We are often alone when in the company of others, and even when we are alone we are often in other's company.

"Human beingness" comes together somewhere between our inner selves and the social world--it combines inseparably many elements from both sides of reality. Maleness and femaleness represent an important cultural unity based upon biological, sexual complementariness. Male and female stand for two of the great moieties of humankind. To conceive of a world that is primarily one or the other is to image an impossible world without balance.

Through our pan-human cultural experience, we have come to embody these differences within ourselves, and in our cultural construction of reality, we have come to recreate in the world these differences that have become experientially embodied within us. Our embodiment of the world and the world's embodiment of us are an inevitable and inescapable aspect of our cultural condition.

If we strive to dichotomize and analytically separate these differences we sunder what was originally a unity and must then repress what once constituted an inherent part of ourselves and others. And if we must repress a part of ourselves, we end up projecting that part upon the world in an illicit fashion, and end up seeking it in the world in order to subconsciously restore the sense of balance and unity that was originally ours.

As mechanisms for such difference, we commonly employ complex cultural models, symbolically constituted and cognitively integrative of our realities, constructed upon the basis of corporate principles of difference and identity in the cultural construction of our reality. These symbolic models assist us in our daily interaction with others and help us to navigate through the phenomenological complexities of our everyday lives. They become internalized with a measure of "subjective inevitability" such that they seem natural, reflexive, instinctual, even if they are culturally constructed. Hence our cultural constructions become embodied in our behavior and our sense of being, even upon a biological level. They allow us to articulate and intermediate between important social differences in the world, and through identification with significant others, allow us to achieve an ontological and psycho-social sense of order and "atonement" with the world. It is on the basis of these models that we dichotomize our realities, and it is terms of these models that we strive to reunify reality.

These models, incorporated into both the world and our experience of the world, become institutionally "larger than life" such that they, in their social extensiveness, variability, complexity and criticality, come to have an important shaping and constraining force upon our existence, one that tends to remain in the background, invisible to our normal awareness. They constitute the cognitive, symbolic ground against which we are always configuring things of meaning and value in our world. These culturally constituted models come to live through us a much as we come to live through them.

As these models become altered within changing historical circumstances, so too does our identity and our fundamental outlook upon the world become changed. Basic models may be more enduring in form, but may also come to encompass a wide range of derivative variation. Individuals and groups are often preoccupied with stylistic elaboration and alteration of basic symbolic forms, both behaviorally, conversationally, and materially expressed in the world. People have an inherent fascination and interest in this reshaping and malleability of symbolic form. The cultural history of humankind can be written in general and specific terms of the shifting importance that different cultural models, and their symbolic constellations and behavioral and relational configurations, have held sway over different peoples in different periods and different periods of time.

Such models are not set in stone, nor are they biologically inevitable. They can shift in a semi-porous manner with the sands of time, and the symbolic elements constitutive of such configurations are regularly transmitted between people, from generation to generation, in the form of tradition, and from group to group in the form of acculturation. There is a wide range of variability and flexibility as well as malleability of form of such configurations, infinite in fact, and these come to constitute the stylistic components of any cultural configuration we may encounter in the world. Because they are socially embodied in our experience, in our behavior, in our being, and because they are also expressed through our reciprocal relationships with other human beings who also embody the same or similar or different symbolic configurations, the entire cultural framework of human systems achieves a certain stability, adaptability and endurance of form that has served humankind well in its survival, reproduction and growth.

No human being can stand or remain isolated outside the nexus of such a cultural configuration. When such configurations breakdown, the effects are noticeable in terms of psychological disorder and behavioral disorientation. They are also noticeable in terms of the functional breakdown of social relationships and sense of social order. To raise and rear a child outside of any such framework, however primitive by received modern standards, is to deny the possibility of complete humanness to such a person and to condemn that individual to a life of monster-hood. These are anthropological facts of human reality, of our human world, that are inescapable and undeniable. To embrace them is to celebrate our collective heritage and identity as human beings. To deny them is to deny the basis for our own existence in the world. The other becomes a kind of looking glass we hold up to see ourselves, and in doing so, we also gain a window upon the wider world.

03/07/05