A SIMPLE SUGGESTION

by Hugh M. Lewis

The theoretical emphasis upon the political economy of a World System has tended to downplay the dynamic role religion has played in the history of human civilization. Whenever you find empires, colonies and long distance trade networks, you will also find a Tower of Babel of monks, priests and good and bad people of every faith and persuasion. Furthermore, such emphasis has tended to stress the 'economic' side of the coin of a monolithic kind of capitalism and has tended to downplay the role which force and the power of its threat has played in the competition for foreign resources and markets as well as the possibility that in the course of human history, there may have been many kinds of markets and many heterogeneous kinds of little capitalisms. Finally, there is no clear way of telling whether religion has ever had a purely economic motivation or whether capitalism has not ever had a purely religious or ideological purpose.

One reason that the expression of power and force and the violence it begets may be highly symbolic in form and function is that by so framing it provides a means of indirect aggression, a way of shifting the struggle onto another, reified plane and of mythologically mediating conflict and resolving difference in a way which communicates and yet which minimizes the risk of reaction. Furthermore such symbolization may provide a mode of expression which helps to 'make sense' of realities not otherwise easily encodable into a more straightforward linguistic terms. In other words it may provide a means for marking what otherwise must remain mostly nonverbal, out of awareness, taken for granted, unmarked, indirectly constrained and socio psychologically repressed for purposes of order and control.

Analytically, it is convenient to distinguish between different levels of human process which are actually holistically integrated. We can separate organic processes of the biological organism in adaptation to its environment, from primary processes and secondary processes of socialization, identification and acquisition. Similarly, we can separate cultural and symbolic processes from what amount to corporate social processes of interaction and action. Then we have a more general and broader sense of what amounts to a transcultural process of human civilization, culture contact and acculturation. Historical change and the power to control change is articulated upon each of these different levels and things which happen upon one level are bound to reverberate upon other levels, though we must take care not to confuse one level with another in our analysis.

When we speak of human performance, upon which ever level, we must see this as part and parcel of the ongoing process of the production and reproduction of human reality. From the standpoint of an anthropology of knowledge, we might refer to this as the anthropological construction of reality. Human performance brings into play in human process the factors of human intentionality, power and the law of unintended consequences.

Chaos and disorder also have an anti-chaotic order and regularity to its processes. The expression of force, violence and disorder in human society is not necessarily entropic or completely random--rather it may normally contain certain, perhaps underdetermined informational and anti-entropic potencies or 'capacities' which may constrain and channel its expression in critical ways.

The instantiation of disorder has a certain expectability, if not predictability, which renders 'what happens when things fall about' a legitimate subject of scientific analysis and synthesis. We may speak of the accumulative potency for destructiveness residing in certain regular states or random intervals--the frequency or irregular periodicity of its occurrence should be expected to remain relatively stable over the long run or over the broad picture. We can estimate a murder rate of a certain percentage per year for a given society, based on past incidences or estimates. We can predict the minimal frequencies of mass murders, suicides and deviant acts of cannibalism. We can expect riots in cities to recur with an irregular tempo similar to that of volcanic eruptions.

Typically, chaos in relation to social structure and cultural order is expressed in certain 'anti-structural' ways--ritual reversal and anti-symbolism abound within an antithetical world which defines its power base 'upside down' in contradiction to the predominant pathos, ethos and nomos of its parent culture. We call these 'social movements' and see them as the unintended if inevitable consequence of social order and control. Most societies also incorporate into their ritual process certain rites which entail a marked form of anti-structural chaos--a temporary period of ritual reversal and communitas. Complex, open, stratified societies normally tolerate a given range of human deviance and difference and a number of sub-cultural groupings and orientations which may exist in contra distinction to the predominant orientation. Societies also maintain themselves in spite certain minimal level of the incidence of violence and aggression and the disorder concomitant with its expression or regularly sanctioned specialized, controlled forms of violence as in sporting activities or games.

Seen from this standpoint the expression of force and aggression carries its own kind of informational content--it will have a certain value which may be primarily symbolic in its manifestation. This value is defined within the structural limitations of the social order it resides within and in turn helps to define these limitations to social order. These may be certain dynamic, multi-determined potency states, capacities or structural thresholds or tolerances which are defined principally by the human capacities for power, to endure stress, suffer violence or channel aggression as well as to symbolically express such states.

We can predict that at any given level of human process, inequalities or disparities and boundaries separating people will tend to result in a schismogenic increase in the potential for violence. The greater the differentials the greater the potential, and these potencies can remain latently 'stored' for a relatively long time before it suddenly 'blows up'. Competition and conflict may viciously aggravate such potencies or it may serve as a control mechanism to dampen it. Such states may require a certain trigger or catalyst or the crossing of a minimum threshold. The release of such potential energy may have a net consequence of temporarily lowering the net level of energy within the system. It may also have the effect of temporarily reducing the overall criticality of the system to lower level than before.

We can find individual acts of violence and abuse or various impulse control disorders the symbolic expression upon a psychological level of this capacity for aggression, a capacity which in large measure may be defined or critically constrained by wider factors in the social environment or cultural context. The expression of adaptive, neurotic or psychotic disorders may be symptomatic of this state of internalized and repressed aggression. It is possible that many of the so called culture bound syndromes can be interpreted as just such symptomatic expressions of suffering or symbolic expressions of aggression which have been culturally defined and elaborated. Similarly we can fit incidences of hysteria, trance, crowd reaction, mass murder and acts of cannibalism into such a framework.

If we are to define a useful model of social pathology as social process or patterning which may be either individually adaptive but maladaptive for the group, or else adaptive for the group but individually maladaptive, or maladaptive for both individual and the group, then we need to find indices of distress by which to measure its consequences for both the individual and the group.

We can say that a wide variety stressors or stress inducing agents emerge or are eminent in human process which tend to cause a build up of tension upon one or more levels. Stress or tension, resulting from such multi-factorial agencies will be symptomized by a certain incidence of neurosis or behavioral deviance. Finally stress will be suddenly released as so much stored up potential energy, triggered by one or a number of stress releasers in the form of symbolic violence and aggression.

From this standpoint there may be internal order even in mental illness itself, a symbolic sense of meaning or coherence, which may in terms of the prevailing social order constitute what amounts to as a pattern of destructive interference--a form of informational recursion within the system which cancels out or destroys other critical information in the system.

It is in terms of the hidden order of disorder as this becomes symbolically expressed in human process that the following proposal for anthropological research is based. If knowledge is anthropologically constructed in certain ways, it may also anthropologically destruct in other ways.

This is a proposal for an explicitly comparative study between two complex contemporaneous social worlds--American and Malaysian--is proposed. Both are 'poly-ethnic' societies of sorts, yet both are patterned in very different ways--economically, politically, socially and religiously. Malaysia is the host of a number of anthropologically interesting phenomena--latah, amok, jungle fever, small group hysteria which are considered 'culture specific'. It is also an area where certain forms of ritual acts of aggression are regularly sanctioned--carrying the kavadi, walking on coals, trance and spirit possession. These recurrences are symbolically rich and always contextualized within a politically loaded social world. It is also a society where other forms of violence are sanctioned--public ridicule, summary capital punishment, whippings as well as violence by accident trauma, criminal deviance and psycho-pathology.

American society is also replete with its own forms of violence--the 'cult of rugged individualism' begets in the frustration of American individuality a high incidence of murder and abuse. Since World War 11 America has been one of the most aggressively militarized and militaristic nation on earth--defined within the rubric of 'Defense'. The media has commercialized and capitalized on the soft selling of violence. Sexual themes are normally censored, though violent scenes are normally left unconsidered. Guns and ammunition are easily available over the counter and there may well be an arsenal in every other household. American society is also host to a chronically high incidence of bizarre, psychopathic mass murderers and child molesters. Furthermore, we have our own culture specific syndrome--anorexia nervosa and bulimia.

The intention of this study is to conduct participant-observation and case histories in both societies as well as a variety of selected 'events' in situ and to analyze each from the standpoint of its entailments and articulation upon the different levels of human process--from the broadest level down to the personal level of the individual. The idiographic life history of each individual and each event will be unique and yet certain common themes may emerge in which help to define statistically significant segments of a cultural boundary of identity and difference between the two societies.

The discursive iteration of each event and each case history should reveal empirical evidence in terms which are observable and recordable, illustrative of a cultural code which contains both symbolic and linguistic components and which may reveal a central syntactic 'functional' patterning--the hypothesis being that each culture provides certain basic, paradigmatic symbolic frames or a variety of such sets of frames from which to choose, which articulate upon the different levels of human process and which serve to culturally constrain the expression and recounting of experiences and events and to help pattern human performances. Certain implicit 'transformational' rules, both conventionally derived, allow for the flexible reiteration and reinterpretation of such frames to fit a wide range of experiences and to help define the parameters of patterned possibility within each culture. The basic frames, the transformational rules and their resulting parameters are hypothetically available to statistical description and computational manipulation and can be rendered into a concise set of hypothetical 'postulates' about the culture system as a prescribed system for the mediation of power and the maintenance of order in its respective social setting--a mathematically defined model which can serve as both a heuristic tool for understanding the cultural patterning and as a simulation device for testing a range of possible variations.

There is a logical ordering of symbol systems, socially articulated and psychologically internalized, which remains the same for the native practicing voodoo upon an unfortunate victim or for a contemporary citizen of a modern society who in hate of another group blames ad persecutes its victims or between people who parade in military fashion on a makeshift airfield in hope of cargo landing from the heavens and contemporary people who race down the boulevard in an overpriced sports car. The internal logic of the human symbology remains upon the same functional level in either case whatever its content or what we may choose to believe.

If we are to step outside of the hermeneutic circle imposed by our own subjectivities, our own ideologies and even our own familiar frames of linguisticality and if we are to break the philosophical conundrum of a never ending reflexive estrangement of the self in the rendering the strange familiar, as well as the ethical dilemmas of our pervasive ideological involvement with power, then it is imperative that we define for ourselves an approach which will allow us to more objectively analyze our human relationship to power such that we may, with our sense of what is sound science, step beyond its purview and its ever widening spheres of control.

It is by finding the counter examples, by defining the deviant event and the abnormal instance that we can better define the parameters of what is 'normal' and 'usual' and therefore mostly beyond our critical awareness.

In specific ways, we can speak of the culturally patterned, socially sanctioned socialization and structuration of power, modes of indoctrination and mobilization and the symbolic expression of violence. It is important that we seek to better understand what the world integrating processes of modernization and mobilization of human resources means for our world. It is urgent that we seek to better understand anthropologically the implications of human power--the capacity to create, control, change and destroy--for the performance and reiteration of human process in the world and for its consequences for the human condition.