uni-dimensional--it is constrained by one or another of the possible dimensionalities available in relational systems. In other words, the so-called scientific rationality of modern Homo saipiens is in structure not fundamentally different from the "primitive" rationality of our archaic progenitors. Rather, it is subject to another order of constraint that more basic relational systems are not normally subject to. On the other hand, there is nothing that prevents a relational system, or a person who normally operates upon such a basis, to "switch modes" and operate upon a more constrained level of logical operation. People regularly do when they are required to.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The constraints of a mathematical system are that such a system must conform to basic principles of identity, precedence, temporal-spatial irreversibility. The same thing cannot be two places at once, and a thing that happens cannot also unhappen. The shift in emphasis is from one of "object-relation" to one of "object-identity" and depends upon the fixing of an object to a single unitary value.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The shift occurs as the result of attempting to reduce the variability and indeterminancy of system--to fix it into a single set pattern or "attractant" order. It is the difference between a system that is loosely constrained and one that is tightly constrained.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What we actually encounter then are "mixed systems" and "mixed strategies", and depending upon the contexts, people regular switch systems or "styles" toward either extreme. Verbal punning and metaphor takes advantage of the multidimensionality of a relational system, whereas deliberate decision-making requires a more rigid set of rules for deriving results.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are no "things" per se in a relational field--there are relational sets that are defined by the relations that they contain. A thing is in a sense such a relational set.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The remarkable thing about relational sets is that though bounded, they are open in that they may contain an unlimited number of relations nested within other relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relational logic functions something like glide or transformational geometry across the relational field. Reflexive symmetry/asymmetry, translation, isomorphic projection are the kinds of patterns which can be sought in such a system. The kinds of connectives that are employed in such a system are those of set theory. Greater than, less than, equal to, equivalent, intersecting, conjunctive, disjunctive sets, a subset or superset of--they are relative determiners of relation between sets of things defined by the things which are incorporated within their relational field. Things "intersect" by virtue of sharing a number of the same relations. The transformations describe the undulating relational topography through a temporal continuum.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Equivalence sets play an important role in relational fields. Equivalence sets are those which share a similar net overall value and yet which may be composed of different kinds of relational configurations. Equivalence sets may be substituted for one another within a larger set of relations without changing the overall value of the entire field. And yet the substitution of equivalence sets can also simultaneously constitute the basis for an indirect chain reaction of change in other sets that eventuate in changing the total value of the system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Analogical systems can be considered to be relational sets which are based upon equivalence sets--the relations between equivalences sets can be said to be proportionate to one another if the sets which they relate are equivalent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can write equivalence sets in terms of a quaternary structure that describes the possible kinds of transformations allowed within such a system. For instance the statement "A is to B as C is to D" may be rewritten as "B is to A" as "C is to D" or alternatively as "A is to D as B is to C" and finally as "A is to C as B is to D". If we substitute a specific relational sign for the "is to" linkage--for instance is greater than, less than, equivalent to, or intersects, then we must specify the transformation required in the relational sign for each alternate string, such that if A were greater than B as C were greater than D, then to rewrite the structure D is less than A as B is less than C" is the appropriate equivalent, and not D is greater than A. What seems mandatory in these transformations is that the original rational relation be preserved regardless of the permutation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Within a relational system, a thing may stand for a set of relations, and may simultaneously be a part of the same or other sets of relations. Relational systems have a basic duality of patterning. Furthermore, things may be simultaneously part of more than one set of relations, sets that may cross-cut one another and intersect at the juncture represented by that thing. Things as components of entire sets can stand for the set itself in relationship to other sets--sets can be interlinked by critical elements lying at the intersection between sets.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relational sets can be captured in terms of things that they contain, and the "thingness" or alternatively the "nominality" of the system can be emphasized. Alternative, the same system can be described in terms that emphasize the "relationality" or alternatively the "verbality" of the system. It takes little insight to see that the former emphasis lies upon a "space-like" and spatially defined orientation, while the latter emphasizes a more "time-like" and temporal orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is from studying the structure of natural language, as symbol systems, that we can derive some important insights into the nature of relational systems. Systems can vary in how they emphasize the things and relations between things. Systems can be "active-passive", "topic-comment," or "ergative" in syntactic structure, and the structure of all such structures have both a paradigmatic and syntagmatic organization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such systems combine two aspectual components of into a single relational set that defines a string--it describes the thing, and then the relational of the thing, or what can be thought of as "subject-predicate" atom. The subject announces or frames the object, while the predicate consists of a set of statements pertaining to that object. The predicate itself is subdivided into the functional relation and the parameter--what amounts to the object-complement of the subject. The predicate itself is in a sense the inverse function of the subject, as it always entails an emphasis upon the verbality of the topic and the subordination of the predicate object. Now the basic syntactic order of this basic component varies considerable between languages. We have SOV, VOS, SVO, OVS, OSV and VSO--and these six combinations describe possible paradigms for the arrangement of this molecular association. Some languages may allow for alternative arrangements along these dimensions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is decidedly something basic and fundamental in this core molecular unit, something which reflects how humans think and process information in a structured way. This constitutes a basic design pattern for human communication upon which all other permutations are derived.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Principles of permutation or of transformation involve processes of modification, subordination and super-ordination, displacement and substitution, inversion, deletion, suppletion, conjunction and disjunction and relativization, and complementation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The inference structure of relational logic is not the "if-then" structure of two-value logic. It is rather a correlational structure of a multiple-value logic which states that relation A may vary directly or inversely to relation B. The nature of the meta-relation which can be said to be established between the two subsets, A and B, is not one which can be thought of as causally overdetermined. Rather it describes a calculus of interdependencies, of what might be referred to as conditional or contextual covariation. Such systems can be thought of as being inherently undetermined systems, and therefore suffer from a fundamental critical indeterminancy that precludes the kind of syllogistic deductions available in truth-value logic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may talk about multiple-relations, fractional relations and power relations, as well as incremental and decremental values.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whereas the result of a truth-value logical system is a branching hierarchical decision tree, a iterative structure, the result of a relational-value logical system is rather a recursive system of nesting sets within other sets--a recursiveness which may have destructive or constructive consequences for the values of the relations. We cannot map a relational field in the same way as we map a decision tree--we get a circuit chart rather than a flow chart, such that there are multiple possibilities branching from every node in the system. We can trace the paths and loops through which information will flow, and we can describe the action of the entire system, but we cannot single out the final consequences which result from its operation like we can from a decision tree which yields definite results depending upon which branch we descend upon. Instead we get a system equilibrium and a system which does something--generate frequencies of energy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The recursion of the relational system lends itself to rather elegant description in a way which long parenthetical syllogistic chains lack. Classical logic describes a discontinuous set of entities--relational logic describes a continuum of relation. The kinds of formal fallacies that pertain to classical logic do not hold strictly to such a relational system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What such a system allows for is the possibility that relational sets may have a duality, being both a set of values, and at the same time a meta-value which is defined as the net value of all its relations, a value which may be synergistic, and reified as something more than the sum of its parts. The fallacy which occurs in such relational logic then stems from the confusion of the whole for the sum of its parts--this occurs when we attempt to translate a continuous field into a discontinuous or numerical set--when we assign finite, discrete values to infinite, non-discrete variables. The fallacy of relational logic derives from confusing equivalency with equality or identity--the isomorphism of structures may be more apparent than actual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What relational logic may allow for is an alternative kind of inductive syllogism upon which may be based a kind of "hypothetico-inductivism." From the standpoint of scientific falsification, such logic can be said to generate unfalsifiable conclusions. Relational logic nevertheless may have certain basic principles of relation, upon which derivative secondary principles apply and which render complex transformational patterns.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Information is contained in the clash of contrasts in the world--while simply information encodes change, knowledge is critically aware of the change information encodes. Human knowledge rests upon the knowledge of the difference knowledge makes in the world.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua">We do not have an adequate theory of interference. Interference must be regarded as a complex natural phenomenon, a chaotic patterning, which results when two or more dissimilar forms of organization or forces come to occupy the same place and time. We can have constructive or destructive interference--the former being a kind of deviation amplification, the latter the opposite kind canceling out of opposites. The interesting facet of interference patterning in nature are the resulting moire' patterns which can be quite complex, regular and intricate in their organization, as well as quite transient. Also such patterning may be the product of the interaction of relatively simple sets of factors which individually have little or no net pattern. Interference patterning can be expected to occur, but not predicted. We know that something will happen, but we cannot be sure exactly what the patterning will be. Another interesting facet of interference is its capacity to produce, and carry, information, or meaning, the result of its redundancy, which is an order in scale beyond the meaning or information capacity of the separate elements that produced the pattern.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Interference patterns occur everywhere in our experience. It may be the planting and maturation of a garden, or the painting of a picture to be hung on wall. It may be the primary socialization and development of a child, or the phenotypic expression of a pair of twins. It may occur in a committee meeting, when the world goes to war, or when economic depressions strikes unexpectedly.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must ask how we can define interference patterns, our account for their origin theoretically. We can use the example of light passing through a diffraction grating--information is constrained, channeled, split or spread out by some kind of formula which recurs with a given regularity. In this sense we can say that information, naturally occurring in some sort of predictable pattern, is distorted, obstructed, or altered with some kind of regularity, resulting in modulation of the information field into intervals which have a sinusoidal wave-pattern--with crests and troughs. From this model, information itself must be considered as a kind of normal perturbation within some kind of differential field of possibility or potentiality, one which results in some kind of boundary that makes prediction possible between the two bounded spaces. Information can be seen as a kind of regular deviation that effectively, if temporarily separates an otherwise flat or singular field into two or more separate sub-fields, in which the differences between the two sub-fields are greater than the similarities between them. Interference then, creates information from a differential field of possibility. Interference patterns may be layered one on top of another, each subsequent pattern critically altering the resulting interference pattern of the previous set of interference. Interference is not an absolute thing, but a question of more or less.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Interference can be seen to follow a normal kind of curve, past a point of criticality, too much interference will result in greater destructive patterns.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can also speak of self-inducing interference patterns, as well as self-destructive patterns. Self-inducing interference is the result of recursion of information within the system that results in greater, or additional interference--information produced by interference feeds back into the field as additional information.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can also refer to simple or complex interference functions which may produce different long term histories of patterning, which may lead to a cycling of possibilities at a predictable rate, or else to the patterning settling into a relatively stable, if not frozen, channel which is self-maintaining or self-stabilizing. In short, interference patterns follow natural chaotic patterns.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, the interference patterning can be thought to carry information that is the result of both constructive and destructive patterns that are integrated together and which cannot be separated from one another without altering the pattern it self. Constructive patterns can be said to be the result of positive interference, destructive patterns the result of negative interference. Positive interference results in increased information in the net system, the increase in structure or redundancy that carries meaning. Negative interference results in decreased information--a tendency towards randomization in which variability of pattern becomes greater than the redundancy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Interference patterning can be said to produce "pseudo-events" which contain information not contained in the constituent components, as well as information that is more comprehensive in scope than that carried by its constituent elements. In this regard we can understand such interference patterning as holistic and synergistic phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak of exogenously and endogenous forms of interference, and interference which is variably determined, or even indirectly or infinitely determined, and in which the same influences may affect different entities within a system differently, even contradictorily. When we think of exogenous interference, we are referring to influences of which we may be scarcely aware, and yet which may have a critical influence on the resulting patterning. Similarly, we can speak of interference systems as critically underdetermined systems, and also as either cumulatively determined or decisively determined.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Also, we have a simple black and white system when we refer to simply positive and negative kinds of interference. We might refer as well to colorful systems with a range of multiple values determining the kinds of interference, and thus the resulting effects.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Interference patterns are usually transient and ephemeral episodes that last only as long as the particular combination of factors fit the particular arrangement. Interference patterns are caught upon a short trajectory that results in rapid decay and increasing randomization. We might say that constructive and destructive patterns occur in a certain proportion, proportion that alter and rapidly leads to the predominance of destructive over constructive patterns. Constructive patterns rapidly erode into destructive patterns. From the standpoint of systemic dialectics, negative feedback becomes predominant over positive feedback.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can refer to constructive patterns of interference by an index of the relative "coherence" of a system--coherence being the capacity of the system to contain significant information.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We seek coherence in the natural order by means of a science, often without realizing the extent to which natural interference must underlie and determine coherence in nature. To see the universe as God's clockwork with a perfect principle of order is to fail to see the random process and potential for disorder that underlies all naturally occurring phenomena. We have, in our science, taken order too much for granted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Constructive patterns can be defined as those instances of interference which carry a net amount of information above the value of the average, or the normal, while destructive patterns can be defined as those instances of interference in which the net amount of information carried is less than the normal average. We must then define a line of neutral value--a flat or even trajectory in which the capacity of information of the interference pattern is equal to the sum of the information carried by its constituent components. We can call this the line of "criticality" which defines the ratio and likelihood of expected to unexpected events.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We might say that the basic laws of thermodynamics, and the principle of universal entropy, govern the history of interference patterns. It determines that the birth, growth, maturity and demise of all constructive interference patterns will follow a normal life cycle and a normal developmental curve.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see the phenotypic profile of all organisms as limited instances of complex interference patterns, not only between different organisms, or the environment and the genetic organism, but at different levels of interaction--between possible different genes in the genome.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">With interference patterning, we can speak of a magnification induction, in which information capacity is greatly, if momentarily, enlarged beyond the natural scope of its elements. While interference patterns are a result of perturbations, perturbations can also result in the disappearance of an interference pattern.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must consider that many complex phenomena we encounter in nature are the result of interference patterns that lack any single causal determinative explanation. We might consider them as complex patterns of co-occurrence of elements or relations across a field of potentiality or possibility. Also we must also seek to define the contrasting phenomena of synchronicity which must also be regarded as a complex, chaotic natural phenomena. Synchronicity can be described as the independent occurrence of two or more similar events at the same time. Synchronicity must not be confused with the idea of the synchronic, also implying simultaneity, but as well systemic interdependence of elements. Synchronicity must be regarded as an inherently diachronic or historically ordered event, from a time-like perspective that attempts to explain change and the heterogeneity of the world in terms of a general theory.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Synchronicity may well be a kind of diachronically ordered interference pattern which is expressed temporally rather than in space and which is to some degree independent of spatial constraints in its historical trajectory. The same thing may happen in separate places because time itself may converge, constructively or destructively, at the same moment in different places.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The factors used to account for the occurrence of distant, independent events at the same time must be indirectly and contextually related--a common background of historical change and development which produces a similar effect in many different places at the same time. While synchronically ordered interference patterns are one event, in one place and time, and can be seen as major critical events, synchronistic events must be seen as system-wide, or systemic, and many little co-occurring minor events induced by a similar or common range of factors. The former case might be considered a case of local interference, the latter, general interference. We may liken the difference to a pan-human, but endemic disease, which strikes with a certain low frequency everywhere, versus a localized, epidemic disease which rages with a ferocious lethality, but only in one area or region, leaving others regions relatively untouched.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now we must consider the possibility of mixed frequencies, or cases that involve some ratio of both kinds of interference at the same time. We must also therefore consider the possibility of interaction between the two kinds of interference, and the possibility of a third, resulting kind of interference that is in a sense a hybrid of the two. I might refer to this as "hyperference" and might be seen where many minor, generalized events set off major, local interference events, or else a single, local event may catalyze a system reaction. Hyperference must be seen as the possibility of either positively catapulting an entire, generalized information system on to a new order of patternings--a kind of system evolution--or else possibly in the sudden catastrophic implosion or blinking out of an entire system. We might refer to such dramatic revolutionary episodes as "hyper-events," and we might see such complex phenomena as earthquakes or tornadoes as such hyper-events of nature. Hyper-events can be seen as a kind of chain reaction set in motion by the combination of interference patterns which cause a radical new structural organization to the elements than previously.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We might speculate on whether there are not both constructive and destructive forms of synchronistic interference--and in the case of constructive interference, temporarily carrying more information than can be accounted for by the constituents that compose the pattern.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The layering of information levels one on top of the other, with the resulting interaction and influence between the levels, can be described as the "moire' effect". We can refer to the structure of such multi-tiered interference patterning as multiplex.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Many phenomena that we must seek to explain and deal with, particularly social phenomena and phenomena involving the mind, evolutionary development and expression, and even physical "cosmographical" patterning like the weather, or the organization of distant super-clusters, may in essence be the surface appearance of complex interference patterns set up by many multiplex factors. Even phenomena as ordered as human language may be a complex by-product of interference patterns occurring at several levels. It is for this reason that mono-causal or deterministic explanation of such complex patterns frequently fail to satisfy or predict the patterning or the changes. If we seek to excoriate the layers of interference grating to find the first or deep level of information, and the order or seriation in which each layer has been added to the information system, we are liable to be misled in believing that the deepest level is the source of all subsequent levels, the ultimate, primal cause, rather than the proximate, efficient cause, and we may fail to see that it is the unique and ordered combination of different factors and levels of information which produced the epi-phenomenal interference pattern--the "epi-ference pattern." We must recognize that subsequent levels are interacting and producing new interference patterns with the interference patterns of the previous levels, and not directly with the factors which produced that initial pattern in the first place.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can hypothesize that in such complex patterns, deeper, more basic levels underlie, and to some extent, predetermine surface patterns. But we cannot directly account for the primary functions of such deeper factors only on the basis of inferring them from the epi-phenomenal patterns of the surface that we are always observing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see that interference and information in our reality may be a common source for many paradoxes with which we must deal. If a sense of order runs deep in the meaning of human reality, so also does a sense of disorder. From the standpoint of viewing all life as interference patterns which are expected to be quite ephemeral, life itself may well be a grand illusion--a trick that nature plays upon itself--but a momentary, temporary appearance of something more than itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must expect that tampering with the earth's ecology, and the social effects of global overpopulation, may well result in unexpected, and quite dramatic, consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Changing interference patterns alter the interval and differential in a relational field, and alter the probabilities and directionality of change within the field. When we consider the history of patterned phenomena, whether it is the growth of crystals, or a plant, or a mammal, or whether it is a school or a hospital or a nation, we must consider that history as a natural one of the epi-phenomenal patterning of interference phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, the robust history is always impacting upon the present patterning to be found, and yet the net history is always changing in its total net effect in the unfolding patterning of events. Each new pattern changes not just the immediate context of relations, but the whole structure of the history of the patterning, and hence the prospective impact upon future events. The changes and alterations that modify the patterning are taken up in the momentum of the change process. This kind of history is neither linear nor static, but curvilinear and dynamic in its resulting patterning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that we cannot simply adduce or reduce the primary factors or initial causes of naturally occurring phenomena in the way that we can the principles of mechanics. Nor can we merely look to more complex multi-causal models as implied in much of our system's theory in order to predict the patterning that we encounter. In our formulas and equations we must also take into greater account the mixed determinations, the unknown variables, and the synergistic results of overlapping interference patterns. In a critical sense, the determinative factors involved are continuous, open-ended and virtually infinite. The finite universe of elements which are subject to the influences of the system are not the cause of the system, merely the mechanical operatives driven by the system. The patterned possibilities are also, in a critical sense, infinite and open-ended, rendering attempts at precise prediction futile.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak of expectancies, rather than predictions, of finite primary relations, and secondary derivative ranges of action.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can also speak of being enmeshed within an immense web of interrelations, and within an ongoing continuum of process and change. If we look for first causes or final consequences, we are not liable to find many unless we specify explicit the contextual frame of reference within which we are working. Such contextual definition is frequently left implicit, to be presumed only, in many of our explanation for natural phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An implicit part of the relativist and holistic presumption in cultural anthropology has been that the important factors underlying any particular cultures patterning cannot be simply adduced from first principles or superficial observation. Extensive involvement in the cultural life, from the insider's point of view, is required before even a rudimentary understanding of the many factors and processes occurring within a community can be had. Learning how a group is integrated, or remains unintegrated, and how it changes, or fails to change, and what it values or not, are all important parts of this ethnographic description.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Science is rooted in the critical disjunction between the inherent devices of natural information and the deliberate designs of human knowledge.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The study of human language and of systems of communication distinguishes certain "design" features that serve as principles of order in the elucidation of such systems. This approach, if extended to the notion of the design principles which underlie information in the natural order and human knowledge, may be helpful in coming to understand the differences and similarities between natural information and human information which is linguistically based. There is an inherent implicitness about natural information which no where "explains itself"--on the other hand there is a certain potential explicitness about human information, which, if not actually explained either formally or informally, is possible of such explication. Another way of putting this might be to assert that natural information is intrinsically coherent, whereas human information is extrinsicially coherent. Natural information may be contradicted by changes in the external order of things without affecting its internal consistency--it may remain internally consistent in an externally inconsistent universe. Human information may be internally self-contradictory, but may not contradict be externally contradictory. On the other hand, natural "structure" or order is always globally contextualized, and in this sense is always externally constrained. Human order is always locally centered, and is thus always internally constrained. The functional designs of natural information are rather like "devices" as opposed to the "designs" of human knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the consideration of design features of information and knowledge, we must see that design is rooted in the properties and processes that underlie the phenomenal patterning of the world. We identify the properties and processes of coherent systems by their designs, we identify designs by the properties and processes. There is a standpoint which sees "design" as an inherent facet of human representation of information, as a fundamental way that we frame our experience of the world and superimpose a sense of order upon it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The human brain, adapted for language, filters the phenomenological flow of experience through an "emblematic pattern recognition system"--what amounts to representational "Gestalts" which cognitive psychologists refer to. Emblems impose "design" upon the world, and it is in terms of emblematic designs that we come to know, explain and describe our experience. Emblems have a dual identity in that they also function as natural devices in the creation of information--they challenge the external flow of experience with their own history. We must see emblems as complex entities, primarily symbolic, which can conjoin together into a coherent and meaningful pattern, a whole, a number of different significant components which may be derived from many diverse sources--they are in other words, synthetic in their putting together differences to create identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The design of emblematic designs must be seen as prefigured by temporal and spatial contrasts and arrangement, or what structuralists have come to refer to as syntagmatic versus paradigmatic order. We may impose order upon our emblematic ordering of experiential events by either controlling or constraining one or the other or both the temporal and spatial aspects at the same time or in sequence. Emblematic design therefore implies some kind of either spatial or temporal constraint, or definition. If there is no such constraint, there can be not prevailing sense of order and coherence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I refer to these elements of human design as emblematic because I consider them to be complex conceptual constructions synthesized by the mind, and made possible by the normal mental organization of the human brain, and because they combine linguistic data with other forms of associations and values to create a composite, externally coherent understanding. They are simultaneously embodied in consciousness as such constructs, and in the world as symbolic material embodiments--they are both symbols that refer to which point to external signs that stand for themselves. They thus establish a relational bridge between the internal sense of order and the externally constructed world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, we might consider the achieved logos of our natural sciences as constituting a sort of emblematic metalogue about both the objective realities of the world and of their own emblematic status in the world. It becomes metalogic: rationality about logical relations and beyond logical relations. We must speculate hypothetically of the basic design of human information, related to its functional processing, and which underlies human meaning in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of theory must per force be an understanding of "design science"--of how principles of design serve to order our experiences of the world as well as functionally order the world itself.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The genome of a single cell contains the totipotency of the entire species. Similarly, the cultural knowledge of a single informant can be used to partially reconstruct an entire cultural world. Somewhere between the genome and the informant, ranges the totipotency of the neuron to recreate the human mind.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A digital computer may not replicate the functions of the human mind, because the mind may function digitally like a computer, but does not necessarily have to. The crux of the problem may be that neurons themselves are not simple digital "on/of" switches in a vast neural network of informational processing and learning. They may be more complex devices as such, themselves bordering on the complexity of basic sentience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mind has been claimed to function like a holographic recording device--it works with parallel distributed information processing. Such a system of neurons forms a complex adaptive system in which individual neurons can be rapidly reorganized and altered independently or in groups. There are on top of this basic neuronal ordering of experience, other control structures--that of the brain organization, of consciousness, and of cultural knowledge and constraints which become internalized. We must see that the entire meaning system may work simultaneously upon several interdependent levels at the same time, each in a complex dual-processing dialectic. The structure of DNA, of the brain, of dialogue, and of the social order itself, replicates such dual processing upon different levels or orders of information.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must speculate further that these different levels may be constructively combined in a conjunctively "coordinate state" or else may be destructively combined in a disjunctively "discoordinate state" which pervades information processing upon its many levels.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may further speculate that such "coordinate states" fall into certain complex "acceptance" states that are to some extent dynamically self-maintaining. Given such acceptance states, once the basic pattern is acquired and deeply embedded, state that we might refer to as specialized adaptation embodying a "wisdom," the general state may become less adaptive to further alterations or more susceptible to major disruptive perturbations from which it may not be able to recover. Fine-tuning of the system in its coordination upon different levels is gained at the expense of a more general adaptability. Once a system crosses this threshold of optimization, there may be small chance of its return to a more adaptive order or of recovery.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In the problem of the construction of intelligence, we are bounded by the horizon of our own intellect.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any artificial intelligence program or philosophy which fails to address the human construction of reality;, of the cultural context in which the meaning of "Mind" and "aboutness" are inherently situated, must fail to achieve its goal of reconstructing human intelligence. The meaning that any such program must capture and reproduce is the meaning that is culturally constructed and an inextricable part of the cultural context in which the program was constructed in the first place. From this standpoint, we cannot clearly separate the program from the programmer, and the program, as well as the machine in which the program exists, must be seen as the extension of the world of the programmer. Thus we can see the real aim of artificial intelligence as providing a sophisticated mirror, a functional device, for allowing us to reflect critically upon how we construct our sense of reality. And if a computer or a robot are an merely an extension of our own minds in our construction of reality, then it should be possible to eventually program them with the designs of knowledge which are intrinsic to our own Mind. The robot may function in ways that are meaningful to ourselves, but not necessarily in any other way. This is a separate and different problem from the one of providing a computer with its own consciousness and its own sense of history and artificial intelligence will remain just that--artificial.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem of artificial intelligence is that it must cross the nature-culture boundary. It is a human made device, a construction of reality, which is supposed, like Frankenstein, to come back to life. The problem of making something animate from the inanimate still eludes science. Native intelligence is situated within a brain that was developed over millions of years of evolution--we cannot easily extricate it and put it into a computer. We can think of artificial intelligence as just that, an extension of our own artificial, cultural construction of reality. It may not reveal very much about our native intellectual capacities, except as these might be tied to the cultural construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, anthropology has at least the study of the culture of knowledge and information to contribute to the problem of artificial intelligence--to understand the embeddedness of human intelligence in culture, its differential distribution across cultures, and its relationship with human cognition. We should not presume a universality of a non-linguistic, culturally disembedded "universality" of "rationality" without an attempt to understand the anthropological construction of rationality, and the possibility of alternative rationalities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our computers are supposed to provide us a window into the "black box" of our own minds, but this is only possible if the design of the computer program, and the device of the computer itself, are based upon a theory about our Mind which can then be tested by the performance and coherence of the program. One problem of this approach is that if the Mind is a synthetic and synergistic property of the mental functioning of the brain, then it may simply not be possible to reproduce it merely by the enumeration and coordination of its many components. Another problem is again, the problem of cultural context in which the construction of the program must be situated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must distinguish then an important difference between artificial intelligence as the product of a human programmer, as a part of our cultural and cognitive construction of reality, and possible forms of "alternative intelligence" about which we may speculate and come into contact with, but not "know" from an insider's point of view. We are reminded of the insuperable dilemma of "getting into the head" of a dolphin or a chimpanzee or even of another person. It has proven impossible to get into our own heads, much less figuring out the minds of "Alien" visitors who would possess enough intelligence to visit us. This is not so much a problem of "translation" of different, unsynchronized, realities, but moreover the problem of simulating "native speaker intuition" which allows us to automatically approximate and abbreviate, without apparent strenuous and complicated mental calculations, the probable meanings of another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another way of looking at this dilemma is that in order to figure out a design of the human design of knowledge, we need to consider all the alternatives for such design that are available or possibly available to us, before we can begin to decide which one is the most suitable for ourselves. In this, we have achieved almost no progress.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we wish to achieve a rational and reflexive metalogue with our computers, then provide a place for them within the anthropologically constructed context of intelligence. This we have done, but in ways that do not create the necessary awareness and reflexivity of their informational content--they do not mediate change in reality in any complex sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can easily see the revolutionary and transformative effects of many technologies upon the noetic consciousness of humankind--writing, electronic technology, mathematics, all have created a vital, dynamic and cybernetic context in which human consciousness has been expanded and developed. We hardly understand these consequences of the interaction with a computer in terms of the exploratory extension and elaboration of human consciousness, and its constructive consequences, in our world, but they can be nothing less than revolutionary.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="nine">Part II</p> </a></font><a NAME="nine"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The ANTHROPOLOGY OF HUMAN CONSTRUCTION</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We cannot escape the consequences of our own construction.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Taking into account the construction of anthropology in the world, we are in a position to account for an "objective" anthropological construction of the anthropological construction of human reality. In this project we find the status of anthropology as an authentic science to be most clearly situated. It offers a general framework for tying together in a synthetic manner several fundamental problematic questions about human reality, questions which by them selves may be insuperable or irresolvable.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="ten">VII.</p> </a></font><a NAME="ten"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Language</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The anthropological construction of reality begins and ends in language, for language lies at the core of our common being.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human language is the critical determinant of the "World View Problem" and exits centrally in the construction of both cognition and culture and composes the nexus of relations between them. Humankind evolved as the consequence of the acquisition of language, the general organizational structure of the human brain consists of those components and complexes that are specially adapted for speech-tool production and processing, the entire "anthropological complex" is a generalized adaptive mechanism in human evolution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of language cannot be properly conceived outside of the context of this complex and its consequence of the anthropological construction of reality--in other words any complete theory of language must be based upon the consideration of its central location in this complex construction of reality. We cannot clearly or analytically separate the study of language from the study of its cultural context or its cognitive design as if it existed in isolation and independently in reality--every component of language, its syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology or morphology cannot be considered outside of this holistic anthropological complex.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A theory of the anthropology of language must take into explicit account several problem sets:</p> <dir> <dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. The problem of language change, both internally as a function of drift, and externally as a function of inter-lingual contact.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. The problem of the social functionality of language--language as an inherent, institutionalized social phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. The problem of the systematic "structure" of language process and its patterned variations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. The problem of the relationship between language, cognition and culture.</p> </dir> </dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The general problem of linguistic acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an anthropological standpoint, these central problem areas in the study of language should be interdependent in their explanation, such that a general anthropological theory of language should simultaneously and satisfactorily resolve all four problem sets.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A "functional-constructionist theory" of language is proposed as such a theory, one that is based upon an integrated "holistic-relational" theory of grammar, and one that successfully resolves these four problem sets. Given a predominantly structuralist orientation of American linguists, I do not expect that this theory would be well received. It is of a "synthetic" variety that is not highly regarded from a strictly positivistic point of view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The value of such an anthropological theory of language is that, if it proves to be productive and insightful, should be generalizable to other aspects of cultural life, and to the general anthropological problem of "culture" itself, in modified form. It should also yield an important psychological theory of meaning, the cognitive construction of reality, of the development of personality and the dynamics of socialization and enculturation. In other words, it promises a unified theoretical framework that may help partially resolve many important anthropological questions beyond itself.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Structure must at some point account for the fact that the only thing that does not change is change itself.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The science of comparative linguistics was founded in the demonstration of systematic processes of language change. The ordered nature of linguistic process has been the source of some paradigmatic unity for the science of linguistics. But change processes, and the mechanisms causing and conditioning the directionality of change, are not well understood.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Every component of a language, its syntax, lexicon, phonetics, are subject to continuous change. If we consider a language spectrum composed of several tens of thousands of languages that have been spoken by humankind through its many millenium, we can name those changes that tended to increase the overall linguistic diversity and divergent linguistic evolution against those that tended to decrease diversity, as convergent linguistic evolution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Change occurs endogenously in all languages, and all language groups are subject to exogenous influences that can result in many abrupt and dramatic alterations. Endogenous change must be seen in the longer span as a fairly stable and continuous form of change--a rate which may in the long run be expected to be relatively constant even though there may be a great deal of local variability. The Age-Area hypothesis holds that such language change will be greatest in focal areas of interchange and interaction, and that language will be most conservative in isolated, peripheral areas of least contact. From this standpoint, some of the sources of internal change may be very similar to those of external change--the former occurring within a domestic context while the latter may represent the same sorts of phenomena but occurring in a wider, inter-group context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Exogenous language change has not been well studied in its variety and thus is not well understood. This form of change can be quite variable in its rate and form of occurrence, which makes its effects much more difficult to "retrodict" than those of internal change processes. Long term contact and interaction between two language groups will produce cross-over in both directions, generally of a phonologically modified lexicon based upon domains and categories of terms which have been borrowed from the neighbor culture. The History of English has been a prototypical example of the complexity of such exogenous change processes. The Norman conquest consisted of a relatively few but powerful lords who nevertheless superimposed their own French Idiom upon the old English, with the result that now more than 60% of the English lexicon is derived from French. Few if any language groups have remained permanently isolated or shut off from contact with any outside groups, thus most if not all languages have been subject to some degree of exogeneous change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This makes the net analysis of a "change profile" for any language at any given moment of it history extremely problematic. In other words, we lack any non-relative, absolute baseline for language change, from which we derive the "pure" and "unadulturated" native language. We must speak of a language continuum and of a robust continuity of language change time immemorial. It is frequently difficult to draw the line between those linguistic elements that were the result of some previous borrowing or were "sui generis" to some "native core". In this regard, the comparison of related languages and of their divergence from an original "core" comes to our assistance, except that it does not allow us to peer into their history past the moment of their divergence. What is missing is an historical account of the actual phenomena and processes that had previously affected that core. Recently, theorists have exploited this type of comparative analysis of languages to build a tree for most languages on earth, stemming from some "proto-language" at some remote time in the past.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem with this approach is that it attempts to group languages and derive deep history on the basis of the surface patterning alone. It can neither provide an account of the history of the borrowing of such words, and it cannot present a sense of historical parallax as to the actual depth or scale of time involved in this linguistic evolution. It necessarily oversimplifies an extremely complex picture of language changes, and thus provides only a superficial account of the history of the language continuum.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A similar kind of genetic tree has been made based upon analysis of the molecular clock, which stipulates that all present populations of humans descended ultimately from a single Eve perhaps 150,000 years ago, or similar socio-biological accounts that closely link language, other cultural traits and genetic frequency as relatively conservative complexes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The absurdity of this kind of account stems not so much from the unlikelihood of such evidence, but from a common sort of fallacy such accounts are based upon. This fallacy is one of assuming a common genetic factor, or a "least common denominator" which common ties all "languages" or "peoples" or "cultures" on the surface because they share the common definition of language, people or culture. Building the genetic tree consists in progressive excluding the unrelated components of each element, until just the "common core" is condensed out. It is like a pile sort based upon the overarching question of "which are the most related"--and we can perform just such a pile sort using genetic markers of similarity, etc., upon the linguistic data, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We thus superimpose a hierarchy of determinations based not so much upon the actual history of the elements, but upon our question and presupposition of "common affinity." Whether it is based upon empirical data or our own reading or convictions about such data, the resulting hierarchy is derived from our own sense of order and not from history. There is no reason to assume, on the basis of such hierarchies, that the history or genetic "tree" of languages has ever been hierarchically arranged on the principle of categorical exclusion of differences. A long history of exogenous change would rather tend to produce a picture of hederarchical associations of non-exclusive categories, and thus render a picture of a long bundle of strands inter-linked with one another. Thus whether we are speaking linguistically about 30 thousand years ago or genetically of 150 thousand years, there is no reason or justification for the presumption of one common "ancestor."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The linguistic and genetic pictures of those points in time were likely as complicated as they are today--and the linkages producing the continuities between then and now are as numerous and as indirect as they are today.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the basis of this we can formulate a basic proposition regarding language affinity and change--not all language change is "genetic"--language affinities may be the result of convergence and of exogenous changes, and language differences may be the result of divergence and endogenous change. We must consider language change to involve not only the process of "fissioning" but also of "fusion". But in both cases, the net profile of a language at any given moment in its history is a complex combination of both sets of influences. It can be expected that over the long run the combinations of these influences will "even out" to a "continuous rate and directionality" of change and will produce some kind of trajectory for the entire language continuum in terms of this continuum's increasing structural complexity and "criticality". We can also expect to see a long-term pattern of the ebb and flow of language change, long periods of relative stability in languages, and then brief, climactic episodes of dramatic change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is at this point in our argument that we need to consider the "birth" of new languages from the contact and fusion of two or more languages. In a sense, this is what happens whenever exogenous change is dramatic and relatively abrupt. In other words, if we look at the deep history, we can consider many more languages than appear to be the case, to have been "born" in the process of creolization at some point in their past. The sudden emergence of a "Creole" can be an infrequent but fairly rapid phenomenon. It can emerge within the span of one or two generations. The predominant "language biogram hypothesis" is founded upon the presumption that there is an abrupt edge to the ancestral "basolect," with the result that a generation of native speakers are reared in a "linguistic vacuum" or deficit by "pidgin" speaking parents. This young generation is forced to fall back upon their biologically programmed linguistic resources and invariably fill in the gulf in their language with a "natural" and rudimentary grammatical structure that resembles the speech stages of young children. By the time these speakers come of age, a full-blown Creole language has emerged.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The fallacy of this argument is rooted in the presumption that there can be genetic and cultural continuity across generations, and yet some kind of linguistic deficit or discontinuity as the result of pidgin speaking, ignorant and illiterate parents. This presumption either underestimates the linguistic character of a pidgin as a full-blown language capable of transmuting not only itself, but culture as well, or else it, more likely, it oversimplifies the complex picture of language change processes that are occurring at the moment in time. First, the "pidgin" speaking parents are more likely fused bilinguals having to interact in public in a foreign language they have almost no tuition or familiarity with--the likelihood of using a pidgin, by definition a "trade-language" at home or in a temple is not great.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There can be no such thing as a "linguistic vacuum" of an "impaired" or inadequate language competency by native speakers. There is thus a language boundary between a devalued, domestic "mother tongue" and a publicly powerful "language of the law." This situation is accentuated by the possible frequency of actual miscegenation and amalgamation as the result of intermarriage. The children thus grow up within a funny and complicated linguistic environment. What they become is sort of "permanently fused" multilingual--the context of multilinguistic fusion becomes incorporated or internalized in the child, thus a new 'Creole' is precipitated. The child-like qualities of its emergence and development are simply that--the speech of children who must within a shared context of a child-culture, work out a common grammar. The language form eventually will fall into an "acceptance" state that will, like a center of gravity, accrete and eliminate random variability. The children of these contexts are not "filling in" a vacuum, so much as they are internalizing as a native language a linguistic environment marked by a strong boundary and inter-lingual fusion.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, we must consider the value of code switching as a form of an acquired linguistic competency, and code mixing as a precursor to such "fusion" from which new dialects and languages are born. Code switching between different idioms, styles, dialects or languages, is a skill that children learn from a very early time, and become masters of by the time they are teenagers. Code switching in complex environments is a function of multilingual acquisition and a mark of processes of linguistic fusion. If speakers were fully independently bilingual in such contexts, code-mixing would not be necessary, and code-switching would be purely a function of the social context--code-switching would not occur on the basis of the native speaker's intuitions or preferences for one idiom or another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The case of language death is another example that illustrates the importance and role that the "boundary" between public and domestic and internal and external plays in language change. Languages which are confined exclusively to the isolation of the household and to the speech of grandparents are bound to die out with the passing of the generations if they are not permitted a part to play in the public sectors of language.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The wheel turns faster at its edge than at its center.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though all elements of a language are subject to change, it is apparent that some kinds of components are subject to change differentially, and some are, in given contexts, more likely to change, and others are more likely to remain conservative. From this standpoint, we must consider that at any given moment, a language represents a "net profile" or a "robust state" which is uniquely patterned and which permits a range of differences in the possibilities and patterns of change. This argues for an external/internal boundary separating one language from another, within which each language demonstrates a holistic integration and limits of differential variation in form and function. There then becomes a boundary between "species" of languages which is quite similar to the conventional boundaries between biological species--that of reproductive isolation. The commonly accepted definition of such a linguistic boundary is one of "mutual unintelligibility." Given such a boundary, a language is presumed to be inherently conservative and self-stabilizing, and to have certain "threshold" for crossing which mitigates the possibilities of exogenous change. Each language boundary also presents a "semi-permeable" membrane which selective filters out new elements to be incorporated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The conventional picture of languages tends to see languages as quite conservative and stable and as separated into little gardens of continuity--some have tried to link these gardens to cultural and genetic continuity as well. Though the notions of a linguistic change continuum and of linguistic fusion tend to blur such boundaries somewhat by emphasizing process and change over stability of pattern and conservatism, such boundaries do in factor seem to hold true for most languages. But the areal boundaries and the linguistic map of the world given at a particular cross-section of time, do not necessarily represent the enduring temporal boundaries that define languages.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the definition of these boundaries, we must acknowledge the important role which political and functional isolation of languages has played in creating conditions that has lead to the linguistic separation of peoples. Once political boundaries are created, even with closely related languages, schismogenesis can result in more rapid and increased separation between the languages.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox seems to be this--the continuity of any given language includes continuous change. Presumed continuity across space may occlude the actual situation of many isolectal boundaries and dialectical, idiomatic and stylistic variability within a language at any given moment--as long as these internal boundaries do not result in mutual unintelligibility they do not result in linguistic fission. At any given moment, some elements in a language are dying out, while others are emerging, some elements are diminishing in frequency and pervasiveness, others are increasing. Thus languages exhibit a continuous tidal and current of change--a kind of "brownian motion" of its molecules.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The robust profile of the holistic integration presupposed as fundamental to the intelligibility and coherence of any language at any moment presents patterning not only of its elements and their differential distribution, but also of the possibilities and likelihood for directions and rates of change. We can speak of and define the "critical state" of any given language at any given time as the "net moment" cumulatively balanced by its combination of stable elements and the diverse changes among these elements. The nature of language structure and of its systematic and a-systematic changes must be comprehended from this standpoint of its holistic integrity and functional constraints, and from the degrees of freedom and range of variation permitted or tolerated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A linguistic tradition would be one that values conservatism of its elements and devalues variation and change. Languages can thus become "institutionalized" as conservative forces in a culture, and can also become implicated as "change mediators" within revolutionary social movements. The analysis of a linguistic moment can also be used to provide a window upon the complexities of the social and historical environment in which it is situated. Dramatic moments of social change will be reflected in the transitional state of its language--periods of stasis will be reflected in the stability of the language form, and periods of complex interchange and contact will also be reflected in the multilingual complexity of the language environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must consider this external/internal boundary in the definition of language as nowhere absolute or fixed. It is a relative boundary that permits always some modicum of crossing. Another way of saying this is that there is no human social context of absolute mutual unintelligibility, in spite of linguistic differences two people can make themselves understood. Being wholly relative, these boundaries then permit some degree of flexibility and "fuzziness" of their definition--a quality of language that becomes important in considering their social functionality, construction and holistic integration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to emphasize at this point that no language is a perfectly coherent system. All languages suffer from a degree of incoherence and ambiguity of function and meaning. Languages are more coherent in some spheres of reality than in others, and may even remain silent about others. Language systems thus are to be seen as imperfect and subject to the effects of continuous variation and change. Human language usually works very well, extremely well in certain contexts, but it also sometimes fails to work at all. In this regard, we must remember the linguistic lessons of Alice in Wonderland--the world of wonderland was made topsy-turvy not by its linguistic ambiguity, but by its extreme linguistic coherence--by the over-determined uses to which its language was put. It was Alice's own linguistic ambiguity and tolerance for the ambiguous that enabled her to successful navigate her trail though wonderland.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The power of language is in the dialectic between convention and arbitrariness.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have come to the point where we need to consider the basic mechanisms of language change, as well as to a consideration of the anthropological construction of language that is founded upon its function within socio-cultural and historical contexts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The basic mechanism of language change must be regarded as the freedom of stylistic variation and flexibility or looseness that is provided in all systems. All constraints that order a language permit of some tolerance for error and margin of variability. There can not be a totally "constrained" or over determined language system, because the inherent openness and productivity of human language depends upon this inherent flexibility and freedom incorporated into its design. Each language permits a certain amount of free play in all of its components. Some components of a language are more highly constrained than others, yet even the most restrictive still allows of some modicum of variation. Human beings, creatures of play and exploration, tend to take license of this inherent "looseness" of their language to experiment, play and create new forms. Less constrained components of a language may be subject to greater variation, hence change, than others. "Ignored" elements may exist in unaltered form, and may become extinguished.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The directionality of changes will be determined by the nature of the constraints imposed upon change, both internally and externally. Externally, the central mechanism of this kind of control of change must be seen in the use of language to convey critical information of intrinsic importance in the world--more focal aspects of language will tend to be more highly elaborated than peripheral aspects. Especially important in this regard, are those dimensions that relate to social distance and valuation of people--language can be used as a social distancing device to create and reinforce boundaries separating people and to define hierarchies of social status and power in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Stylistic differentiation is an important motivational force in language change, in both its directionality and its intensity--a kind of schismogenesis previously noted. There is in this a premium placed upon the communicative, or information carrying function of language--language difference can promote differential valuations and inhibit or facilitate the transmission of important information across social boundaries. Language can be a source of pride and common identity for a group, as well as a badge of projective prejudice and discrimination.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Internal mechanisms controlling the direction and resistance to change have to do with the structural integrity or coherence of the system a whole. Generally, we can argue that changes in a language will be accepted if they facilitate the communicative function of language or to elaborate the expressive function. Facilitation of communication and elaboration of expressiveness are of course complementary in language function in terms of enhanced competence and improved performance. This is where the focal areas of linguistic activity will be subject to greater elaboration, hence more susceptible to change, than more peripheral areas. As can be seen from the previous discussion of socio-structural constraints in linguistic control, external and internal constraints are coordinate and complementary to one another. They are, in other words, constitutive of a dialectical cybernetic system of language the consequences of which determine the direction language changes will go, if not the actual content or value of such changes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Given a science with sufficient sophistication, we might be able to predict how a language may change within a given language environment, but not exactly what the changes will be. This, again, is a function of the "arbitrariness" of human language, one nevertheless conditioned by conventionality. Internal constraints of a language are themselves in part constrained by external constraints--the appropriate style and manner of speech one adopts is largely dependent on the social context. What becomes acceptable and appropriate as the preferred, or prestige or standard form of a language will be measured by these external conditions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">External constraints condition internal constraints, but do not themselves determine them. To a large extent, the internal order of the human language system is self-organizing and internally self-constraining. Changes in one part of the system may have reverberations in other aspects, or entail a chain of changes elsewhere within the system. In this regard, we must understand that the different dimensions and components of the system are integrated in the overall control structure they represent--syntactic changes may lead to morphological alterations, modified phonology may lead to a shift in the meaning of a term, and in its use.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mechanisms of change do not of themselves determine whether a change will be accepted and adopted, or else disregarded. The resistance or acceptance of any given alteration will be multi-factorially determined. In this regard a few alterations will prove very successful, while many others will fail. There is no single reason governing why or how a given change will "catch on" and become widespread, but again, we must look for external criteria in conjunction with internal principles.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In terms of the basic mechanisms of change, they are the same whether we construe them as endogenous or exogenous to a language. In this regard we clearly see the dialectical relationship between language and power to control and direct change in terms of the constraints of convention and the arbitrariness of linguistic production.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may posit a dialectical relation between the expressive elaboration of a language and its increasing coherence. In general, endogenous changes in a language will tend toward the increase in the internal coherence, or the minimization of structural ambiguity, of a language, but at the sacrifice of its external expressiveness. Exogenous changes will tend toward the elaboration of the external expressiveness of a language, or the minimization of functional ambiguity, but at the sacrifice of internal coherence. Thus we may speak of a certain optimal limit or threshold in language change. In this regard we may see pidgins and Creoles as containing a "reduced" and simplified grammar, but accomplishing what may be impossible in a more common linguistic context--the mutual intelligibility of speakers from two different language backgrounds.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Linguistic competency may be common to all, but it is performance that makes the critical difference</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have come to a point at which we can now consider a theory of human language which I have termed "functional-constructionist"--one which calls for a specific kind of theory of language structure. In subordinating language structure to linguistic function, I wish to thereby reemphasize the inherent and inextricable importance of the sociality of language--language cannot be properly conceived of except as a social phenomenon. The social functions to which language is put, and the designs and strategies for the employment and construction of language on a daily basis, are the primary factors in the determination of the structure and patterning which language acquires. I also thereby bring the problem of language theory back to the muddy question of human meaning and the making of meaning in the world--to which it has always belonged, and from which the "structural linguists" have seen fit to alienate their science of linguistics.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is the principle mechanism available to human beings to create and maintain social boundaries in the world. By its encoding and definition of knowledge, language also becomes the principal medium for the differential distribution of the "social stock of knowledge." Speaking and interaction is the principle mechanism for the maintenance of subjectively based internalizations of the culturally constructed world. Language precipitates the meanings, values and helps to solidify the socially constructed world. Language is the basis of rationality and rationalization, and is the principle means of the basic anthropological fallacies upon which the efficacy of the constructed world depends--the fallacies of abstraction, reification and reductionism. Language maintains the deceit and illusion of ideology and false consciousness--it is only by means of our language that we are capable of lying. Language is the principle means of the symbolic encoding of reality that reinforced on a secondary plane, the institutional processes of everyday life. Language is the principle means of the expression of our subjective character and interest, and for the realization of our common humanity. It is the principle means for the communication of information upon which complex social organization depends. All of these functions are central to language, and language is central to all of these functions in the social world of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot every clearly separate these functions from one another in our daily discourse. Many of these are often combined in the same utterance or discursive frame. Often one or another function is super-ordinate in the strategic control or manipulation of language within a given context. The stylistic variation that is the main mechanism of language change is largely constrained within the scope of control of this functional hierarchy. The social success of individuals within the system is often defined by their mastery of the functionality of their language in the construction of reality. This mastery is not only rhetorical or ertistic or a matter of sophistication or refinement. Silence often speaks louder than words, and nonverbal communication or actions may even speak louder yet. But however pragmatic the strategic deployment of language, it is always poetic--poetic mastery of one's language becomes the proof of performance, without which the doubt of one's linguistic competency would always remain. In this regard, a virtuoso performance in plain old Black English can be used much more powerfully than the best of the Queen's English.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is the principle mechanism for the encoding and expression of information, for the mediation, coordination and control of change in reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to understand the role of the institutionalization of language, and that language plays in the process of the institutionalization and legitimization of the anthropological construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Language mediates the boundary between the internal world of consciousness and external world of being.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The central function of language in the anthropological construction of reality forms the context for understanding the structural patterning of language. Language is a complex system for encoding and making sense of human reality, and for the communication of information. In order to achieve these functions all languages require some form or other of systematic structure which constrain the possible variations of patterns--all systems must be non-chaotic and coherent in order to encode and carry information. The signals that compose any language must be ordered and rearranged according to understood principles.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A "holistic-relational" theory of language grammar holds that all components of a language must be considered together in the composition of its structure--implicit rules regulate meaning and pragmatics as much as syntax, word associations and signs must be predictable and stable in order to make sense of the world. From this standpoint, we cannot consider analytically any single component of a language system as existing independently of all others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The interdependencies of all linguistic components determine that each language has a unique structural patterning relative to that language, that all languages are continuously changing, and that each language has its own particular history of configuration and modification. This does not mean that languages cannot be usefully compared in terms of their structure, and that genetic relationships do not exist between languages. Nor does it mean that there is not a biological substrate underlying all linguistic process which predetermines in certain fundamental and universal ways the outermost boundaries and design of human language. But this biological basis of human language is not predeterminative of the surface structure which languages take--it determines neither the form nor the content which linguistic construction shall take, but only the outermost boundaries within which almost continuous variation is possible. This surface structure has no underlying "deep structure" which causes its patternings--but it does have a structural history and a background of change. As coherence systems, all languages are by definition self-organizationally stable and conservative. Internally, they change towards a net increase in coherence and a minimization of ambiguity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Externally, they change towards the enhancing of the functional performance of the language within its many contexts. A language hangs together in a minimally coherent manner because they are thus integrated and adaptive in the world. They draw and maintain a boundary around themselves that mark off the internal linguistic world of the language, and the external realities of the world. The surface structure of a language must be understood in terms of this boundary and its requirements.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is from this standpoint that I will refer to the distinction between the extrinsic and intrinsic relational structure of language, as necessarily the two sides of this hypothetical boundary--the former reinforcing language from without, so the speak, the latter from within. I refer to it as a "relational" structure because, I believe, all languages set up a vast and intricate system of relations that serve to define and situate each element of spoken or written discourse within a larger history of the language, that "contextualizes" the net value of that element in such a way as to render it linguistically significant. Some sound or signal that for some reason fails to fit within this relational context must be seen as linguistically anomalous and as if nonsensical noise--signals may fit in partially but fail importantly in even just one critical sense, and hence fail to make sense except as suggestion or error or nonsense. It is from this consideration that we can speak of the relational "positionality" of a linguistic element as its net, inherent value at the critical moment of its production in context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be kept in mind that though to be coherent a language must be holistically integrated and functionally adapted, it is neither perfectly structured from an internal point of view or functionally adaptive externally. The incompleteness of the system is both a source of its error and "ambiguity" as well as the source for its flexibility, variability and change. All languages tolerate a certain modicum of ambiguity and error, as well as variability and change. One important way to get at the structure of any language is by studying the systematic kinds of errors and ambiguity that may exist in different components of a language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human languages are defined by, among other things, the design feature of openness. Though mechanically composed of only a finite set of discrete sounds, these sounds can nevertheless be arranged into a virtual infinity of possible patterns. The relational structure which impinges upon these linguistic possibilities at any given moment, determined by the total incorporated history of the language, creates what can be technically referred to as a linguistic paradigm which systematically reduces the infinitude of variation to humanly meaningful proportions and ordered arrangement.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Each language works within its own linguistic paradigm in the production of new meanings and possibilities of pattern. It is because of this that the systematic study of language as a science is possible, that language is not burdened by infinite complexity as a patterned system, and that different languages can be productively compared and analyzed in terms of their paradigms in order to get at the implicit rational design of these structures and at some of the conditional factors that influence their development in any given language and in human language in general. Again it must be emphasized that there is no compelling reason to presume that the paradigm of human language must itself be based upon genetic and biological structures--if these are anything, then they are but one dimension of constraint within these linguistic paradigms.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic structure in human language is the basis of the design feature of "duality of patterning"--language is a finite set of signs which by virtue of their rearrangement can produce an infinite set of patternings which point to a world beyond the signs themselves. This is also the basis for the claim of the symbolic character of language, and for the "displacement" of significance beyond the intrinsic value of the sign itself. In human language, the dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic structure is purely an analytical contrivance, a convenient entry point into language; in reality intrinsic and extrinsic qualities interpenetrate one another in every component of a language, such that it is never possible to clearly delineate between the two.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Extrinsic and intrinsic properties converge together in the encoding of reality, in the codification of language itself. The marking of the linguistic boundary consists in the production of explicit signs and signals from within a vast field of otherwise implicit relations. Because the sign is finite, it can only make explicit one or a few of the dimensions of relation in which it is situated. This rendering explicit what otherwise remains implicit, is a way of configuring a complex "emblem" against a background field. The "structure" of the sign is outlined by its background relational field--this is its extrinsic structure. The sign itself presents an explicit outline that, by foregrounding, contrasts the background. This is the intrinsic structure. Natural information in the universe is purely intrinsic--this configuration of significance between foreground and background does not occur.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another way of putting this is to claim that language, by its explicit encoding of a few significant elements out of an immense field of relations, achieves a complex symbolic relation based upon pattern recognition. The outline of the sign within the field creates a meaningful pattern, which, from an extrinsic standpoint, is unique to that moment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The explicit encoding of information in language can be expected to follow certain principles of priority--the principle of economy, or of least effort, and the principle of value, or of greatest effect. In terms of this encoding, certain implicit categories of significance will be implicitly inferred, and others may be explicit referred to--we make a distinction between overt and covert categories. A great deal of syntax centers upon this issue of encoding of meaning in language. From a functionalist standpoint, even categories of Noun and Verb can be seen to be implicit in the encoding. It is not difficult to see that this sense of syntax is not very distant from, indeed, almost synonymous with, the problem of meaning, or of semantics. Explicit encoding is also seen as a means of "marking" a relational category as somehow significant. In general, "unmarked" categories that remain implicitly in the background are considered to be more "basic" to the structure of meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Marking is construed as a means of emphasizing some elements in a field over others, and entails an intrinsic form of valuation, or significant contrast, between marked and unmarked elements or relations. To turn what is basically, or implicitly a "noun" in a normal field of relations into a verb, certain transformations of "marking" must be effected--similarly to change what remains implicitly a verb into a noun, other conventions marking the transformation must be effected, such as turning "is" into "an 'Is'".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this framework, it can be seen that meaning is by its design arbitrary. There are no fixed, a priori, absolute or non-relative relations that predetermine the significance of any particular sign for all time. This intrinsic flexibility in the use of signs in human language is called the "associational value" of the element. Each and every sign may be used in a variety of ways--but this usage entails the syntactic marking by means of conventional formula. Syntactic order enters into the transformations of basic meanings by means of the superimposition of conventions in the use of linguistic elements. Even the deliberate violation such conventions must themselves be somehow "marked" as such.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are lead to a consideration of two interrelated aspects of meaning and meaning-making in human language. First, "basicness" presumes a "prototypical" implicit field of relations which prototypicality reveals interesting facets about human knowledge. On a common sense level, the "basic categories" of meaning, though largely culturally constructed artifacts, forms the substrate of value and signification. Basicness of categories is widely presumed to be a universal substrate of human experience and cognitive recognition in the world--the case of the near-universal acquisition of basic color terminology reveals how our common experience may be similarly ordered upon a subconscious level. But the basicness defines the "center" of gravity of meaning of a basic category of relational value, but it does not clearly mark the boundaries or outermost periphery of such categories. This can be considered from another point of view. "Basic categories" which mark the centrality but not the peripheries of meaning, are usually regarded as mutually exclusive, and therefore as hierarchically related.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speculate upon certain "marginal" or "derivative" or secondary categories which serve the function of defining the peripheries of basic categories, and which tend to be mutually nonexclusive and nonhierarchical in relation with one another. We can assume that these secondary categories are more explicitly marked by conventional constraints than are basic categories, because they tend to be more ambiguous.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another complementary aspect of this is what might be called the "embedding of conventional constraint" in the implicit field of relations such that categorical markers which are clearly conventional artifices, are nevertheless normally construed as if "basic" and natural to the background field of relations. This embedding is accounted for in several ways, and it becomes the basis for the inherent stability and conservatism of language, and for its great functionality in the world. It is largely a function of the way information becomes neurally encoded in the brain--not only are basic categories marked out in this way, but a cultural construction which proceeds to delineate a greater number of derivative categories also entails the neuronal embedding of this knowledge in the brain.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This "embedding" of constraint within language is the principle means of increasing the coherence of language and reducing its ambiguity. We must distinguish this implicit embedding of constraint in language from the explicit encoding that marks its normal usage. This implicit embedding; follows the contours of basicness and thus serves to mark out and define more clearly the boundaries about basic categories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another way of putting this, is that the more refined and fine tuned the pattern recognition function of a language, the greater the number of secondary categories will be marked out as if primary and basic, and the less implicit will be the ambiguity which exists among unmarked categories. It can be seen how cultural bias can become experientially rooted upon the level of common sense and even of perceptuality--conventions of value and propriety can become implicitly embedded in the very articulation of language, on a level which remains out of awareness, because unmarked.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can expect cross-cultural convergence along toward the more basic categories of meaning, and greater divergence along the more peripheral categories. We can also expect that if there is a lower limit of the substrate of "basicness" of relational categories, there may also be an upper ceiling or limit upon the number of derived categories which can be effectively embedded. Expert knowledge is an example of these kinds of limits--human expertise entails a great sophistication and refinement along focal areas, but great depth is achieved at the cost of breadth. From this standpoint, not only do different cultures very significantly in the number of basic categories they mark out, but also in the number of "domains" of relation which they mark for such embedding.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In relation to this, it is worthwhile to consider embedding in relation to "elaboration". We can expect that wherever we find greater elaboration of certain relational domains, there will also occur greater embedding of conventions upon secondary categories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Elaboration is the explicit marking of secondary categories in such a way as to incorporate greater variability in the patterning. We refer to this as stylization, and it bears an interesting relationship with the communicative function of the enhancement of coherence and reduction of ambiguity. Elaboration recalls the expressive function of language, and is tied up in its marking and explicitness. Elaboration can be seen as dialectically antithetical to the process of conventional constraint, and becomes a way of anti-structurally defining the negative outline of language structure. This anti-structural function of elaboration, by virtue of its markedness, is a means of making manifest the marginal and implicitly ambiguous. It should be expected that as elaboration proceeds, embedding of convention will follow. We can see clearly the expressive, experimental and exploratory function of language play in the process of elaborating marginal areas of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another way of looking at the relationship between embedding and elaboration--elaboration proceeds where embedding can follow. There are marginal boundaries of all knowledge that, because of the upper limits of the embedding function, embedding cannot follow elaboration. In these regions, even elaboration must be constrained, because it no longer serves its function of precipitating embedding. We can expect in these areas to find the most explicit constraints of convention, which are not concerned with elaboration, but with the strictures of the reduction of ambiguity by the increase of coherence. We can expect that these areas come to have a certain "negative basicness" about them in that they point to a center or locus of categorical constraint which is exclusive and hierarchical, but which leaves the margins to be defined by elaboration. Explicit constraints thus are hedged all about by elaboration, though they appear to share the same categorical imperative of function as to implicit basic categories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is in the relation between basic categories that are implicit and basic constraints of meaning that are made explicit, a certain "shadow effect" in which such constraints, though conventional and arbitrary, come to acquire a "basicness" about them which is similar to basic categories. This can be put in another way--basic categories tend toward the simplification of the explicit encoding, and so do basic constraints--neither are enumerated or elaborated at any great length, though both are hedged all about by much embedding and elaboration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this explanation, we proceed upon a continuum from the most basic and implicit categories of experience, through marginal embedded and elaborated categories of constraint, to basic and explicit categories. There is in this movement a dialectic between implicit meaning and explicit constraint.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This brings up an important point about language--all implicit relations are virtually encodable, or are capable of being made explicit, whether or not they actually are. This is a basic design feature of human language--all human languages share the capacity for encoding any and every relation possible. Given the paradigmatic structure of certain languages, it certainly holds that certain categories are less readily encoded than others--the finite structure of any given language may make it extremely difficult to encode some forms of relation and very easy to encode others. This "comprehensivity" of language is tied to its productivity and openness as a coherence system.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We will not discover the universal structure of language in formal rules, but in the errors and violations of the rules we make and use</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have arrived at the point of considering what a language paradigm consists of and what factors may account for a particular organization of a language paradigm. In order to do so, we need to account for the basic structure of the sentence. Intrinsic relational structure is that which is specific to the construction of sentences--all other relations which impinge upon the significance of an utterance are to be regarded as extrinsic. Intrinsic meaning is always explicit, except where it has become embedded. Put simply, any language paradigm consists of a control structure that governs the intrinsic structure of language at the level of sentence construction. It is the sentential paradigm of a language which governs the type of marking and transformations possible within a language, and in terms of which change becomes realized.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no need to posit a universal deep structure to the construction of such paradigms, for they remain largely culturally implicit and conservative. It is unlikely that, given the requirements of natural language in terms of flexible decoding and encoding the world in a coherent and consistent way, it should be mathematically structured like any finite-state machine. The logic of the paradigmatic structure is largely informal and defined by its exceptions and variations. We can posit certain minimum constraints that any language must systematically incorporate in order to maximize coherence, such that syntax should have an optimum level given the design features inherent in human language. Exactly what these constraints may be will vary widely with different languages, and the results of different sets of constraints will produce differential patterns.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard the lesson of translation from one code to another is information--it entails the transformational encoding of a message in one linguistic order into a correlate in another. A similar process may be happening in normal speech production that produces almost infinite variations upon a few basic constraints. Are there basic patterns upon which such transformations are based for any given language, therefore requiring many rules for transformation, or else are there available to the average speaker a relative large set of schematic linguistic "chunks" which require only slight marking or alteration to be made serviceable in speech. Evidence of oral traditions supports an hypothesis of such schematic "chunking" in a language. In a literate context, chunks may remain, but in smaller, more grammatically parsable units. It is also possible that a mixed kind of situation exists for most languages--with some regions of a language governed by basic paradigmatic units or rules, and others less grammatically encoded but more highly schematized. In regard to this aspect of speech production, we really do not know how language works to construct sentences that make sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To examine what a basic sentence is, we must see that it is foremost an explicitly defined relation--or what might be referred to as a relational statement. A sentence serves the function of marking out one particular significant relation, or related set of relations, for some functional purpose. The relation focuses upon the identity of a "thing" that is the main subject of the sentence--the relation marks in some way the "thingness" of the subject in some functional way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The most basic sentence is a one word utterance or exclamation--this is the most implicit possible form of a sentence and has the most minimal possible intrinsic structure. It consists of a useful beginning in the understanding of sentential structure because it most clearly demonstrates the importance of the background relationship to the definition of a sentence. In this regard, a "Me!" in regard to some context does not function as a normal me in any other sentence or alone as merely a sign without a symbolic referent. To say "Hey!" to someone necessitates a context in which its functional meaning can be interpreted. Such one word sentences must be seen as contextually determined and context bound. The frequency which we might use such single word utterances in the course of conversation might, upon retrospection, defy our normal expectations of intelligibility, though we may do so without any loss of import of significance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is in marked contrast to a basic sentence form with basic categories and basic constraints, such as "The cat sat on the mat" which is held to be relatively context independent--it is a sentence which effectively contains its own context, and does not present a problem of implicit ambiguity. We may ask "what cat" or "where on the mat" but this call for elaboration merely hedges the central significance of the statement. Yet if we modify a single word, such as "this" or "that", we bring into the sentence the problem of implicit context. Implicitness is the measure of the contextuality of a linguistic element--basicness is the measure of the codability of an element. Contextuality and codability thus are seen in a converse relation--contextual relations are less encoded, highly coded relations are less contextual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One word sentences cannot be considered as the normal form of a sentence, and thus represent a special case. The minimal structure for a normal, prototypical sentence form is not one word but two--technically known as a "subject" and "predicate" or as a "topic" and "comment". Either of these sentential categories may be replaced by a phrase, or a set of phrases, to yield highly complex sentence structures. In one word exclamations, one or other of these is left implicit, though in normal sentential construction this is not paradigmatically appropriate. The more regular sentence structure is conventionally held to be subject, verb and object--languages vary widely in this and the range of variations come to encompass all possible permutations--SOV, VOS, SVO, OVS, OSV, and VSO. But this analysis disregards the cases of objectless sentences and the relation of the verb to the object as a part of the predicate. This has to do with transitivity/intransitivity of a basic dimension of verbs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words, key paradigmatic relation is between the subject and the predicate--the definition of both subject and predicate are secondary issues. The sentence structure may be considered prefix, infix or suffix in relation to the placement of the subject in relation to the predicate. This is important because it entails the order of modification of sentential structure that can be taken, and because this specifies the subject in relation to the relational predicate as explicit, whereas the modification of individual linguistic elements, which may follow its own prefix, infix and suffix notation, involves the relational modification of a "thing" or "thingness."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The subject then takes on a special relational value, as not the thing modified by a relation, but the thing that modifies the relation. The role and function of the object as part of the construction of the predicate is as a thing modified by the relation. What makes a sentence distinct from any other linguistic element, is that modification includes a subject-predicate relationship in which the subject, as a "thing" modifies the relation, or an object of the relation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It implies a certain informational value unlike that of things being modified or acted upon--a sentence thus constitutes a relational statement about the world, whatever its alleged truth value, which is a piece of linguistic knowledge about the world--it achieves a function of explicit symbolic relation and value. From the standpoint of human language, there is something of critical importance about this structure of relation. The precise order or nature of this relation may very with different language systems--whether topic-comment or ergative-accusative or active-passive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no "deep" or "universal" structure underlying this basic order of sentence patterning. Whatever is the predominant paradigm of the language will include some degree of implicit embedding of its structure in the language code that will facilitate recognition. "Transformation rules" are applied to the basic paradigm of a language for three sets of purposes--to account for and generate variable patterns of the sentence structure, to recognize and correct errors in sentence structure, and to translate from one language code to another. Transformation rules are largely implicit and remain embedded, though they guide elaboration of sentences. We employ these rules as a matter of habit and reflex, and these rules are therefore functionally encoded in our performance--they are "performance rules" and as such remain implicitly embedded in the construction of our sentences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A paradigm of a language, in lieu of more definitive scientific explanation, well simply be defined as the minimal, most basic constraints which govern the formation of all sentences in a given language. These include basic rules of sentence order, punctuation, modification and marking of components. There appear to be few formalizable and universal paradigmatic constraints underlying all languages. Different languages vary considerably in their paradigmatic organization, and paradigmatic structure remains implicitly embedded in the patterning language takes. When overlaid and brought into constructive, conjunctive coordination with the basic and implicit relational field, these rules become organizationally constitutive of symbolic and relational meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Transformation rules modify sentence structure in relation to the basic paradigm that remains implicitly embedded. To understand the relation of transformational rules to the basic paradigm of a language, we need to understand the relation between the implicit and explicit values at the level of the sentence, and how these are interconnected with implicitness and explicitness at the level of the linguistic element. This is roughly the difference between intrinsic implicitness/explicitness and extrinsic implicitness/explicitness, that has previously been described. Intrinsic implicitness/explicitness involves the relational and positional value of the linguistic component within the framework of the sentence--it is different from that extrinsic value derived as if the element stood alone, outside of the sentence. Another way of looking at this is to say that the sentence creates its own context of relations that critically intercedes with the relational contexts of any of its elements. This is simply more than the intersection of contextual relations of each of its elements. The intrinsic contextuality of the sentence is based upon its fundamental relational paradigm within any given language, and the embedded and elaborated transformational rules which govern its production and articulation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The basic paradigm remains largely implicit to the intrinsic structure of a sentence, as do the implicit transformation rules--what becomes explicitly encoded in a sentence construction is the coherence of the meta-relation described by the unique conjunction of the sentence components. In extrinsic structure, relations are implicit and thingness is rendered explicit--in intrinsic structure, relation itself is rendered explicit, and thingness is made implicit beneath the scope of the explicit "meta-relation". Bringing diverse elements within the scope of a sentence "meta-relation" precipitates out in increasingly explicit ways what otherwise remains implicit to the elements themselves. The conjunction of a sentence with each additional element creates diminishing degrees of implicitness, and increasingly explicit specificity of the "meta-relation".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sentence construction accomplishes reduction of implicit ambiguity about the meta-relation, and explicit expressiveness about this relation at the same time. A sentence accomplishes a functional symbolic relation that is the foundation of sentience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The intrinsic positional and associational value of a component within a sentence will determine which transformational rules will apply, at both the sentence and the elemental levels. How a component of a sentence shall be modified, and how the total structure of the sentence shall be modified, will be governed within the control structure of the basic paradigm of the language. This control structure governs the modification and selection of elements in relation to one another in the construction of sentences. Transformations are allowed within the latitude of the system, or may violate the basic rules of the paradigm, as long as the violation is marked by modification as such.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sentence as a whole, self-contained unit, thus conveys not only explicit information about the world, but implicit information about its own structural patterning as well. A sentence becomes then, a complex "element" of a language with its own extrinsic relational value. The punctuation of a sentence, whether it is marked in writing by a period or a question mark, or in speaking by a pause or a rising ultimate tone, bounds the elements within that frame into a closed internal order in which the relational values of each of the components begins to rapidly work upon one another to produce some final composite, relational significance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The elements bound within the scope of a sentence enter into a complex dialectic of mutual constraint and inter-penetration of value. It is a complex calculus, and as sentences are being produced, a dynamic one--with each additional element contributing to the dialectical relations as a "diminishing degree of freedom" in the final composition. We can speak of a sentence as a complex composition containing a net, if not quite discrete, relational value.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradigm of a language is founded upon the differential requirements and coordination of the functions of speaking and hearing, or writing and reading. Intrinsic structure is necessary for the purposes of unencumbered and correct speech production that will maximize either communication or expressiveness, or both, and minimize as much as possible ambiguity. The listening to the speech of others entails the application of embedded transformational rules that will automatically decode and simplify the variability of sentences within the range of the paradigm. The productive elaboration and play with words of one's own speech requires a kind of internal "listening" or monitoring of one's own speech activities, and a channeling of the stream of speech through the embedded transformational rules.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left with a sense in which the dialectic between the basic paradigm and embedded rules of transformation are mutually constraining, in the control of sentence construction. This continuum is also neatly bisected by an axis formed by the dialect between implicit and explicit structure--or what might be better referred to as virtual and possible structure versus actual and probable structure. All rules are implicit except that their instantiation forces upon them a certain functional "explicitness" which marks the "correctness" of the construction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A sentence is a complex and dynamic construction. It is more than just a string of words or signals--the relational order of a sentence becomes a functional formula about a relation in the world. It becomes a proposition, a statement of value, whose primary significance points beyond itself to the outside world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Human discourse is the fulcrum of human development</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sentences usually come embedded in a larger linguistic context, a context that is usually marked by some form of social exchange. This larger dialogical context comes to constrain and enters into the relational dynamics of sentence construction. The relational values of sentences are negotiated between speakers, and lead to the development or modification of an implicit relational field. A sentence provides a window between the internal relational topography of the speaker/listener, and the outside world. It is a window through which order and transformation can go in both directions. Feedback from another speaker/listener is critical in this process of coordinate modification of a "dual-processing system". Self-contained feedback is affected by a single speaker monitoring their own speech. An internalized dialogue is affected which accomplishes the same pragmatic functions as real social interchange. In this regard we can refer to the "inner voice" of the mind which is an active, productive agent of implicit speech. Unvoiced because unspoken, the voice of consciousness becomes a virtual voice of active thought and imagination, as well as a "vital voice" of the self. This voice enters into the complex calculus of speech production, as do the voices of others. The inter-sentential context of language is appropriately the level of pragmatic functions of language--roughly put, the uses to which speakers may put their words, either in their own heads, or in conjunction with the heads of others, as well as in relation to behavior and social action. In this sense, nonverbal communication and paralinguistic signals become the implicit constructions of the pragmatic functions of a language in its social and psychological context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The same linguistic functions which create and maintain a social context of expression and communication, also create and maintain a psychological context of sense of self, feeling and thought and intentionality--linguistic process is implicated in all of these internalized psychological processes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The pragmatic function of language is to mediate between, coordinate, and modify internalized, implicit relational field of the language bearer, as a "cognitive map" of the world, and the external relations of the world. This process is one of negotiation between internal and external relational frameworks such that each attempts to control and modify the other. This is what is referred to as the dialectical dynamics of discourse. Language is inextricably implicated in the human experience of the world--it imposes an intermediate filter which we selectively channel and reduce the complexity of incoming signals to a meaningful, manageable order--and allows us to flexibly modify our internalized frames to fit the external realities. In other words, language as discourse representationally modifies human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is easy to see how externalized social constructions can so reinforce internalized conceptual frames of the world, and both can come to acquire the status of "naturalness" though they remain artifices of human production in the world. In a sense, this level of language process is only possible in a human-made world--a cognitive map of a natural, non-cultural world would be de facto and by default, a nonlinguistic one. It is by such a means that people come to symbolically appropriate the signals of their natural environments, and to animate these environments with a vitality or spirit force which takes the force of a cultural construction of reality. This is in part the consequence of the pragmatic function of human language in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left with a sense of a layering of language process upon several levels. The semantics that govern the relational field that remains mostly implicit, morphology and phonology govern the production of basic linguistic elements, syntax governs the coordination of these elements in sentence production, and pragmatics generally controls linguistic discourse. These four levels of the functional signification of language process can be seen as form a complex system of coordinate, dialectical processing in the production of human language. We cannot clearly separate or privilege these levels above one another without destroying the synthetic and holistic integrity of linguistic process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint the holistic integrity of language as a bounded, self-organized system, becomes important. The meanings produced within such a system are virtually internal and enclosed within the holistic integrity of the language as system. Within this holistic scope it makes sense to refer to the functional and relational "structure" of language within which the values of any element within the system are conditioned and constrained by its functional and relational status within the total language "field".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any language, to the extent that it is holistically integrated in the disambiguation of reality, has its own logic. The logic of language is not formal, but informal, in the sense of being replete with all the fallacies of logic that we are prone to. It is a symbolic and relational and functional logic--it works in the world in which it is situated. Common sense is embedded in this "natural logic" of language. The logic of language is that it imposes its own validity of coherence and consistency upon the world--it legitimates reality and therefore it is an "ideological" logic, and from a structural standpoint--mythological. This logic is structured by the linguistic disambiguation of contradiction which is inherent in language and language change. The logic of language resolves contradiction dialectically.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We cannot consider a world without language, or a language without a world.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The worldview problem has always been a central question in anthropological linguistics, because its theory attempts to specify the nature of the relationships between cognition, language and culture. There as been great disagreement as to what role language actually plays in relation to cognition and culture--the question seems to be a complex one which admits of no simple, singly deterministic solution which strict science seems most satisfied with. But there can be little doubt that whatever its finer points, the role language in relation to both culture and cognition is a central and critical one. It would be difficult if not impossible to imagine either culture or cognition without human language, just as it would be equally difficult to imagine human language without a cultural context or a cognitive component. The problem of world view is centrally tied up to other important questions, the problem of meaning and the nature of the relationship between mind and brain, and more widely, mind and body, and the problem of the relationship between nature and culture, or nature and nurture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can refer to the central, strategic 'triangulation' function of language in the Worldview problem, serving to locate meaning somewhere in the nexus between cognition, culture and language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In regard to this problem area, the functional linguistic theory elaborated thus far has made several significant contributions. Language is a holistic and integrated system, one that is nevertheless open and productive in relation to the world in which it is situated. Language rests upon an implicit, preceptual and prelinguistic "passive recognition system" of the human brain--the ordering and significant boundaries of this system become, by processes of acquisition, determined by the biological encoding of linguistic elements within the language field. The "naming" function underlying language is paramount in the carving out of the implicit relational field formed within the brain.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In human acquisition, such naming follows a regular developmental progress, and has the effect of making explicit, for purposes of externalization, significant relationships that would otherwise remain only implicit and internal. "Rules" of linguistic structure and transformation that govern the elaboration of language also become implicitly embedded in the organizational patterning of the mind. These are functional rules of performance--they are not "formalized" or learned in any formal sense, but are self-organized and "worked out" in trial and error during acquisition. The linguistic function of the brain itself is specially adapted for the acquisition of such linguistic structure, and the organization of brain function is inextricable from the linguistic organization of human mind and intellect. These rules are most apparent upon the sentence level of language production, and sentence construction provides a basic mechanism for the externalization and modification of implicit and internalized linguistic elements. Above the level of the sentence, we must come to recognize that the social and constructionist dimensions of language are also inextricable from language and its encoding in the mind. The dialectics of discourse permit the coordination and modification of both language and internalized cognitive structures that are dependent upon language. Internalized linguistic structures map an external order, and the external order mapped are externalized internal linguistic structures. The feedback process that occurs at this level of language is what links language to an outside world, and accounts for both the social construction of reality as well as for the psychological construction of a sense of self.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The centrality of language in the worldview problem does not entail a simple picture of linguistic determinism of either culture or cognition. Language as a coherent, and imperfect system, exists within a larger world--its internal functionality is in part conditioned by its external functions built around human adaptation and the need for communication of complex information. Its power is neither independent nor a priori in this world. This is attested to by the fact that the functional imposition of other cultures with other languages leads to a great deal of exogenous cultural change. Language reinforces and serves to modify cultural and cognitive reality--it underlies how we normally carve up our continuum of experience as well as how we come to cultural relate with our world. Languages, to the extent that they are internally integrated and holistic, are relative beasts--but the holistic functions of linguistic integration of reality are themselves tied to external adaptive functions in the world. We must not mistakenly identify what amounts to the functional centrality of language in our world or our worldview with the deterministic power of language to control or change our world. Language may make some elaborate or exotic forms of experience more available to us than others--it is a principle means of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Different language systems do carve up the continuum of human experience differently than others, and do permit different ranges and direction of possibility in the elaboration of world-view. But there also seems to exist a very complicated, common substrate underlying our consciousness which to some extent predetermines the implicitness and basicness of all languages. All languages are relationally and functionally united by basic design features that render its information processing capacities equivalent in all languges. On the other hand, culture does have a definite conditioning and determining influence upon both the organization of mind and the organization of language. No human language can be conceived of in a vacuum of the cultural construction of reality in which it plays a central part, or in total social isolation, or outside of the history of its own making.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In terms of the multiple levels of language function and relation, there is a sense that the cognitive dimension of language has greatest play upon the lower, more basic levels of language elements and meaning, that language comes fully into its own upon the intermediate levels in intrinsic sentential structure, and that cultural dimensions of language become most important upon the discursive and pragmatic levels of language function.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Change agents in the world who want to tap into the power of language must pay heed to the inherent, anthropological limits of this power--language is interdependent with culture and cognition in both the World and in our View of the world. Together, language, culture and cognition form an anthropological complex that is analytically inextricable in the understanding of human reality. Simply changing how we speak about the world will not, by itself, bring about major changes in how our world is ordered. But it may alter how we think and come to act in relation with the world, and by this, we may come to change the world as well.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Language was the mother of human evolution. It was the grease on the gears of human development, the fuel on the fire of human civilization and the glue in the human construction of reality.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Implied in the previous discussion of language in relation to worldview, was the importance of acquisition processes in understanding this role. Acquisition has also been previously implicated in the constructionist dynamics of language change and linguistic process. The embedding of linguistic value and structure is largely a function of acquisition processes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I will refer to general anthropological acquisition as relating to all areas and phases of the processes of human development. Linguistic acquisition is an inextricably part of cultural and cognitive acquisition. The primary and secondary acquisition of a language is related to the acquisition of culture, or enculturation, and socialization, as well as to cognitive development. In the larger scheme of things, we can refer to phylogenetic and evolutionary acquisition of language as being related to the developmental acquisition of an individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In all cases in which the basic processes of linguistic acquisition will be implicated, the component of linguistic acquisition will be similar in process and function, except that the history and the context in which acquisition is occurring will be different with each case. The processes of primary and secondary acquisition are no different in their dynamics, learning proceeding along the same basic lines in both cases, except that in the former case the mind is mapping much more of the original language on to the brain, while in the latter case the second language must be learned via the application of explicit rules of translation until the second language can becomes fully encoded into the mind of the foreign speaker. Similarly, the acquisition of a culture of a different or new language proceeds along the same lines as the individual acquisition of a language, because in this case the culture is by definition a collection of individuals learning the same language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speculate also as to whether the first human acquisition of language may not have evolutionary proceeded along the same lines as that of child-acquisition, except that in the latter case it is a blank-slate in a culturally constructed language environment, and in the former case it was a matter of the brain reorganizing itself for purposes of language and its acquisition within a context of a linguistic vacuum or genuinely linguistic deficit.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this sense, ontogeny may well recapitulate phylogeny when it comes to the biological organization of the brain for language and to the organic developmental processes underlying and based upon language acquisition. This last case is perhaps the most anthropologically problematic and interesting because it concerns the conjunction of some important lines of inquiry. Another way of stating the matter may be that the kind of linguistic mediation which involves the feedback relationship between the individual in society, might be similarly related to the linguistic mediation which has been evolutionarily involved in the feedback between "human nature" and human culture. In this case the young child's grammatical errors, holophrasis, and phonological fusion or mispronunciation of elements may have been comparable to early human's first stages in language acquisition. We might look to the kind of minimalist vocabulary and language structure of a 16 month old child, or a 2-year-old, as perhaps comparable to the scale and level of order of the first "proto-languages" which came to be spoken by humankind. Whatever may be the case in this ultimately irresolvable issue, we can be sure that the entire anthropological complex of acquisition was to a great extent a cybernetic and self-organizing process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of the child, we can see the self-organization of the child's language as occurring in a complex cultural-linguistic environment. But the child functions as a sort of "implicit linguist" in this world--as a strange and silent alien who must figure out from scratch the intricacies and complexities of their language world. The child does this with an innate facility that escapes most adult language learners, but the child makes many mistakes, playfully explores and experiments with the linguistic environment with trial and error and with an energy, an abandon and naive curiosity that eventually over comes all obstacles and barriers in its paths, and quickly learns from the mistakes made.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A basic anthropological theory of language has been roughly outlined in this set of essays. I have chosen to call it functional-constructionist for several reasons. It has been based upon a number of presuppositions and a number of lines of evidence in linguistic research. One of its presuppositions if of the basic relational structure of human language which predetermines its organization and underlies its functionality in the world. An anthropology of human reality cannot ignore the problem human language. Anthropologists have traditionally approached the problem of language from a holistic and relativist standpoint, largely because they have been confronted most directly with the problems of language difference and of translation between languages, and because the problem of language cannot be considered, from an anthropological standpoint at least, in a kind of analytical vacuum from other important aspects of human reality--most importantly the problems of cognition and culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The theory proffered within these essays sought to help explain several important aspects of the anthropological problematic of language--the problem of language change, of language function, of language structure, of language in relation to the world-view problem, and of language acquisition. Any anthropological theory of language, to be satisfactory, must address at least this minimal set of basic questions. But any such theory must also leave more questions unanswered than it has asked.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eleven">VIII</p> </a></font><a NAME="eleven"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Psychology</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We find ourselves in the world, and make the world in ourselves</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropology of psychological knowledge must begin and end within a general theory of human meaning. An anthropology of language leaves open the question of the human construction of meaning, as well as the processes of internalization and externalization which imply a psychological dimension of human linguisticality and experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Of course, an anthropology of psychology, rooted in the dialectics of the worldview problem, extends beyond this question to encompass a number of other problems such as collective representations, the anthropological construction of the self, or sense of ego, the role of symbolization, identification, folk psychology and attribution theory, human belief, feeling and behavior, and the question of a cultural psychology and the part played by psychological attitudes in cultural tradition and social institutionalization. What is sought in this case is a central anthropological theory of psychology that will somehow effectively take into account these various problems of a cross-cultural psychology. Put somewhat more systematically, an anthropological theory of psychology must take into explicit account some or all of the following problems:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. The problem of meaning.</p> <dir> <dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. The problem of the psychological construction of reality.</p> </dir> </dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. The problem of attribution and attitudes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. The problem of identity.</p> <dir> <dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The problem of the cultural psychology of human relation and social process.</p> </dir> </dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">6. An anthropological psychology of human "being".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">7. The limits of psychological knowledge.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not too difficult to see how these general questions may be interrelated and may form an outline of the theoretical problematic of an anthropology of psychology.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">But for nonsense nothing would make sense. The ground of meaning is the material of the mind, the software of the brain, and the substance of thought, all rolled into one.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A theory of meaning is inherently psychological, though it must entail linguistic and socio-cultural components as well. Such a theory of meaning incorporates a number of other important psychological questions--the role of worldview, of common sense, of intuition and imagination, of perception, conception and emotion, the question of subjectiveness and human experience, the problem of value and quality, the question of mind, knowledge, and information, etc. If we take a cue from the previous essays concerning the anthropology of language, we may say that meaning is similar to language in being mostly functional and constructed and relational in structure. Moreover, meaning presents itself in human reality as comprehensive and as holistically integrated. In other words, a human meaning system is synthetic and can only be understood from within its internal structure of signification. This argues for a certain relativity and integration of meaning systems which is relative to the observer's point of view. An analytical approach to meaning that takes it out of its context must prove insufficient.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a sense that meaning lacks the purity or perfection of form which characterizes mathematical knowledge which is known by its intrinsic logical correctness and precision of form. Meaning is of the phenomena of the world--rarely perfect or clear-cut in its patterning and process. There is also, from an anthropological point of view, the viewpoint that meaning has an inherently human quality about it. From this standpoint we can argue that anthropologically, psychological meaning is inherently "phenomenological process" and must be understood as such. The key psychological dimensions of this phenomenological process are that it is experienced holistically as if of a single, whole fabric; that it is experienced presentationally, as "true to itself" and unmodified by intermediate structures; that it is experienced as if immediate and proximate, or local; that it is experienced subjectively, or what has become known as emically; and that it is temporally experienced.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If and when meaning becomes representationally abstracted from its primary presentational experience, its representation remains phenomenologically experienced as such, but it becomes experienced as non-phenomenological. Abstraction is the process of ideological decontextualization of meaning by arbitrarily alienating meaning from its phenomenological process. Abstract meaning is experienced as if disembodied, as if objectively real or "etic", as if a temporal or static, and therefore spatially real, as if remote, universal or general, alienated, as if representational.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is in this abstraction a fundamental sense of paradox which accompanies its intrinsic meaning--for abstracted meaning is experienced simultaneously as disembodied and as phenomenologically real, as simultaneously immediate and universal.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In contradistinction to "abstraction of meaning" we might refer to the reverse process of the phenomenological "concretization" of meaning. Concretization involves the refamiliarization of alienated meaning, the precipitation of experience in phenomenological form.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is difficult for us to imagine a world completely without language. The closest we may come to this is to imagine the difficulty of understanding an world of an alien culture in which, without access to the meanings of its language, the depth of the culture is lost to us. Or we have the familiar distinction between alphabetic and non-alphabetic cultures, and between literate and oral culture, in which we can imagine the character of experience in a world not as completely abstracted as our own. In this we can see the importance of language in the abstraction of phenomenological experience, and in its reconcretization as if experientially embodied.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The heart of meaning becomes then the paradoxical ambiguity that is inherent in the linguisticality of experience--in the embedded linguistic encoding of experience in the human being, in the mind, and even in the brain. Such ambiguity and paradox comes from a sense of implicit contradiction, or a sense of something meaning two exclusive things simultaneously, each of which necessarily entails the negation of the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another way of saying this, without language there would be no sense of contradiction or ambiguity about our experience of the world, and without contradiction or ambiguity, there would be no sense of the meaning of experience as we know it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Phenomenological experience is prelinguistic. The trouble with human experience is that though we can have prelinguistic experience, we cannot talk or think about it without language. As soon as we bring the problem of language into our experience, we find that the basis of our meaning becomes inherently paradoxical and ambiguous. Our ability and our need to linguistically encode our "previously unapprehended" experience entails that though we can know phenomenologically we cannot know that we know, or "re-cognize" our cognition, or reflexively, apperceptively and metalogically think about our knowing, without bringing our experience within the purview of our language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a sense, a name is a word that contains its own negation at the moment of its affirmation--it both is and is not what it represents.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see this as an inherent symbolic process, and as part of the symbolic design of human language. Language permits symbolization. Not all symbols have to be linguistically encoded, at least not in the form that we are usually acquainted. A flag is an example of a symbol that, though named, does not normally exist in the mind as such. The symbol exists iconographically or ideographically as a complex emblem, but not alphabetically in the way that we understand it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is to be contrasted with symbolic forms which do not exist in reality except as a word--for instance God or "Culture" or "Beauty"--these may connote many instances in the world which exemplify their facets of significance, but nowhere can "Beauty" as a whole thing apart be found.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are led to a consideration of the way that experience becomes linguistically encoded. Language at this levels serves as an indexical "call" system by which we can "look up" meaning. This demonstrates the arbitrariness of language, when we can consider that any word can be attached to any set of significances, and this is the basis for so much linguistic variability in the world, and presents a problem for translation, because not all words of all languages call up the same set of significances.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is what the language calls that becomes important psychologically for a theory of meaning--we must contrast denotation of naming with the connotation of the range of things named or left unnamed. What a word calls are a set of conceptual and perceptual associations united by the word--these associations, when united by the aegis of a word-name, are "con-cepts" and exist as an abstract construction of diverse elements of experience. This construction is emblematic and iconographic, but depends upon the calling function of the word as name for its unity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Underlying this conceptual construction are what might best be described as "precepts" rather than as pure "percepts"--they are more than presentational signals or senses in the purely organic way, rather they are the rudimentary representations of phenomenological experience, and constitute the bedrock of human experience. They are in a sense the elements of a concept before the naming function calls them. One aspect of this is that a name calls a concept that calls other concepts by implicit naming. Another way of putting this is that a name calls other names, but in the course of calling a concept the other names which reference the components of the concept remain embedded implicitly in the structure of the concept itself, as "signs" the linguistic function of which remains suppressed and subordinate to the linguisticality of the concept itself. Again, this recalls the design of duality inherent in naming.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The point made here is that phenomenological experience must be recorded and neurally deposited in the brain in a prelinguistic manner, one which, though entangled with linguistic naming, is nevertheless a separate and internally coherent system of representation. These organized, prelinguistic units of experience are what I shall call "memes" and are what, under the scope of conceptual construction, are referred to as basic, implicit precepts. We might call these genuine "percepts," except that they are somehow representationally deposited in the brain for purposes of pattern recognition and memory organization. They constitute basic phenomenological and schematic "frames" by which we "chunk" experience before naming.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To a certain extent, these constitute basic categories of "salience" to which prototypical naming seems coordinated. They are signals that exist focally in our field of experience that direct our attention, awareness and subsequent selection, rather than peripherally or derivatively as aspects which tend to be ignored, or because of greater intrinsic ambiguity in our perceptual field, prevent focusing. These are the fuzzy boundaries of our prototypical categories of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cognitively, we might refer to these as "gestalts", although gestalts may be more complex patterns of experience made up of arranged memes. Memes become arranged into a relational field in the mind that stands as a representation for the actual perceptual field of experience. This relational field maps on to our perceptual field, and by means of basic pattern recognition, creates a "slot and filler" dialectic that directs our perceptual awareness, and our learning, as we proceed to focus upon and fill in the anomalies of our field of experience in such a way as to resolve the ambiguity which such anomalies create.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The linguistic encoding of experience precipitates what might be called as the acquired awareness of the world. What might be thought of as the critical difference of awareness between merely looking at and actually seeing some thing, or between hearing and "listening" to something. The difference is between a sense of sentient involvement and disengagement with something that captures our attention or fails to.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a sense that states of mind are run serially in the mind much as a movie projector might run a series of slides to produce a sense of animation. A successive series of states are transitionally ordered with one another, and the fact of transition is somehow controlled. We can speak of focal points of a picture as we scan the entire image to take in the whole. Our continuous and recurrent scanning produces a detailed picture of the entire image though we can only focus upon one set of details at a time. The capacity of a specific momentary state of attention or mind might be fundamentally constrained by the capacity of our short-term memory. It is as if the mind can control simultaneously only a minimum number of basic elements. The holistic integration of the mind that we like to think of as the continuous stream of consciousness is in a sense a mental illusion, a trick which the mind plays upon itself in the organization of experience, by which it combines minimal constructs together into larger constructions of meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important at this point to emphasize the temporality of this primal form of meaning. Speaking about mapping and pattern recognition tends to depict a scientifically appropriate "spatiality" of meaning, which is contradictory to the fact that phenomenologically the "field of perception" exists within a dynamic temporal continuum characterized by the dialectics of change and stasis. Spatiality is exclusive a function of our visual imagery which is but one dimension and component of our experience. Experience exists synthetically as an incorporation of several dimensions of perception, and more important--in embodied time or temporality. The field of relations which coordinates with the continuum of perception is an equally dynamic and temporally ordered continuum--it is not a static and unchanging Cartesian space. This points up the important adaptive function which the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget referred to as assimilation and accommodation. Organic mental illness affects just this basic function of the brain to coordinate internal and external worlds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">More importantly, it affects how we think about "memes" if we see them as perceptually multi-dimensional and as existing dynamically in time as well as in space. They are synthetically related--its relational field is multidimensional. More importantly, memes may themselves, in their relational organization, be hierarchically arranged on order of their basicness and their complexity. We can speculate upon derivative constructions of memes that nevertheless remain prelinguistic, as complex, polysynthetic constructs of "perceptual units of experience". This is so because most of reality cannot be considered or comprehended, as experience along an exclusive dimension of perception--as pure sound or pure sight. We might consider the phenomena of a distant barking dog or howling wolf, by which we can make a prelinguistic association if we have actually witnessed a dog barking or a wolf howl. If we hear a wolf's howl without previous association, it will be encountered as a strange and anomalous sound in our range of experience. In other words, mimetic associations and relations can be prelinguistically established and mentally encoded, which defines categories and complex constructions of experience, after which naming serves the function of eliciting. If names can elicit experiences and complex associations, experiences and associations can also elicit names.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">"Memes" can be considered as the basic "percepto-cognitive" constituents of meaning which are deposited in the brain and depend to a large extent upon the functional organization of the brain, and the cognitive organization of the mind. Memes, if these can be said to exist, are the contents and substance of meaning that is stored in memory and which is the "preprogrammed" material underlying the mind. They are built up emblematically in relational constructs that form a discontinuous field of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The emblematic construction of mimetic precepts may itself follow basic innate organization of the brain. We can speculate upon certain "universal constituents of meaning" or "archetypes" which are fundamental in the mimetic, prelinguistic organization of the mind. Children have an innate fascination with round, spheroid objects. Roundness may be a basic "cognate" underlying human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We might speculate that other such universal "cognates" may include an "edge", a "point", an "angle," and some basic, rudimentary sense of numerical relation or unitary identity and difference, upon which the cognitive mechanics of counting and the later skills of mathematics and logic are based. Not to privilege vision in this regard, we must speculate upon certain aural cognates as well, which we might include as tone, pause, tempo, beat, rhythm. We are left with an attempt to link mimetic precepts, cognates and basic perceptual categories as possible first relational sets or associations of experience. We can think in this regard of basic contrasts of taste like sweet and sour, saltish and bland, spicy and bland that correspond with basic taste buds. We are also biologically programmed for the perception of certain wavelengths and ranges of the electromagnetic continuum, as well as for motion. We feel hot and cold, blunt and sharp, etc. At this point we are at the levels of the perceptual substrate of meaning itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mimetic relational field constitutes then an organizationally separate system of meaning that is deposited in the brain and underlies the mind. Developmentally, it comes into conjunction and interdependency with a conceptual linguistic system which overlays and comes to interpret the relational field. The two systems of the mind cannot be clearly separated, and constitute a "dual processing system" which is itself hierarchically ordered and dialectically self-organizing and dynamic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If developmentally the mimetic system comes to depend upon the linguistic system for its sophistication and abstraction, it is also the case that the entire linguistic system of the mind also depends upon the mimetic system in certain fundamental ways in terms of its own nomic organization and function. Concepts dependent upon the naming function of language are themselves relationally arranged in a vast interconnected network of perceptual-conceptual elements. Names call other names, and other associations, at the same time that they call up the preceptual memes that these names are linked to.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mimetic relational system underlies the relational system of the basic level of language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mimetic system controls memory and memory organization. The structure of memory must tell us something about the organization of the mimetic system. We have short-term, working and long-term memory. In this we recognize basic structural limits in the relational system. The natural sentence or phrase is seven to eleven syllables in length, corresponding with the normal range of short-term memory. Working memory constitutes that nexus of associations that surround and occupy immediate attention. They are the elements most available to immediate preconsiousness, without entailing the complex "recall" system of retrieving associations from the "long term memory". The capacity and seize of this intermediate memory organization is important and may be complex--itself composed of discrete levels of memory function and organization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is worthwhile speculating whether or not the mind, and the brain, is not organized into several integrated "systems" which function in a coordinate, parallel programming matter. We have identified a linguistic and a mimetic system. In this regard we can consider a "perceptual system" which processes primary perceptual information. We can speculate that the brain also has a voluntary system and an involuntary system that controls vital bodily functions. We can speculate as well that the brain has an important "shut-down" system that controls sleep and dreaming. There is also a "stress system" which controls the response to threatening situations, "motivational" control and "aggression" and sexuality. We might also speculate upon a basic "reflex system" which controls the automatic response to basic stimuli, and which is subject to conditioning and habituation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From a psychological and anthropological standpoint, two such systems that seem of exceptional importance are the interrelated systems of consciousness or of cognitive awareness, and a system of valuation. These systems may be separate, but are interdependent and coordinate in the same way that language and mimesis are. What can we say about them. There is an intrinsic design to human awareness and subconscious which is important in the consideration of these systems. First, these systems are symbolic. Until known, symbolic anthropologists have been left out of research upon the mind, though it is common understanding that humans are by definition symbolic creatures, and that symbolization must somehow underlie and be intrinsic to the human mind. We can understand the structure of human symbolization in terms of the interrelationship between the mimetic and the linguistic system. But we to understand its function within the brain, we need to consider the dynamics of the symbolic translation of experience, the organization of consciousness. At this point we consider the interrelationship between consciousness and rationality and normative decision-making, or judgement. We must speculate whether these might be separate but interdependent systems of the brain, or else a single system which overlays and coordinates the others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems that they may be two systems that combine to create a single overarching system. The two subsystems constitute respectively what might be referred to as the system of consciousness and the subconscious system. The function of the former system is to bring into coordination the mimetic, the perceptual and linguistic systems to create cognitive thought, self-awareness. This level is experienced phenomenologically as multiple "profiles" or facets of synthetic awareness which constitute the basis of imagination. Not only are relations encoded and deposited in the brain which govern the organization of basic elements of meaning and their articulation, but rules that govern these relations are also deposited as well. We can entertain and explore a range of alternative profiles of consciousness in order to bring our awareness into coordination with our actual flow of experience. We might refer to this system as "mentality". The other subsystem consists of the subconscious coordination of the various processes, including motivational control, and controls the emotional basis of human feeling and mood. This system brings mind and body into coordination, and also performs a function of the affective encoding of the evaluative strength of experiences. Not only is information encoded in terms of the perceptual-preceptual associations, but also in terms of the affective associations of the moods, motivations and bodily reactions that such relations stimulate. Information about these stimuli, their strength, direction, modality, must somehow be encoded in the brain and the mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Given the apparent order and interdependencies of these several systems of the mind, we can speculate that they are combined, especially via the two previously described systems, to create what we might refer to as psychologically a sense of "self" or of "self-being" and anthropologically as "ego-identity". The psychological self is not just a synthetic unity of the separate systems, but constitutes itself a separate and synergistic system of its own, and forms the basis of what we refer to as "mind". From this standpoint we can consider what might be the design structure of "gestalts" as the underlying relational patterns of order of "mind." Gestalts must be seen as certain discrete, subjectively constituted "states of mind." This overarching system can be considered as a "blackboard" in which different subsystems are brought into asynchronous coordination in the mediation of the ongoing flow of experience. The consciousness and unconsciousness struggle for control over the mind, and the mind itself works within its own constraints to yield and resume control over its subsystems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The gestalts of the mind entail a complex encoding of a composite system of conscious, symbolic construction that combines relational elements, rules of relation, and values of relation into a complex, dynamic order. The system may be rationally constrained to function in terms of some logic, but it may also be mythologically ordered as well. In whatever modality, it functions to create complex symbolic judgements about experience, which may include rational and normative evaluations. A gestalt then is a complex, composite filter that mediates and modulates the experience and reactions to experience. The system of mind performs as a kind of general purpose control system that governs other expert systems. Its design is made up of elements and relations, values of association, and rules of relation. Furthermore, these gestalts are deposited implicitly and functionally in the brain, and no where are formally ordered, except in that formal training may reinforce such functional deposition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is worthwhile to speculate how the brain actually functions to produce such a sophisticated and sentient system of mind. On one hand we have evidence of certain aphasias that some discrete functions are specifically located, such that damage to these locations results in irreparable and irreversible loss of that function. On the other hand certain forms of information appear to be distributed in parallel manner throughout the mind, such that damage to only one region might result in only a minor loss of resolution or impairment in the overall capability to process information. The system can also continue to function as a whole if separate locations of the system are damaged and specific functions lost.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mind appears to be a functional hierarchy of systems embedded within other systems, and brought into coordination with one another at several levels. The system is relationally complex and adaptive in that its self-organization is not simply a matter of structural complexity, but of coordinate inter-functioning in which each system, and subsystem, is not only separate, but tied to many other systems and subsystems throughout the entire structure. The system as a whole can withstand considerable local loss and damage, and generalized impairment, without the entire system breaking down in the way that the loss of a distributor cap or points, or of a lead wire, might prevent a car from running. On the other hand it is simply not a anti-chaotic system critical self-organization--though it contains this structure, an event in one part of the mind simply does not generate a random chain reaction throughout the system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A theory of meaning must encompass and account for the complexity of human meaning--it is the result of many different processes of the mind and the brain, as well as for its "basicness" in the mind. From the standpoint of an extraordinarily complex mind, meaning is deposited in continuous complexes which may be called "gestalts" or "mental states," and contain basic constructs or components that consist mimetic elements, rules and values which constitute, in the brain, "memes"--the basic elements of meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Conscious focus and attention, however motivated or directed, may consist of a series of discrete mental states that become serially superimposed one after another in some fashion. This occurs rapidly enough to create the illusion of a "stream" or "continuity of consciousness" much like the movement of frames of film produces the illusion of animation. Thus our consciousness becomes animated because the discrete focal states of mind become fused in the rapid tempo of their succession. It appears that short term memory and working memory have a function integrating these short bits of focal states of attention and awareness to create larger relational episodes of experience, or experiential "events." In this way the ongoing phenomenology of experience becomes enmeshed within an internal web of associations and meanings to foster a sense of overall continuity of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Memes therefore encode three kinds of coordinate information, relational "thingness", relational rules, and relational values. Each is a separate sign/signal that performs a distinct function in the integration of experience, in two forms, at the complex level of the systemic mind, and at the basic level of the neuronal and biochemical organization of the brain. These memes constitute basic symbols, as well as the basic components of more complex symbols.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must ask how a neuron, or a group of interrelated neurons, may encode relational "thingness," rules and values at the same time. If we can understand this, we can understand the control structure of human meaning. We must speculate whether the neuron itself is a complex kind of symbolic device that somehow builds meaning from its signals. Thingness can be considered the stimulus and direction of the signal, as well as its discreteness. Rules of relation can be considered the switch work and "circuitry" which returns some response to the signal. Values can be the thresholds and the triggers that control the switching operation. In this regard, we can consider that the neuron is capable of recognizing and responding to a certain range of discrete types of signals from various sources, relying discrete types of signals in specific directions. From this standpoint, the signals received and transmitted may not only be bio-chemically complex and distinguishable, but also of certain "frequencies" and intensities. The neuron itself may be a kind of complex dual processing mechanism that accomplishes a basic symbolic function of displacement and stimulus generalization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The entire organization and systemic hierarchy of the brain and mind are based upon this principle relational and mimetic organization of the neuron. More complex systems within the mind represent the specialization of the generalized brain function for the purposes of discrete functions. But the entire system itself comes to reflect at each level the basic ordering and design of its most fundamental elements, and each of its most basic components, in sense, contains information about the entire order of the system. In other words, each element knows its own position and the positioning of many other elements within the system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must consider mind and meaning, or what we might call the basic sentience and sensitivity of knowing, as being intrinsic to the biology of mind itself. In this sense we must not be too premature in dismissing the sentience of a lizard, that, though instinctually order, knows to move from the hot rock to the cool shadow to adjust its body temperature, or the basic symbolic understanding of a dog in its relationship with its master or a chimpanzee that struggles to learn a human system of signaling. We, as "wise" human beings, do not control an exclusive monopoly on symbolic meaning or sentience in nature. Symbolic meaning is the very texture of our experience and our being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Learning must be seen as a basic compensatory function of this system of meaning that affects and seeks to maintain a dynamic equilibrium among its coordinate structures. Learning itself can be seen to be complex and to take place upon many different levels simultaneously. The neuron itself can be found to learn, and to adjust its own signals in relation to the whole.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may put the matter in a different, summary form. Meaning is the product of complex adaptive systems of dual processing--it is the intrinsic patterned epiphenomena of such processes. Meaning is intrinsic, not only to the basic complexity of human reality, but of all of biological nature. Humans share in this with all other life forms, albeit in an especially sophisticated manner. We must speak of a stochastic unity of mind and nature. Intrinsic to the meaning of complexity is the function of learning--all complex systems are, by definition, learning systems which acquire an ability to independently modify their relationship with their changing environment, in order to maintain an internally functional, dynamic equilibrium. In this sense, given the basis of meaning in our nature, the evolution of mind as we know it was probably an inevitable eventuality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All such complex systems acquire over time a certain level of expertise within a given context. Humans by nature learn to become experts within a given context in a very individual and characteristically human way. Such systems entail a complex encoding of information, implicit rules and values that guide adaptive functioning in specialized niches. Ant colonies can also said to develop a kind of local expertise in relation to its environment, a form of expertise which may be constrained in certain biological ways, nevertheless, a certain kind of embedded "wisdom" about its environment. The specialized adaptations of an ant colony within its environment sets up internalized selective pressures which may drive that group to genetic speciation based upon the biological programming of its expertise. Human mind evolved as the result of internal selection pressures created by the acquired expertise to a given environmental regime of its remote past. When we refer to ourselves as "wise" human beings, we must remember well where our wisdom came from.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speculate that the basic systemic and neuronal organization of the brain in which mind is implicit and potential is genetically encoded. We can speculate further that internal selective forces drove for a kind of ontogenetic development which favored cultural acquisition--which in other words favored the delayed development of the brain until well after birth for the acquisition processes to have fullest effect in the realization of the mind. Selective forces favored a developmental dependency of the brain and the mind upon the acquisition process. It meant that such development, from a genetic standpoint, therefore became underdetermined.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, certain biologically based structures of mind may have become genetically encoded, the hypothesized universal "cognates" of experience, for instance, as well as a developmental bio-program for the ordering of acquisition itself and for the developmental specialization of brain functions.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We make ourselves in the world at the very moment that we make the world in ourselves.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can properly speak of a phase of the anthropological construction of reality in terms of its psychological dimension, or what might be called the "psychological construction of reality"--namely the way external socio-cultural schemata and structures become psychologically internalized, and the way internal psychological structures become externalized in the world. The central role of language in this mediation has already been emphasized. In the manner that words deposit conceptual constructions in the mind to render the abstract real, or to concretize and reify phenomenological process, and also in the way that words precipitate in the world the objectification and legitimation of meanings otherwise internal in experience. But language, though central, is not the exclusive mediator of this process of psychological construction. It is said that "actions speak louder than words," and sometimes silent inaction speaks the loudest of all. The realm of paralinguistics covers those forms of communication that do not involve the explicit encoding of language. We must see these forms of human communication and intermediation with reality as not simply "outside of language" but also as "meta-linguistic" in being both beyond language and about language as well.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To a certain extent, we can speak of the process of psychological construction as the disembodiment of experience, and the embodiment of the world--those symbolic mechanisms that opened the door between external and internal realities allowed the flow of change to travel both ways. It established a bridge between those two worlds that assured that from henceforth the human relationship with its world would never be, from a behavioral point of view, static. The individual, in her/his subjective identity, becomes caught in a dialectic between inner meanings and external references.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psychological construction of reality is intrinsic to the anthropological process of the acquisition of culture. This process involves the internalization as if a part of the subjective nature of the individual, those artifacts of the culturally constructed world, and the subjective "identification" of those extrinsic elements as if they were a vital extension of one's subjective identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we understand the psychological organization of the human being in terms of the hierarchy of the mind, we can see that this process of the psychological construction of reality takes place upon all levels of subjective experience. It thus presents itself with a holistic integrity about it, and a complexity, which from an analytical approach is not readily penetrable. This holistic integrity of our psychological construction of reality is experienced as the somewhat paradoxical completeness of our subjective experience, one that, in its healthier forms, entails a vital coordination of mental state such that feelings seem, at least, in congruence with thoughts and beliefs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This sense of completeness may be more fictive than real, however, and it may always be ultimately elusive and we may always seem to be in pursuit of it. Another way of putting this is to claim that the internalized codifications of reality, the relational field which is in the mind, is a "mapping" of the external realities presented to the phenomenological experience of the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The functional principle of psychological process is an adaptive one that maintains a dynamic equilibrium, or sense of balance, between inner relations of meaning and external realities. In this regard we speak of the psychological mechanisms accommodation and adjustment--the attempt to modify internal structures to fit external forms, and the attempt to adjust external forms to fit internalized structures. It can be posited that the sense of self is directly tied to this adaptive function of psychological process. There exist certain thresholds for psychological process, both for changing the external world, and also for maintaining resistance to or for overcoming psychological resistance to internalized changes. These thresholds stipulate that for whatever form of psychological interest or involvement, there will be a certain minimal investment of psychological energy and motivation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must also understand these processes of the psychological construction of reality to be an extension into the world of the symbolic nature of human meaning and intrinsic systems of symbolization. Human psychology is by definition symbolic psychology, and human experience of the world and action in the world is always symbolically mediated and becomes expressed through symbolic action. Because of the inherent symbolic nature of human psychological processes, human subjectivity is always characterized by a sense of indirect displacement of meaning, a sense of the intrinsic alienation of the relation between the sign as symbol and the thing signified, and a resulting sense of psychological ambivalence and "antinomiality" that is a result of this continuous displacement of significance. There is a sense that if every thing is experienced from a subjective psychological standpoint as phenomenologically symbolic, then there is nothing within our experience that is of a non-symbolic or absolute character. Everything points to something else, and thus forms a continuous relational field in which our externalized embodiments and our internalized embodiments are experienced as psychologically, subjectively relative. Thus, via symbolization which requires always an external, material reference, we are able to "project" onto the external world those relational fields and frames which we have previously internalized, such that the external world becomes a psychological extension of our own inner world. Symbolization allows us to objectify feelings and states which otherwise would remain purely subjective.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not too difficult to see how language is at the center of this process of psychological symbolization. Language, and its related facility of tool constructing, both require an externalized form in the world by which meaning is concretized and rendered real and communicable. The forms of language that are deposited within the mind are a reflection of those externalized forms in which language is deposited. In this sense the mind mirrors reality as much linguistically and symbolically as it does perceptually.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At this point we must understand the problematic of worldview, ideology, common sense, and the role of mythological thought in symbolization. The function of symbolization has been regarded as a secondary institution to legitimate the primary externalization of human cultural construction. Mythology has been held as the most basic and undifferentiated form of this kind of legitimating function. but we must also recognize, from a psychological standpoint, other possibilities in the function of symbolization and mythology. Symbolization is also the primary process in the psychological externalization of subjective reality, and a principle means of legitimating in externalized form, internalized states of being. Mythological process serves not only in the legitimization of traditions and social institutional processes, but also, and perhaps more directly, in the mediation of personal experience, especially in the resolution of contradiction, the overcoming of conflict and the "collectivizations" of marginal or relativizing episodes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology must be construed as the basic relational logic of symbolization, or what might be referred to as the structure of "symbology." This structure is inherently subjective and psychological in character, and is inherent in the relational structure of meaning itself. It provides a psychologically sufficient mechanism for the overcoming of contradictions, for the mediation of dialectic, or what might be called the "identification of difference." It accomplishes this feat by what might be called symbolic reversal. Symbolic reversal accomplishes symbolically between contrasting sets of relational significances the psychological equivalent of displacement and identification, by means of psychological identification with the contrasting sets of elements. In symbolic reversal, the normal relations are converted, or turned upside down. The entire process of the anthropological construction of reality that involves the dialectical mediation between mind and body, and between culture and nature, becomes inverted by means of symbolic reversal, such that things that have a cultural and human-made origin become construed as natural, and things of nature becomes construed as the embodiment of culture. It effects the processes of what might be called the culturation of nature and the naturalization of culture, or what has been referred to as the fallacy of misplaced concretization, reification, overemphasis and anthropomorphizing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psychological appeal of mythology is symbolic and in a sense "metalogical"--it is not rational in the strict sense of the term, but exists in the temporary psychological suspension of logic and the credibility of our reason. It is a "sense-making" mechanism for the mediation of conflict and things that are ambivalent, which functions by means of the suspension of normal apparatus for making sense of a sensible world. Via symbolization and mythologization of reality, we can transform reality into supernormal states which nevertheless retain the appearance of normalcy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Worldview must be seen to arise in the holistic integrity of the subjectiveness of our symbolic world, from its sense as universal and relationally complete. Our symbolic world is a world without holes or seams. Worldview represents the composite body of knowledge and subjective understandings that are the product of our internalized experiences of the world. It is a psychological phenomenon, because it is not the world itself, but our view of the world as this is psychologically and symbolically mediated. Worldview has the virtue then of appearing all encompassing and comprehensive. Most people entertain a worldview that is mostly implicit and partial and incomplete. Because it remains mostly implicit, we are usually not aware of the contradictions of the hidden presuppositions upon which it is based. And, for most of us, it is per force a worldview that we share with many others. It exists in the social world as a common framework for the interpretation of experience. We must see then that world view is as much reinforced by and legitimated by a predominant world order as it reinforces and legitimates this order. More appropriately, we may say that it accomplishes symbolically the task of situating the subjective life of the individual, or the psychological self, within the widest possible sphere of external relations, and also, at the same time, of situating this wider sphere of external relations in terms of the subjective, biographical experience of the individual. Worldview functions at the level of the total self and the total world--circumscribing and encompassing everything that comes within the purview of experience. But it nevertheless remains a psychologically rooted phenomenon of the construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Ideology is often taken as a synonym for worldview, and worldview must be regarded as a necessary foundation for Ideology--all Ideology is rooted in one form of worldview or another, and entails implicitly such a worldview. But Ideology has a more specific form in that it is necessarily also an explicit, versus implicit, system of symbolization, beliefs, values and knowledge, that becomes to some extent institutionally embedded in social and cultural processes. Unlike worldview, ideology often entails a specific program or doctrine of practice for the realization of its professed aims and goals in the world. It is explicitly a strategy of the psychological construction of reality, and its function is more explicitly that of legitimization than is that of Worldview.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a necessary relation between ideology and history, because ideological belief and consensus, as an explicit system of symbolization, requires at some point closure from the external world. An ideological system is perforce a closed system in which specific or generalized psychological constructions of knowledge are intentionally made the basis for the externalizations and objectification of reality. As a necessarily closed system of symbolization, the internal point of view within an ideological sphere presents a view of the world in which contradiction is either suppressed or ostracized. The insider's view of the world is one of its own moral superiority and correctness, and of cognitive rationality or "truth", no matter that at some point such an attitude required a certain "blind leap of faith" in order to affect the necessarily closure to the system. Contradiction and difference is denied, and is considered to exist "outside" of the system that is regarded as perfect. It should be apparent that ideology depends for its efficacy and closure upon the fallacy of rationalization and reification of reality--the mythological transformation of human-made elements as if natural. There is a sense that what ideological systems attempt to do is to keep out and control history, in as much as by history we mean the processes of change and contemporaneousness which influence our world. Symbolically, ideology attempts to stand beyond the bounds and laws of history, and thus are bound to failure as they become undermined by history.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Common sense is another form of symbolization of the psychological construction of reality. It can be regarded as a mostly implicit system of symbolic reference and inference by which we make sense of our normal, everyday realities. Our everyday worlds become imbued with a certain facticity and efficacy which we tend to implicitly draw upon in our attitudes and interactions within a larger world. Common sense must be regarded as based upon an unsophisticated form of rationalization and simplification of our experiences. It is thus tied to the rhetorical and persuasive power of our language, especially our everyday language, to embody and symbolically legitimate our psychological experience of the world. Common sense derives its efficacy and legitimacy from the efficacy of the situated expertise of our local knowledge and adaptation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There has been some debate over the commonness of common sense, or whether it may actually be a cultural construction very relative to the context of its construction. Common sense everywhere shares similar properties as psychological processes of symbolization derived from the pragmatic efficacy of phenomenological experience. But it must also be equally contradictory in what common sense makes sense of and how. One person's common sense may as well be another's nonsense. From this regard we must consider the relationship between a psychologically based collective consensus of belief or attitude or rationale, and the commonness of common sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The indirect constraints of conformity to the norm, and the psychological sphere of group consensus, can have an overwhelming effect in making seem subjectively real and objectively legitimate aspects of reality which are in fact psychological constructions. Psychological resistance to such pressures towards conformity are difficult if no alternative points of view are available or socially tolerated, and if the only alternative to conformity is one of isolation, marginalization, ostracism or nihilation. There is a great deal of common sense in the attitude that "you can't fight city hall" and "its done this way, because it's always been done this way." One dimension about all common sense that deserves some attention is its implicit closed mindedness and its failure to bring into explicit question the implicit presuppositions in which its inferences and references to the world are rooted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Common sense continues to make sense of our world as long as we continue to cover over and leave unquestioned the values, standards, and beliefs in which it is based. In a sense, what is anathema to the received view of common sense is a critical attitude which doubts and questions everything, especially that which seems the most normal and unquestionable, as but psychological constructions of reality. In a sense, common sense then can be seen as a denial of the psychological construction of the reality upon which it is based, of the symbolic antinomality of psychological experience, and thus a naive and blind faith in the objectiveness of our psychologically rooted objectifications of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of the psychological construction of reality, worldview, common sense, ideology and mythology can all be construed as normally conjunctive and coordinate in their legitimating and objectifying function in the mediation of experience. They all function in different ways upon different facets of reality, to accomplish the same psychological functions. All are rooted, as systems of symbolization, in the linguisticality of human experience. Each form reinforces the other in maintaining a sense of the symbolic and psychological integration of reality. Another way of putting the functions of these systems of symbolization is to see that they are all rooted in a human need to symbolically obfuscate and block out the threatening sense of discrepancy and antinomality that is inherent to our symbolization--to make seem symbolically complete those subjective realities that would otherwise seem symbolically incomplete.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Religion can be seen as a special form of symbol system which combines all of the other forms in some formalized way as to produce a functional institutionalization of the processes of symbolization in reality. We may have mythology or worldview or ideology without the additional aspect of these being necessarily religious, but we cannot think of a religion which does not incorporate some or all of these other systems of symbolization. Religion functions to combine and coordinate these other symbol systems in such a way as to render their differences non-discrepant and non-contradictory with one another. Religion also necessarily marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane, and if not a clear boundary, then it defines the nature of the relationship of the supernatural to the everyday normal realities. Religion also necessarily has a social psychological function of marking the moral and normative boundaries of normal life--it serves the function of maintaining the individual psychologically and sociologically in relation to the group and its ethos and nomos of order and propriety.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must construe religion as a special example of such systems of symbolization in the psychological construction of reality, because religious systems become inextricably bound up in the legitimization and institutionalization of traditional symbolism. Religions mark the boundaries of normal psychological existence, and mediate the experience of abnormal or marginalizing psychological states. They do so by conferring upon certain, explicit, formal systems of belief a status of sacredness and inviolability--a status that can be and must be accepted on the authority of blind faith alone.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">There is a critical difference between the psychological self and the psychology of the self.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">So far, the psychological construction of reality has considered some of the ways in which the self constitutes its self and becomes symbolically constituted in the world. We have now come to the point of needing to consider the construction of psychology in the world, as a sort of complementary consequence of the psychological construction of the self. We switch from the subjective basis of psychological knowledge, to the objectivity of psychological knowledge. From this standpoint, we must consider the construction of psychology as being situated external in a common world of shared knowledge and feeling.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The most basic form of this kind of externalized construction of psychology takes the form of "folk psychologies" or folk theories of human attribution, ascription and attitudes. We must consider attitudes in this special case as those states of mind that exist as the product of the internalization of objectified psychological constructions in the social world. Attribution theory concerns theories of reference, transference, and projection of attitudes upon the self or upon the subjective experiences of others in the world. We commonly attribute psychological needs, motivations, designs and dilemmas to others state's of mind based upon our assessment of their behavior, speech, interactions, moods, and upon our own psychological preunderstandings and prejudices.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psychological knowledge, in the form of theories of attribution and attitudes;, becomes part of the common stock of knowledge, and to a great extent allows us to coordinate our own psychological view of the world with others. We can refer to a "psychological world view" as a comprehensive relational framework of understanding and knowledge about the nature and role of subjective experience and psychological knowledge in the world. We commonly rely upon such a worldview to draw inferences and form opinions about the subjective constitution of both others and ourselves. It is important to realize that all cultures have maintained some form of psychological worldview regarding human nature in general and the character of individual personalities, whether we have dubbed and constrained our psychological theories as "scientific" or "humanistic".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are several important dimensions of this type of theorization. First, it becomes critically implicated in the legitimization and articulation of social power and policies towards individuals and groups. Psychological knowledge is inextricably tied to the problems of social control of the individual. It becomes enmeshed in patterns of prejudice and in the kind of informal and indirect means of information control. It forms the basis for the labeling of individuals and the construction of social categories. Secondly, this kind of psychological theory becomes profoundly implicated in inter-group relations and interactions, in terms of group-references and stereotypical labels and constructions of the "psyche" or "Spirit" of a people. This kind of theorization reached its grandest scientific proportions in the "national character" studies instituted during World War II.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can see that this kind of power is intrinsic to status ascription and labeling which accompanies the linguistic interpretation of psychological states. We cannot clearly separate psychology as a subjective phenomena of the individual, from psychology as knowledge and theory about such phenomena. These two sides of the same coin enter into a dialectic in the psychological construction of reality and become mutually reinforcing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this we must understand the involvement of certain social-psychological mechanisms which concern the role of social identification, internalization of social constraints and values, the psychological experimentation with aggression and feelings of hate, the psychological inculcation of authoritarianism, and the psychological need for projection. A mechanism of social boundary identification entails projection onto out groups of those elements of human nature that must be repressed internally within a society in order to maintain conformity and a social hierarchy. This social boundary identification becomes incorporated in the psychological boundary identity of the individual within society, in terms of that individual's status-role identity. It entails some degree of internalization of those values and norms of the society, and thus a dichotomization of the self in terms of a fore-grounded positive public self and a background, repressed "weak" self. The repressed side of the self must find some form or another of expression, and thus tends to realize itself internally in a society in forms of perversion or deviance, and externally in projection upon out-groups of the same negative characteristics of personality. The external boundaries that a society maintains as to what a perfect person is supposed to be like, in terms of propriety and appropriateness of attitude and feeling, become internalized in the individual in terms of social psychological boundaries between the self and other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can properly speak of a cultural conjunction between a psychology of power and a power of psychology, when we wish to understand the political motivations and dynamics that characterize a given cultural orientation. We can see then that the psychological construction of reality extends beyond the purview of the individual personality and individual subjectivity, to encompass the subjectivity and power of an entire cultural patterning. The power motivations of the individual translate into the power motivations of an entire people. When we speak of human psychological construction of reality, we must also understand how humankind has come to empower itself in the world in its own special way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in this regard that we must learn to exercise great caution in our judgement of the attributes and attitudes of others we do not understand or who do not fit our own psychological preconceptions of what people are like. The psychological complexity of any personality is enormous, even astronomical by any standard of measurement. It is not only that previous experiences, future expectations and immediate events concatenate in a dynamic and chaotic way to create a momentary psychological profile, but more importantly, we cannot be so sure where our own psychological constructions and power trips end and those real psychological constructions and motivations and interests of the other begins.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Yet in this regard we are constrained to respond and interact with others with some kind of psychological construction of reality--we must ascribe some form of status with another in relation to ourselves in order to make sense of that person at all. We are forced into a kind of psychological paradox of identity, such that the identity that we ascribe to others and which others attribute to ourselves becomes inseparable from our own and others psychological processes of identification. Psychological identification is more than a purely internal process--it is an external, and more importantly, a social and cultural process.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Without Identity we would not be human</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox of human identity is that we cannot separate our processes of psychological identification that are central to the formation and stability of our individual personality, from those objects of our external world, especially other people, to which we ascribe an identity. The psychological world we construct outside of our selves, within the purview of our psychological power, is a vital component of the construction of the identity, the process of identification within ourselves. We become identifiable and identified with the objects of our own identification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On a basic level, we can properly speak of the embodiment of our environment, through a process of psychological transference and attachment of vital significance to externalized symbolization as if these were an extension of our own being, our own sense of history, and our own intentions</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we speak of transference, which is the psychological equivalent of the symbolic displacement of value and significance, we must also mention its relationship with the cognitive processes of reference and inference. Attribution and ascription rely upon the dialectical processes of relational reference and inference. Inference is a means of drawing upon implicit meanings and relations in order to make conclusions or explicit relational significances. Reference is a means of explicitly pointing out relation which otherwise remain in the implicit context. The processes of identification require the definition in belief and behavior of a "significant reference other" as a kind of central role model, and often the negative definition of a "counter-reference other" which sort of anti-structurally defines and legitimates the other by marked contrast. The symbolic embodiment of our effective life world entails a kind of "relational topography" of salience by which our sense of reference/inference is stable, and which the process of psychological transference is coordinate. We can speak of rudimentary psychological identification as involving this kind of learning and equilibrium within a set environment of stable relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The objects that we identify in our environment are a part of our own identification within the world. We cannot clearly separate the emotional components of this dialectic of identity from the purely cognitive, perceptual or behavioral components.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human identification involves especially a cultural and social environment. Our personalities are formed psychologically on the basis of our early parental identification, which later becomes transferred upon a wider and more diverse set of secondary role relations involving social legitimacy, authority, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This form of identification is essential in the formation of our personality, at even an organic level. Small children require the mediation of a caretaker as a means of integrating and internalization their socio-cultural life worlds. Identification is the principle mechanism in the psychological integration of personality, the formation of individual character, and in the internalization of the effective environment. Even meaning itself is characterized by the identity we bring to it--we identify things in the world in some essential, vital way. No matter how seemingly intelligent our computer, we can never be too sure that the definitions and solutions it outputs per our requests would have the same vital sense of identity--does it "know" the definition, or understanding its solution?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in this regard that we can speak of developmental discontinuities, contradictions and deprivation that results in disordered identification later in life. These constitute the basis of the so-called personality disorders and basic "dependencies" of personality. Early primary socialization and identification may be broadly discrepant with later requirements of identification that will result in either a kind of displacement reaction, what is known as a conversion, or else in the internalization of a basic dichotomy and contradiction of personality, which will lead to the resultant need for psychological projection of elements which need to be repressed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The failure or disjunction of identification between the internal personality and the external world results in the experience of alienation, anomie and separation. These experiences can recall previous episodes of similar disjunction, and their avoidance or the obsessive unresolved conflicts from previous episodes can result in a breakdown or failure of the individual personality to adapt to changing environments. Strong, inordinate identification of personality at one period in a lifetime might result in a kind of "fixation" of that personality at that point, with the resulting incapacity of transference and reformulation of identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It may frequently be the case that socio-cultural systems, as systems of symbolization and of structured behavior, provide a supportive crutch in the adaptation of people who are them selves psychologically afflicted by continuing and unresolved conflicts of separation and fixation of personality. Cultural systems may provide a protective umbrella that reinforces the lack of adaptability of individuals, allowing these to achieve partial adaptation within relatively narrow cultural frameworks. We have numerous examples of fanatical sycophants, true believers and religious zealots whose only claims to psychological stability is the fact that the ideological system in which they are enmeshed is received as acceptable and reasonable.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The centrality of the processes of psychological identification in the development and adaptation of the individual, especially within an effective socio-cultural life world, leads to the critical question of a socio-cultural psychology. We speak in this regard of the dialectics between the psychological integration of the socio-cultural world, and of the socio-cultural integration of the personality. This dynamic process of mutual integration entails that we cannot clearly separate the boundary between the internal nature of the individual and the role and influence of cultural symbolization and social relations upon the personality. Nor can we completely separate for objective analysis social action or relation as psychologically non-subjective process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We speak of enculturation, socialization and anthropological acquisition as central processes in not only the formation of human personality, but in the reproduction of the socio-cultural world. In this regard we ask a critical question of the relationship between the personality of the individual and the patterning, values, orientations and histories of a culture and social grouping. This process of status-role identification, one that is functionally determined by the distribution of humans to resources and resources to humans, involves some measure of coordination between personality and cultural orientation. We can refer to "structuration" as the ongoing reconstructive "moment" of this interrelationship between the propagation of the system and the development of the personality. This is of course a complex, dynamic and dialectical process. We can speak of its conservative tendency towards holistic integration of psycho-social experience, yet this integration is nowhere complete or finished. Human nature, no matter how culturally constrained, is still by definition open and unfinished business. To the extent that such integration is achieved, we can refer to the relativity of culture and psychology. And yet it is not ever absolutely so in even the most rigidly constrained social systems. All human systems must retain a modicum of latitude and flexibility if they are to be adaptive at all. In this margin of openness exists the universal possibilities of human nature, of the function comparability of socio-cultural systems, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is some relationship between the degree of hierarchy that is culturally emphasized, and measure of social stratification and social closure, and the development of authoritarian personality traits in individuals, the need for projection and in-group/out-group boundary identification, and the tolerance and promotion of violence and aggression within a system, and the experimentation with hate and victimization. This relationship may not be a simple one or easily explained, but from a psychological standpoint it is important to consider the relationship between the social empowerment of the individual personality, and the psychological empowerment of the social system. Such forms of reciprocal empowerment often come to positively focus upon identification with a key individual or a specific orientation of personality or way of life, and comes also to negatively scape-goat upon an antithetical and contraposed orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must understand in this regard the importance of ritual process in social structuration, and especially, of ceremonies which mark and define as "anti-structural" those experiences or events which are seen as symbolically marginal to the collective orientation. It is by such means of the incorporation of "anti-structure" that structure comes to define itself as universal and complete. The key element of such anti-structure is that it is rigidly marked and structured within the system, as interstitial, and as rites of reversal, or marked contrast, with the normal moral order of the system. A great deal of psychological deviance may be symbolically at least a form of psychological anti-structure in reaction to the system, just as it is during such ritual episodes that such repressed psychological reactions are most apparent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must understand that the processes involved in this dialectic between personality and socio-cultural system are themselves unfixed and continuously reconstructed. In this regard, we must think of these processes as always negotiated, no matter how much the asymmetry of dominance-dependency might be promoted. This negotiation involves the ceding of power from the system to the individual, and from the individual to the system. It involves a series of interactions and dialogues between individuals and their status role models, by which a contract and a compromise of mutual interest are established.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must seek the anthropological ramifications of psycho-social "interest" in such dialectics. A calculus of identity, interest and involvement entails an assessment of motivations, needs, capacities, orientations, intentions, values, commitment and involvement in social relations. We are largely defined within the nexus of our social relations, and the kinds of reciprocities that these entail, whether they are affective or symbolic or material. Interest as such comes to define and demarcate social relations, and social relations come to instantiate the differentials, conflicts and cooperation of mutual interests between people. In such a manner, the complexities of a "system" however institutionalized, become the interests, realized, frustrated or potential, of individuals in transaction and social interrelation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These interests, as psychologically constituted as they are psychologically constitutive, form the basis, then for psycho-social integration of human reality, and furthermore, are functionally and relationally defined in the relationship between humans and resources, including, of course, symbolic, social and psychological resources.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropological psychology of "human being" must aim at those psychological states, attributes and dimensions of phenomenological experience which are uniquely, characteristically human. There is a range of experience, perceptual, behavioral, conceptual and linguistic, which we come to recognize as thus far exclusively human. These are the human psychological traits which most intrigue and interest us in our scientific inquiries.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the subjective experience of these elements that we come to know, recognize and define our humanness and the basis of our nature. Human identity and identification involves more than just the internalization and externalization of the world into the body. It is even more a matter of the psychic integration of experience that leads us to recognize and define a unique sense of self, of biography, of individuality and personality, or of what may be called "anthropological ego." Anthropological ego brings into focus the "sacred" and spiritual components of human value, of symbolization. We know ourselves by our sentience and our imagination of possible worlds, by our empathy and ability to feel the feeling of others, even of non-human others, and thereby to form a relationship of respect or even of worship with others. It is not without reason that we hold all living things in reverence and that we attribute to individual a notion of universal human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we define such ego simply as a complicated little bundle of many things and their interrelations, both within themselves and with the outside world, we are faced with a dilemma of the synergy of our anthropological system of being. It is a synthetic unity that cannot be simply analyzed by a dissection of its elements and their connections. The anthropological ego in the world forms a functional unity of identity and process that cannot be simply analyzed or directly understood.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an evolutionary and historical standpoint, anthropological ego in the world and its anthropological construction of reality constitute the basis for a fundamental problematic of the existentiality of human being in the world. This basic problematic is in part one of psychological identification, but more, it is one of anthropological integration of reality. It is inherently paradoxical because it is symbolic and it is a system of knowledge that, in its very moment of recognition, constitutes its denial and nihilation as experience of the world. Or human dilemma is not only the evolutionary imperative of survival or of historical achievement--but it is a basic dilemma of anthropological identity and unity with the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this we can recognize the inherent limits and anthropological horizon of our psychological knowledge. We must seek to understand ourselves and our own subjectivity while remaining bound within the psychological purview of our own experience and subjectivity. It becomes irreparably reflexive and anti-nomial. It is without wonder that psychological ambivalence and existential uncertainty is a universal anthropological characteristic of our human condition.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twelve">IX</p> </a></font><a NAME="twelve"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Abnormality</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">One human's vice may be another's virtue, but we may all be both vicious and virtuous creatures.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">The questions of the anthropological construction of reality considered so far have come to focus upon the universal occurrence of human abnormality, defined behaviorally, psychologically and socially, and its functional significance as symbolic anti-structure. A theory of anthropological abnormality must see it also as a constructive process, one that has for normal process destructive consequences. It must also construe it from the point of view of anthropological normality and its normative connotation of "health" as something that is itself relative to its anthropological construction in reality. This leads to a need to define an anthropological theory of human health--as to what might constitute a healthy personality and a healthy socio-cultural context for the realization of personality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These issues address a long-standing argument concerning the relativity of culture and the integration of culture and personality. We cannot fully understand our anthropological conception of "culture" if we do not first deal with this notion of anthropological "abnormality" as something more than normative judgements. A non-normative definition of "abnormal" and hence of "normal" is the foundation for a "science" of cultural anthropology, and it points up the value of understanding abnormality in anthropological knowledge such that we might better define the boundaries of normality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are several key issues that deserve elaboration in this regard, and these are:</p> <dir> <dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. An anthropological theory of psycho-cultural integration and its basis in the functional definition of human health.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. An anthropological theory of psychological pathology and personality disorder.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. An anthropological elaboration of the experience of "culture shock", alternative states of consciousness and transformation of personality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. The anthropological notion of "archosis" and of "social pathology" as institutionalized process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The definition of certain psycho-social events such as mass hysteria, violence, etc., as evidence of "anthropo-pathological phenomena."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">6. The anthropological definition of "anti-structure" as the symbolic antithesis of "structure."</p> </dir> </dir> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A non-normative definition of anthropological normality must be considered from a functional point of view that takes into account the functional adaptation of the individual, and by extension, of the group, in its total environment. This definition presupposes a kind of functional relativism that says that whatever succeeds functionally must be seen as healthy. But such a definition is not ever so simple or simplistic, because functional adaptation of a group may be dysfunctional for many individuals or other groups, and may in the long run prove dysfunctional for the group as well. It does set a very broad range for the spectrum of human possibility and socio-culturally patterning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To say that there are no absolute, non-relative criteria of anthropological normality is not the same thing as claiming there can be no non-normative definition of such normality. Issue might be taken with the point that normative evaluation is intrinsic to the definition of normality--each implies and necessitates the other--therefore we cannot escape the normative implications of our anthropological definitions of normality. It is also simply not sufficient to merely set the outward bounds for such normality by defining it negatively and implicit by what it is not or by its opposite of abnormality, although this is largely what we do.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can seek some kind of statistical definition of normality, with the sobering reminder that whatever our unreal "average" there will always exist countless counterexamples and exceptions which we must take into account.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If our anthropological definitions of normality lead us to conclusions which may seem to contradict some tacit presuppositions we may have about human virtue and goodness, then this alone should not lead us to reject outright such definitions. Normal human beings may not be by definition necessarily moral beings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we find that most humans by nature tend to be exploitative and that most recent cultural orientations which have succeeded on earth have been anti-ecological, and that human altruism or unselfishness is an uncommon virtue, we should not therefore necessarily reject the importance of the moral character of humanity as abnormal. Are we to judge traditional Hindu civilization as necessarily immoral or abnormal because it is rooted in an ethos of hierarchy, which is antithetical to our own somewhat hypocritical egalitarian ethos, without thereby bringing into serious doubt the groundless moral-normative credibility of our own cultural orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A functional definition based upon the psycho-cultural integration of individuals within a cultural framework does not necessarily succeed either, because it has been historically the case that some of the most tightly integrated societies achieved such integration at great human cost, and generally, in the long run, proved to be dismal failures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must not confuse the question of the anthropologically normal, yet culturally relative, with the other question of what is anthropologically "healthy" which seems to imply some kind of normative commitment to non-absolute values. A "normal" society may or may not prove to be a healthy society, and a seemingly healthy society may or may not be a "normal" society. This is a complex anthropological problematic which may lack any final resolution and which will be considered again in the penultimate chapter of this work.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Here it must suffice to develop a working anthropological definition of normality and abnormality as an issue fundamentally separate from the normative question of morality, as defined by anthropological experience. The question of anthropological definitions of normality and of human health must also be considered as fundamentally separable questions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The normality, morality and health of any given individual or any given socio-cultural grouping in history are intricate and entangled questions, entangled by the problematic of their basic relativity upon several levels of anthropological process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There seems to be no satisfactory, straightforward solution that would appeal to our scientific sensibilities. The definition of anthropological normality must encompass the question of morality, and must include as well the definition of abnormality. What seems most normally the case is the instance of human error and imperfection, and the case of the human possibility for correction. We all share in the human heart of darkness, and the paradox of our sentient being is that this heart of darkness becomes also the source of our own humanity and philanthropy. If historical humanity seems most normally a war-mongering beast, then the historicity of this bestiality does not thereby preclude the possibility or efficacy of establishing peace on earth. Our being is most normally open and unfinished, and part of this unfinished business included both the possibility of being very bad and very good.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We thus transcend the normative issues of the question of human normality/abnormality, and come to understand these normative questions as in part a consequence of our definitions of normality and abnormality. We seek to judge humankind by the character of its actions, after the historical fact of their instantiation--we do not seek to anthropologically pre-judge human character or behavior.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The objectivity of anthropological knowledge about human action in the world is rooted in this commitment to a non-normative, hence "relativistic" attitude towards human difference. We can think like anthropologists and still pass moral judgements like human beings, though these are considered professionally exclusive concerns. This may lead to some forms of anthropological objectivity that are difficult to stomach from a moral or human point of view. How can we adopt a non-moral, anthropological objective view of the kinds of social processes that lead to the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis during the holocaust? And yet we must if we are to seek an anthropological understanding of the nature and possibility of human evil in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Studying such events and social processes in an anthropologically objective manner does not necessarily entail condoning those processes. In fact our primary anthropological motivation may be their theoretical value in the fact that such practices are almost universally condemnable and regarded as anti-human by virtually any standard that they are most interesting anthropologically, and yet the historical fact and facticity of its occurrence, an occurrence in which an entire nation and culture was involved, remains to be reckoned with from an anthropological point of view.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We must live daily beneath the dilemma that in human terms a law is always defined by its violations.</p> </b></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One problem with our definitions of abnormality is that we define it from a scientific and moral standpoint as almost exclusively a phenomenon of the individual. We lack any consistent theories that treat social pathology as a "disease" of an entire group or social organization. But, besides a bit of the "organic fallacy", such theories would not be in many circumstances very far from the truth. We cannot conceive of how whole organizations or groups or even nations may behave at times and in ways that seem pathologically self-destructive, even though we are not lacking in numerous examples of just such group phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We shoulder the individual with sole responsibility despite the psychological fact that within many organizational contexts there is a general diffusion of responsibility. We are quite to label and treat deviant individuals as "abnormal" by standards that we hesitate to question as also possibly "abnormal".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We generally ignore the alternative possibility of wider deviance that may be institutionalized process in a society. Perhaps this is in part because we have always tended to equate norms and standards of behavior with collective interests and group sanctions. An anthropological theory of the normal and abnormal will not be attained until the alternative set of problematic of the possible abnormality of entire social systems can be taken fully into account in our formulas. But, again, how can we do so without attributing what may amount to our own culturally biased normative evaluations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems as though most state officials reserve for themselves the privilege of labeling entire societies, and usually refrain from doing so until a war or severe competition makes it convenient to do so. When we label our official enemies as evil and as somehow inhuman, we often fail to see our own complicity in the perpetration of violence as also evil and as in some way in humane.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For a society to regularly bring into question the credibility or legitimacy of another, outside of the justifications of war or competition, would be to also indirect cast a shadow upon its own legitimacy and credibility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is unwise for those who live in glass houses to cast stones. Even anthropologists are not professionally construed as having the power or the privilege of making a judgement call, no matter how sound and reasonable it may be, upon the health or disease of a society in question, in a similar way that the exclusive authority of a doctor is regularly called upon in the diagnosis and treatment of biological disease. This form of power, real and explicit social control, is a power which is reserved by the officials of the state, whether they be self-appointed or elected. But the anthropological question of the health or pathology of a social system remains to be answered nevertheless.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems that this entire dimension of social science is deliberately shied away from, because it tends to relativize not only the society we bring under our scrutiny, but by implicit contrast the relative health of our own social ethos as well. This kind of question remains mostly taboo in the context of a conservative political arena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And this also points up the degree to which anthropology and social science, as functional institutions within a larger social framework, are constrained and made subservient to larger, more powerful agendas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As long as such questions are kept strictly "academic," some amount of questioning of social ethos and norms are not only permissible, but to be expected. But as soon as such questions are brought into a wider public forum as part of policy, they quickly become sanctioned as a threat to the normal order. And a great deal of this sanctioning process goes on as psychological self-sanctioning and interpersonal suppression of "radical ideas". But again the fact of such questions, and their basis in reality, remains to be considered.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One lead in this regard has been Edward Sapir's distinction between genuine and spurious cultural orientations. We must consider as anthropologically sound the social relations and an aegis of culture that fosters the cultural development of the individual, or of many individuals, in a kind of positive cybernesis with the socio-cultural environment, and as anthropologically "spurious" those relations that tend to be competitive, exclusive, and which tend to deny or frustrate the fulfillment of the individual's developmental capacity. In other words, it seems difficult to justify anthropologically any sorts of human relations which tend to deprive the individual of fulfillment, and which are rooted in stratification and differential access to resources. This call to a kind of generalized anthropological equality seems itself a bit serious if we consider that human civilization has been built as much upon stratification and exploitation as it has been upon "human fulfillment" or bloodshed. But we have yet to receive a final verdict upon the anthropological soundness of human civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evidence from a meager handful of some of the most prototypically undeveloped cultures on earth all point to a basic equality and reciprocity of relations of prehistoric human beings that defy any form of stratification whatsoever. Stratification and human history brought fulfillment for a few, but often at the expense of the many.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And yet, in some of the most modernized societies, no matter what the net cost in a global perspective, the standard of living remains unprecedented, disease and premature death has been brought under control, and the quantity, if not quality, of living has become unsurpassed. From a purely functional standpoint, by almost anyone's standards such societies should be construed as "healthy" if not quite moral. And the entire rational of developmental anthropology rests upon this unasked premise--"Why not?"</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Ruth Benedict proffered another definition of the abnormal as those personality orientations that fall outside of the predominant patterning of a culture, by embodying basic contradictions to the ethos of this pattern. This relativist definition leaves aside the question of a universal norm, except in its call for universal tolerance of individual differences. By this definition then, normality becomes a question of internal "fit" between culture and personality, whether from an extrinsic point of view this fit is adaptive or not. This more closely conforms to a functionalist definition of normality that adopts a point of view of the internal structure of a society.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Regardless of the larger implications of such a theory, from the standpoint of the anthropological construction of reality it seems to be a necessary point of entry into the problem. In this regard we can speak of the relative symbolic integration between a socio-cultural system and individual psychology, a continuous process which entails some modicum of adaptability in the bigger world. Mostly integrated societies are usually adapted along the lines of integration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Symbolic integration, especially in long established traditional orientations, tend to pervade every facet of individual and social life. It unites the different segments of life into a unified whole, and lends symbolic legitimization to its facticity. Such symbolic integration allows us the illusion of reification of the whole, of the whole self, of the whole life, of the whole system, which is transcendent in identity and purpose beyond its many components, and which often constitutes the basis of personal and social action in the world. Such reification does not necessarily have to assume an explicit form, but may remain implicit in the background of peoples' beliefs, rituals and customary practices. There is a mutual, common investment and commitment to a set of corporate interests and corporate identity which extends beyond the bounds of individual self interest or even of the immediate moment of group involvement.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Symbolic integration affects both the individual psyche and organic functions of the individual and the social mentality and group coordination and the character of social relations. Symbolic integration implies a coordination of significance upon a linguistic and meta-linguistic level. It involves the reiteration of traditional schemas in the voice of the present, the reshaping of old themes to fit new circumstances. Symbolic integration, from this functionalist perspective, becomes as a work of art--a grand and consonant synthesis of many diverse parts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can accept, tentatively, a definition of normality and health as something based upon a "domestic analogy" with issues of human rights, freedoms and responsibilities. In the sense that social relations are defined in the balance between rights and responsibilities to uphold the rights of others, we see that societies are themselves constrained within a similar need to maintain a balance. At the upper boundaries in realizing the cultural freedom of its patterns without violating the freedoms of other cultural groupings, and at a lower limit of realizing cultural conformity and unity of action without thereby restricting the rights and freedoms of its individual constituency. We can consider the reverse case in a theory that sees the common predicament of humankind as having been caught between a lower boundary of "micro-parasitism" in its struggle for social survival, and an upper boundary of "macro-parasitism" by the depredations of a small exploitative elite class on the body of the host society.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An internal and external definition of socio-cultural normality would consider the mutual limits and the dynamic historical dialectic between the shared interests of achieving internal integration and external interests in adaptation of the society in the world. Internal functional integration is considered healthy and normal as long as it promotes but does not prevent adaptation in the world, or the interests of group survival in the long run. Inherently destructive social movements must be considered also to be inherently self-destructive. On the other hand, adaptation in the world is considered a normal external function, as long as this does not lead to internal disintegration. This dynamic dialectic becomes an issue that resolves itself around the problem of resource distribution, acquisition and control, as both individuals and groups come into competition with one another for exclusive advantage over the interests of others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no simple calculus of what constitutes a set of resources that drive individual or group interest--resources may be cultural, psychological, symbolic, spiritual and human as much as they are material or natural. They are defined by human interest and involvement, which includes as an important subset human needs. One culture's definition of resources and interests may be quite divergent from another--conquistador's were interested in gold in a way which was foreign to interests of the native peoples, a kung bushman would have little need for uranium ore discovered in his hunting areas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, we can speak of a functional convergence of basic resources which is pan-human and which are defined by the basic human needs and requirements for survival--food, air, water, heat and energy, shelter, sexual reproduction, etc. We can then speculate upon a large range of derivative and secondary resources that are more culturally defined and variable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, we can imagine a normal and healthy context that strikes a delicate and complicated balance between many different conditions. We can accept a tentative definition of human health as freedom from parasitism, whether natural or human-made, and as the maintenance of the established wisdom of a mutual symbiosis with the world, whether natural or social. We can also imagine the possibility of an entire society being lead by a handful of abnormal individuals to commit acts which are by any standards against their own self or group-interests, by fostering a symbolic illusion of a vital interest or need which does not in fact exist.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An insane world is one in which symbols no longer make sense.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we adopt such a functionalist definition of normality, we can then define abnormality as, from an internal standpoint, the symbolic disintegration between socio-cultural system and the individual, with consequences upon both the individual psyche and upon the group life and social relations. The case of the civil war of Vietnam brought forward the idea of "desymbolization" as an important symptom of the disintegration of a people and its traditional culture. Desymbolization is the result of symbols that no longer perform their function of coordinating meaning upon the linguistic level of the medium and the meta-linguistic level of the message. Internal contradictions between levels result in destructive dissonance that undermines both the psychological and the social normative foundations of group identity and life. Unity of action and purpose become lost, and group identity becomes a thing of crosscutting and contradictory relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This internal disintegration becomes matched externally in the disequilibrium of the balance established in-group relations with the individual constituency and with other groups. Conflict of interests and schismogenic competition over the same resources become the symptoms of such desymbolization. Adaptation becomes a destructive process of aggression, rather than a constructive process. Of course, externally, such situations seem to have been more normal than not in the history of humankind, although we can point to the rise of increasing political centralization, administration and social stratification as the principle means of overcoming and establishing regionally a larger, external framework of adaptive equilibrium. We refer to this as political integration, and note the pervasiveness of conflict and warfare between politically integrated groups or in areas left undefined by higher political integration. In a sense, political integration is a central issue of any civil war or radical, revolutionary social movement.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can imagine big brother worlds in which the purposes of political integration take precedence over all other social considerations, and which is only achieved at tremendous cost in individual freedoms and liberties. We must ask how free we have become in our brave new world if we face an ever present and pervasive psychological need to liberate ourselves from our own repression--though every physical or material need may be over satiated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A definition of human disease must be recognized as the suffering from parasitic infection and the failure of maintaining a mutually symbiotic relationship with the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can recognize several levels of psychological disorder. First, we can refer to those "organic" mental diseases such as schizophrenia, catatonia, manic-depression, dementia, substance-dependency, and possibly impulse control disorders. We can recognize a broader and more variable class of "neurotic" disorders which show and evidence of psychological, emotional, adaptive and mental dysfunction, but without a clear organic basis or etiology. Finally, we can refer to that range of "personality" and "sociopathic" disorders that seem to be rooted in the failure of acquisition processes and early identification which results in the internalization of fundamentally discrepant or contradictory realities. We can furthermore see the possible patterns of interdependency in these levels of disorder, and their linkages to broader levels of social dysfunction of relations and social structure.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Unalleviated neurosis can be a pathway to the formation of psychosis, and are often accompanying or prelude symptoms of a psychotic episode. Personality disorders which are fundamentally basic and relatively permanent may induce stress, or be induced by social stresses, which result in the vicious spiral into neurotic-psychotic disorder. On a social plane, we can see that personality disorders are often inextricably implicated in social pathologies within institutional or reciprocal social relations. Such social pathologies involve victimization, dominance-dependency, violence, exaggerated forms of aggression or sexual perversion, extreme sycophancy and authoritarianism. Marginal sub-groups often attract and are constituted by marginal members of a society who are them selves psychologically maladjusted to the dominant ethos. Such subcultures can provide a modicum of symbolic integration that permits the partial adaptation of the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropological construction of reality involves both the creation and the reshaping of individual and collective psychological identity. There is a basic coordination between individual personality configurations as culturally constructed and dominant "cultural types"--assimilation through internalization, and "alternation" to such types in secondary socialization often involves a manipulative orientation that is considered as "spurious" rather than genuine.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Abnormality is the shadow of normality that is cast between alternative realities.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must consider the definition of abnormality as arising from the possibility of discrepancy and contradiction between competing, inimical and exclusive versions of reality. If primary socialization in a specialized, complex society entails the internalization of plausibly distinct versions of identity, then a choice will be available to the individual, a choice that will include the possibility of "betweenness" between both realities. If we must choose what is normal from a spectrum of cultural differences, then we are either forced to adopt one orientation or another as normal, by which all others are at least implicitly abnormal, or else we must adopt a more relativist orientation which would define that abnormal as what is marginal or interstitial to any and all cultural orientations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in this regard that we can consider the anthropological phenomena of "culture shock" as centrally apropos in the anthropological construction of "abnormality." It is in other words the condition of being either without a cultural orientation at all, or else between caught indeterminably between alternate and often contradictory cultural orientations. The common experiences of culture shock are feelings of separation, homesickness, symbolic displacement, disorientation, disaffectation, threatening ideas of reference in regard to the host environment, depression and the kind of emotional crises affecting severe alteration. If we can refer to "culture shock" in the unusual circumstances of crossing cultural boundaries, we might also refer to similar syndroms of "social shock" which might accompany dramatic dislocation, social role or status-identity redefinition, and radical social mobility. We can also refer to "personality shock" which might accompany "alternation", conversion or personality reorientation in course of one's biographical development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A theory of culture shock sees for possible pathways or modalities of adaptation, which correspond well with four basic patterns of acculturative processes. The most severe form of culture shock is demonstrated in cases of chauvinistic attachment to one's original orientation. The second form is one of the "captured" convert who totally abnegates the original orientation in the adoption of the foreign. A third form is one of rather permanent marginalization between both orientations, such that it leads to dysfunctional adaptation in either or both orientations. A final form, perhaps the most successful, is a variant of the third, entailing a permanent betweenness, but one that is based upon a successful fusion or else independent alternation between the two worlds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It makes sense to refer to basic cultural processes of disintegration and "dislocation" which can accompany the shock of the new or the foreign. Severe acculturative pressures, especially if these are asymmetrical, can lead to a relatively permanent dislocation of a people from their historically rooted and traditional orientation in the world, a dislocation which may or may not be accompanied by a successful substitution or displacement of previous values and norms by alternate ones.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Traditional cultural formulas regular define rituals and symbolic means for mediating such transitions or for "healing" the shock of marginal experiences. Such mechanisms provide a normal and healthy means for managing with the threat of disorder and chaos which accompanies dramatic differences or discrepancies. From this standpoint, transition and transformation itself, as the symbolic and phenomenological experience of "betweeness" and of change, is what is deemed as most abnormal, anti-structural and threatening to a cultural order. Transition offers the threat of disintegration and failure of reincorporation, of a permanent condition of marginalization without definite identity within any orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, humans seem to have an inherent capacity and even a psychological need for the adaptive flexibility thyat accompanies such alternation and transition. Psychologically, human beings have available a broad range of alternative states of consciousness, some of which may be promoted or prohibited by a society. The abandon and therapeutic exaltation which accompanies trance and spirit-possession are adaptive forms of alternation in conditions characterized by severe psychic distress or social stress--these are marginal states which in a more apollonian and organized society are deemed as inappropriate and threatening to the normal status quo of rational consciousness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The longer history of human adaptation may have been one of regular movement and adaptation in a larger context--migration may have been frequent and relatively common. Sendentism may actually have been a more recent social innovation that became adopted as the normal mode of cultural existence. Humans may be more or less equipped to accomplish such external adaptation and transition by their primary experiences of enculturation. We must seriously regard the possibility of anthropological abnormality in the inability of "normal" people to effect or successfully accomplish alternations or transitions, and who are so structured and defined with a static orientation, that they find change or difference to be normally threatening or dangerous.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We cannot clearly separate where our madness ends and the other's begins.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must seriously consider the not uncommon cases of social pathology or "archosis" as fundamentally institutionalized and normalized "abnormality"--a form of social psychosis which afflicts upon a functional and structural level of the organization of a society.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An example of such archosis are a nation of people so wrapped up in the symbolic mythoi of their collective identity and consciousness, that they promote a fanatical ideological orientation which denies the history of their involvement in genocide and ethnocide of other peoples. It may involve not only a vast and intricate circle of deceit, a culture of denial, or a collective delusion, but it may also involve institutionally the socialization and mobilization for violent action and aggression, for hate, as well as the paranoid illusions of a hostile world. Such a social system must be described as psychotic because its normal modes of information processing and interrelation with a larger world become fundamentally disturbed--internal symbolic processing precludes the assimilation and mediation of external changes or differences. An example of such a collective syndrome in the social psychology of small group dynamics involves the theory of "group-think" which may become a predominant influence in high level strategy and policy-making.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Militarism can be seen as a gradual "infection" of a society which involves institutionalization and socialization for mobilization for war and violence against targeted out-groups, a culture of male dominance, hate-proneness, etc. In regard to the military mentality that is promoted in a militaristic society, we can also consider the formation of authoritarian power structures within societies that preclude individual achievement or alternation outside of the authority structure of the system. Such systems promote a form of paternalistic authoritarianism that places a premium upon conformity, uniformity and collective consciousness, and regards as antithetical to its interests, signs of individuality or individual initiative. The denial of individual subjectivity is intrinsic in such authoritarian regimes. Social authoritarianism promotes psychological authoritarianism, and authoritarian characters flock together and organize themselves into strongly authoritarian power structures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see implicit in all forms of social stratification principle of hierarchy and structural inequality that is supported at the base by appeals to collective solidarity and symbolic interest. The key aspect of authoritarian societies and of archosis is that individuals regular place group interests and reified collective identities before their own individual interests to such a point that the former may entail the nihilation or destruction of the individual in their fulfillment. Whether or not we regard such a process as anthropologically normal or not, which is always an open question in the modern context of capitalistic development, we cannot but regard it as functionally diseased and maladaptive--as an anthropological form of pathology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social systems exist in an uneasy relationship with change and transition in the world--they must provide serviceable mechanisms for mediating such transition at all levels. These mechanisms have to do with power, if we define power in terms of the capacity to control and cause change. Too much change can be as pathological to a system as too much resistance to change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social movements, their genesis in the schisms of social change and conflict, are an indication of the state of being of a given society. Social movements are like transformations or transitional states of the personality--they represent forms of social alternation that accompanies reorganization. The schismogenic processes of social movements are evolutionary and have been continuous throughout the history of human civilization--the few that succeed of the many that fail are not an indication of the latent tendencies inherent in all human social organization for schism, conflict and regenesis.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">All real things of the world cast a shadow.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">"Anthropo-pathology" can be considered, from the standpoint of an anthropology of knowledge, as both a study of the kind of disorder inherent to anthropological understanding, as well as the kind of disorder that is inherent in the anthropological construction of reality. As a study in human "antistructure" and "destruction" which attempts to ascertain an order in human disorder, it tests and defines for us the boundaries around our normal ranges of experience, as well as the extreme limits of our range of human variation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A holistic and synthetic approach to "anthropo-pathology" must consider that the different kinds of human disorder, whether psycho-pathology or social pathology, cannot be clearly distinguished from one another, especially in their symbolic aspects. There is a symbolic integration of reality to be found even in processes of apparent symbolic disintegration. It is integration which proceeds along the margins of our normal sense of reality, and is therefore construed in many ways as antithetical to it, but it shares in the same underlying psychological and symbological processes as does our normal, everyday orientation toward reality. This order in disorder is reversed from the normal ordering of anthropological process, and bears a contrastive relationship to change and transition than does normal order. In a sense, change is valued in its own right, not for its consequences in terms of stability and stasis, but for its own intrinsic effect. Given such an orientation, any form of stability except the stability of instability, becomes anathema. Symbolically, the normal relation between the sign and the signified, becomes reversed, as more of an irrelation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we refer to reversible worlds, we refer to a fantasy realm of a human delight in disorder and celebration of difference. There seems to be an intrinsic human need, however much repressed, for symbolic reversal of the normal ordering of experience. Perhaps dreams are made of such reversal. Perhaps there is a therapeutic or rehabilitative function in such a need--humans have been adapting for many millenium to changes in their world, and the facticity of change and its qualities of randomness are incorporated in a stochastic way into human culture and character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Events or episodes of anthro-pathology--crowd reactions, mass movements and hysteria, individual deviance or group deviance, etc., found to occur at a certain minimal frequency in all societies, which clearly demonstrate how this kind of intrinsic human disorder happens and what it may involve. It is frequently violent and destructive. It is often framed in terms of symbolic reversals of the normal order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We might refer to a basic anthropological dialectic, between nature and culture, structure and anti-structure, identity and difference, stability and change, order and chaos, life and death, and between construction and destruction, that is constitutive of the human condition, not only symbolically, but functionally and adaptationally in the world as well. It may be a dialectic, as Anthony Wallace described, that has no net synthesis except the simple resynthesis of change itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, all structure casts its anthropological shadow--and it is by the proportions of its shadows that we gain a sense of the outlines and dimensions of reality. A world without contrasts is not only flat, but anthropologically uninteresting. There can be no anthropological construction of reality without its possibility for destruction.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="thirteen">X</p> </a></font><a NAME="thirteen"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Culture</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We seek our human identity upon the edges of our world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">Gone is the anthropological illusion of culture as a bounded, isolated phenomena--no longer can we afford to foster this illusion of the enclosed culture circle that has existed in a kind of timeless vacuum sense the dawn of humankind. "culture" as anthropological process offers us a phenomenology of human reality which brings back to our anthropological formulas both a sense of history and time and a psychology of human being and a sense of the subjective importance of the individual personality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We construe our cultural realities in terms of the complex, multi-determined boundaries by which we order our experiences and relationships with the world. The notion of "Culture" as a complex, phenomenological boundary demarcating the human experience and defining our common human condition, describes a pathway by which we navigate our realities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The kind of cultural boundary we seek to maintain unites our experience in history as biographical, connecting our sense of the past with our present predicament and our future promises. It is a complex boundary which functions upon many levels of our integration of experience, and yet which no where remains very clearly defined for very long. It pervades every facet of our experience, and yet the fact of its own boundedness remains commonly invisible and transparent to our view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have come, by a rather circuitous route, to reconsider, and possibly rehabilitate, the notion of anthropological "Culture" as a central orienting conception in the anthropological construction of reality, both theoretically and in the "really real" world. Culture has been a rather paradoxical concept, for though it has been a central orienting paradigm for an entire "science of humanity" it nevertheless is itself without fixed or final definition. It has been many things to different people, and in an ideal sense, can be claimed not to really exist at all except as our own anthropological construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The notion of "culture" as boundary; offers us an opportunity to reformulate and reintegrate the rather contradictory foundations of anthropological science. Human boundaries are holistically integrative and thus by definition also entail a relativity--but the fact of such boundary itself may be a human universal, and it is by means of boundaries that we identify differences in the world, and thus boundaries have always implied cultural and anthropological comparisons. Phenomenologically and empirically, boundaries also bring our feet back down to the earth in the sense that they do not imply eidetic, eternal "strukturs" or "Logos" of human reality. They are negotiated, permeable, malleable, diaphanous, alterable, ephemeral, violable--human boundaries, in short, unlike so many boundaries which have kept most other species in their place, are constructed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">How shall we construe the concept of "Culture" as anthropological boundary? It is a boundary that is defined through time as much as its marked across space. It is as much psychologically as socially constructed. It is symbolic as well as materially defined. It is both embodied and disembodied. These dimensions have been reiterated enough. But the conception of Culture as a complex boundary in the anthropological construction of reality has other important implications. First it marks the texture and the manifold contours the fabric of our experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are both united and separated by it, and it is the principle means by which we are known and others are known by us. Without a stable sense of boundary, meaning would not be possible--the anthropological construction of reality would not take place. It is basically a symbolic and therefore paradoxical texture. In one hand we may hold its substance, and in the other it may slip through our fingers no matter tightly we grasp it. Its complexity is integrated in a stochastic way that incorporates randomness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We usually understand a given cultural orientation by terms of that strange anthropological calculus which interconnects its various traits and aspects, its traditions, style-patterns, values, beliefs, symbolism and collective representations, mythologies, rituals, institutions, technologies, arts and artifacts, we attribute relativity to culture in our understanding that no two cultural orientations are quite alike, though they may share many parallels, and many are radically different. We can travel over a mountain-ridge with expectations of encounter people not unlike the one's we just left behind, only perchance to discover a very different and contradictory orientation. There seems little systematic order in the diffusion and adoption of traits and elements across our boundaries that would allow us to predict with any sufficient accuracy the consequences of contact we establish between our boundaries. And yet when we scratch the surface of their skins we find the same basic humaness as that's within ourselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in our own nature that we need our boundaries by which to make sense of our realities. The kind of sense we make is cultural knowledge, and the boundaries that we depend upon are our own reciprocal cultural constructions of reality. The sense of boundary which underlies our conception of culture demands also that we conceive of cultural process as a dialectical continuum which incorporates change and stability along a wide range of possibilities, which combines and recombines a broad diversity of elements into stylistically unique patterns.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The boundaries of this cultural continuum are characterized by the dialectics which its many elements are mutually constrained. These dialectics articulate our cultural boundaries. They entail the incorporation of basic tensions and contradictions--the contradictions of cross-purposes and inimical designs. There is no culture which is without its own special set of conflicts and contradictions, and there is no cultural grouping, no matter how enclosed and inbound upon itself in the world, which is complete and completely separate from the larger world. This cultural continuum guarantees that we must locate the position of all cultural orientations within its range, and that the net value of a culture will not be determined in an exclusive, internal sense, but by the critical conjunction between its own corporate design and the larger external processes of the continuum itself, and the world beyond the continuum. We can see human civilization as defining the boundaries of this continuum, and recognize that the continuum itself, though vast, is not unbounded within a larger world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">However much we may deny otherness in the world, it is by only by such otherness that we come to know ourselves in the world.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot have a worldly conception of culture without at least some kind of implicit comparison between cultural orientations. A culture defines itself and its own identity not only terms of the possibilities of its own development, but in its contradictions and relations with other cultural orientations, which in definition are but realized extensions within the world of alternate possibilities of itself. The study of culture is always comparative, no matter how implicit such comparison may be. It is only by contact with different cultural orientations beyond our own boundaries that we are able to recognize the potential relativity, spuriousness and transparency of our own cultural orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because we are frequently dealing with holistic constructs which model the complexity of integrated realities, we must often approach the comparative study of culture on the basis of "types" and reified constructions which are but poor substitutes for the reality. We tend to reify culture as something real in and of itself, rather than as just a conceptual construction representing real historical processes and phenomenological experiences. We may devise complex models to schematize our cultural understandings, yet we recognize the lack of a non-relative basis upon which to base such constructions. When we compare cultures, we lack any fixed reference, non-arbitrary reference point to guide our comparisons. We select traits on the basis of what we understand to them to be, often without consulting the people whose traits they really are. We are thus involved in a kind of reference, ascription and attribution of cultural identity that we cannot do without and yet which will never prove to be correct.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak of "basic culture" as what might be construed semantically as "prototypical" of categorical human culture. This comprises categories of cultural construction that are similar to basic linguistic/semantic prototypes, and yet they remain basically the substance and design of culture. Such elements and traits of culture tend to be linguistically encoded in very simple, unelaborated terms. The category of "chair" is quite unremarkable--it corresponds to its counterparts of "color" or "tree"--and we recognize a chair as something that is fundamentally cultural, even though not all cultures have had chairs as a common part of their cultural universe. We should note that this "basicness" of culture tends to correspond to what some would refer to as "folk culture" to be distinguished from "high" or haute cuture the elements of which tend to be marked in special and elaborate forms.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have demonstrated a near universal order of acquisition of basic color terms, an order which is largely determined by culture and yet which remains pan-culturally the same in design. We might speculate upon a similar kind of universal order of "basic cultural categories" which are prototypically convergent upon the same range of phenomena. In this regard, we can expect some measure of statistical correlation and corroboration of such convergence. We might eat with fingertips, leaves, chop sticks or forks and spoons, but the bowls and plates we eat from are nearly universal in their basic shape and function. We can also expect that from a point of view of adaptive integration, such basic culture tends to be practically oriented to matters of daily life and living, things that we take for granted in the grand scheme of things. Their practicality may include their expressive and symbolic value, if we think about all the things a simple ring may bind together, or the tones made by a simple horn or flute.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no anthropological study of a group of people or a cultural orientation that is not inherently a cross-cultural comparison. It is the intrinsic comparability between cultural studies that constitutes the primary ground for their empirical character. The empirical value of cultural studies is not to be found in the descriptions of material contents or spatial configurations--it is found by the comparison of similar and different traits between cultures, the establishment of common correlates among cultural configurations, or what has been called "adhesions" and the measurement of their distribution in space and time. Though our comparisons will always fall short of historical determination or scientific causality, and though they may always be plagued by Galton's dilemma, we can nevertheless see clearly the substantive, factive basis that the fact of basic difference and identity establishes in the world. Traits cohere together and make sense only in comparison with other sets and trait complexes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The science of anthropology, if we are to speak of a genuine and legitimate science, is rooted in its basic comparative research. A study that does not test its conclusions within a cross-cultural context, no matter how implicitly, remains from an anthropological standpoint incomplete and scientifically inadequate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have not yet learned how to conduct or manage our comparisons in the most productive manner, though we have made great progress in the accumulation of a broad, cross-cultural data-base. We face the unsolved problems of history, of encoder reliability, and the basic validity of our comparative constructs and categories. Similar to the study of language, we must see the history of cultural change as complex and dynamic, internally driven along pathways of divergence or else independent convergence upon a similar adaptive trait complex. We can also refer to the exogenous forces of differential acculturation and transculturation that interrupt cultural processes and redirect them.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that the very boundaries that make possible and mandatory comparison, also become the principle objects of such comparison. It is through systematic and rigorous comparison that the boundaries and outlines of a basic cultural orientation yield themselves before our observations. By the identification of such boundaries in terms of basic difference and correlation between cultures, we can gradually piece together rudimentary range of our cultural continuum.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All such comparison is itself rooted in a basic presumption of the common ground of humanity--what might be referred to as the anthropological context or the human condition common to all people in the world. In other words, all cultural orientations must satisfy on a daily basis fundamental human needs and aspirations which all people share with one another. All cultural orientations must define and appropriate a similar range of basic resources that are considered vital to its survival, whatever the environment in which it is situated. Cultures must establish and maintain a dynamic equilibrium in the balanced reciprocities and relations between people and between humans and their world. This constitutes a basic paradigm or matrix for the instantiation of the range of variation among different cultural orientations in the world, one that creates a common frame of reference for our cross-cultural comparisons.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We define our nature in terms of our culture.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Humankind is characterized by its world openness. Unlike many other kinds of mammals, human beings lack any definite, clear-cut markers by which we can identify the nebulous notion human nature. We lack the clear instinctual patterns found among most other species. Instead we have evolved to a condition of becoming in our growth and development critically dependent upon the acquisition and mediation of culture by which to complete and bring to maturation our character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Culture becomes by definition those external forces and factors which impinge upon our innermost being from the very beginning, and which become internalized in place of instinct, to the point that they become as if primary nature. We cannot therefore speak of a pure human nature totally unadulterated by the influence of cultural conditioning. We only have to study the few extant cases of feral children and children raised under conditions of severe cultural deprivation to witness the helplessness and lack of order of pristine human nature. But we can speak of humankind having evolved an inherent, naturally based capacity for culture. Indeed a need and even a drive for cultural acquisition, one which makes all children so curious and interesting in the world. We can also speak of human-made, externally based cultural elements becoming internalized as if they are natural, to the point that our language, our appetites and aversions, our sexual preferences and practices, our values, attitudes, beliefs, our feelings and our daily behaviors, take on a force of habit that has almost the strength and the same power of control as if fully developed instinct.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">With the possibility of internalization of cultural character as if human nature, comes the reverse possibility of the externalization of bits and pieces of human nature--needs, drives, emotions, behaviors--as if a humanly constructed part of the cultural world. The child not only internalizes the life and life-world of the parents, but in the process extends its own organic being into this effective environment to make it intrinsically an extension of its own being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The process of internalization is characterized by what has been called subjective inevitability and is part of another process referred to as primary acquisition, primary socialization and primary enculturation and, from a psycho-social standpoint, primary identification. These are different dimensions of the same phenomena. What characterizes all of them, besides the sense of subjective inevitability, is that they involve a process of deep embedding of behavior and thought, to a point beyond the influence of mere habit or acquired patterns of behavior, to the extent that they become a relatively permanent and subsequently unmodifiable part of basic human character. Though fixed, they are not so complete as instinct would have it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can call this entire phenomena primary process and speak of humans having learned things so well that it becomes more than second nature if something just less that first nature. It is upon the deep-seated level of primary process that we must seek explanations for many social and behavioral phenomena, and solutions to many difficult and intransigent human problems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The point of primary process is that culturally derived characterized are ingrained to the point of organic being, of even perceptual experience in framing and modify how we relate to the world we inhabit. At this level, people with different backgrounds may indeed experience, even see, the world differently than others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The principle of primary process explains a cycle of culture and personality development that can be claimed to have largely taken the place of natural evolution for humankind. We are no longer constrained by natural selective forces, but have instead substituted an alternative kind of developmental patterning in which there is a critical feedback between, on one hand, the externalized world of culture and the internalized world of human nature, and, on the other hand, the level of primary process and the subsequent level of secondary social process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As we internalize into our own character cultural based traits, to the point that these become part of our primary being, we in turn subsequently externalize into our cultural life-worlds that primary being, to the point of critically influencing its direction of development. As our characters become, with increasing age, increasingly fixed upon the level of primary process, secondary process increasingly takes over in subsequent influence upon our character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The differences between primary and secondary processes are roughly the difference between primary and secondary language acquisition. They do not differ in kind or quality except that the former are characterized by an inherent capacity or facility, almost an imperative, while the latter is notably lacking in such a capacity. The primary level is the level at which things are acquired organically, automatically and reflexively. Secondary level things are acquired by force of habit and conditioning, but the effect is far more ephemeral and far less complete than for primary conditioning. The energy threshold for secondary acquisition is much higher and less surmountable than for primary acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It can be said that humans are genetically programmed to some as yet unknown extent for primary acquisition during critical stages of early childhood.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Primary acquisition, having been deeply embedded, takes on an unmarked and largely subconscious influence. It comes to constitute the background of culture and personality out of which secondary process later reconfigure human character. Primary acquisition is largely unadulterated and does not compete with previously acquired traits, except perhaps at the level of genetic capacities. Secondary acquisition must largely compete with and take over space of primary acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The unmarked condition of primary process is important because it goes on at a level that remains largely out of awareness. A large amount of nonverbal communication can be said to occur at the level of primary process, in an unmarked way. Remaining out of awareness, it is largely beyond the normal purview of our conscious control. It remain largely taken for granted, implicit, unquestioned.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural constraint, at the level of primary process, is largely the kind of indirect constraint that constitutes the cumulatively decisive cultural context for the conditioning of human personality and character. Primary process comes to control us. We rarely have the opportunity to control our own innermost character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is most likely that subsequent external influence on the level of primary process is likely to have critically disruptive effects, the source of events or episodes or crises upon personality and social identity. Attempts to alter and modify primary process of the adult personality are likely to be met with a great deal of subconscious and indirect resistance, negative reaction, and even failure, and may have expectedly yet largely unpredictable end-results. This is true whether we are a well-intentioned Psychiatrist trying to cure a patient of her/his childhood repression, or a well-meaning Professor attempting to alter the behavior and character of one of her/his prime students in a more professionally suitable manner.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is at this level that we can experience, and account for culture shock, and the problem of crossing wide gulfs or strong cultural boundaries which separate different peoples in time and space. The resistance and frustration we are likely to feel as an alien in an alien environment, will most importantly be upon the level of primary process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to also recognize that our crossing of boundaries in life, our passages, must be mediated in one way or another by the critical presence/absence of a significant other. In early stages of development, this is known as bonding. Later we refer to it as identification, reference, friendship, modeling, and mediation or brokerage.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basic cultural differences are to be found to exist mostly upon the level of primary process. Upon this level different cultures are pervasive and nearly total in the daily lives of its constituency.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It becomes vital that if we are to understand the influence of culture upon character, and the influence of human nature upon culture, then we must seek answers and evidence upon the level of primary process. From a cross-cultural standpoint, we can see the great difference whether we raise, in different cultural milieus, children to be independent or interdependent, sociable or authoritarian, dominant-dependent or nurturant, responsible or sociopathic, passive or aggressive, introverted or extroverted, open or closed-minded, honest or deceitful, orally dependent or phallic, taciturn or talkative, inbound or cosmopolitan, conservative or liberal, tolerant or intolerant, hierarchical or egalitarian, physical, emotional or cerebral, sympathetic or apathetic, violent or peaceful, sexually repressed or sexually liberated, ego-centric or socio-centric.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to recognize the multi-factorial structure of the influences and factors that impinge upon the development of primary process--many of which are beyond human awareness or control. We must critically examine the long-lasting impact that widespread day-care may have in critically altering the cultural character of its youngest generation. We must reexamine the case of single parent households, early childhood separation, foster parentage and adoption, the cases of aberrant or deviant socialization. We must look at the deep intransigence of cultural ingrained patterns to change or influence, as well as the long lasting influence larger historical and social events can have upon subsequent generations of a culture. We must look at the case of cultural inferiority complexes when a minority group is subjugated and repressed by a majority group, and the effect this must have upon the development of subsequent generations at the level of primary process. We must examine the influence which a pervasive and omnipresent electronic media may have at this level, whether intentional or not.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see primary process for what it is, as something paradoxically both beyond our control and yet remaining within the purview of our power and our patience. It controls us while we try to change it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is by primary process that we can account for a large substantive part of those anthropological relativisms that have plagued the social sciences since their inception. Cultures caught upon different historical trajectories have developed and come to transmit primary process in fundamentally unique ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the uniqueness of this primary process is that it is a multi-factorial kind of thing, probably not accounted for by any single or even minimal set of determinative factors. The kinds of historical and social factors which input into it and the resulting character and cultural patternings are not simply predictable or even commensurate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This leads us to ask a central and important question, of what exactly is primary process, and how does it occur. An important component of this must be the organic program of early child growth and development, and the many environmental factors that either enrich or stifle this growth and development. The young child grows into the mold fashioned by the workings of the cultural environment s/he grows up in. As the child grows into this environment, extending itself in a ever enlarging circle of the larger social self, the child also steadily incorporates much of this environment into itself, such that it forms the basic templates from which all subsequent maps and models will be derived, or compared or contrasted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This process is stimulated from within with almost no natural or built in resistance. There is a natural drive, a cultural imperative, for acquisition which will prompt a child normally deprived to explore and seek the nourishment it needs to grow with. A child seeks a continuous challenge with life, at all stages and levels of sophistication and difficulty. The challenges that children meet on a daily basis, and which often defeat them, are obstacles that adults take for granted. Adults have successfully met these obstacles and have incorporated them at a level of autonomic reflex that they do not even notice them anymore in the same way that the same things may become the center of the child's complete absorption.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What significance does the notion of primary process hold for evolutionary theory of humankind. First we may say that the primary mechanism driving human evolutionary development must have been the development of this mechanism, and the unique set of circumstances allowing for this development, which made possible to externalization of human nature in the form of culture and which also made possible the internalization of a rudimentary cultural environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot ignore the long period of childhood socialization and infant dependency, and the strong bonding between mother and child. It that an extended period that may, in terms of primary process, never really end, and one which renders the human being a socially dependent creature--dependent upon the group for more than just satiation of hunger or sexual drives, but to meet other symbolic, linguistic and affective needs. These social needs have long remained without any necessary organic basis in human survival and yet with many important organic associations and effects. It rendered humankind vulnerable to the condition of the group--subject to its ostracism and control, even to the point of its physiological wellbeing. It rendered humankind continually anxious and capable of being easily subdued and subjugated to the demands of the group. Symbolic forms took on a vital life within the context of the group that had a strong impact upon the being. It meant a permanent loss of innocence, and the beginning of a never ending quest for independence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that if we are to institute social reforms that will be effective in inducing social responsibility as well as greater social equality. We will have to do so mostly upon the level of primary process, and it will be at this level that our most problematic resistance to reform will be met.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our conception of culture must take into account several important facets. First, though cultures are most integrated, they are not without significant contradictions. These contradictions as well as cultural integration, are important to the understanding of the internal dynamics which drive endogenous cultural change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultures are also mostly functional in their integration that is they are organized on the basis of achieving certain strategic purposes in adaptation in the world. This functionality of culture occurs upon all levels of its integration, and drives what may be referred to as exogenous change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultures are also symbolic in their integration, and it is the curious amalgamation of their symbolic functionalism that is most distinctive. Even the most practical and pragmatic tools and devices of a culture have some symbolic value, and all symbolism has some material form in which they are invested. Cultures are as much a worldview as they are a world. They constitute a coherence system that allows people to make sense of and adapt to their world. They provide a template that is superimposed in a representational manner upon experience. The basicness and rootedness of culture and its boundaries in our organic being, in our innate capacity for cultural acquisition, accounts for the great conservative stability of culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Nevertheless culture is subject to the forces of change, both internally and externally. Cultures have for the most part been self-organizing entities--they function structurally in an anti-chaotic manner. The superimposition of one cultural orientation upon another, a the diffusion of a culture, or inter-fusion of different cultures, are processes which must be seen as secondary to the actual internal organization of basic culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can specify that cultural boundaries are maintained and changed upon all levels of anthropological process, both from within in terms of their incorporation of difference, and from without in terms of their symbolic and functional value in relation to a larger world. Such internal and external factors create a basic dialectic that fosters the kinds of boundaries in our experience we recognize and refer to as culture. Internal dynamics which result in cultural drift cannot be easily separated from external forces of history which frequently come to play a predominant role in the determination of cultural changes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A comparative science of culture is not unlike a similar comparative science of linguistics that lies at the core of culture. Certain cultural processes exhibit an internal regularity that may be remarkable. Like languages, all cultures must maintain some sense of internal closure and boundary in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must also see that in terms of the functional integration of a cultural orientation, is measured in terms of its relative equilibration in the distribution of basic resources to humans and of its human constituency to its basic resources. Many of these basic resources may be culturally defined and determined--their locus within a specific cultural matrix will depend upon a number of factors. But we may derive on the basis of this, a basic functional formula for the relative integration of a given cultural orientation, one that is multidetermined, and which may have differential consequences in terms of the internal dynamics and contradictions and the external, functional strategies and alterations. We can, for any given culture, configure a general functional calculus in which the primary variables are the distributive relations between people and their cultural definition of basic resources.</p> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fourteen">XI</p> </a></font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"><a NAME="fourteen"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Society</a></p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We are by nature social animals--in this we celebrate and lament our human condition in the world.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we substitute the static notion of "Structure" which underlies social relations and organization, by the more active and dynamic notion of "construction," we bring back to "society" the many implications of its social history, its praxis, practice, performance and process. Construction relocates the relevant "structure of the conjunction" in the surface patterning rather than in its depths and resituates human action and transaction in regard to human interest, involvement, intentionality, and its counterfactual accounting of unintended consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left with a stage set by individual actors, each guided by tradition-bound scripts that are improvised modified to fit the uncontrolled dynamics of human dialectics and social relations. Social relations are marked by a contradiction between reciprocity and asymmetry of action. Social patterning, social relations, organizations and stratification, are largely determined by processes of social production, power and resource distribution. Social process is in a sense always in the present moment of action--it is contemporaneous without a deep sense of history. It is both the beginning and the end of the circle of the construction of reality, where the actual act of construction takes place.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social relations describe the character and volume and differences in social interactions and transactions that occur at any given moment. In social relations, we can distinguish analytically between the processes of social organization and transmission--the former being seen synchronically over space, the latter diachronically through time. Issues of social complexity, circumscription and stratification are important considerations in the calculus of social process. Cultural and social processes are also dialectical--secondary social processes surround, reinforce and cause change in basic cultural orientations. Part of what is socially transmitted is cultural. On the other hand, cultural boundaries mark the pathways along which social relations are possible or probable, and help to define the character and nature of these relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">.i.Social relations; have been a central determinant in the anthropological construction of reality--these have largely driven historical changes in social patterning, organization and "structure". This is primarily so because social relations govern and predetermine the distribution between people and their resources. This constitutes the basis for power in society, and social relations constitute the social transfer and transmission of this power as well. It is in this regard that the discussion of social mobility and mobilization becomes important, as a sense of "movement" within social relations--a movement of people, statuses and resources.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social processes have been throughout history as destructive as they have been constructive, as competitive as they are cooperative. Social integration has only been accomplished through increasing stratification and status-role specialization within societies, and the centralization and augmentation of destructive forces has only been increased as a result of this integration.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We know the world by how we are known by the world.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is difficult to know if the appropriate way of studying cultural process is analytically through nomothetic use of statistics and analysis of social status and roles, or else through the use of biography and corporate institutional history that will secure a greater sense of depth and understanding of the background causes which set the stage for social action. A science rooted in comparison must be based upon interpersonal differences of status, role, resource, power, etc., but any such comparison is bound to be limited and shallow if it fails to take into account the psycho-social factors involved in the phenomenology of human interest and involvement;. Psychological and individual identity and power are inseparable from social identity and power--each lends legitimacy and efficacy to the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we refer to "status-role identity" we must understand how this secondary form of identification is vital to the adaptive functioning and health of the individual in the world. The human is by definition a social being who exists in the world of other humans. Who a person is and how that person adjusts is largely dependent upon the socially defined and contrained role that that person acquires in the world. Human wellbeing is only possible in relation to the social processes of production, performance and practice.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus there is a place for nomothetic statistical comparisons in the study of society and social relations, but there is also a great need for a phenomenological inquiry into the subjectively constituted idiographic dimensions of social process. We properly refer to a "structure of the conjunction" which occurs at the critical moment in time and space, which we understand as a social "event," or episode, or state of affairs, or moment of action. We can see society as an interlocked web of series of events or states marked by transitions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a wonder why, in our theories about our social order, we are quick to explain social relations and organization as the result of basic forces, but we are reluctant to confer upon social process the causal primacy that may account for society and its many forces. In a sense, we need to turn Hegel, Marx and Freud inside-out and understand that social relations are not constrained by a material, sub-structural base, so much as they constrain the construction of such a basis in the world. Aggression, male-domination and a "cult of male superiority" may not account for social gender stratification so much as be accounted for by it. Social relations permit and constrain the limits and variability of personal actions.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We measure our world by our places within it.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human relation, or what might be called human social relatedness, have not only changed in time, but they have evolved. Social relations and human sociability has an intrinsic character and coherence about them--they entail transmission and communication which entails the disambiguation of internal contradiction or external conflict. Their character is fundamentally different in the world today from what they had been in the age of Rome, or in the time before human history. If today we speak of the modern isolation and alienation of the liberated ego, we can refer to ego-less, totally dehumanized identity of the slave in the time of Caesar who nevertheless occupied a place in the classical cosmos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard we can refer to the relative "social world" and "social world view" in which social relations are situated at any particular period or place, and to the inherent social relativity which characterizes the situatedness of people in the world. We are born into a particular time and place, into a web of relations and sphere of social action that we cannot escape. Though we will make many transitions in the course of our life-time, we will always be surrounded by and engulfed within a sea of humanity. The situation of one person at one point in time and place, is quite unlike that of another person at some other point.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox of this is that our only standards of measurement and identity in the social world are based upon the comparison of only superficially comparable, or else incommensurable realities. Though we have no real basis in the judgement of others, we must act on the basis of such judgements. Though we may refrain from such judgement or withhold it in our relations with others, we are nevertheless constrained indirectly by society in our capacity to make such judgements. We have no choice but to adopt the standards and constraints of our society if we are to manage within it at all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus we are all constrained and ultimately determined by our social world and our positions within it. Whatever we may choose to do or to believe in, the consequences of such choices will be weighed in terms of the social world. We can act to change our positions, and our social world, in accordance with our wishes or expectations, but even these actions are ultimately constrained and severely limited within the social world, and were only made possible in the first place by the room that we were provided within it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I will call "sociality" the net measure of any person's place within a social world, as a nodal point in a nexus of relations, and as "societas" the net measure of the total field of social relations at any moment in place and time. It is expected that though both of these measures would show much turbulence in the local context, but in the "structure of the long run" they should demonstrate a dynamic stability upon some level of "criticality" which is related to the self-organizational character of the total field of social interrelations. Corporate, institutional social organization is itself defined within this larger continuum of societas. The structural character of these institutional forms which organize social relations into enduring patterns are an intrinsic aspect of the self-organization of society which achieves local acceptance states.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important in this regard that we seek to get away from a structural model of human society as organized like a pyramid with a base and a superstructure. Such a model has been an implicit and paradigmatic design in a great deal of social theory. The centralization of power and social relations accompanying social integration always occurs within a larger field of social relations. Though there has been an increasing tendency towards higher and more encompassing levels of integration, this process is never complete or comprehensive, and always proves ephemeral and transitory in the long run. It is always subject to the occurrence of "critical events" which might bring about a dramatic reorganization or else decentralization of the overall order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a sense of indirect social relations, such that the resonance and consequences of social action may be delayed or displaced from the local context of its immediate social situation. We are forced to act within situations without really ever knowing what the net outcome of our involvement will be. Our acts may eventually rebound upon us as their reverberations come full circle to visit upon our doorstep. We can thus define a kind of social horizon based upon the situatedness of our social actions, one that critically limits our ability to act in a larger context of social significance. This horizon will itself be quite variable for different social actors, with the span encompassed from one or another's position being much more advantageous or of greater social elevation than others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak in this regard of strategic and tactical positioning of people within the social system, by which people maneuver and manipulate social relations in order to gain ascendancy and advantage within the system of stratification. Such movement itself can either reinforce or else destabilize existing social relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we speak of the changing character of social relations, we can also speak of the changing character of human social identity. The net value and profile of sociality and societas will be distinctive and historically relative. We might refer to the historical dialectics of social identity and difference as being fundamental to the process of change in human social relations. People enact their parts in relation to the relative presence or absence of "significant others" who in turn react, sometimes unpredictably.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we refer to the dialectics of identity and difference in social relations, we are necessarily referring to reciprocity and asymmetry in social transaction, and to the institutionalization and secondary legitimization, and internalization of these dialectics in the social construction of reality. Society knows itself in terms of the stratification and organization of diversity that accompanies social integration. We must see in this regard that societas and sociality constitute basic functional "models" and "maps" of social reality by which we navigate in our world. These models orient us in the social world and provide us a sense of direction within that world. They also provide us with a means of making sense of our own social status as well as the social status of other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We might refer to "class consciousness" or to "social conscience" as basic dimensions of such models which underlie our interpretation of social experiences and which serve to motivate us in the field of social action. It might be referred to as a critical, if embedded, awareness of our own and other's relative positions in the world, which pre-structure our construction of reality via our social relations. This form of social consciousness can be seen as humanly basic and pervasive in the assessments and interpretations which we bring to our experience, bounded by the horizon of our own situatedness in the social world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is an inherent tendency to defer the social realities of our current situation and to displace the consequences of our own social involvement in such a way as to foster a deceptive illusion of our own legitimacy and moral efficacy in the world, often at the expense of other people. People in positions of authority who are conceded even a modicum of limited power over others, may quickly come to abuse such power in their lording over of their subjects. These social psychological dynamics will tend to be excused or over-looked in our social assessments, or framed within paternalistic terms. Not only will the legitimacy of the underdog in a party of such relations remain fundamentally ignored and implicitly denied, but often such people become the hapless victims blamed for their own victimization. People devise sophisticated strategies and rationales for the justification of their position and behavior within a social world--especially if the basic motivation for such behavior entails uneven advantage at another person's expense. And we can construct external social worlds which will reinforce stratification in such a way that a sense of contradiction and discrepancy between our actions and our basic values arise only under unusual circumstances, if at all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can thus speak of our psycho-social conscience as a system for making coherent our world of social relations, and for dispelling and dealing with a sense of contradiction or ambiguity which is bound to be encompassed within such a system. This system is of course bound within a cultural universe, and itself constitutes a constraint upon this universe. This system is social because it is collective and shared by many others within our social world. It is a socially embodied system. Roles and statuses within the system come to acquire a symbolic value and an action potency. It sets the common standards by which we judge people and their actions, and by which we coordinate our own actions and attitudes. Whether or not it is necessarily a vicious circle of deceit or a screen of obfuscation, it nevertheless remains a cybernetic circle of meaning and action in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As reiterated before, though such systems work to eliminate a sense of contradiction or conflict within its social nexus of relations, never are they completely without contradiction or conflict. All social organization entails the incorporation of contradiction and the management of conflicting, schismatic relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It can be said that a moral question mark always hangs over the state of affairs of human society, a question rooted in the ethical dilemmas inherent in human relationship, over reciprocity or asymmetry of transaction. This question mark becomes only more critical if more diffuse when it comes to the social institutionalization of corporate organizations. This question-mark about moral legitimacy of human social order always threatens to undermine the basis of human social relations. These questions are tied up not only with the legitimacy of the social world, but of the social world view which we have as well--with questions of its ethical efficacy and philosophical status, with its validity and relevancy in the world. Societies can provide simple "Solutions" to such questions, by effacing all fronts of respectability or of moral goodness--but never can we act in the world free of such questions.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fifteen">XII</p> </a></font><a NAME="fifteen"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Humanity</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Ours is a world of moral dilemma we cannot escape.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">If the view of the anthropological construction of reality proffered within these pages teaches us anything, it should be that we must learn to exercise extreme caution in our judgements of the realities of others. Our sense of morality and ethics are as much anthropological constructions of our reality as are any other facet of our world. There exists no simple anthropological calculus or general solution by which to make such judgments or by which to construct our world. And yet we are always challenged by the dilemma of a moral imperative for acting and yet to act within a vacuum of moral justification. And we must also accept that anthropologically people are neither good nor bad, but are intrinsically capable of acts that may be both evil and good in the world. There is no person or social system that is without ambiguity or contradiction. Humans are by definition the creatures of imperfection prone to making mistakes in their constructions of reality. It is by virtue of our vices that we have the opportunity to learn.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The principle moral call of anthropology has been one of universal tolerance for human variation and difference, a call that is itself relative in falling short of the "tolerance for intolerance". Toleration for difference does not necessarily constitute by itself a justification of evil and misanthropy in the world--it entails only that we seek rehabilitation of the harm and its sources rather than nihilation or vengeance. Those who confuse tolerance with indifference are themselves morally confused and contradictory creatures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For good reason, anthropology has been aptly characterized as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. We are left to consider the question of anthropology as a humanity as well as the humanity of anthropology. It is not enough to consider anthropology as only a history, or as a philosophy, but as its own kind of humanistic inquiry and its own separate form of humanity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology as humanity values the human differences which underlie all our illusions of identity, and thereby seeks the identity and unity of anthropological difference in the world. It leads to an appreciation of the common humanness and human condition in our world. An archaeologist who discovers a ten thousand year-old baby doll in a child's grave has established a strange bond with the human objects of his study. Our humanity is to be found only in the buried realities of our world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The construction of reality is inherently a human construction of a human world. An intrinsic part of our humanness is that we are morally and meta-ethically constrained in the world, whether we like it or not. The Nuremberg trials taught the world of the universal efficacy and legitimacy of the moral basis of our own humanity, the imperative of which we cannot escape in our actions, the consequences of which violation must sooner or later rebound upon ourselves in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we search for the source of such humanity in our being, we must find it ultimately in the possibilities created by our own human sentience that allow us to feel the feelings of others, and sense the meaning of others places in the world. It arises from a recognition of the possibility of our own error in the world--in short, it is a product that we have no choice but to live within a world of our own making.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The moral efficacy of our humanity is thus intrinsic to the very process of our anthropological construction of reality, whether we acknowledge it or become aware of it or not. Moral dilemma is implicit to the happenstance of our own anthropological contradictions in the world--part the fact that we are coherent creatures who must make mistakes in order to become more human.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible to formulate a universal moral calculus rooted in the social dialectics of human rights and responsibilities, of human needs and resources. Such a calculus would yield a basic contradiction to anthropological knowledge itself--the anthropological world has been mostly one built of stratification and as=symmetry, with all its implications of violence and promotion of aggression. Historical processes of modernization in the mobilization of the earth's resources, with all the evils this entails, are seemingly irreversible and inexorable. We can scarcely imagine no other effective form of social integration which does not institutionalize or incorporate some measure of asymmetry and violence in social relations. And yet, somehow, we must resolve this contradiction in our anthropological construction of reality, because morally speaking, we have no other choice.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropology of humanity might begin with the premise that all human construction is reality is oriented by some fundamental contradiction which involves a basic moral dilemma. Every human situation, every anthropological dimension, is morally constrained within this kind of contradiction. The sense of contradiction, and the demands it makes in any given context will never be exactly the same. Such incorporation of contradiction will constrain anthropological processes in certain historically decisive ways. Furthermore, we can speculate that each person's life is endowed existentially with a central purpose, or a basic anthropological "reason for being," by which, from a humanitarian point of view, we can make sense of that persons life experiences.</p> </font> <p>  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="sixteen">XIII</p> </a></font><a NAME="sixteen"><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">An OUTLINE of a THEORY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">of the ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION of REALITY</p> </font></a><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The world reflects our image and resonates with our voices.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">This chapter presents in succinct form an outline of a theory of the anthropological construction of reality that summarizes the contents of this book. It incorporates a number of general theories which are found to be convergent in such an outline--a theory of human language and the anthropology of language, a theory of mind and meaning, a theory of human culture, society, a theory of anthropology in relation to history, philosophy, science, academia. Any one part of this theoretical construction could stand upon its own, but the broader perspective of the anthropology of knowledge is sought for its thematic unity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is an inherently reflexive dilemma of an anthropological construction of the anthropological construction of reality, of the anthropology of knowledge about the anthropology of knowledge. We cannot be too sure where our own theoretical construction of anthropology ends and the presupposed anthropological construction of reality actually begins. We begin by noting that this very kind of dilemma, of the anthropological reflexivity of our knowledge about our selves and our world, is inherent and inescapable to both our condition and our knowledge. We are human because we understand ourselves thus, and our humanness is anthropological constructed in such understanding.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Should we need to escape the horns of this dilemma of our anthropological reflexivity? The fact of this dilemma seems to be a relatively recent discovery in the march of anthropological knowledge--though it was implicit in almost everything anthropologist did and thought from the very beginning. We must learn how to live in the world of our own making, in the contradictions inherent in it, without allowing those contradictions to take over. Many believe that we cannot hope to have a genuine science of anthropology within such contradictions, that a genuine, logical science of anthropology must be necessarily a non-contradictory science. But how can we have a non-contradictory understanding of something that seems inherently contradictory. If it means that we can never hope to have a non-subjective, totally "objective" science of anthropology, what some would dub as "etic," then so be it, but this does not thereby preclude the other possibility of building a subjective science, one that is "emic", that is, by definition, a science of human subjectivity. It must be genuinely asked why "the emic enema" should be such a threat to the world order of so many anthropologists--except as a purgative for their intellectual hang-ups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, a theory of the anthropological construction of reality is both consistent and coherent in making sense of the contradictions that plague general anthropology in search for a covering law or a genuine scientific identity. It is both comprehensive and systematic because it explains a wide diversity of anthropological phenomena within a unified theoretical framework, yet without the oversimplification and reductionism that such theoretial unification usually entails. It is productive both because it specifies directions in which to seek solutions to specific problems, and also points to specific methods and empirical procedures for doing so. But there is no need to promote the sale of a new formula or theory for intellectual consumption by professional anthropologists--it must succeed or fail by its own merits, or not at all.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of knowledge can be centrally characterized by several elements. First, the boundaries of the anthropology of knowledge are constituted anthropologically by the boundaries of human knowledge itself. We learn about these boundaries by the empirical exploration of what we do not know. Secondly, these boundaries are constituted internally in part by the representational constraints that the facticity of our own knowing places upon our knowledge of the world--we can indirectly infer these constraints, but we cannot step directly beyond them. In other words, our only anthropological windows upon the world constitute themselves our principle "anthropological veil" which we must penetrate. The fact and facticity of this veil is normally transparent and invisible to our consciousness. The reflexive role of an anthropology of knowledge is to bring this transparency and its distortions into recognition. Third, the status of anthropological knowledge is situated within a all encompassing hierarchy of determinations, which constrains all our scientific understanding of the natural world, and must always be located within this hierarchy. Fourth, anthropological knowledge is highly susceptible to certain informal fallacies of understanding, namely reification, abstraction, reductionism and anthropomorphization, which constitute the basis of central biases in relation to which it becomes a central project of anthropological knowledge to liberate itself of its own "centrisms." These fallacies stem from the "mythological" substrate which characterizes all human knowledge as symbolic construction, and it is the project of a science of the anthropology of knowledge to demythologize its own knowledge in the understanding of its principle object of inquiry, namely itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in regard to these anthropological "horizons" of our knowledge that we can speak of the "anthropological construction of reality" as a central theoretical framework for the anthropology of knowledge. Where before we think in terms of "structures," if we substitute the notion of "constructions" we have a better sense both of their theoretical facticity of the knowledge situated in our world, as well as of the basic anthropological processes which underlie all knowledge in and about the world. It is in this universal facticity of human knowledge that we find the common basis of our being in the world. The anthropological construction of reality holds that all human knowledge is perforce anthropologically "situated" knowledge and thus is relative to the contexts of its situatedness in the world. Another way of putting this is that all human experience is intrinsically, organically, cultural experience (if by culture we include language, Mind, society, etc.) and as such has been anthropologically constructed in those special processes in which humankind has made itself in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropological construction of reality involves several dialectically interrelated and dynamic processes upon several levels of human reality. We can refer to organic process, psychological process, cultural and social process, and "trans-culturative" processes. These processes combine in a holistic manner to constitute what can be considered a complex dialectic of mutual, dynamic constraint.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of knowledge is therefore interested in the differential distribution of knowledge in the world which is the result of these anthropological processes, as well as in the intrinsic constraints and extrinsic reasons for this differential distribution. It also strategically relocates the subjective, phenomenologically and psychologically constituted experience of the individual human being, as the principle anthropological knower, or ego, in the center of its theoretical framework, as well as a place for biography, as the principle basis for the temporaneity ordered knowledge of the individual in the world, and, in a broader context, social history, in anthropological theory. We must deal, in the anthropological construction of reality, therefore, with the related problem of the psychological and cultural constructions of reality, and their interplay in anthropological processes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropological processes can be divided analytically in their moment of constructive realization into three phases which correspond to the human externalization into the world, the objectification and reification of these externalized constructions, and then the subsequent internalization and subjectivation of these constructions. Language figures centrally in this entire process, and lies at the center of the anthropological construction of reality. The organic foundation of language allows for the embodiment of knowledge via language, and also for the linguistic disembodiment of organic experience in the world. These phases of anthropological process are analytically important in describing the fundamental dynamics of its basic dialectical patterning between mind and body and nature and culture.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropology of knowledge must have a philosophical foundation--and the foundation constitutes the anthropological basis for philosophical knowledge. Philosophy takes form around the dialectics between rationalism and relativism, which doctrine it has most denied. Anthropological knowledge is situated in and by its intrinsic relativity. We can refer to anthropological relativity of knowledge as the foundation for the various forms of relativity that we recognize. The problematic paradox presented by a doctrine of relativism centers around its refutation of the received anthropological notion of "the psychic unity of humankind", and the positing of a priori, "universal" structures of Mind, language, culture, society, truth, etc. Relativism is not inherently inimical to notions of universality, but only to notions about their a priori, absolute and unchanging character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The doctrine of relativism, tied to the relational basis of human knowledge in the world, and to a doctrine about the holistic character of human reality, has long constituted a central tenet of anthropological knowledge. It is on the basis of this refined relativism that we can find a philosophical premises for anthropological knowledge and an anthropological premises for philosophical knowledge. We can find the reason for anthropology to be rooted in both a critical skepticism toward received "truths" to reality, as well as in what can be referred to as the human imagination which makes it possible to realize alternative possibilities and human difference in the world. This anthropological imagination is shared by all human beings in the world, no matter how it may be denied, and is what makes of all people part time anthropologists. Anthropologists seek a special sort of identity in the world--the kind of Identity that underlies and constitutes the basis for human differences. This quest for knowledge is guided by the fact that some differences seem to make more of a Difference than others. Humans delight and celebrate the possibilities that such differences make in their world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">The anthropology of knowledge must begin with the situatedness of anthropology within the confines of a tradition-bound and authoritarian academic insitution. It must come to terms with the departmental social dialectics and petty professional politics which guide its research agendas, with the basic contradictions which are rooted in academia between its function in a larger political economic framework as a "mode of information" and the "user-pays" dependency, and its commitment to the pursuits of genuine science and freedom of thought. American academic anthropology is also saddled with the competitive, authoritarian and egotistical American character that constrains its own cultural dynamics in "critical" ways. Traditional intellectual boundaries within Academia may no longer be the most flexible or best boundaries for knowledge of the world--knowledge in the real world does not necessarily reflect these intellectual boundaries--there is thus a growing, critical need to encourage and develop means of interdisciplinary integration. In this regard, we must see our cognitive models and maps as based upon implicit cultural models which we may well be taking for granted in our constructions of reality. In these regards, Anthropological could lead the way, but ultimately its only real guide is our own intuition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a real and fundamental difference between the Two Cultures of Academia--two basic orientations which, in their mutual dialectics, more often talk past one another than with one another. It is vitally important that anthropological knowledge define itself in its own terms, not in negative terms of what it is not or analogically in terms of what it should be like. Anthropology suffers a double bind by being marginally defined between the two cultures, thus a full fledged member of neither and a potential traitor to both. It is of paramount importance that anthropology come to form its own "Third Culture" which stands on its own, instead of being merely a marginal science of the exotic and esoteric.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology as History must be regarded as an important dimension of its general problematic. The problem of history always serves to compound our anthropological answers--whether this is Galton's problem or the archaeological problem of "reconstruction" or the cultural problem of seeing into the well of time that we call tradition. Our science of anthropology would try to define itself a-chronically, as if time did not interfere to complicate the basic patternings and sense of our human reality. Anthropology and History share a basic relationship with one another in that History deals with change and differences in time, where as Anthropology deals with the equivalencies of the same phenomena across space. But time invites change and change entails complexity. We superimpose evolutionary frameworks as a substitute for the solution to the problem of History, but these frameworks are spurious at best in regard to the past. Anthropological History is not only natural history, but human history as well, and this sets up its own problematic dialectic that no simplistic evolutionary schema can hope to resolve. Though history is basically empirical in its orientation, it nevertheless is not nor cannot be a "science" because of the intrinsic inability to recover its primary phenomena of interest.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">History is important because it is an inseparable part of our anthropological construction of reality--to deny a person's history is tantamount to a denial of their humanity and humanness. We share then, in the depths of our past, a common history that unites humankind as of one family. We can speak of history as human history, and as human-made history, and we infer in this all the subjectivity that comes from the phenomenology of its biographical experience. We replace "structures" and the laws upon which they are presumed, with the processes and practices of "construction", of which History itself is a part. From a perspective of the anthropological processes of the construction of reality, history can be seen to be a study of the patternings that these processes have assumed in the past. We can thus see human history from the vantage point of several different, interrelated levels--we have biographical history and phenomenological accounts of "pathways of practice, we have social and cultural history of human networks and traditions, involving institutional histories of corporate social organizations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no simple solution to the problems presented by our human history. But there is recognition that the general principles underlying the study of history have their own theoretical system that is fundamentally different from the scientific study of natural phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Despite the problematic of human history, anthropology must still address the issues presented by "Human nature". Many anthropologists bent upon turning their field of study into a positivistic science see the common sense of basing such a science upon human nature, and thus using universal laws of human nature as determinative of culture. The result has been the propagation of so many specious "just so" stories in anthropological literature that seek to explain everything from human evolution to human social organization. The social dangers in terms of its legitimization of unjust policies far outweigh their theoretical or intellectual value.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This has been the case despite the fact that from the standpoint of the anthropological construction of reality, human nature seems by definition to have been naturally "underdetermined" and that this indeterminancy of human nature made possible and even necessary the construction of culture in the first place. We can even go on to claim that far from nature underlying and explain culture, it is more plausible to regard culture to a great extent underlying and explaining "human nature." The point is that we cannot clearly separate where nature leaves off and culture takes over, and the two have, evolutionarily speaking, growing dialectically interdependent. If we wish to propagate our own "just so" origin myths, then we must take this dialectical interdependence between our culture and our nature centrally into account. In this regard, we must see the evolutionary importance of human acquisition processes that are organically embodied and developmentally controlled.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can bounce to the other extreme and speak of the anthropology of Mind. The quest for the universal structure of mind that would serve as the basic template for our cultural designs is about as hopeless as the search for the sentient, conscientious and self-determining gene. There is an anthropomorphic fallacy of strong artificial intelligence that believes that, via the programming of "mind" we can recreate intelligent life and living sentience in machines. But unlike our biological counterparts, an anthropology of mind in the manner of Gregory Bateson remains relatively unexplored in terms of its possible theoretical implications. The conception of a universal Logos as an ordering principle of the both the cosmos and of humankind, is rooted in our rational Greek tradition. There is a sense in which science is based upon "natural information theory" and we can properly speak of a "hierarchy of determinations" controlling the design structure of natural systems. Human with their culture and their nature share inextricably in this hierarchy of determinations, but we must see a fundamental difference between the semiotic design of natural information and the symbolic design of human knowledge. We must deal with a "World View" problem that attempts to triangulate human meaning between cognition, cultural construction and our language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of natural systems theory, we must consider the basic design features of human knowledge and informational systems. An anthropological theory of Mind is necessary a theory of meaning and its anthropological construction in the world. An alternative theory of relational logic with its own functional calculus is proffered as inherent to the design of human meaning systems. A relational system is one in which there are no absolute anchor points, everything within the universe of the system is defined in terms of everything else, and each thing has a dual value, of being itself, and the net sum of its relationships with the universe. We must further regard living systems, and systems of culture "as symbolic transmission" and of human mind as "symbolic processing" as formally complex and dynamic dialectical systems which are stochastically adaptive to changes in its life-world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is central in the process of the human construction of reality--it is central in the worldview problem and in the human world itself. An anthropological theory of language must take into account several fundamental questions about human language--it's dynamics of change, its structural and systemic stability, its basic social functionality, its central relationship in the "World View Problem", and the problem of acquisition. A "functional-constructionist" theory of language is proffered based upon a "holistic-relational" grammar.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language change involves a maintenence of a boundary between intrinsic, endogenous changes in language, what can be referred to as linguistic "drift", which occurs upon all levels of language process, and extrinsic, exogenous changes due to inter-linguistic contact. Endogenous change tends towards disambiguation of meaning as it is linguistically encoded, but leads to the formation of functional linguistic boundaries, schismogenesis and divergence of language--what can be referred to as linguistic fission. Exogenous changes tend tends to increase linguistic ambiguity, but leads to processes of language convergence and "fusion". The history of language is complicated by this dialectic between internal and external sources of language change, thus any simple evolutionary framework for the origin or basis of language is bound to be superficial and probably in error except in local, limited cases. A language boundary is set up, based upon a robust profile of its net processes of change. The basic mechanism of change in either case is held to be the stylistic variation that is rooted in the inherent flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity in human language. Such flexibility is also the basis for the functional power of language in its external social contexts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language structure must be understood holistically as embedded in the context of its speech production. The notion of a universal, abstract deep structure of language is one that is a reified residuum of our own literacy. To the extent that language is a coherence system that depends upon a boundary with the outside world, it is seen as integrated, and to the extent that it is relatively integrated, it is holistically and relatively as separate system. We must see language structure as a dialectic between several levels--what correspond to the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels of its patterning and structure-- on a basic "mimetic" level of its signs--there intrinsic-extrinsic functionality which is organically encoded in the brain. At this level we can speak of a continuum between implicitly and basic, prototypical constructs of meaning, a range involving embedding and elaboration of meaning, to explicit rules of "marking" and definition which govern the differential deployment of terms and the exceptions. The second level of syntax focuses upon a sentential and internal level of sentence construction which constructively mediates between the internal and external world, and which structure tends towards the disambiguation of meaning based upon a basic relational paradigm and basic transition rules which are implicitly encoded and which guide the possible transformations available to any particular language. This sentential construction of language is situated within ongoing external social contexts that are discursively mediated. The construction of language above the level of sentences is guided by functional considerations in the adaptation and coordination of the individual in relation to the individual's life world. This is the pragmatic level in which an adaptive equilibrium and linguistic coordination is sought between linguistic and meta-linguistic levels. A large part of linguistic, discursive process involves the elicitation of internalized relational frames of meaning, their "testing" in the world, and there reevaluation in relation to the world. We can speak of language creating an "inner voice" of consciousness that is self-monitoring in relation to external speech.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The social functionality of language has to do with the mediation and legitimation of change in the world. Language is a social phenomena, and cannot be properly understood outside of its context of speech production. The power of language has to do with its relationship to social change in the world--language, at the center of our construction of reality, functions to integrate reality and to legitimate its integration. Language is the glue of our construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In terms of the worldview problem we cannot clearly separate the centrality from language from culture and cognition. It is an interdependent system tied together upon several levels. We cannot imagine a world without language, nor can we think of a language without a world. The function of language is to serve as a glue in the symbolic construction of reality--it is the principle mechanism underlying human symbolization. Thus it encodes meaning in the mind, and precipitates meaning in the cultural world. It also refers back to itself. Language and its construction thus "triangulates" meaning in reality within the worldview problem, serving to situate it within its field of relative significance and salience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Linguistic acquisition is the basic design of anthropological acquisition. We must understand the evolutionary and cultural importance in the formation of language in terms of primary acquisition of a child. In this case, we might refer to a valid principle of "ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny"--in all cases basic linguistic acquisition remains the same, except that in original acquisition, the developed linguistic structures were not yet in place. As adult language acquisition is to a child's acquisition, so also are the child acquisition and creolization process in the formation of new languages similarly related to the original acquisition of language in humankind. The study of linguistic acquisition is fundamental in understanding the biological foundation for language and its development. We have been genetically preprogrammed for linguistic acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropology of psychology is implied within such a theory of language, and provides a ground for the understanding of some of the questions about language. From the standpoint of the anthropology of knowledge, we cannot have a psychology that is not necessarily a cultural and a social psychology. And question of cultural context is the most problematic, uncontrollable and complex for an empirical science of psychology. Such an anthropological theory of psychology is rooted in a theory of meaning, and, therefore of "Mind". Internal human psychology is governed by the relationship between the Mind and the brain, and the mind and the body. We have not a clear sense of what these relationships really are, of the psychological organization of the mind, or of the nature of Mind. I propose a theory of meaning that is encoded organically in the brain in terms of basic prelinguistic constructs of meaning that I refer to as "mememes." I refer to a mimetic system of the brain that is implicated in human memory organization. This is enmeshed in a systemic hierarchy of the Mind, and includes several systems arranged in an ordinate manner. The linguistic and mimetic systems are interdependent, such that a great deal of meaning depends upon its linguistic encoding in order to be precipitated in consciousness. Psychological experience is inherently phenomenological process and therefore temporaneity. It is thus subjective and biographical in character. The basic symbolic linguisticality of experience entails that there is a fundamental ambiguity and paradoxicality about it, since this linguisticality is itself phenomenological, and yet constitutes its own contradiction in its non-phenomenological constitution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard we can speak of the psychological construction of reality, as basic to the process of the internalization, subjective instantiation and embodiment, and the identification with culturally constructed forms. The systems function in an integrated fashion to produce a characteristically human sense of anthropological ego-identity--an identity that is critically situated in a world that is primarily socially and cultural constructed. Psychology is itself a theory about subjective human identity and identification, and individual and cultural psychology involve the process of subjective and strategic identification and "location" in world. Such theory of identity entails theories of attribution, ascription and attitude that are fundamental in our psychological construction of reality. Psychological identity is inherent in human meaning, in that we "identify" some elements as significant in relation to our experiences. Some basic theories about identity are fundamental symbolic systems--mythology, religion, ideology, worldview and common sense. These theories are essential in reinforcing the psycho-social integration of human experience. This form of identity is holistic, and wholly human. Such identity and its symbolic processes of identification are complex and have many consequences for the construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human identification as an anthropological process in the construction of reality goes on simultaneously and dynamically upon many levels of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In regard to the psychological construction of human reality, the anthropology of abnormality becomes an important consideration. Abnormality can be thought of as a critical discrepancy in the processes of identification, such that there results a symbolic "disintegration" of reality. We lack a non-relative and non-arbitrary theory of "normality" and "abnormality". We cannot properly speak of "normality" outside of a normative context. Yet we can speak relative abnormality from an implicitly functionalist perspective which deals with the relative integration of reality at all levels of anthropological process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is by comprehending "abnormality" that we can define the boundaries of what is anthropologically speaking to be regarded as "normal". We can properly only understand "abnormality" then in a relative context of alternative states of what is normal. The presence of alternative states of normality relativizes what is normal, such that it is the differential and transition between such states which becomes anthropologically significant as "abnormal". Transition and transformation is the main adaptive function of integration by which we understand normal as "healthy". The crossing of cultural boundaries that precipitates a condition of "culture shock" is a form of anthropological abnormality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We lack a systematic theory of group pathology and of cultural and social abnormality. We construe almost the entire phenomena of abnormal experience as psychologically based, and therefore we burden the individual almost entirely as the source of abnormal adaptation. We can infer that social pathology and cultural archosis involves states of transition and symbolic disintegration--what was referred to in relation to Vietnam as "desymbolization". Such disease can become institutionalized and can serve as a support mechanism for individuals disturbed by some form of pathology or personality disorder. We can speculate that social authoritarianism and authoritarian power structures are such instances of institutionalized pathology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a sense in the anthropological construction of reality that symbolic abnormality is a necessary "anti-structure" in the reinforcement of normal experience. Destruction of reality is to be seen as an antithetical and dialectical counterpart to the construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, we can redefine our conceptual construction of culture from the standpoint of symbolic "boundary" which is phenomenologically defined at all levels of our experience. Because it is phenomenologically experienced, we can bring the subjective self as central actor in culture, and biography as historical experience, back into focus in our conception of Culture. Boundaries are never fixed for very long--they define a complex cultural calculus that comes to rest at some central point of balance. Boundaries are flexible, permeable, and changeable. They are, in short constructed. Such cultural constructions are made in the context of a larger cultural continuum. We know ourselves in relation to differences and possibilities of others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must understand how basic cultural patternings and boundaries can become organically embedded and embodied in our experience in such a way as to be reflexive and construed unconsciously as an vital, inviolable part of our basic being in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the basic boundary underlying our conception of culture that entails our anthropological science of culture shall be a basically comparative approach that seeks the identity of difference in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">There is nothing human in the world that is not without contradiction.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Given a rehabilitation of the concept of culture as not a bounded, timeless circle, but as a boundary of phenomenological process, we are led to a revision of our sense of society as not a "structure" but as a process of "construction", a performance, a practice. Society becomes a field of human interrelationships which are symbolically mediated, and which are functionally structured in relation to the distribution between human beings and culturally defined resources. We are led to a basic form of social relativity in which our identity and our view of the world is largely defined by our social position within it. We attempt to manipulate and change our positions, but always within a larger field of unintended consequences. We are always constrained and situated within a larger context of a social field that is itself enmeshed in a dialectic between social construction and destruction. We construe our social identity and mediate our social relations in symbolic terms. We are also enmeshed in the dialectics of social identity, defined as status-role identity, and difference. Social relations are defined by the dialectics of reciprocity and relative asymmetry of relation.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The possibility of human perfection is rooted in human imperfection.</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Finally, we can conclude with a reconsideration of anthropology as humanity. It offers us a view of humanity that is neither inherently good or evil, but is capable of both. Our humanity is defined by our construction of reality, and the sense of identity that we bring to this construction. We are nevertheless constrained by a human dilemma of our basic moral being, intrinsic to the very nature of our human sentience that allows us to imagine the possibility of our own evil and of the suffering of others. Whatever we do in the world, we are implicitly acting under this moral umbrella constituted by our basic humanity--we cannot escape its imperative in our any of our actions, and it is in terms of these that we shall ultimately be judged. All construction of human reality incorporates basic contradictions in the integration of reality. Anthropology as humanity has the purpose of discovering these basic contradictions and their moral calculus in any given context or event. By it, we define the "reason for being" of our own identity, both personally and collectively.</p> <p> </p> </font> <p align="center"> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript1.2"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </SCRIPT> <NOSCRIPT><A HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER=0></A> </NOSCRIPT>  <p align="center">  </body>