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<body> <script LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropologos</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Essays upon Anthropological Knowledge</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">For the Phoenix</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and the Liberation of Sen Ha</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">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> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I turn another page of my book</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">As I glance into your dark face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">At first I see my informant's funny look</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">With tears in the corners of yellow, bloodshot eyes</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I turn to the next page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And I look again into your face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">To find the lines of lost youth</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The wear and tear of age</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And the blemishes of another life's vicissitudes</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Beneath the rosey blush</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And the blue-green mascara</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Brushed feintly over epicantic folds</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">My informant no longer appears tearful</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And a smile soon breaks upon the swollen purple lips</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Covered by glossy red lipstick</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Revealing a mouthful of crooked white teeth</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I turn the next page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Then I look again into your face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And find dark eyes of sadness</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A puffy cheek that's been abused</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A bump upon a low forehead</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And scratch marks around the neck</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">My informant's face is hiding her troubles</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Behind an innocent smile</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Beneath the front of feline grace</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Yet another page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I once again peer into your face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And there I find beneath the feminine mask</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The tell-tale signs of advances you wish to make</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A silent question you are too afraid to ask</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Symptoms of suffering you cannot fake</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">There the lonely look of a lost child</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Longing for the warmth of a dead mother's embrace</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The image of a young adult grown suddenly old</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">From a new page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I see into my informant's face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A foreign past full of strife</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Without the full flowering of life</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In a world you've somehow missed</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And again the next page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I look again into my informant's face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And there discover a touch of my own humanness</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I peer into the puffy red eyes of my informant</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And find the small reflections of my own face</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">In the black orbs of a dark distorted world</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">As I turn another page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I look back into the eyes of my informant</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">That look back through a world of lies</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And there I finally find you looking into my world</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I come to the last page</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">I look one last time into my informant's eyes</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And there at last I find my friend</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Waiting patiently at the other end</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">For me to finally close my book</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Contents</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></b><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#one">Introduction <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Dialectics of the Anthropology of Anthropology</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twoback"></a><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#two">Part I <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Science</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#three">The CORNERSTONES of ANTROPOLOGY</a></p> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></b><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#four">SCIENCE and HUMAN REALITY <p ALIGN="CENTER">Toward an Authentic Anthropology of Science</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#five">SCIENCE and SENSE <p ALIGN="CENTER">Scientific Consensus and Anthropological Complexity</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#six">ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENTIFICITY and SCIENTISM <p ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHROPOLOGICAL FALLACY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Formal, Informal and Unusual</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#seven">ANTHROPOLOGOS <p ALIGN="CENTER">Science or Humanity?</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#eight">The POST-SYNDROME <p ALIGN="CENTER">Above and Beyond Anti-Anthropology</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#nine">The ART of ANTHROPOLOGY <p ALIGN="CENTER">Heretical Humanism in the Field</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#ten">Part II <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Knowledge</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentyfive">The ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION of REALITY</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#eleven">ANTHROPOGENESIS <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Origins of Humankind</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="elevenback"></a> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twelve">REDEFINING ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROCESS <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology at the Critical Juncture of Past and Present</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#thirteen">ETHNO-CULTURES <p ALIGN="CENTER">Emerging Anthropological Categories</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#fourteen">RELATIVITY, RELATIVISM, WORLDVIEW, MIND, BRAIN, CULTURE, the Structure of Complexity <p ALIGN="CENTER">and other Dangerous Anthropological Questions</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#fifteen">CULTURE and CHARACTER</a></p> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></b><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#sixteen">The OTHER in US <p ALIGN="CENTER">And Ourselves in Others</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#seventeen">HUMAN BEING and BECOMING</a></p> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <a NAME="eighteenback"></p> </a></font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#eighteen">Part III <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Humanity</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#nineteen">TRANSCULTURATION <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Historical Process of Human Civilization</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twenty">EARTHBOUNDNESS and ANTHROPOCENTRISM <p ALIGN="CENTER">Beyond the Bounds of Anthropologos</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentyone">WORLD CAPITALISM, CULTURAL ECONOMIES <p ALIGN="CENTER">Some Unasked Questions of Human History</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentytwo">HUMAN RIGHTS and RESPONSIBILITIES <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Development of Human Resources</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentythree">MISANTHROPY <p ALIGN="CENTER">And the Anthropology of Evil</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentyfour">PEACE and POWER <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropological Challenges of Our Future</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><a NAME="one"></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="1"> <p></font></b></a><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="1"> </p> </font><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Introduction</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Dialectics of the Anthropology of Anthropology</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology needs the world, whether or not the world needs anthropology.</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This collection of essays treats general topics of anthropology. The essay form presented in this collection is meant to be exploratory. Short in length, treating focally some central topic deemed important in general anthropological perspective, grouped thematically into larger sets, this essay form is particularly fitting to anthropological textuality and discourse, and deserves its own place among longer manuscripts, monographs, journal articles, and reviews. The essay comes out of the academic side of Anthropology--remains the primary form for representing of key readings in many anthropology seminars, embedded as these usually have been within larger texts, and it would not be too far-fetched to claim that many important anthropological insights began within a stack of student essays upon professors' desks.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These essays are meant to be experimental and creative. If they violate certain cannons of literary style or certain codes of professional discourse, they do so with the deliberate intention of bringing into question the modern, immediate necessicity of many of our literary or profession-bound prescriptions. In written style and form of presentation, they are meant to be novel and not just a stagnant rehash of interminable coursework or of the general anthropological literature borrowed off the shelves of some university library.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">They were written during a time when anthropology as an academic institution; has been passing through some rather fundamental and far-reaching transitions. The larger socio-political environment has been increasingly hostile to anthropology. Underemployment, long term joblessness, and the attendant social anomie, have become an expected part of the average student anthropologists' career trajectory. The anthropologist's world itself has been radically changing, and it sometimes seems as if little room remains, either at home or abroad, for the academic creature called the anthropologist.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I would say that anthropology is indeed a science, a human science, one with such vigor that it does not need to harness itself to any narrow positivistic or naturalistic framework. If anthropology suffers in the world today, it does so alongside a suffering world. If anthropology falls short of funds and recognition in the academic ranks, then its practitioners have only themselves to blame--the pursuit of their own narrowly defined professional involvements at the expense of any larger good of the anthropological community. It has always been up to anthropologists, both personally and professionally as a community of scholars and scientists, to provide a place for themselves in the world whether the U.S. government offers them funding or not.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The principle dilemma confronting anthropologists today is to come to terms with, both theoretically and methodologically, a changed and rapidly changing world, without selling itself out as a change-agent of the world, and from a more philosophical perspective, to learn better how to deal with the general problem of change in the World. If anthropologists fail to change with the world, the world will surely go on changing without anthropologists.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a paradox that though the place of the anthropologist in the world has been changing and in many ways diminishing, the real need for a more realistic anthropological perspective in a world facing its greatest historical dilemmas and problems centrally tied to global human overpopulation has only increased. The world is rapidly growing to need more anthropology, whether it needs its anthropologists or not.</p> <p> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology is an on-going, professionally circumscribed dialectic about the science of human reality. It had its birth in the contact with alien peoples and their strange lifeways. Like all such kinds of contact between different peoples, it tended to erode and eventually undermine any monolithic, universal charter for our view of how we see our selves and others in the world in relation to us. Contact brought about the need to understand basic differences and different identities. Such contact was the cross-cultural equivalent of a major paradigm shift--for the quirks and oddities encountered in the world could no longer be neatly fit within a Eurocentric version of the world, and still lay claim to the title of "empirical science." As usual, stereotypes, labels and patent falsehoods which commonly accompany any chauvinistic, ethnocentric point of view hide more than they reveal, and so soon become no longer adequate means by which too realistically comprehend our world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectic of Anthropology continues today, much better informed, more specialized and compartmentalized than before, and yet one in which the very intention of the inquiry is, implicitly and often unwittingly, to undermine the basis for its own legitimacy. For contact is always a double-edged sword, no sooner do we learn to interpret and accommodate human differences within our world-view, then the very foundations of that world view come crashing down around us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The object of anthropology as science has always been to bring into critical focus the very foundations of its own premises--to come into contact with the "strange," to render the strange "familiar" through a process of reinterpretation, and in the process to reflexively make the familiar "strange," and to excoriate and elminate the hidden ethnocentrisms and biased presumptions in which its theory and praxis is cast.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As the dialectic continues, between what one anthropologist has referred to as the collectivizing orientation of the "invention" of Culture and the "relativizing" counter-process of the "discovery" of cultures, anthropology has been building a kind of trans-cultural, pan-human bridge between the gulfs separating peoples and their realities and relativities. Ideally, this bridge provides a kind of value-free, neutral ground upon which differences can be mediated, on which different peoples, separated by time, place and social difference, can meet peacefully, and equally, on common ground.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have built our bridges without recognizing them for what they really are--and we have always been quite ready to burn them down at the first sign of trouble. But the work of bridging continues, as the dialectic unwinds itself in increasingly complex convolutions, and know it or not, greater gulfs separating people have no been spanned in the name of anthropological science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology's claim to science rests in its strong, broad-based emphasis upon empirical observation. Anthropology as an empirical science will remain long after all the theoretical castles have been razed. It does not matter so much what form we choose to encase our experience in. It is the anthropological experience itself that will remain of greatest importance, whatever theoretical script it may have been conceived and written in. From the standpoint of anthropology as an empirical science, one good descriptive metaphor is worth a thousand words of definitive explanation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A strong emphasis upon empirical observation would seem to make anthropology primarily an inductive discipline, and the word "observation" would tend to deemphasize the subjective component of the process of participation. But humans can intuitively observe with their feelings and feel with their observations, and feelings may be no less empirically relevant than observations. Furthermore, anthropology claims a broader-based view of science as a discipline than what our philosophical models of inductive and deductive theory allows for. We may say instead that the dialectic of anthropology remains essentially abductive, but in a self-realizing, apperceptive and critical way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Before we delve more deeply into the dialectics of anthropological discourse, it is important to note that the terms of the dialectic are not so important as the dialectical process itself. We can engage in an on-going question and answer dialogue about the nature of human reality, all the while keeping in mind the fact of the dialectic itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology as science holds as its principle object the description and explanation of human reality. Enhanced realism is the main point of anthropological inquiry. Such realism brings with it its own Pandora's box and its own price tag. We must be willing to regard our selves and others in the world without the help of our sacred illusions, without the deceptive veil of our ideological beliefs or our most fundamental mythoi. Some would say that the price to be paid is the price of reality itself--perhaps too great of a paradox for mere human mortals. We must walk among the mountains of gods while remaining tethered to the common human ground of our own being. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#oneback">back</a></p> <p><a NAME="two"></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"></font></b></a></p> <a NAME="three"> <p>  <hr> <p></a></p> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The CORNERSTONES of ANTHROPOLOGY</p> </font></b> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology is not constructed of cards upon clouds.</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological knowledge is characterized by four foundational principles--holism, comparativism, relativism and empiricism. Whatever else anthropology may or may not be, it can never escape the consequences of any of these four concepts and still remain genuine anthropological science. These are implicit presuppositions of all anthropological method and theory, and they reflect together a general attitude and approach to human reality that is characteristically anthropological.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It nevertheless remains true that the four precepts stand in uneasy relation, and in frequent oppostion, to one another. A comparative approach often demands an analytical orientation that may defy the attempt at holistic comprehension, while the attempt at holism sometimes runs counter to empirical experience. Relativism and comparativism have always been cast in dialectical opposition to one another, even though each implies and necessitates the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">No matter how native an anthropologist may become in the process of his learning about another culture, the anthropologist nevertheless continues to compare the foreign culture with his own, even if on an unconscious level or in a tacit manner without her/his awareness of it. Comparison is, on a basic, unmarked level, part and parcel of all ethnography--even the most emically contrived and subjectively delivered. Comparativism is inherent in the structural relationship between the anthropologist as observer and the "native" as observed. It is by comparison that anthropological understanding is achieved, and without it there could be no systematic construction of a science of human differences and idenitities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Paradoxically, comparativism requires relativism--comparison cannot be realistic or successful without shedding our own ethnocentric biases that preclude our attempt to understand others. Relativism allows us to embrace other realities in such a way as to make the possibility of comparison, and by implication, translation, more of a realistic likelihood.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a similar way, holism stands in contrast to comparativism and is required as well by relativism. Relativism entails that the relationships prevailing in a situation are somehow intermeshed in a way that cannot be easily separated. We speak of cultural integration of different institutions, practices and beliefs and see that change in one area may result in reverberations in many other areas. Similarly, we seek explanation for a particular cultural phenomenon not in terms of a single proximate cause, but in terms rather of a background of conditioning interrelationships which make the phenomena a possibility in the first place.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A strong emphasis upon empiricism entails that holism cannot be a purely rational affair of eidectic conceptual structures removed from the source of their experience in reality. We can generalize about basic structures of human action or social behavior based upon a handful of assorted examples, but when we hypothesis at a higher level of generality we cannot be too overly confident that our limited samples are enough, or are representative of the universal pool of experience. It is this single feature which keeps anthropology a science tethered closely to the ground.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A strong and strict empiricism has been one of the unacknowledged cornerstones of scientific anthropology's theory and method. Whether we are noting etic blinks or understanding emic winks, it is the act of encoding experience, a first-hand encounter with the world, and the primary weighting of this source of infomation over all others, which is the hallmark of anthropological research and which makes ethnography scientific. Our own theoretical or operational rationale does not matter so much, whether we are materialists or idealists, as does the consideration that we are to some extent, in some imperfect manner, engaged in the world, involved with it, seeking to learn about it first-hand.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Perhaps this empiricism has been so obvious in anthropology that its implications have mostly been taken for granted. Almost everyone would agree on the value of doing sound empirical research, although many would disagree on exactly what constitutes sound empirical research. And it does not matter what kind of anthropologist, all would hold as of primary importance first-hand observation in anthropological research.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To call anthropology an empirical science is not to claim that it is necessarily inductivist versus deductivist, or that it has its origins in the empiricist philosophers. It is this primary valuation of empiricism that anthropology as a science shares with all other genuine sciences. Anthropology, like any other science, must derive its knowledge and understanding from the world first and foremost.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The empiricism of anthropology and of science in general is largely an epistemological and an ontological proposition about reality and how we can know the world. It holds scientific knowledge to be essentially presentationalist, as opposed to representationalist, and that all such knowledge is derived primarily from the perceptual experience with the world which is independent of our awareness, separate from our own subjectivity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such a claim does not deny the fact of subsequent distortion of knowlegde, or the secondary bias and reinterpretation of experience by representationalist structures of the mind, or that our experience of the world, even in its primary form, is constrained in critical ways by the limitations of our senses and the prejudices of our awareness. But the possibility remains of a relatively unbiased, "objective" view of reality which it is science's purpose to achieve, and even though this view itself might be from a theoretical point of view quite representationalist and derivative, it is held to remain fundamentally rooted to the basic percepts of common human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This brings to bear another significant point about the empirical basis of anthropology--that is that all such basic knowledge must be "public" knowledge--open to view and subject to multiple evaluations and the critical process. It must be communicated, or at least communicable, and it must be shared, or capable of being shared, between many different people. It cannot be privileged knowledge available to only a select group of people--all women, only to Americans, black only--nor can it be secret or specialized knowledge privy only to an insider's access.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is precisely because the phenomenon that it reports upon are open to public scrutiny, that such knowledge can claim the possibility of being presentationally real and empirical. It must also be the case that all such knowledge must remain open to evaluation and scrutiny.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This brings to bear a basic paradox of the inductive character of science as an empirical enterprise--no matter how many white swans we may count, we can never be finally satisfied that the next swan will also be white. In such an inductively based enterprise, we can never take the last logical leap of faith in our ascent from the particulars to the general. Whereas deductive approaches can fall back upon the power of logic, the best science can hope to do is to provide a statistical measure of relative certainty. But the virtue of this is that our deductive rationality is liable to fail us where and when our statistical methodology will not.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Much lip service has been paid to the hypothetico-deductive method, especially in the advancement of the "natural sciences," without recognizing that the whole hypothetico-deductive approach must still rest upon an empirical substrate in science. The first and last referents of any hypothetico-deductive approach must remain empirical, or empirically derived, if the approach is to have any broader scientific relevancy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Just as the empirical spirit and nature of science has so often been over looked, so also has the basic instrumentality of science and the role of scientific instrumentality in the advance of scientific knowledge been largely left implicit and taken for granted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By the instrumentality of science is meant something different than "scientific instrumentality"--though "instrumentality" for both carries a larger set of connotations which describes a general orientation and overall approach within science. The instrumentality of science refers to its practical orientation and emphasis upon real, measurable results. If it works then its probably scientific. According to Thomas Kuhn, the measure of scientific advance and of paradigmatic unity for a field is its achieved progress written in terms of its past track record. But in this we must separate the idea of an empirically based instrumentality from the kind of ideological instrumentality which Gadamer treats and which underlies such sciences as capitalist or marxist economics--the self-fulfilling prophecy of historical scientific demonstration after the fact. The instrumentality of science must be demonstrated in a field of counter-factuals--of contenders that rise to discredit and disclaim a theory. In other words any theory must successfully compete against other alternative contenders. Kuhn also refers to the "puzzle-solving" character of the scientific enterprise. The instrumentality of a science is its ability to successfully solve the problems which are defined by the scientific community as relevant, and these solutions are governed by a kind of selective regime in which there tends to be a more "correct" solution, which solves more "problems" or more sides to a problem, than other contenders. The correctness of such solutions can only be seen as "limited case" solutions which exist temporarily within the purview of the current or predominant scientific paradigm. New information encountered upon the margins of the paradigm accumulates to undermine the correctness of the current received scientific explanations, and open the field for yet another round of competition and debate. The selection of a newer theory will rest upon its demonstrated "instrumentality" in being able to account for and accomodate the newer exceptions to the older paradigm. The other side of the paradigmatic coin is the instrumentality of received, tried and true "shared exemplars"--those archetypical test cases upon which a particular theory rests as a demonstration. From a theoretical point of view, there is nothing which is prototypically or monolithic about a "shared exemplar"--it is rather a polythetic set of examples or models which serve as heuristically powerful and productive orienting models for subsequent scientific research. One common characteristic of shared exemplars seems to be their heuristic productivity in generating a host of derivative corollaries, spinoffs, questions and solutions to minor problems which becomes part of the footwork of a subsequent generation of "normal scientists".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The idea of shared exemplars brings into focus the notion of scientific instrumentality. New ideas, discoveries, inventions and techniques allow us to see things in new ways, and to rethink old problems. Often new advances must await the development or refinement of new means for seeing or observing reality at a distance. The indirect observation and measurement of discrete phenomena, beyond the bounds of normal human-sized perception, has had to await the development of techniques and technologies which have pushed back the frontier of our perceptuality. Exceptions our counterevidence which accumulates upon the periphery of our predominant paradigm often does so because of the detailed refinement of such scientific instrumentalities, and the collapse of the old paradigm and the possibility for a new way of seeing reality is made possible because of the same refinements in scientific instrumentalities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The instrumentality of science and scientific instrumentality must be seen as going hand in hand in the achievement of progress in science, and are thus two sides of the same scientific coin of "instrumentality" in the general sense of the kind of practical, pragmatic, common sense, result-oriented, technical habits of the "scientific mentality." Put another way, what works in science is what proves to be "Instrumental" in the advancement and production of scientific knowledge--that which is not scientifically instrumental is usually regarded merely as "trivial."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It has been this instrumentality of science that has guaranteed that its practitioners must be something more than ivory tower armchair philosophers of the world. It placed a premium upon empirical demonstration and upon the heuristic productivity of knowledge. In this regard, we cannot clearly separate the philosophy, or the theory, or ideology of science, from its praxis or its practical side.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The perennial quest for universals underlying human culture has been one of the primary theoretical concerns of anthropological science. Different kinds of universals have been proposed, some a little less arbitrary than other kinds. But no completely satisfactory set or theory of such universals has yet been discovered or defined in spite of decades of cross-cultural research, and for many the search, perhaps misled from the very beginning, has been all but abandoned.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And yet there remains something intuitively and hauntingly intriguing and reasonable about the concept of human universals--something strong and stable upon which we could build our science of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The notion of universals comes squarely up against the paradoxes of cultural relativism, and "anthropological science" as a quest for universals and anthropology as a relativistic orientation toward humanity constitutes a fundamental contradiction within anthropology. On one hand, we are supposed to seek an insider's perspective in the appreciation of foreign world views and values with the understanding that there may be no set of universally shared values or world-views free of cultural bias. On the other hand we are told to find a common language of translation, a universal language of anthropologese, which will allow us to adequately reinterpret the cultural codes of any point and place into our own language of choice, without loosing anything which may be of substantive, indeed vital, importance. As anthropologists, we are supposed to be able to entertain some privileged point of view, a "bird's-eye view," of the bottom line in human reality. Inherent to the very act of crossing critical cultural boundaries to do long-term participant-observation is the belief that something of scientific value, something general if not partially universal, can be carried away from the experience. And yet the more the field experiences accumulate, the more aware we are made of all the exceptions to the general rules which once so monolithically framed our science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we are to look for, and eventually find, human universals, then we must have some reasonable, if not quite realistic notion, of what it is we should be looking for and what we may or may not actually find.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we start with a few basics, like language is a human universal, or likewise the human capacity for culture, its acquisition, elaboration, development and transmission, is sort of another human universal, the most we seem to have accomplished is to emphasize the self-evident. Similarly, we can stake a claim to certain universal cognitive structures or even something as indeterminant as "rationality", we do not move much further in the direction of explaining the foundation of human reality except to place a priority of mind over matter. Of course, humankind is also a symboling species, as well as a toolmaking and tool-using. And humankind everywhere has long had the same basic sets of needs--nutrition, sexual reproduction (some would even add to things like "love, societas, even intellectual stimulation to the list). Humans share a similar basic range of emotions, aggression, and prejudice. And yet, if we tally the list, what kind of scientific formula are we finally left with.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First we can safely say that there is no such thing as an exceptionless universal. For every principle we come up with, some exception to the rule, can be found. This does not disqualify the universal principle in anyway, but only sets it within a reasonable scope of a bounded, and therefore scientific, generality. If we presume things to be universally, exceptionlessly true, then we are setting it beyond the purview of our scientific control.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Not being an exceptionless universal, does not thereby make it any less valuable to anthropology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another idealist point of view which sees the concept of culture as the metaphor of our own making which we apply to certain kinds or qualities of human phenomena on the basis of certain tacit presuppositions of cultural difference and identity. Culture does not exist out there somewhere so much as it is our own invention, itself a part of a certain anthropological theory about human reality, a conceptual category into which we fit certain varietes of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On one hand, universals cannot be so empirically self-evident as to beg the obvious--all human have two hands, so many teeth, so many bones, etc. On the other hand, universals cannot be so rationalistically self-defining as to be tautological--culture are the things that compose culture, the things that compose culture are universal--for instance the definition of universals as the needs or institutions which compose culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What we are searching for in terms of universals are bridging, or mediating principles or theories, which link the concrete of empirical phenomena with the abstractions of our own definitions. We are looking for such "middle-range" theories that will serve as adequate, broad-based predictors of certain social phenomena. We are not talking about the prediction of discrete events so much as probabilistic tendencies of co-occurrence. Rather than prediction in the normal scientific sense of the term, we should perhaps be referring to estimation of likelihood. Similarly, the kind or level of control that we seek in the verification of our predictions does not have the precision or laboratory-like insulation from extraneous or unknown variables. The kind of control we seek is rather more one of relative distance, defined historically, geographically, culturally or socially. When we speak of an island colony or of a peasant village as a kind of natural laboratory, we have in mind a pristine state of affairs which exists in an a historical vacuum, perfectly sealed off from outside contact.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Universals must address some abstract principle which can be held to sufficiently account for a set or specified range of cultural phenomena, regardless of the circumstances or extraneous influences which may result in a great degree of variability in the expression of that phenomena. Furthermore, universals must be able to account for general directions, and unfolding patterns of change. Such principles must be able to explain not only how a given kind of change has occurred, but, from a social and historical perspective, why that change occurred.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, we must distinguish for analytical purposes different levels at which our theory must account for different ranges of experience. One level is that of the existential life-world of the individual, the ego-centered and ego-derived plethora of phenomenological experience including social relationships, patterns of interaction, characteristics of individual personality, as well as the interior psychological realm of the individual. Another level is that of the social institution seen as some kind of corporate organismic whole, somehow above and beyond the life experiences of any one individual. Finally, we must recognize a cross-cultural, trans-historical level beyond the bounds of any corporate organization of people, and encompassing effectively humankind in its entirety.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see that universals operating at one level of experience and abstraction, may not articulate upon another level. And yet, if we see human reality as more or less integrated, then we must approach the problem of the articulation of universal theory upon different levels of experience. <a NAME="four"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">2</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">SCIENCE and HUMAN REALITY</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Toward an Authentic Anthropology of Science</p> </b> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The informant told the Anthropologist, "it just ain't so."</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And so the Anthropologist, from a careful translation of the notes, told the class, "It just isn't necessarily so."</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And then a student, sitting in the back of the classroom, went home on vacation to report to her parents--"You know, my anthropology professor said that it's not necessarily just so."</p> </font></b><font FACE="Brush Script MT" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font>Human reality always presents itself as is, full blown. In fact, it can be argued that all reality is human reality, that there can be no demonstrable reality outside of our human experience of it, and thus all reality is mediated and represented by our channels of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus, human reality is universal and in the primacy of its experience, unitary and undifferentiated. It is the whole, and we cannot ever step beyond its boundaries or outside of our own experience of it. In this sense, human reality is like a cosmic egg, something that is self-contained, integral, unbroken, and complete. Logically we cannot escape this dilemma. Empirically, it constitutes the somewhat paradoxical ground of our anthropological science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We regularly employ our anthropological science to analytically separate human reality into its different parts, in order to better reveal the internal dimensions and relations between its pieces. In linguistics, we use analytical categories like syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in order to usefully separate and define what seem to be important dimensions of our language structure, though in actuality our everyday speech always has these categories naturally synthesized into a single, coherent, holistic patterning. Similarly, students of culture conventionally carve up the cultural universe into its different aspects, traits, or students of society into its roles, institutions, relations and identities, though our experience of culture and social life always presents itself in a relatively undifferentiated phenomenological web of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our science is depends methodologically upon such analysis that seeks to separate the parts out and see how they are interrelated to form the whole. The pattern of organization by which the parts interrelated to constitute the life of the whole is what scientistists refer to as the underlying structure. They seek to capture the principles of this underlying organizational structure, and its processes of functioning, change and development, as a set of general propositional statements which can then be applied experiementally to other, similar kinds of entities. It is on the basis of these inductively derived principles that science proposes hypothetical theories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But our science is not just analytical in attempting to uncover the general patterning and process between the parts in the constitution of the whole. It becomes also necessarily synthetic in attempting to put back together the many parts into a new arrangement which is effective and vital or relevant in some way. Wresting out from the local patterning the general principles underlying the structure of the whole, science then moves on to apply those very principles in ways which are useful, in ways which lead to greater experimental understanding over the processes and patternings which result.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever the criticism of Thomas Kuhn's seminal work, <u>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</u> (1966) the strength and suggestiveness of its implications and conclusions for the social production and praxis of 'normal' science remains to be fully reckoned with. Usually missing from critiques of his work are several important points that he makes about the structure of scientific praxis. These are:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. Normal science is oriented towards rather specific .i.puzzle-solving; problems which have definite, correct solutions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. The social reproduction of science is based upon the training, orientation and transmission of central, important 'shared exemplars' which provide the basis for community organization, and which are both theoretically efficacious and methodologically heuristic. The concept of 'shared Exemplars' as it is used is inherently ambiguous, suggesting more than one possible meaning and having more than one set of implications for what constitutes a 'paradigm' of science, but it carries the overall suggestion of being a 'Gestalt' or general pattern or model about which a science defines itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. Kuhn makes a case for a kind of relativity of knowledge which he holds to be embedded experientially at the level of perception itself, and which becomes encoded by the idiom of language that a theoretical orientation, and its set of Gestalts, entail. The community of scientists become divided into separate camps each speaking in its own idiom and each having its own way of seeing the world which is incommensurate with the other. An attempt is made to interpret or translate the new idiom in terms of the old, but such attempts are only partially successful and ultimately fail. What occurs is a '.i.Gestalt shift;' as the new idiom, embedded as it is in a new gestalt organization, is better able to account for deviant phenomena which the old idiom proved unable to solve.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">6. The new theory will successfully account not only for the annomalous phenomena which the old theory could not successful account for, but will also successfully incoporate the old theory in a parsimonious way as a 'limited case model.' The new theory can account for all the phenomena covered by the old theory, but the old theory cannot likewise account for the anomalous phenomena upon which the new theory is based.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. Kuhn's principle of 'achieved' rather than immanent progress in the development of science is central to his notion of paradigmatic revolutions. Achieved progress is only measurable in hindsight indexed by the improved resolution of the new Gestalt to better account for natural phenomena and to resolve the puzzles which science poses.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Since the publication of this seminal work in the history and philosophy of science, a great deal of debate has been sparked in the social sciences over their "paradigmatic" status and over the general applicability of this model, not only to the natural sciences, but to the social sciences as well. Kuhn himself alludes to the pre-paradigmatic status of the social sciences that have not yet coalesced under the aegis of a single ground, a foundational, textbook theory which all members of the community are agreed upon. According to Kuhn, the mark of the pre-paradigmatic period of a science is the divisive nature of its community, unable to come to terms about the basic, foundational issues of the field. It is as if the social sciences, sociology, psychology or anthropology, are yet awaiting its own general Copernican, Newtonian or Darwinian theory. Because such a pre-paradigmatic science cannot coalesce upon a shared foundation, it cannot settle into a normal paradigmatic period of puzzle-solving activity which will lead to the uncovering of anomalous phenomena not satisfactorially amenable to the normal Gestalt.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is likely that if the social sciences are to be considered as yet "pre-paradigmatic," then its ability to come to rest upon a common ground will not be determined by competitive exclusion in the academic market place, or by the politicking of departmental and subdisciplinary factions who promote their own agenda at the expense of other possible orientations. The ability of social sciences to become scientifically paradigmatic will also not be achieved by the application of fundamentally philosophical or ideological principles and programs which presuppose some kind of "covering law model" which is borrowed from a half-baked philosophy of science. The philosophy of science is not scientific production or praxis, and the criterion that determines the value of the former are not the basis of the validity for the latter. Nor will the paradigmatic unity of the social sciences be achieved by the somewhat analogical adoption of general theoretical models borrowed from other scientific disciplines, whether this is Evolutionary Biology, Information Theory or Ecology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If and when the social sciences achieve paradigmatic progress, then it will be on the basis of general theoretical models which are derived from the phenomenal patternings of the field of study itself, and its success or failure will be measured by its ability to account for a diverse range of phenomenon in a relatively axiomatic, parsimonious way, and to heuristically solve the puzzles that the science can then pose on the basis of its model. In other words, it is likely that the orienting theory which will render the social sciences fully paradigmatic is most likely to be specific to the field of inquiry itself, and not derived on the basis of some other model of another field of inquiry. Just as Newtonian physics could not have predicated or predicted Darwinian Evolution, it is likely that a paradigm creating theory of the Social Sciences will not be predicated upon a revised model of Darwinian Evolution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Similarly, the theoretical problematics of forging a foundational, paradigm theory for the social sciences cannot be reduced to a language problem which then demands etic/emic distinctions, positivistic equivalences between the word and the thing, the signifier and the signified, or a fact-based, logically ordered system of 'operationalization.' Rather, it is likely that greater idiomatic coherence of the jargon of the field will be the result, and not the principle causal factor for, the paradigmatic unification of the field. The theory itself will provide the terminological, and hence perceptual and conceptual coherence, which such paradigmatic unity seems to require.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Critics of the application of the paradigm model to the social sciences emphasis the intrinsically non-paradigmatic character of the social sciences versus the natural sciences. This distinction follows the traditional divide between the sciences and the humanities. If the social sciences are so called, rather than identifying themselves with the humanities, then has been an attempt to position itself closer to the sciences that have more prestige value and more success in the modern world than the humanities, and is likely a reflection of the inherent, underlying status ambiguity of the social sciences that seem to be interpositionally situated between the Sciences and the humanities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These more humanistically oriented scholars emphasize the distinction between "Naturwissenschaften" on the one hand and "Geisteswissenschaften" on the other. Scientific positivism fails in the social sciences because it fails to adequately take into account its own hermeneutic horizons of its intersubjective language. In the social sciences humankind is both its own subject and object of inquiry. The cosmographical patterning of human and social phenomena in the social science fields are held to be so complex and multiply determined that single, simple models are bound to be inadequate, that no final covering law model can be nonideologically invoked, and any unifying theory accounting for such a wide range and complexity of relations is bound to be metaphysical rather than strictly scientific, and hence the provenience of philosophy rather than general science. Social science, rather than being strictly 'paradigmatic' as with the physical sciences, is rather socially constructed science. The best examples of the social construction of the social sciences can be found in the fields of economics which, whether in the guise of classical economics or of Marxist political economy, makes the claim of being the most 'objective' of the social sciences, and yet completely fail to step beyond the purview of its own hermeneutical horizon or ideologically self-serving circle.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Radical critics of the social sciences reject the idea of a science of human social reality altogether, and would identify the social sciences as straying from the fold of the traditional humanities. According to this vision of social sciences, the field is text-producing and discourse centered, but is inherently non-progressive. If there is any advancement of social science theory at all, then it is on the basis of a kind of critical triangulation of insights provided by the enumeration of multifaceted insights. The conduct of the social sciences is as much an aesthetic exercise for its own sake as it is a 'knowledge-producing' field of inquiry, done for the insights it provides into human reality than for any final solution to its problematics. The number of alternative theories explaining any given patterning in human reality is potentially boundless, and ultimately, there are no non-subjective criteria for determining which theory is better or more valid than another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A more sophisticated, sensitive and possibly more realistic position neither accepts or rejects either extreme out of hand. While it acknowledges the more socially contrived and constructive nature of knowledge in the social sciences, a thesis which Kuhnian paradigmatics actually extends to the natural sciences, it also does not completely reject the possibility or plausibility of some kind of paradigmatic basis of unity for the social sciences, a unity which is of necessity grounded in the empiricism, however limited, and in the anti-ethnocentrism, or non-ideological-status, however culturally constrained, of these fields. Such a compromise position sees the social sciences as occupying a "Third Culture" the region of which is between the sciences and the humanities. Its inherently ambiguous inter-positionality is not a bane, but a boon to the social sciences, and is a reflection of its distinctive character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not satisfying to view the social sciences as either a strict science nor as a stray from the humanities. From this viewpoint, the social sciences are likely to be "quasi-paradigmatic" rather than pre-paradigmatic or un-paradigmatic. An alternative, rather eclectic view is that the social sciences are "poly-paradigmatic" and encompass of diverse variety of sub-disciplinary paradigms which are not so much competing for the same region of mind as they are mutually constitutive of this region. A textbook like unity of the sub-disciplines is possible, but this unity is likely to be superficial, partial and incompletely satisfying. The proto-paradigm that emerges is likely to be a composite mosaic, a collage of perspectives, rather than a single, integrated point of view that subsumes other points of view. The unity achieved will not be the puzzle solving multiplication of uniformity implied by a paradigmatic prescription, but rather a kind of paradox resolving organization of diversity that manages to juggle and synthetically incorporate a rather disparate set of points of view. The kind of patterning described by this quasi-paradigmatic unification of the social sciences constitutes a complex kind of social dialectics whose patterning and progress is emergent and elaborating. Old theories and frameworks fall by the wayside as inadequate or fundamentally erroneous, followed by new directions of movement and interest which in turn eventually grow old and no longer satisfying. Old ideas and themes often become revitalized in a new way, free of the implicit presumptions and biased entailments of their previous, outmoded guise. New orientations are never complete or final, and always have their own tacit biases and hidden weaknesses, but constitute partial improvements over older, outmoded frameworks. In a more gradual and less precise way, a foundational structure for social sciences is laid.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This "Third Culture" orientation for the social sciences has several corollary implications. First, it is likely that both the natural sciences and the purer humanities also are dialectical in a similar way and the social paradigmatic structure of scientific revolutions explicated by Kuhn are actually the dialectical patterning of the sciences. What separates the sciences from the humanities, and the social sciences from either, are not the paradigmatic dialectics itself, so much as the foundational possibilities which such dialectics entail for inherently different domains of knowledge, the structural design of the dialectics varies between these basic disciplinary orientations, and thus result in different generic possibilities of model construction for each, and the relational criteria integrating ideas in each of the areas of inquiry. Hence a skyscraper will not stand on a foundation of earth, and a foundation of reinforced concrete will crack beneath a mountain of sand and stone. Science constructs skyscrapers, and the humanities make mountains out of molehills.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectics of inquiry and discourse falls upon a continuum ranging between polar extremes based upon the pattern-recognition nature of the knowledge of a discipline and the structure of incorporation of ideas by other ideas. In the pure sciences, new gestalts incorporate and adequately account for old gestalts in a way that is relatively complete and correct. In the humanities, new points of view fail at best only partially incorporate older ideas, but rather tend to displace these ideas. Progress is rather an additive and cumulative process of accretion of new ideas to old, where as in the sciences progress is measured by the incorporation of old ideas by new ones, and by the discounting of erroneous ideas. In the social sciences, incorporation takes place, but never so completely as with the harder sciences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in the shared ground between the sciences and the social sciences, and between the social sciences and the humanities, that we must focus our attention. The common attributes which the social science disciplines share with the natural sciences tends to set it apart from the humanities, and the common attributes which it shares with the humanities tends to distinguish it from the sciences. On the dialectical continuum, the classification of science, social science and the humanities is in part polythetic as well as prototypical in identity. We must also look for those traits that are prototypically social science, which distinguish it from either the natural sciences or the humanities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What the social sciences share with the physical sciences and which separates it from the humanities is its definite empiricism, its qualified objectivism and its naturalistic orientation. For purposes of scientific inquiry the social sciences typically adopt an empirical, objective and naturalistic attitude toward the phenomena it seeks to describe and understand. Its empiricism, objectiveness and naturalism are not separate, but are mutual related facets of the same general orientation toward the world it seeks to understand. Critiques of the social sciences fail in not taking into account the empirical orientation of these fields. But its empiricism is not an unconstrained kind of empiricism. It is a relative and conventionally constrained attitude, whereas the social sciences are, ideally at least, absolutely and nonarbitrarily constrained. It is constrained by the very facets that it shares with the humanities, facets that the humanities incorporate more completely as forms of rationalism, subjectiveness and culturalism versus naturalism. Pure humanities tend towards being almost absolutely arbitrary in its constraint. It posits as a priori rational, ideologically constructed points of view or rational frameworks. The subjectivism of the humanities is evident in its unrestrained reflexiveness and apperceptive, metaphorical metalogicality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now the features prototypical of social sciences becomes more clearly evident when it is configured on the dialectical continuum between the sciences and the humanities. The point of departure it shares with the science is its inherently 'non-ideological' claims to knowledge. Its point of departure it shares with the humanities is in its own critico-reflexive recognition of its own ideological subjectiveness and arbitrariness. Science differs from all other forms of human knowledge on the basis to its claim to a non-ideological status of understanding. Of course, this status is never unequivocal or without final uncertainty. This non-ideological status is demonstrated on the basis of its puzzle-solving success, its capacity to predictably and correctly resolve a wide range of diverse and specific problems. Implicit in this claim to non-ideological ontology is the general openness of its knowledge, that it must be public knowledge that is capable of being communicated to others who may not exist within the purview of one's own collective representations or belief. This tacit assumption of science is particularly relevant for the social sciences in which many theories are often invisibly based upon hidden ethnocentric presumptions or otherwise unwarranted biases. The criteria for its openness or general communicability is that it is based upon some set of measures or standards which are readily available or replicable by others who may be removed from the immediate context. In such a way the theory can be empirically demonstrated or replicated by a form of first-hand evidentiary witnessing by others. The notion of shared exemplars arises out of this form of evidentiary witnessing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">No scientific theory, then, can be seen to gain immediate or completely unconditional acknowledgement--its success comes after its proposed recognition, as the result of its ability to generate these Shared exemplars as demonstrative cases of its validity. In other words, the success of a theory is determined after the fact of its repeated demonstration, on the basis of whether it works or not in solving the problems it poses for science. There is another spinoff to this argument that is directly related to the purported non-ideological status of such theory--this is the test of non-tautological or independent verification. Independent verification occurs externally to the theory, and its terminological domain itself, after the fact of its proposition, in contexts which are historically unrelated to those in which the theory is created or defined, by people who are relatively neutral or do not have an established commitment to the success or failure of the theory. Especially in the social science, such independent verification is sometimes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate. Though the theory may generate consequent solutions, its validity must be founded initially upon its capacity to resolve a problem that was posed before or independently of the theory itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This criteria carries with it the presumption of a universal homogeneity of hidden structure, and with it certain implications about the constancy of physical absolutes--of time, space, substance, and even human perception. It is these very presumptions which violate the principle of the scientific reality of human reality, and which it is this principle which links science to the humanities upon a dialectical continuum of relative knowledge. What science seeks are general axiomatic principles that account for a wide range of phenomena, but not for universal principles. All such propositions are by definition incomplete and partial, subject to verification or eventual falsification by the demonstration of counter-factual or anomalous evidence. If scientific truth were by definition absolute and universally truth, rather than contingent and relative, then it would have no need for improvement, for progress or for independent demonstration. Only knowledge that is ideological can make such universal presumptions, whether they are verified or not.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is these criteria, above any others which have been proffered by philosophers of science, which serves to distinguish science or science-like understanding from any other kind of knowledge. It can be seen that the sciences and the humanities, existing along the same dialectical continuum, differ more in matters of relative degree than in kind. The traditional distinction between Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissenschaften, as also the etic/emic and subject/object dichotomies often encountered to distinguish the sciences from the humanities, are in a sense spurious dichotomies that emphases the differences of extreme, ideal types, and which cover over the similarities of the middle ground.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must inquire, then, into what distinguishes the social sciences as independent of the natural sciences and of the humanities, or, in other words, those characteristics which are prototypically social scientific and that serve to identify it as a field of inquiry separate from either the natural sciences or the humanities. Like the sciences, it attempts to be empirical, objective and non-ideological. Like the humanities, it takes as its central problematic the understanding of human reality, including the subjective, ideological and constructive components of this reality. But for the social sciences, human reality is not the starting point as it is for the humanities, it is the endpoint. It is not enough for the social sciences to be a poem, a story or a myth, though it may be poetic, narrative or mythical, it must also strive towards empirical objectiveness of meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are certain definite characteristics that standout as prototypical of the social sciences--these are: 1) Its use of statistical correspondences and correlations, 2) Its dependence upon materially substantive datum, whether continuous or discontinuous, which are subject to independent manipulation, 3) Its use of diagrammatic representations which purport to represent or cognitively map significant variable or simplified structures isomorphic with the patterning of phenomenological experience, 4) Its use of prose narrative which is formally propositional and coherent from the standpoint of symbolic logic, and 5) Its heremeneutical/critical dependence upon printed or inscribed textual records or primary documents that serve as the principle means of reporting and referencing its results.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The relative and highly tenable nature of each of these criteria may be criticized. What is counted statistically and what is ignored is often a purely subjective decision of the encoder, acts that seem substantively real to the observe may have a different significance for the performer (a blink may not be a wink, and even a tool may have been just an object of art), superficial and oversimplified diagrammatic representations may obscure more 'structure' than they reveal, or falsify more than they demonstrate, the logic structure of the descriptive narrative may always be subject to alternative interpretation, correct propositions may rest on false but hidden premises and explicit and correct premises may generate false but implicit conclusions, and the authority of written words may only be apparent rather than actual, while oral discourse, while ephemeral in its mode of broadcast transmission, may actually be more authentic. But given these sobering insights into the limits of our social scientific praxis, we must not thereby discount the overall relative reliability or validity of such praxis when it is honestly and seriously conducted, or prematurely dismiss its general accountability in its description or explanation of human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Not all social science texts must contain all of these elements in order to be good social science--texts may have all of these and yet be poor science, and texts may have few if any of these elements of design and still be scientifically superb. Texts may fall way to the humanistic end of the dialectical continuum, having no ostensible resemblance to science, and yet reveal generally valid facets of the human experience. Social science can be aesthetically pleasing and still remain good science. </p> <p><a NAME="five"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">3</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">SCIENCE and SENSE</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Scientific Consensus and Anthropological Complexity</p> </b> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Common sense seeks the sense of conformity, science seeks the conformity of the senses.</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science has been and always will be a human "sense-making" practice--it's aim has always been to make sense of the world in terms which reflect the world's own intrinsic ordering of phenomena, and not our own ideas about it. Part of the sense-making process of science has therefore always been to penetrate the veil of our own illusory beliefs in order to experience reality in and of itself. Our theories are the interpretations that we then bring to this experience in order to make sense of our senses.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science has always been susceptible to the risk of lapsing back into the same fold of our preconceptions from which it strives to break free. Science must struggle with the received view of things to liberate the vision of the world from the common sense chains of human illusion that bound our world in ignorance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science is the inevitable consequence of the culturative exploration of the world, and can be found to flourish wherever such exploration is not overly constrained by the ideological force of tradition.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science depends upon achieving a "consensus" of views among its community of practitioners--this consensus follows the form similar to an open trial in which the facts of a case are presented in a public forum for critical review and evaluation. It is rooted in a naive yet profound faith that "seeing is believing" and that "actions speak louder than words." From this standpoint, the criteria of science are always by definition public and open for review. A case, for example, in which several contradictory views seem equally plausible, is one in need of further empirical evidence or "witness testimony" and cannot be unequivocally decided until more evidence is obtained.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is because of this need for consensus that Science may often be unwitting victim to the received wisdom of culturally embedded "common sense." The appeal to the common sense value of a particular point of view is often heard, especially when a theory might otherwise lack firm empirical ground upon which to stand, or whose architecture appears loose or overworked.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Common sense "makes sense" of the world, but not quite in the same manner that good science demands, because its appeal is primarily to the preconceived frameworks of our beliefs, values and viewpoints, rather than to experience which may be at odds with such framework or lie outside our normal horizon of understanding. Common sense is not necessarily any less logical or more logically fallacious than science, its theories may be just as elaborate or as rigorous as those of science. The point of departure between common sense and science seems to be that while the former never gets beyond the bounds of its own "facticity"--situatedness of its knowledge in a cultural and historical context, that the facts must fit the framework. The latter must bring in the facts and fit the frame to the facts. Science must often fly in the face of the received wisdom of our common sense--a feat that may sometimes seem to contradict our sense-making inclinations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The point of departure between science and common sense is that science must accord with the natural order of the world, as this is attested to by the phenomena of nature unconstrained by human involvement or interference. Common sense remains rooted to the human order of the world, and depends upon the constraints of its human involvement.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left to reconsider in the light of the sense-making differences between science and common sense, the place and role of science and common sense in anthropological knowledge of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological knowledge must deal with the stochastic complexity of human reality. This complexity is both natural and cultural, and in its anti-chaotic patterning resists facile reductionistic explanation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The value of common sense has always been its vast compression of the complexity of reality into a convenient, conceptually manageable scale. It makes sense of the world by simplifying its complexities by several orders. Furthermore, common sense apparatus frequently relies upon a kind of sleight of hand, tricking the senses into seeing what it believes. In this regard common sense is not so much "sense-making" but becomes actually anti-scientific in demanding a temporary "suspension" of the credulity of our senses in exactly the opposite way that science sometimes demands our temporary "disbelief."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Common sense depends upon non-contradiction of our senses--information must be coordinate with our received frameworks of experience. Contradiction is antithetical to common sense, and common sense becomes our basic apparatus for dealing with and resolving contradiction in our world. This also means that our common sense is highly susceptible to the kinds of internal contradictions that our science must expose. Science seeks such contradiction as the means to its resolution, while common sense must deny it. Common sense remains fixed, while science "moves on".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We depend upon our common sense to successfully function in our everyday world. But the success of our science depends upon how much we are able to overcome the seductive power of our common sense, in learning how to see the world the "way it really is." The appropriate attitude of sense-making science is that of critical doubt and skepticism--which seems quite contrary to the usual attitude of common sense which is one of naive faith and unquestioning acceptance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological knowledge will stand upon is own as a genuine science in exact proportion to the extent that it will be able to divest itself of its own common sense preunderstandings and seek means of stepping beyond the horizon of it is own facticity in the world, to deal with the human order of the world upon its "own" terms. This is easier said than done, because human beings are not atoms or genes or molecules, and human symbols have this curious, unnatural arbitrariness about them. The Human order of the world is one that has long been contaminated by the antiscientific history of human involvement and interference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the problem to the development of anthropological knowledge as authentic science is that we yet lack a properly scientific theory of the kind of complexity that the human world presents to our senses. Human beings simply do not follow perfectly predictable orbits like planetary bodies, nor are our wills or imagination necessarily subject to genetic predetermination in any direct, causal way. We are left in our pursuit of an authentic science of anthropology with a hodge-podge of many science-like pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, but with only a fragmentary sense of its edges or corners or the patterning its center might present to the senses. In this regard the only map to guide us becomes the patterning of our common sense that has been tempered by our scientific skepticism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Of what might an anthropological science of human complexity consist? In the first place, we must consider the possibility that our anthropological jigsaw puzzle is not a static, set-piece problem promising one finite, correct solution. Rather it is a dynamic game we play, with the many jagged edges and borders becoming altered as we try to fit them together. As we add more pieces to our picture, its patterning changes in ways we can hardly predict. The pieces that seemed to fit together a century or even a decade ago no longer seem to cohere in exactly the same way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see the anthropological field of view as an evolving, epigenetic landscape. The surface patterning that has been apparent to our senses are epiphenomenal forms of underlying currents and processes of which we are scarcely made aware. If it is evolving, we must see that it must be an infinite state machine that is nondeterministic--yet it remains stochastically ordered because it is a self-perpetuating patterning--one that is anti-chaotic. It's structure may not be so much some underlying static law-like order, but rather the dynamic relational structuration of the many parts in relation to the whole and to one another. In other words, the changes in any part of the entire pattern are critically constrained by the nexus of relations with many other parts, and the random changes of these relations. Thus the total history of the whole puzzle plays an important role in the patterning and net value of any of its parts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because the total history is virtually unrecoverable, and because the net value of any of its parts approach virtual infinity, we must seek in our science a statistically systematic means of eliminating the impossible from the possible, and then of deriving from the statistically possible the plausible, and then the most probable. In such way we may come to gain a sense of the overall scale and dimensionality of our puzzle, and determine the proximity of its outermost boundaries. We will never have much more than a global weather-map of the human world, from which we can read the general trends and make short-range forecasts, but of which we will never be able to predict or control the complete concatenation of factors which go into its creation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If general laws can be found to underlie this patterning, we must seek them as basic relational principles that govern the order and possibilities for change between elements in the system. We might also speculate that certain transformational rules apply with some regularity in the derivation and expression of the possible patterning Whether these basic principles and derivational rules apply in a completely deterministic manner is open to serious doubt. They may apply or not in any given instance in a boolean manner. Furthermore, in regard to human reality, many of these determining principles may be more or less "arbitary"--subject to volitional human agency--therefore lacking the imperative "force" of "natural law".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This picture of an authentic anthropological science which does not depend upon the reductionism inherent in common sense, speak for a deeper and widened role for cross-cultural research and comparative studies in providing a systematic methodology for approaching the complexity of human reality in this manner. But we must construe such research in a revised way, one that is assisted by computer processing. But when we consider the problem of the integration of over a trillion neurons of several billion people in a multi-trillion dollar world economy--we must see the fruits of such an anthropological science as a remote objective.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">How to revise cross-cultural research to better fit this expanded role of anthropological science. One suggestion is to frame its database into an historical time-line--to use a temporal framework to fit and frame the facts of our cross-cultural comparisons. Another suggestion is to deliberately cultivate a "trans-disciplinary" perspective that is able to coordinate and integrate knowledge of various fields into somekind of meta-synthesis. Finally, this suggests the value and necessity of adopting, at least for heuristic purposes, the so-called "pan-optic" point of view which seeks to "comprehend" in the patterning of human reality in its entirety, with the paradoxical understanding that such a perspective must necessarily always be conditional and incomplete--an authentic anthropological science must remain as holistic as it is relativistic and comparative and empirical in orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another principle involved in the patterning of the whole of human reality. The consideration of its many possible parts cannot be had in isolation from the history and patterning of the whole--we must somehow take the whole into account in our anthropological science. We must deal with a dilemma in this way--the whole may exhibit a robust sense of stability which belies the actual dynamic action of its many parts, and the transitional dynamics of the whole may proceed inspite of or only indirectly dependent of the actions of its many pieces. If we look at any local situation, we may come away with a sense of stability and dynamic that may not directly accord with the long-term patterning of the whole.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the anthropological science of our human complexity, there is a place and an important role for our common sense when it is unfettered by the conditional cultural logic of our own context in reality. It will be our common sense, liberated from its boundaries, which will serve to simplify our complexity and serve as the basis for achieving a scientific consensus. Our reformed common sense, reminded of its own inherent limitations and contradictions, can be put to the service of our anthropological science in helping to prune the complexity of human reality to a maneagable scale.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <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 which function at 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 superordinate levels, though the laws and principles obtaining upon a superordinate 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 governability. 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. It is something that 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 benetic 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 psychosocial 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 electro-magnetic 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 subcritical, 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. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#fiveback">back</a></p> <p><a NAME="six"></p> <p>  <hr> <p></a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">4</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENTIFICITY and SCIENTISM</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The proof is always in the pudding.</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science has been surprisingly successful in coming to grips with reality and in wresting from nature its secrets. It is little wonder that science has become the new secular religion of modern civilization. Its promise is of a real world utopia in real human time. There is no problem that is beyond the power of science to eventually resolve. If we wish to shroud ourselves with a veil of respectability and of credibility, then we could want no better than to don the garb of the white lab jacket and to call whatever it is we do a science. And there is a great deal of ritual in scientific praxis, and many legends of great men and even a few myths and more than a mere modicum of magic, and its professors sometimes resemble an officially ordained priesthood.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Perhaps it is to be expected when Social scientists and others with a "softer" more humanistic field of inquiry adopt or reinterpret many of the traits of the physical sciences. For many it has been a way of selling one's wares in a System that prizes and puts a premium upon scientific research, but which affords little compensation for more humanistically oriented endeavors. Maybe it is a means of career advancement, or professional survival, or even "just a living." The need to dress up basic interpretations with numbers, diagrams and statistics to provide the front of respectability and authority of science, just in order to publish what otherwise remains an interpretation, makes a hypocrit of many professors.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must separate the issue of the reality and praxis of science from its ideological sycophancy and promotion in the world. We must learn to recognize its many limitations and its boundaries. It is not so that anything that is not amenable to science is without value or credibility, or that any question which is deemed unworthy of scientific method is somehow trivial or irrelevant in the world. Science cannot answer some kinds of questions, but these questions are therefore no less important to ask.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Philosophers argue the finer points of the significance of science, and even the issue of exactly what it is or how it works is a topic hotly debated in some circles. Though many people may call themselves scientists and act the part, they may not actually have a very detailed or complete idea of what science really is. In fact, though many of its sychophants talks as if they know what science is really all about, no one in the world has a bottom line on the subject.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science has been judged primarily in terms of its successful track record--we know it works and this seems to be enough. But we do not know if it will keep on working forever or if it will sooner or later fail us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The many technological spinoffs of science and the scientifically organized process of progressive development in the world seems to be generating many unintended side-effects which our original models and equations had not anticipated. We might call this a kind of iatrogenic disorder of Science--diseases and problems that are the result of the treatment of other diseases and problems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science as a construction of reality has been as much an ideology in the world, a kind of history in the making, as it has been any genuine attempts to account for the natural processes of the world. There has been science, and then there has been scientism and scientifism. In this regard, it should be emphasized that governments and corporations can fund science and even direct its development, but it cannot appropriate science to its own ends and still call what it has appropriated "science."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And there has been an inherently destructive side of scientific praxis. Its tampering with natural processes and the natural order has in many ways irreversibly destroyed or disturbed natural rhythms. And scientific discovery has led to the technological production of many deadly weapons--in fact the quest for more lethal weaponry has been one primary motivation for the support of scientific research. So much destruction has been wrought by science in the name of progress that it has led a few skeptics to speculate upon the thanatological side and motivations of science, and perhaps to even see in the dogma of science the harbinger of death.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The pure scientists of course can claim a well guarded neutrality in this matter, and point blame to their less respectable "applied" cousins who will work for whoever will provide the most funding. But scientific neutrality is as much a vain claim to untouchability as it is a necessicity in the objective advancement of a value-free orientation. All people, pure and applied, must acknowledge the responsibility for which their own actions and decisions play in a broader world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science is, in fact, not value free. Whether we adhere to a dogma of positivism or to a more open version of our science, we are in fact tacitly affirming certain loaded values and conceptions about a scientific worldview, about the nature of reality, the value of knowledge and the power to interfere with and control the natural order. And scientists as human beings cannot long feign a protected neutrality from the many consequences of their own work, to be human in the world is to acknowledge one's unavoidable involvement. Science is in fact a world-view and value orientation in the world with many profound implications.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Like it or not, Science is probably not the end all or be all of modern life. Science may not be able to solve all our problems, and may in the long run lead to more problems than it will be able to redress. Science is not without its own limits, and failure to recognize or to live within those limits may have more unforeseeable consequences for the world. This is not an anti-scientific call to a return to basic fundamentalist Christian values. A realistic science is a limited science, and a limited science is a safe one.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But because no one has a bottom-line on science, about what it is or how it works or why, no one can play the final authority in judging what is genuinely scientific from what is not. It is not satisfactory to most scientists if Thomas Kuhn finds the ground of science to be subjective intuition and epistemologically, phenomenologically relative. It is a paradox that much of what passes for hard science may in fact be quite spurious and superficial, while much which gets passed by as "unscientific" may actually be quite scientifically suggestive or profound. Science has little to lose and much to gain from adopting a more open and broader account of it self. It is not a unitary phenomenon. It is many different kinds of things to many different kinds of people. We cannot too easily prescribe what science can and cannot do, what kinds of questions science should or should not answer, or what kinds of solutions we ought to label as scientific or not.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a great likelihood that as the world changes and as science changes the world, science itself, as a part of the world, will also change and become something different from what it is today or has been in the past. It is very likely that the science of Archimede's day or of Ptolemy's was very different than Galileo's or Newton's science, and that Einstein's or Max Planck's science was different from the science of today. And if science has taught us nothing else about our world, it is that we probably cannot predict what our science will become like.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We again must look for a critical conjuncture between those anthropological aspects which underlie the criteria of science, and those scientific aspects which underlie the legitimacy of anthropology as science. For reality, however else we may define it, is inescapably a human reality from the standpoint of the knowledge of the human observer, and human reality, from the standpoint of the world encompassed by the knowledge of the human observer, is a universal reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The criteria claimed to underlie science has been variably defined as demonstrability, verifiability, falsifiability, productivity, predictability, replicability, or explanability. Truth as it is held to be scientifically verifiable, is subject to certain tests or cannons of tenability which are used to determine its acceptance or rejection. These tests are rarely defined formally or explicitly, and some would claim exist more as the function of social consensus or of casual praxis than anything that is rigorously or rigidly followed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I would add to the criteria of science the relative values of openness and communicability of the system--something which is it self a difficult thing to measure. But there is good reason for such values, as it places upon the proof or disproof of science the responsibility for its public access, as an "inter-subjectively verifiable" phenomena, and for its necessary lack of closure in its connections to a larger and always encompassing universe.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It has also been asserted by some that different "paradigms" obey different standards of truth and different ways of knowing reality. Religion relies upon the authority of sacred texts as the basis for its truth-value, and upon the willingness to believe, or to accept by faith, the truth of its doctrine. Art, on the otherhand, relies upon an intuitive and appreciative faculty, and has as its criteria perceptive and sensational experience of aesthetic phenomena. Philosophy looks for the truth of logos and reason, and rationality is the principle means and avenue for the attainment of such understanding. Science, as noted previously, is primarily empirical in orientation, and applies certain specific, "objective" criteria of public verification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard we might speculate whether Anthropology, as a science and as a field of the humanities, must strictly follow the criteria applied in the harder sciences, or else must have its own paradigmatic criteria of validity and verifiability. And we may answer this that Anthropology follows both its own and a broader set of scientific criteria of openness and communicability at the same time. The special criteria of anthropology has to do with inter-subjective validation,; and its principle way of knowing is the knowledge of the self in relation to the other. It follows the broader criteria of science that is similar to other fields of inquiry, but it translates these broader criteria in its own special way, in terms of its own way of understanding the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For good reason, statistics has become the preferred language of description in Science. Statistics forces the quantification of values upon a mathematical field of relational saliency that may or may not reflect the actual empirical field of relations it purportedly represents. The critical point of conjuncture (or disjuncture) is the arbitrary assignation of numerical values to observable things in the world. Such quantification has several consequences. It renders as discrete and discontinous variables that may in reality be indiscrete and continuous. The resulting numerical values, and their quantitative loading within the mathematical field, may or may not realistically reflect the actual, intrinsic differential values of the things so represented. Some things and kinds of things lend themselves more readily to numerical quantification than other things. The result of these two discrepancies is the likelihood of distortion that would tend to favor the biases of the individual who makes the decisions. Finding three or more "blind" coders will probably yield three sets of biases that may or may not have a net effect of neutralizing one another. Also, the assignation of values quantitatively defined to things fundamentally qualitative in definition has the effect of superimposing a superficial sense of one-to-one correspondence, or of isomorphic congruity which remains part and parcel of the positivist presumption.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The translation between a quantitative, formally constrained language and one that is qualitative, and informally ordered, may or may not be correct or accurate, and depends upon the reification of natural language, an informal fallacy, for its justification. Also, all statistics contains the intention to "average" together sets of values that may or may not be meant to be averaged together. In the first place, the causes and contexts of one suicide may be very different, and virtually incomparable, to the reasons and factors lying behind another. Calling both by the same name as suicide will not yield a solution, but rather serves to obscure the original problem of their many incommensurability. This broaches another important part of statistical description, the comparing together of things which may fact be otherwise incommensurable. Finally, if we take both suicides to be variants of the same basic kind of thing, and we "average" the two together to find the modal kind of "suicide" we face the consequence of foisting upon reality as a ideal fact what is in actually an average fiction. If we then compare all our examples of suicide with our average form to see how much or in what way they may very from it, we risk the illusion and fallacy of comparing, and implicitly defining something in the world, in terms of what it is not, and in terms of something which does not have any substantive basis in reality. Another problem in statistical description is the bounding of a universe for a significant sample. If we rely upon our own definitions for determining the boundaries between phenomena, we risk the fallacy of reifying our own superimposed definitions and taxonomic schemas upon the world which may not necessarily be so ordered. Especially important in this are the exclusion or inclusion of "inbetweenies."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These dilemmas are especially apparent to the anthropological investigator engaged in cross-cultural research. A great many different, arbitrarily defined traits or institutions may be in essence "lifted" from their original ethnographic context, and thrown together into a common pool based upon criteria of common definition, type, etc., which may obfuscate the complexities of the reality in which they are ethnographically embedded. Coders in the field may not know whether to call the twitch of an eye a wink or a blink, nor how many times a person winked and how many times the same person blinked--but it might make a decisive difference if we believed winking to be a significant tactic in social interaction or if we believed that blinking may be a significant symptom of a certain culture-specific nervous syndrome.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Inspite of these shortcomings of statistical science, we must acknowledge the important role which statistics has come to play in the articulation of the dialectic of science, and of anthropology as a science. The very factors which are the inherent limitations of statistical methodology also constitute the basis for its greatest strength--the capacity for comparing together otherwise incomparable things, and for deriving significant correlations and central tendencies from such comparison, correlations which may not otherwise be obvious or available for evaluation. Statistics, if correctly done, will yield conclusions which will be independent of the evaluator's own biases, and therefore can be used as an independent check and gauge against which different evaluations can be measured.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But statistics is important for another reason. Statistics allows us to model in fairly precise terms, and to simplify in a systematic way, what would prove to be otherwise impossibly complex to model or represent in more naturalistic terms. Because of its reductionistic tendencies, and the systematicity with which it does so, statistic offers the potential for capturing in relatively simple and concise terms aspects of reality which, because of enormity, scale and complexity, would not be otherwise describable. Statistics offers us a way of handling and finding order in chaos, in terms that we can quickly comprehend and facilely manipulate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, statistics is a language par excellence for dealing with relativistic phenomena, and for defining the relationships between different things. Heisenberg gave us a paradoxical account of a physical universe that is fundamentally statistical in nature. It offers a kind of relativistic degree of association and significance which does not discount the possibility for error or bias, and which takes into account in its basic formulas the inherent indeterminancy of the final definition of reality. Because statistics is written in terms of probabilities, significances, central tendencies, uncertainties and likelihood, it offers us an alternative language relatively free of the fallacies of the essentialist bias found in our natural discourse--that we can come to terms and capture on paper the "essence" of things instead of just their most likely appearance. </p> <p><a NAME="seven"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">6</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHROPOLOGOS</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b>Science or Humanity?</p> </b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Do we really need to finally answer the question anthropologists seem to so strongly need to ask--namely is anthropology more of the .sciences or of the humanities. Eric Wolf wrote that Anthropology was of between both--the devil and the dragon so to speak. A more sober attitude might perhaps view this question as perhaps the two horns of a spurious dilemma which anthropological knowledge poses for our world. Another view might see the social sciences as forming a "Third Culture" in the style of C.P. Snow's classic distinction. Franz Boas thought of anthropology as both a universalizing science and a particularizing kind of "cosmography."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Some have argued that Anthropology is paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense of the term, others that it is "non-paradigmatic," and still others that it is "poly-paradigmatic" or "pre-paradigmatic" or else "quasi-paradigmatic." The last decade has witnessed the flare up of new debates within American Academic Anthropology, especially as this question is regarded by recent critical and "post-" theorists and "reflexive anthropologists" who have come to review more critically the functional and perhaps classist foundations of anthropological knowledge within a larger world order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is difficult, to say the least, to approach anthropological knowledge in exactly the same manner that a physicist or even a biologist might be said to approach her/his data, with the same degree of scientific neutrality and hence "objectivity". The problematics of understanding human reality inevitably poses for us the paradox of the humanness of our understanding in ways which are not so directly obvious in other fields of the natural sciences. This is especially so when such anthropological knowledge resolves itself centrally upon the reality of another human being (and therefore, by implication, of our own humanness) in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Those who want to see anthropology in a positivistic sense as a "hard science" of facts neglect the "facticity" of their own definitions of the data. They seek a comparative, universal conception of general anthropological knowledge that will yield basic laws of human history, culture, behavior, values and mind. They decry those who renounce this scientific role of science as at worst an anti-scientific threat to the very order and progress of anthropological knowledge, and at best unproductive and unprogressive in any constructive, uncritical sense. The self-styled "anti-anthropologists" and "humanistic anthropologists" disclaim any final version of anthropology, or even the possibility for the emergence of any progressive paradigm of anthropology from the "marketplace of ideas." These anthropologists are regarded as promulgating the "Celebration of the Difference" and a delight in disorder in a somewhat Dyonysian manner. They regard the strength of anthropology to come from the diversity and multiplicity of ideas and perspectives that emerge out of its on-going dialectic, and this diversity along is the justification for anthropological research. The superimposition of uniformity or unity of theory upon anthropological knowledge is bound to be spurious and ideologically self-serving and therefore anti-intellectually dangerous. For them anthropological patterns, like historical patterning of which it is a part, is a neverending and unpredictable unfolding of infinite variations and possibilities upon common themes. The most that can be had is a regionally limited sense of order, one conditional to prevailing circumstances.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important not to overlook the part played by the often cutthroat competition for funding and power within departmental contexts in the drawing of the battlelines about this basic question. The user usually pays, and in a post-Republican, pro-biological unanthropological era, only the user pays.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">So must we answer this seemingly most important question? Perhaps, but maybe not in the way that would seem very satisfactory for either those who prefer to take sides or for those who wish to occupy somekind of conciliatory middle-ground. First, we might say that such a question is but one basic facet of an on-going dialectic that has always informed anthropological knowledge--one that Roy Wagner referred to as "collectivizing/relativizing." But it doesn't seem enough to merely talk about the dialectic while keeping one foot inside and the other outside of the terms of the debate. We might further argue that this dialectic is part of an even more basic, larger dialectic which has informed all of Western knowledge, and perhaps human knowledge in general--thus the question confers and important anthropological dimension to the knowledge of anthropology, and the anthropology of knowlege in general. Furthermore, we might speculate whether or not this basic dialectic which seems to inform Western-styled consciousness, if not human consciousness in general, itself is based upon somekind of basic contradiction or conflict which might underly such consciousness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I suggest that elements of the current debate are historically situated in the contemporary "Modern" epoch of humankind, and in certain fundamental ways reflect basic contradictions and conflicts which confront the contemporary "World-View" as this has become globally defined. We must not overlook the place with World War II had in the situating of a Whitian version of General Cultural Evolution based upon the augmentation of energy. Similarly, the role of the U.S. in Vietnam, and during the Post-Vietnam era, as an imperialist Rome in a unidimensional Capitalistic World System, cannot be overlooked in the cry for the multiplicity of voices, and the bringing home of the third world empire to the domestic Uniteds States does not just fortuitously parallel the call for greater reflexivity in a more domestically oriented American Anthropology. And if Anthropology can be construed as a mode of representation dealing with the incorporation and collectivization of diversity in the world, it can also be seen as a complementary mode of reflection which shows to us indirectly our own most pressing preoccupations and concerns, even our calls to greater reflexivity and multiplicity of voices in the world are a part of this "mode of information" which further augments the very integrative processes which such orientations critique.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot escape the hermeneutic circle posed by the historical situatedness of our anthropological problematics except to look for more general patterns of our dialectics which transcend the vital issues of the moment and which unite our concerns and contradictions with those of other periods and places.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question then, with its relativistic trappings boiled away, becomes not whether anthropology is or is not a science or a humanity (a question that by itself we cannot hope to answer but within the context of our own historical situatedness), but rather how anthropology has and has not been a science and how anthropology has and has not been a humanity, and how it has alway been both, neither and either simultaneously.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The unity I seek to answer this question with is not so much the notion of the "psychic unity of humankind" but rather the "unity of the human spirit and reason in anthropological knowledge and inquiry." As much as we may chide Christopher Columbus and his kind for the "Discovery of the New World" I suggest that we should not see so much contrast with his spirit of exploration and our own spirit of anthropological inquiry, and as much as we might ridicule the Medieval worldview who saw antipods and humans with tails and other anthropomorphic beasts upon the corners of a flat earth, this worldview was so different in function than our own anthropological worldview that has divided the world between literates and primitives, the "Dani" here, the "!Kung" there, etc. In the light of our emancipated science, we might see our view of the world as somewhat more free of ignorance and supersitution than those medieval map-makers, but by what absolute standard shall we measure the level of our own ignorance and bias. If we are ignorant about are world, then we do not know about it, and if we know about it, then we cannot be ignorant. Perhaps it can be claimed that we have grown, in our civilization, a bit older and wiser than that adolescent vision of the world which covered Medieval Europe in a shroud of darkness, but not enough to justify our treatment of our anthropological ancestors with disdain and ridicule for their ideas. Their legacy of ignorance and brutality has been our inheritance, and if today we cannot look beyond the first pages of their histories to view the "native" in an "untouched" state, if we cannot be certain what exactly what existed before the devastation wrought by the Western "discovery" of the New World, then we have no one else to blame but ourselves, because we cannot be too sure we are serving the interests of humankind in any wiser or superior fashion than our ancestors did.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words, whatever our contemporary intellectual hubris, about the only thing we can really be sure of is that we are probably no less historically situated by the hermeneutic horizon of our anthropological knowledge than were our anthropological ancestors, and if nothing else, this should be a sobering reminder about the limits of anthropological knowledge, whether scientific or humanistic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Standing behind the question posed as to whether or not anthropology is a science or a humanity, is a more basic question as to the human status of anthropological knowledge in the world, and the basic contradictions of human reality which underly and constrain this status in vital ways. Is anthropological knowledge about human reality amenable to scientific methods of study, or is it, in the complexity of its pattern, fundamentally resistant, if not completely immune, to such analysis, and thus best served by "looser" if not less rigorous approaches. But such a question, when rephrased, still belies a more basic issue of the boundaries that separate domains of knowledge in the world. The differences in inquiry between physics and philosophy, or biology and history, or art and anthropology, may be somewhat more substantial and significant than those traditional differences posed between "The Two Cultures."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The fundamental question then becomes, not whether anthropological knowledge is "scientific or humanistic" but whether anthropological knowledge occupies its own distinctive domain in the intellectual landscape, one which is not a subdomain of a larger field of inquiry, and if so, then what are the boundaries and the provenience of this domain in relation to other domains of inquiry.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What then, is the status of anthropological knowledge in the world? It is as anthropology relates to the status of human reality itself that we must seek our answer. In other words, it is to be found in our own, shared attitudes towards human reality, whether we seek a wide vision of the field or a narrow point of view, whether we seek an unchanging, static conception of our reality or one which is dynamic and subject to continuous variation. And in a very fundamental personal way, it belies our own attitudes and orientation towards reality--whether we seek a world composed of difference or defined by common identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not unreasonable to suggest that this basic orientation, and the fundamental contradiction between identity and difference which it belies, may be at least in part conditioned by our own historical situatedness in relation to a wider world--who we seek as the source of our funds, our inspiration, our guidance and our beliefs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is recognizeable is a call for the rehabilitation of the anthropological attitude and orientation in relation to humankind, such that it can no longer serve, whether naively or deliberately, the interests of impersonal and inhumane powers, and can be used in the advocacy and promotion of the rights and interests of people. We see applied forms of this in individual cases, such as the Native NorthAmerican land claims filed agains the federal government, or the support by anthropologist of native groups of the Amazon to discourage encroachment by Brazilian development interests. But for these few positive examples there are numerous counterexamples of anthropologists playing as pawns of power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The real danger to the future of anthropology in the world will finally be decided in terms of its general relevance to the world, not in terms of the marketability of its suggestions or its ability to attract the highest-paid brains in academia, but simply in terms of the general relevance of its ideas--its capacity to cross intellectual boundaries as facilely as it crosses cultural boundaries, and to retrieve from such crossing perspectives which transcend the dialectics of its own historical boundaries. The risk anthropology runs is of falling into the very academic banality and mediocrity that is a symptom of its dependency upon external supports and props.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But the kind of rehabilitation of anthropological perspective desired does not have to play the role of applied or advocacy anthropology, but it must be something more than the mere reflection of its own implications in the struggles for power in the world. We can legitimately speak of a kind of reformed anthropology which knowledge is neither exclusively of science or of the humanities, but is self-sufficiently anthropological in orientation. Such an anthropology must seek to step beyond the boundaries of its own hermeneutic horizon, and to define itself independently of the research prerogatives and priorities implicit within a "publish or perish" or "user-pays" imperative. It is a kind of anthropology that can and must provide itself enough room in the world to grow into its own. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#sevenback">back</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eight"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p>  </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">7</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The POST-SYNDROME</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Above and Beyond Anti-Anthropology</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The possibility of translation is its impossibility</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">I would call the "Post-Syndrome" the need to hyphenate long latin words with the prefix "Post" and the need to put every third or fourth word within quotation marks, and the need to attack the legitimacy of sound science with the use of obscure self-contradictions and sophisticated, groundless "tropes."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is not to say that much of the Post-Structuralist, or Post-Humanist, or Post-Modernist perspective; is without value whatsoever--only that the anthropological value of a perspective which comes primarily from literary criticism is critically limited, and is not overly productive as a fruitful way of seeing the world. If we were to adopt unequivocally and whole-heartedly the pessimistic "Post-" point of view, we would risk self-destruction and self "de-construction" to the point of existential despair and academic anomie, and in the process we would undervalue and short change the real work of many an anthropologist.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology can be seen to be a symbolic and ideological component of the social construction of reality, one in which truth and power relations have too high degree of positive correlation to ignore, one in which playing the neutral, innocent, knowledge for knowledge's sake, ethnography carries many hidden and tacit presumptions of espionage, voyeurism, the reinvention and appropriation of culture, etc. It has served the interests of a predominant western point of view, as much colonial, "post-colonial' or neo-colonial as "scientific". The line between genuine science and spurious scientism becomes stretched, blurred and too thin to clearly see the difference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The critique of anthropologos, of a pan-optic principle of presence in turning the histories and subjectivities of<br> "Others" upon the periphery of our empire into the reformed objective history of our own making, a denial of otherness as self which accompanies the inexorable exploitation, subjugation and desocialization of distant others in the world. We must question our taken for granted tropes and view the political history of many of our most unmarked metaphors.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But this line of criticism can only go so far in the reconstruction of anthropological reality. The view from comparative literature which equates ethnography with fiction and mythology is at best naively mistaken in its failure to recognize the historical and empirical basis for such field work, and is at worst a case of dogmatic denial of the real world role that the anthropologist commonly plays in the promotion of his field of inquiry.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Ethnography in particular, however it is written, and anthropology in general, constitute kinds of information, or knowledge about the world, which are essentially neutral. Anthropology is not necessarily an "objective science of disinterested inquiry" which becomes a mere marionette of power. Its information, its knowledge and its techniques can and have been used for the purposes of power, and anthropologists have sometimes either deliberately or unwittingly been dupped into serving such interests, but by and large anthropology as an empirical science remains but a neutral tool that can be used either as a weapon of power or as a means for producing greater good in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The structural inequality of power which underlies the relationship of the ethnographer with her/his subjects of inquiry is perhaps of necessity an uneven one. But the fact of this structural inequality does not preclude the possibility of neutral, relatively unbiased results, nor prevents objective "progress" from being achieved in the advancement of understanding about human reality, nor does it preclude the possibility of personal equality and even genuine friendship with many "others" in the world</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever its vices and virtues, Anthropology remains an imperfect human science about human reality. It is subject to most of the weaknesses, and many of the strengths, that anything human in the world is prone to.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not too long before the fertility and productivity of the "Post-Syndrome" leads to a kind of mental and creative exhaustion. It leaves in its wake of theoretical devastation little fertile ground with which to rebuild the anthropological mansion. Sophistry and Cynicism are no substitutes for sublimity and subtlety. Anthropologists must learn to listen to, but not take as their prime directive, literary critics or professors of English who may hypocritically espouse Heidegger or Foucault. Anthropological style cannot be too profound if it always frames itself by quotes, if it always traffics in self-contradictory obscurities and stylish innuendos, and if its primary agenda is always and only the "destruction" of its own and other peoples' work.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The way past this critical period is not to refuse to look at the shadow it casts upon our anthropological fields, but to learn that a world without shadow is a world without depth or dimension. There is life past the "Post-Syndrome", just as there is meaning to be found in the world without the need for qoutes. The net result of the "Post-Syndrome" is a kind of stultifying corrosion of the capacity to be constructive and creative in the world. It is a juvenile, anti-intellectual reaction to a petty kind of adolescent perfectionism that successful Academics are not taught to outgrow. Creativity does not depend upon being or becoming perfect--rather it comes from the natural curiousity, free play and willingness to make mistakes--just as truth or progress does not always depend upon being right--rather it comes from having proven oneself wrong in the world. Unharnessing ourselves from our own perfectionist obsessions unleashes our creative energies that are otherwise tied up in a self-frustrating knot. Perfectionists chronically fail to learn by their mistakes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If any translation in the world is as good as any other, then there would be no need to practice anthropology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The critical charge that anthropology has been the stepchild of colonial imperialism has been a valid one. But we must recognize that anthropological research and knowledge is constrained in critical, necessary ways, by its historical situatedness in the world, as is any related field of inquiry. We must also recognize that anthropological knowledge by it self, is neither inherently virtuous or vicious. Relativistic romanticism which glorifies the often mean and brutal life of the native other is as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than a coldly "scientific" anthropology of "disinterested inquiry which seeks to transform the subjective reality of the other, according to the principle of presence, into an objective, reified entity to be manipulated within a culturally hegemonic world order. Anthropological knowledge, as science, can be used for both good and evil, and the author of this knowledge cannot be held responsible for what others may or may not do with it. It is the power and value intrinsic to anthropological knowledge that we must learn to appreciate and by which we should seek to judge it--and not the purposes to which it has been or will be put.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the other hand, all anthropologists, as human beings, have an ethical responsibility to the people they study that must transcend and come before their professional obligations or interests as anthropologists. Anthropology that deals with human relations cannot be totally disinterested or subjectively uninvolved--it then becomes at best hypocrisy, and at worst, a danger to human freedom. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#eightback">back</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="nine"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  </p> </font><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">8</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The ART of ANTHROPOLOGY</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Heretical Humanism in the Field</p> <font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Good ethnography, like good art, succeeds at the test of time.</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font>Most professional anthropologists who hold strongly to an ethos of a scientific anthropology would regard the idea of ethnography as an "art" as blasphemous, and yet this is precisely what I would contend that ethnography is and has been in most instances. Knowingly or not, every would-be ethnographer carries into the field a range of models, sets of anthropological experiences, and a "tool kit" composed of proven techniques, tricks of the trade, and special tactics. The ethnographer, whatever her/his prior expectations or designs, is bound to encounter a series of events which will require ad hoc decision-making and fast and loose cutting and pasting. The ethnographic project is always guided, from start to finish, by the final goal of writing a good ethnography. The medium that the ethnographer as artist has to work with is the information, the "data", which s/he is able to elicit from involvements, observations and informants within the field setting. The intent of the ethnographer in her/his project is to draw out from this material a sense of pattern, a configuration, a form, which has some degree of aesthetic value and integrity. The artist becomes as a poet, a painter or a sculptor in creating a vision of human reality that has a sublime sense of aesthetic vitality. As an art form, its criteria of validity and acceptability are inherently different than those we conventionally apply to our science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What the ethnographer produces, like the artist, is an artefact that embodies in itself a new vision, a vital idea that serves to augment the sense of reality from which it was drawn.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Like all artwork, the scientific question can always be asked as to whether or not the representation is realistic or not, or if biased or distorted, then in what ways. But this is not the question the ethnographer, as artist, must normally ask her/himself unless s/he is intent on doing realistic ethnography.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The key question is if good art, whether poetry or painting or ethnography, has an equivalent power to science to inform its audience about something significant in reality. We do not criticize ethnography for being poor science, but for having been poor art.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The appropriate attitude of the ethnography, as artist, is one of an open and honest vision of the world. This is the difference between art and propaganda, and is part of a basic conflict between the function of art in relation to religion and symbolic ideology. From this standpoint, as Marshall Mcluhan wrote, the artist is the anti-environmental sleuth who is not comfortable with the received, "correct" version of reality. About the most that can be said of art as propaganda is that it is most liable to suffer the fate of its own mediocrity--its stratigraphic taphination, fossilization and "petrification" as a dead artifact and anachronism of a bygone era. Viable art has a certain vital "elan" about it which resists such ossification--the distinguishing mark of its vitality is its capacity to stimulate fresh and newer meanings with each rereading. An artist may choose to work with symbolic thema that is essentially religious or ideological, and do a superb job of it, but not for religious or ideological reasons.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While the ethnographer does have an obligation to stick to the facts, as must as this is possible, and therefore does not have the same kind of imaginative freedom as a novelist or storyteller, this falls short of meeting the stricter scientific criteria of "replicability" and "falsification." The anthropologist as scientist may sample a statistical universe and submit findings for review and retesting by other colleagues of the scientific community, but the ethnographer as artist does not have a commitment to produce a repetitious account of the "really real."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The value of ethnography is not the rhetorical or ertistic value to persuade its readership of its "truth." It is the witness-value of a first or second or third hand testimony that is publically open for weighing and evaluation. Perhaps anthropologists have too conveniently depended upon this witness-value--"I came, I saw, I conquered"--approach in their ethnography--leaving their presence, as a matter of good "style", for the reader to take for granted. Ethnographers have also been known to be masters of certain literary tricks of the trade, certain contrivances, allusions, convenient or commanding metaphors, etc., to lull the reader into a certain naive gullibility in accepting the authenticity of the vision represented. It is often undesirable to describe every detail of one's ethnographic involvement--leaving it for the reader to sort through and decide which are relevant or irrelevant to the theme.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The effectiveness of ethnography of art critically depends upon the openness and honesty of the ethnographer. Art depends utmost upon an open and honest view of the world, one that resists the deception and illusions of preconstructed points of view. The witnessing of ethnography in the field must often go uncontested. We are often left without any choice but to take the word of the anthropologist as the first and last, because no other testimony may be available. But even the sincerest and most well intentioned of ethnographer's may still see the world in a fundamentally biased way--honesty has its own relativity of truth about it--as has been attested to by the ethnographic work of many missionaries and priests. Though rooted in honesty, the vision of the artist also depends upon critical skepticism which questions all received forms as these are presented to experience. This fundamental doubting leads the artist, via her/his work, upon a course of discovery in the world of unknown possibilities which leads to the reconstruction of a world more genuine than the one from which it departed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is one of the prerogatives of the ethnographer as artist. All art work, as representations of reality, are artifices and simplifications of reality. All such artwork involves distortion and selective bias. Art would not succeed otherwise. The virtue and integrity of any work of art is intrinsic to its own design, and transcends the considerations of its context of production or appreciation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But we must also resist the fallacy that those who critique ethnography from the standpoint of literary criticism commonly make, to confuse ethnography as just another genre of fictional literature which resonates, however awkwardly or brilliantly, with its own symbolic mythoi. This is the rub that drives experienced anthropologists crazy with the radical literary account of what they do--anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in the field will understand the disdain for those who haven't and yet presume to be able to judge the merits of their work. As an art form, ethnography constitutes its own specialized genre, one which is not fictional so much as fictionalized, facticious if not factual--the merit of ethnography is determined upon its ability to frame the "facts" and remain as close as possible to the "history." In this sense, ethnography shares more with narrative history or journalistic reporting than it does with fictional literature or poetry. It can be poetic in style and force, but it faces the challenge of artistically recording and recovering the "realissum" of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An artist with a keen eye and a creative imagination can often create a vision of reality that is more real than reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">No doubt that a good novel will reveal dimensions of human reality the surface of which a scientific ethnography cannot even scratch. In this regard we can legitimately refer to the virtue of the aesthetic sensitivity and sensibility of the ethnographer as artist--to what might be called ethnographic virtuosity in being able to turn a vision of reality into a good story while still sticking to the "facts."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sometimes, even severely scientific ethnographies achieve such virtuosity and become as aesthetically viable as they are scientifically interesting or information, while oftentimes ethnography framed as poetry fails in its virtuosity as a work of art. In other words, even science can have its aesthetic virtues that many works of art lack.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The training of good ethnographer's may not necessarily depend upon the development of a hypercritical, and often hypocritical, outlook upon the world--such exclusive criticality is often anathema to aesthetic awareness that depends primarily upon the ability to achieve an atunement, and an "appreciation" of phenomena. It is the critical difference between looking and "seeing"--to take "notice" of something as a "thing in itself." If we teach student's of anthropology to be mere critical of their world, without first showing them how to appreciate and involve themselves in the phenomena of the world, in its own terms, then we are producing imbalanced ego's lacking in the capacity to experience reality, with reversed priorities to judge before they see.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can also in this regard refer to the therapeutic function of ethnography as art to integrate in a meaningful way the "marginalia" of experience, and at the same time to provide the "anti-structural" relativization of "normality" by which identity and difference achieve value. This is just the reverse of a "nihilating" function to critically destruct and therefore obfuscate marginal realities. The ethnographer as artist yields a productive interpretation of realities that would otherwise remain foreign and strange--in the process estranging the normal realities with which we are familiar. It is just this, an interpretation of reality, a representation, and not the presentation of reality itself. It is not the ethnographer who necessarily reifies reality, wether ethnography becomes used to reaffirm some cognitive, symbolic or moral order or not is another, ethical, not aesthetic, manner.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The perspective of anthropological research, especially participant-observation, as phenomenological process, has always been readily apparent and available, but nowhere has it been fully exploited for its implications for such research. Similarly, the view of human reality as phenomenological process has largely been left unaddressed by serious theory, except in more recent ethnographic accounts which deal with "pathways of practice" and which attempt to bring the subject-centered world back into focus--this is inspite of the belief that the anthropological construction of human reality is irreducibly "phenomenological" in its subjective ordering of human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The phenomenological process of anthropological research can be seen from two points of view. The first is that of the researchers own streams of conscious experience and transformations as s/he moves from beginning to end of research projects. The phenomenologicality of this perspective presents an inherent "witnessing." It is through such witnessing that the researcher becomes placed in a strategic, "pan-optic" point of view which offers the possibility of not only destructing the previous order of experience, of passing from one field to another different field and therefore demonstrating the situated, differential relativity of knowledge, but of also reintegrating this order in a new way. This strategic location of the participant observing researcher occurs not only in the "ethnographic field" but in the "field of anthropology" as a whole as but part of a larger "field of Mind." It is accomplished because the research presents to himself as wide a variety or variation of experiences as possible, experiences which would normally or otherwise prove disruptive or unlikely, and thus provides her/himself the potentiality for the subjective incorporation and reintegration of a new range of experiences. This strategic locating of the researcher coincides with a critical moment during which the research is able to fully exploit and capitalize upon the experiential resources made phenomenologically available--it is a moment in which a new vision of reality may be born.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The experience of the ethnographer is framed in terms that are subject to disruption. The encounter of alien experiences leads the ethnographer to elicit subconscious frames which then become subject to disruption and which require reevaluation. This process continues until a state of phenomenological "fusion" is reached in the state of mind of the ethnographer, one that does not entail the energy invested in reinforcing preconceived frameworks and the reinterpretation of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The phenomenology of the observed, versus that of the participant, presents another kind of perspective that the researcher must deal with. Part of the implication of the phenomenology of the anthropology of knowledge is "getting behind veil" and into the heads and hearts of the other--the exploration and coming to understand the subjective perspective of the other's experiences, feelings, beliefs and intentions. This presents from the researcher's perspective, as an observer, versus a phenomenologically oriented participant, a critical phenomenological horizon to the experience of the researcher which the ethnographer is challenged to overpass and thereby expand. It is assumed that the native point of view is not just an important perspective, but is critical unexpendable in the phenomenological realization of human experience. Our anthropology cannot go without it, because it provides an important boundary and challenge to our own frames of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Penetrating the veil of phenomenological experience requires a "fusion" of the horizons of the observer and observed, of the phenomenological experience of the participant and the observer. The phenomenological experience of the other does not remain totally inaccessible or unavailable to the researcher--but its position in the strategic perspective of the researcher always remains somewhat problematic and paradoxical.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Passing into the world of the other usually proves much more circumspect and indirect than a simple straightforward projection would appear. It is a series of gateways and passages in a complex labyrinth of experience. We approach its center without really knowing where we are in relation to its periphery. We are caught up within its forest of subjectivity and our map is based upon the phenomonological history of our own pathways. We may be right by the center, and not realize it, we may be going in circles and think we are going in a striaght line--going south while headed north.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The strategic power of the phenomenological research is always complemented and constrained by the phenomenological power of the other to obfuscate and the dependency upon the researcher upon the witness and testimony of the other to guide the research into its world. We cannot penetrate the world of the other without their willing acceptance and mediation. The other then becomes the mid-wife to the birth of the researcher's phenomenological baby.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These considerations lead to a related notion of "existential ethnography" taken in a similar way that Jean-Paul Sartre autobiographically framed his own life-experiences as well as those existential "raison d'etre" of artists.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Existential ethnography; effectively combines both the phenomenological perspective of the researcher and that of the other in to an aesthetically and ethically integrated synthesis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The existential perspective of the ethnographer, involves a series of existential dilemmas and decisions, a phenomenological train of situational encounters in which the ethnographer must act and choose paths. Often serendipidity becomes involved in this process, but also a mysterious form of synchronicity and "kharma" in which the ethnographer's intuition leads to the predicated discovery or encounter. There is much risk in this process, because it entails an openness of the ethnographer that can be easily victimized by the other. At every turn, encounters force upon the ethnographer choices which are not just aesthetically or anthropologically significant, but which also have an intrinsic ethical dimension. The ethnographer must choose, for better or worse.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The existentiality of the other's world is perhaps the goal of the ethnographer's journey. It is to describe/explicate the significant, phenomonological life-world of the other in terms of that other's existential "reason for being" and delimmas for existential encounter. The exploration and discovery of such reason for being may be elusive or oblvious to the other. But its investigation is based upon the faith that there is an important "phenomenological sense of order" in every human beings life--if we are all by definition subjectively sentient. This means that even insane people, who from a normal perspective may seem to lack any order at all, may exhibit nevertheless an internal sense of order--an wonderland kind of world, which is more ordered than sanity, or else a kind of order of disorder. But existential reason for being exists not just exclusively in terms of the phenomenological process of the other's subjective, inner experiences--their existential dilemma is rooted in a wider life-world whose avenues branch out in many directions, and which has its own raison d'etre.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The foundation of the meaning of being human in the world is centrally located in this existential reason for being of the phenomenological other. This "reason for being" is to be contrasted with the "purpose for becoming" which either the ethnographer may ascribe to the other, (in terms of development, equality, etc.) or which the other may ascribe to himself or to the ethnographer. The "purpose for becoming" entails the superimposition of an alien, objective perspective upon existential world, constraining it in human ways it would not otherwise have been constrained.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the principle of a person's reason for being is that we are all, as human beings, "culture bearers" and it is this fact which constrains how we construct and order our experiences and make "sense" of the world. The anthropological paradox of humankind's reason for being in the world is that for each individual it is culture historically unique and different from any other's. This makes a phenomenological, idiographic approach to its understanding paramount. And yet we all similarly share in the burden and consequences of such a reason for being in our lives that we cannot escape, except perhaps in death or madness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, we might refer to "ethnographic ego" as incorporating the "ethnographic self" and the "ethnographic other." It is neither the experience of the ethnographer nor the subject/object of her/his research. It's theoretical, scientific counterpart is what I refer to as the "anthropological ego"--the "subject-centered human reality." It is what emerges as the phenomenological birthing process proceeds to its resolution. It is a transcendent sense of identity that is based upon the incorporation of differences--it is the sense of human reality that results from existential ethnography. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#nineback">back</a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Part II</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Knowledge</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p> </font></b><font SIZE="2"> </font>Taking its lead from the sociology of knowledge, we can construe the question of the anthropology of knowledge as being centrally focused upon the problem of the anthropological construction of human reality and of the culturally constructed "facticity" and "historicity" of human knowledge in the world. We must see the problem of the knowledge of anthropology as inextricably enmeshed in the problem of the anthropology of knowledge, conferring an inherent paradox of the reflexivity of anthropological understanding of human reality. </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <a NAME="twentyfive"> <p>  <hr> <p></a> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">9</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION of REALITY</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">What would be the human tidal wave to sweep clean the slate of history?</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Leaving aside the sticky issue of the reflexive paradox of the anthropological "reconstruction" of the anthropological construction of human reality, the scientifically objective point of view is taken of human reality as a process of anthropological construction--of humankind making itself in the world while reconstructing the world in itself. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman's "The Social Construction of Reality" (1967) provides, as a seminal essay in the sociology of knowledge, the platform for the anthropological construction of reality. They wrote of the centrality of language as both the basis for the public stock of knowledge reinforcing "objectivity" and as a subjectively reinforcing "conversational apparatus," of the convergence of the three dialectically related processes of externalization, objectivation and reification, and internalization during the critical "moment" of socialization in which a social world reproduces itself in the individual and the individual produces her/himself in the world. They mention both an anthropological theory of the order of acquisition of human symbolic capacity and of uniquely human "world openness" which allowed humankind to remake itself in the world, and of the human incorporation of social processes as if natural, the expression of natural factors as if social, and the necessary dialectical balance between social and natural, ideal and real forces in the construction of reality. They refer to a psychological theory of discrepant internalized realities due to incomplete primary socialization or contradictory secondary socialization. Nevertheless, the work is to be critiqued as privileging a sociological and social structural framework, and of implicitly rendering as of secondary and derivative importance either anthropological or psychological alternatives. Any outline of a theory of the anthropological construction of reality must strike a delicate balance between psychological and sociological versions, and we may then speak of the inauguration of a genuinely scientific "anthropology of knowledge."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Taking our lead from a Post-Modern point of view, we can calmly claim that Anthropology is a construction of human reality. It is not human reality itself, except inasmuch as this too is anthropologically constructed, nor is it a "reconstruction" implying that there was ever something originally "constructed".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If it is constructed, then it is a special kind of construction. From the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge, we can refer to the classic case of the social construction of reality. We speak of the tripartite dialectic in which humankind externalizes its reality, reifies this external construction, and then subsequently internalizes what it originally externalized as if a natural part of itself, all three phases coming together during the critical moment of the socialization of the individual through which a society reproduces and perpetuates itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This formal dialectical structure of the social construction of reality can be seen as privileging a structural, sociological account of human reality, albeit a comprehensive and inclusive one, which casts the possibility of the "psychological construction of reality" as but the consequence of the process of socialization. A model of the psychological construction of reality, coming from a psychology of knowledge perspective, would probably reverse this order such that humankind would make its external world a reflection of its internal designs--the projective stage upon which all the human emotions, mentations, drives, play themselves out.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an alternative point of view of the anthropological construction of reality, there is good reason to seek some kind of middle ground between the sociological and psychological poles. It would privilege neither perspective in its attempt to seek a balance between them.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anthropological construction of reality then would derive from a kind of anthropology of knowledge, one which, like its counterparts in sociology or psychology, would necessarily open the doors of understanding onto a world of relativistic paradox. Such a perspective would also have to embrace the inherent reflexivity of "trying to push the bus while remaining on the bus"--the anthropology of knowledge is necessarily a constructed anthropology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question remains as to what precisely such a reflexive "anthropological construction of human reality" would amount to. It would combine both the objective elements of the sociological construction of reality with the subjective elements of a psychological construction of reality, and it would recast this recombination as the "cultural" elements of human reality. Culture would be seen as existing somewhere within the no-human's-land between "Self" and "Other", or between many selves and others. It is demarcated by the phenomenological patternings of interaction between many different selves, seen internally, and many different others, viewed externally. If humankind is by necessity a social being, it has also become irremedially a highly individuated, interiorized being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Of course, as with the social construction of reality, language is to be seen as a central mediating mechanism of the entire cultural process. From the standpoint of our linguistic encoding of a "common stock of knowledge" which nevertheless has a differential landscape of saliency, we can speak of cultural codes and cognitively internalized maps of the cultural world that remain in the implicit relational fields of our world. These codes are schematic chunks that are transmitted between individuals and between generations, and which, in the process of transmission, become gradually modified. From an internal point of view, these cultural codes and the patterning of their interrelationship remain remarkable conservative, and yet retain a capacity for chaotic reorganization. Language comes to embody and contain within it the entire cultural field of meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because it is the medium of primary enculturation, the language, and all that it encodes, takes on a degree of "subjective inevitability" that reaches the level of primary process, of psychological primacy, that it becomes, in the process of its acquisition, organic. The integration that exists in one's effective life-world, one which exists within a viable cultural context composed of significant others, becomes the foundation, and the reflection, of the integration that comes naturally within the self. At this point, we cannot clearly separate what is nature and what is nurture, or what is internal and what is external, as others are in us and we are in others. This is called primary bonding, and, upon an unconscious level, becomes a near total imperative in our lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The language that is the principle medium of our cultural instruction and information about the world becomes also the primary mechanism for the mediation between inner and outer worlds, between self and others--it is no coincidence that so many pathological psychic process are evidenced in terms of linguistic disorder. Language is more than a kind of "conversational apparatus" for reinforcing the subjectively internalized constructions of reality. It is in a sense the active substance of meaning, the actual construction of the cultural world--a construction that has both internal, psychological resonances and external, sociological reverberations. For the ephemeral moment of its being thought or spoken, for the brief period of its scope and intentionality, language precipitates the culturally constructed sense of reality--as both unconscious ground and as social background or cultural context--as the vehicle of world knowledge and of common sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What we refer to as the objectivation of constructed knowledge and its subsequent "reification" in the world, is in fact the process of the concrete precipitation of cultural meaning in the world through communication. It amounts to the realization of cultural reality and its process, somewhere in the no-human's-land between self and other. However briefly, realities merge instead of colliding--figure and ground become a single totality--and meaning is made.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is to be seen from this standpoint that what we are accomplishing with our science, and our anthropology as science, is the construction of an alternative cultural language, one which transcends the historical contingencies of the cultural process but which is nevertheless susceptible to these contingencies, and one that can maintain an objective dialectic beyond the dialectic that is part of the normal processes of human reality. Our sciences accomplish this feat of objective transcendence of the cultural ordering of human reality by forcing knowledge to meet certain rigorous standards of control--that it is publically universal, or open knowledge, and that its terms of communication are not restricted by internal, privatized definitions, but remain relatively or potentially available to everyone. By its reflexiveness, anthropological science, and the science of anthropology, as linguistically encoded, behaviorally expressed constructions of human reality, transcends its own dialectic while remain within the bounds of the terms of its dialectic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see the achievements of technological progress, of social organization and scientific development, as but extensions of this cultural process in the anthropological construction of reality--our world has become, for better or worse, a human-made world which nevertheless remains susceptible to all the whims and vagaries of human nature.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A psychological version of the model of the social construction of reality might reverse the order of presentation, such that the issues of internalization, socialization and the positing of subjective structures of knowledge would come before their reification and subsequent externalization in the larger world. Like the hen or the egg question, we cannot really say which should come first, and it is on this kind of dilemma that the holism of an anthropological version of reality pivots. The holism of such an anthropological version does not preclude analysis of the processes of the human construction of reality, but only renders all such analysis conditional to a kind of stochastic symmetry between knowledge and reality, and our own anthropological self-awareness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any such theory must contain the following elements: 1. An explanation of enculturation and the internalization of the external human reality within the human, and an account of the organic processes which are inextricably tied to such enculturation and internalization. 2. A theory of mythological symbolization and of symbolic processes of projection and informal "fallacy" which permit humankind to organize its behavioral realities on the basis of internalized beliefs and symbolic schemas. 3. A theory of the historical embedding of the anthropological constructions of reality upon many different levels and the framing and precipitation of cultural experience by this embeddedness. 4. A theory of the functional grammar of language as a broader social phenomena and as social praxis which is both psychologically constrained and psychologically constraining. 5. An anthropological theory of meaning which sees information as a kind of parallel-processing dialectic which goes on simultaneously upon the different levels, on a broader socio-structural level in terms of roles and status identities, on an interpersonal level of dialogical and nonverbal interaction, on a psychological level of the internal functioning of the personality, upon a biological level of the organic functioning of the brain, and even of the genome, itself. 6. An accounting of a kind of anthropological relativity and relativism of knowledge, understanding that is intrinsically, normatively arbitrary and descriptively nondiscrete, that is historically and culturally constrained and constraining, that is socially conditioned and conditional, psychologically centered, and even from a purely perceptual point of view, that is fundamentally "representational" rather than "presentational" about human reality. 7. Finally, any such theory of the anthropological construction of reality must provide an adequate account of human paradox, the source of anxiety and "antinomality" within knowledge, and of the anthropological role of science in the resolution of such paradox, a question which must inevitably confront the issue of the reflexive anthropological reconstruction of the anthropological construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For humankind, nature and culture and mind and body are inextricably fused as a single synergistically integrated reality. The inherent "world openness" of human being is linked to the fact that our behavior is not instinctually determined--becoming free from the bondage of instinct allowed us to slip out of the fold that natural selection provided our progenitors. It meant that we faced an imperative of cultural dependency--to be complete we must incorporate into our organic being as if natural a cultural contrived substitute for our loss of nature. It also meant that our cultural realities would become the primary vehicles for expression of our innate drives and needs. It also gave us our first curse of our capacity to incorporate into our being as if natural and automatic things which are of humanmade construction--things which are by definition "cultural." And we cannot clearly say whether it was our first rudimentary cultural artifacts, our guttural gesticulations, our first efforts with our fumbling fingers to hew a stone, or the first fire that sparked the imagination, which freed us from the burden and security of our instinctual dependency, or whether it was our liberation from our own biological drives and needs which fostered our first capacity for culture. More likely it was a kind of dialectical cybernesis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What remains certain is that this process involved both belief as well as behavior. It freed the mind as well as the body--and also that it occurred simultaneously upon several different levels of human experience. I will refer to this as "organic process" and will make the distinction between "primary process", "secondary process," "phenomenological process" and "social process". Primary process refers to the acquisition and internalization of cultural traits at a level that is organically "natural" and automatic. Secondary process refers to the subsequent acquisition of traits in terms of identification, habituation, appetites and aversions on a level which remains available to our awareness and yet usually out of our awareness. Phenomenological process refers to the kind of dialogical "structuration" and "pathways of praxis" by which we biographically, idiographically arrange our lives. Social process, or structuration, refers to the wider socio-structural patterns, the networks and social action, mobilization and mobility of social resources, the constraints and screens of opportunity, the labeling, reference and status-role assignation which impinge upon our world and our lives in so many ways. Historical process, or "transculturation," refers to wider processes of intercultural exchange, contact and historical civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak of internalized cultural schemas, codes, models, cognitive maps and the symbolic, emblematic organization of experience in terms of experience, expectation and encounter by which humankind must frame, evaluate and respond adaptively to its environment. Humankind is always faced with a basic existential decision to modify its internalized scaffolding of human reality to better fit its experiences in the world, or else to attempt to moderate its external experiences in order to fit its internalized framework. And in this regard we can more often than not be regarded as neurotic failures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It should go without saying that such internalized mapping of the world occurs primary in terms of mythological and symbological process in which we ask of symbolic forms and functions, emblems and icons, the double duty of standing for many things at once and to often stand in place of the realities it represents. And in terms of this fundamental process, one which entails psychological processes of repression and projection, rationalization and delusion, the average modern human being is not fundamenally different from his most "primitive" forebearers. The savage mind is indeed incapable of the modern paradox of admiring a good hater.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural constructs, traits, knowledge and experience becomes historically embedded both within the personality and within social patterning as praxis. This embedding entails a kind of conservative resistance to radical change as well as a kind of perverse "history of unintended consequences"--the chaotic history of underdetermined multifactorial systems. We can speak of a kind of historical momentum that carries the human world forward down its own course to construction and destruction. It is a momentum that accretes itself in ideology and systems of rationalization, in religious systems of ritual, mythology, of belief and value, in social custom and constraint, as well as within the internalized, socially reinforced character of the individual personality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Diverse cultural schema become reiterated, recreated, revitalized and in the process reworked and modified in the successive performances and reproduction of cultural reality. In this regard we may also refer to a kind of cultural "unconscious" which remains contextually embedded in both the environment and our effective experiences of our life worlds, one which tends to be all encompassing and "larger than life" in appearance. It conditions and constrains not only our individual and social action, even the possibilities for such action and intention in the world. Because of its all consuming embeddedness in both our common sense and our consensus, it remains normally out-of-awareness, given, taken for granted, tacit only, beyond the ordinary purview of our critical faculties or our conscious control. And yet it constitutes the socially real substrate for our consciousness, for our capacity for inference, belief, for our normative decision-making and even our imagination and creativity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint that we can reconsider an anthropological version of a "functional theory" of grammar, and, implicitly, a theory of "mind." This theory must contrast with the predominant structural psycho-linguistic paradigm that explains language primarily in terms of its organic foundation in the brain and precludes the analysis of language as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon. Language as social process can be seen to be a nested cluster of contextual frames and figures within yet other frames and figures of signification. These symbolic, linguistically encoded frames are not unlimited, but constitute a minimal, paradigmatic set defined upon limited number of definitional dimensions and design. They remain prototypically, statistically "basic" in their derivation from and of human experience, and they are polythetically constituted. These basic, primary frames are "universal" in the sense that they underly the range of human variation. Derivative transformational rules, culturally and historically specific, are applied to these paradigmatic frames in such a way as to render speech production generative and the possibilities for linguistic permutation boundless.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Both linguistic frames, and the transformational rules applied to these frames, become embedded and internalized to the point of "native speaker intuition". The frames are, by design, intuitively self-evident and immediately available to human awareness. Such a capacity comes from our superb faculties for pattern recognition, faculties that allow us to keep everything else implicitly constant while we can focus our conscious attention upon particular "figures" which are changing within our field of view. The innate capacity for such linguistic acquisition is as much a function of the generalized capacity and organization of the mind as it is a matter of any localized, specialized seat of syntactic organization or of universal deep grammar in the brain. The capacity of the human mind is to store knowledge frames within other overlapping knowledge frames in such a way that a limited capacity can yield an unlimited range of possibility. The organization of the human mind relies upon the ability to accommodate and assimilate minor adjustments and shifts in patterning while keeping all other frameworks in a "steady state"--a kind of frequency modulation similar to the functioning of a television set. It also relies upon a background field of passive, instantaneous recognition from which it configures experience, and upon a trick of "passive processing" of information that does not require our conscious attention. It is a "trick" that the mind plays upon our awareness to fill in the gaps, to render as if animated and continuous the flow of experience what may in actuality be a discontinous series of events or discrete series or array of signals.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Pan-linguistic frames and mention of mind brings to bear the critical question of the anthropological construction of meaning in human reality. Meaning is not arbitrary in the construction of reality. It is conventionally constrained and historically condtioned. Meaning is embedded within the Mind and enacted in the world. Meaning is a universal field of significance and possibility that remains implicit in the organization of human consciousness and experience. It can be seen as a human horizon and universal human context of consciousness which is itself multidimensional and mulitleveled.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Meaning is constituted by the mediation of boundaries between two or more parallel but dialectically interactive sets that produce constructive and destructive patterns of interference. It can be seen as multi-lateral symmetry/assymmetry and complex dialetical system of cybernesis. It occurs in the split structure of DNA codes, in the hemispherical lateralization of brain function, in the dialogical interaction between self and other, as well as in the internalized dichotomy between ego and id, or superego and ego, or between conscious and subconscious, or presented sense of self and background self, and also on a larger social frame work between people defined by status-role identity and corporate superoganizational ethos. Meaning is the by-product, an epi-phenomenal patterning, the residuum of our principle existential challenge to deal adaptively with change, chaos and entropy in the natural order of things. It nevertheless becomes the mythological ground of our being to which we primarily refer our experiences of change--though derived from change it comes to constitute the basis for change in our culturally constructed world.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left to reconsider the general problematic posed by the anthropological relativity of our knowledge, and the paradoxically reflexive relativism of our understanding of this relativity. Human knowledge, culturally constructed and organically embedded, is neither unlimited nor universal in its purview. The field of meaning consists of an epigenetic, convoluting topography of the mind. It is both historically and culturally variable. There are different regions and localities of mind in the world that remain mostly resistant to translation. We can transcribe signals, translate significations, interpret definitions and evaluate foreign symbolisms, we can even get into the heads of others, but we cannot readily transfer one range of meaning or superimpose one area of the field upon another without undue distortion.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such anthropological relativity has certain implications for our world. It entails the possibility that disease and illness may be as much a phenomenon of social pathology as it is a question of biological or organismic health or dysfunction. It entails the impossibility of rendering absolute, nonarbitrary judgements about the qualitative status of human events in the world. It does not preclude the possibility of universally general "covering laws" but renders these highly unlikely and always conditional to specification. It entails a statistically determined yet undertermined model of reality. It entails the inexorable antinomal paradoxes of trying to define infinities in finite terms, finite things in terms which are infinite, of capturing change in terms of things which seem static, of finding unity in diversity and identity in difference, of making the strange familiar, and rendering discrete that which appears continuous.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological relativity entails that our science of anthropology and our anthropology of science shall remain a metalogical exercise in reflexive, apperceptive human awareness. It guarantees that our constructions of reality, however validated, shall remain irreducibly human constructions, and that our knowledge and experience of the world, however objectively based, shall remain inherently subjective in constitution. It reminds us that our belief in the materially real, alienated objectivity of our knowledge of the world is but a delusion, a trick of our imagination upon reality. We cannot know or even imagine a world that is not a humanly constructed one--for in our very act of imagining or knowing, we are constructing it in our own image. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentyfiveback">back</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eleven"></a><a NAME="ten"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">10</p> </font></b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">.c.<b>ANTHROPOGENESIS</p> </b></font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">.c.<b>The Origins of Humankind</p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Our origin is our natural liberation and cultural bondage</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The complete origin story of .i.human beginnings; will probably always remain shrouded in silent mystery. But we have accumulated and analyzed a substantial amount of evidence to enable us to assert with confidence some basic pieces of the human evolutionary framework. We know, for instance, that bipedalism preceded the marked increase in endocranial development, which itself proceeded in a stepwise fashion over several million years. We have an idea of the areas of the first australopithecines, and the earliest tool associations. We have a general idea of when Humankind first came to tame and depend upon fire. We know now that the factors of prolonged infant child dependency, and the reproductive and productive role of the mother in the transmission of early human proto-culture, must have played an important role in the stimulus for cultural and cerebral development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We no longer can look to simple models of tool use, or to language, or to increased brain capacity, or social organization, as suitable, prime mover explanations for the beginnings of humankind. Our models of .i.anthropogenesis; today must reflect the sophistication and the complexity of our fossil record and associated genetic and primate evidence. We know that all of these factors, along with others, were important parts of the process of the emergence of human culture, but what we may never know is exactly how or why these factors came together in such a way as to make anthropogenesis a reality. What we confront with our patchy evidence is a problem of history, of constructing the uncoverable parts in such a way that the resulting picture satisfies all our questions. We can call it natural history, or the beginning of human culture history, but it remains essentially an historical dilemma. And in this it matters less whether the time depth is a thousand years or a million, except that a million years is much further removed from the bounds of normal human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But the problem of .i.anthropogenesis; will always remain an important question to be asked by anthropologists, not only because the answers we give it will inevitably reflect our own contemporary concerns, our own unconscious preoccupations, our own values and our own interests, but also because the kind of answer we give to it will be a measure of how we comprehend and construe other important aspects of human reality. This includes how we understand human nature and culture, how we look at human social organization and human character, how we see primary socialization and the transmission and evolution of cultural traits.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our answer to this question is important in yet another way. How we fill in the question of our own origin is mythologically fundamental to the sense of completeness of our human identity in the world. In order to keep a relatively unbiased and universal sense of human identity, we need to have an unbiased sense of our own beginnings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropogenesis must take into account the anthropological processes of humankind making itself in the world for the first time. In this process the role of language must figure as a central mechanism in a similar central way which language figures in the development and primary acquisition of the young child.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The human capacity for language is unique in the animal kingdom, as are humankind's capacity for tool manufacture and use, and human bipedality, year-round female estrus, prolonged infant dependency. From an evolutionary standpoint these were perhaps minor adjustments to be made--rather like the breeding of a strain of dairy cows from an originally feral herd of bovine. They were perhaps transitions that were made within a rather narrow window of space and time--but once accomplished having revolutionary consequences for human adaptation and cultural advancement. Perhaps they occurred only at one particular time and place, within a relatively narrow frame, but once occurring, diffused rapidly to the furthest boundaries of human habitation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must also see the complex of uniquely human traits that are associated with anthropogenesis as in some way holistically integrated. When they emerged, they either emerged together, or at least in tandem, such that the acquisition of one trait opened the door for the acquisition of the others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must also be seen that the development and subsequent elaboration of this complex of human traits entailed or brought about certain special environmental conditions that fostered such development. Perhaps our original protohuman ancestors had carved themselves out of a particular adaptive niche of the pleistocene. We can only speculate what this particular niche was like, except that subsequent adaptive success must have led to an adaptive radiation of the human species, to their subsequent differentiation and elaboration of a range of different eco-niches</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speculate that the early traits evolved in adaptation in a rather specific and narrow econiche of one era, were in someway triggered toward an adaptive generalization which allowed humankind to break free of its natural selective pressures in subsequent periods. Perhaps the triggering mechanism was the change in environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must learn to see as separate but interrelated processes of anthropogenesis as the evolution of humankind and the cultural evolution of human civilization. A theory of "gene-culture coevolution" would want to see cultural evolution as secondary and subsequent to the determinations of genetic evolution, closely tracking the biological evolution of humankind. But genes may follow as much as lead cultural development, and it seems more likely the case that cultural development gradually "took off" the runway of anthropogenesis some remote time ago and was thus launched on its own trajectory. We can only see a "biocultural miracle" if we step back from the local details to take in the entire panorama of the evolutionary process. Then the brief five million years of hominid history pales in comparison to the three or four billion year history of the fossil record of life on earth. It is certain that the kind of selective regime predominant when humankind first evolved on earth are not the same kind of selective regime which prevails today on an earth which is becoming increasingly dominated by human civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the evolution of culture we must look to a few horizons of significant changes. One was the development of agriculture and the resulting development of stratified societies. Prior to this neolithic period, people for the most part lacked the scale of social organization that became possible afterward. The problem of the "prehistoric" period is to explain the development and dynamics of small group cultural traditions--the kind of gemeinschaft cultural groupings that has been stock in trade of anthropological research. The problem of the "protohistoric" period is to analyze the inception and transition toward state organization before the period at which written records can be utilized as evidence. The historic period proper begins with the institution of writing, and continues until today. There is in this transition from a prehistoric, through proto-historic to historic periods, a shift from kin-based mode of social organization and production toward a corporate institutional mode.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a sense that in the prehistoric world, culture had come to mean something very different than what it later became during the historic era. The raison d'etre of cultural organization during the prehistoric period was fundamentally altered by the time history had arrived to document the changes that were going on. And the basis of these changes had little or nothing to do with genetic evolution or modification. During the prehistoric period, culture was in a sense more "complete" and served a wider set of political purposes that it later came to signify--it had not yet become the impersonal kind of constraint it was later to become in peoples' lives. It had a deeply personal, and vital significance. Durkheim referred to its sense of social solidarity as "mechanical" versus the kind of compartmentalized and specialized "organic" solidarity of later civilizations. Culture during the prehistoric period more directly mediated the relationship between humankind and the natural world. It was frequently humankinds first, last and only defense against the vicissitudes of the natural order. Culture was a lifeboat, a means of survival, a plan for action, and a proscription for taboos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As history advanced, small culture became increasingly embedded within a larger and larger context of sociocultural relations. Culture became something limited and limiting, subordinated within a larger socio-cultural field</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Two basic processes are at work in cultural dynamics. These are the innovation and transmission of cultural traits.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">.i.Cultural traits; are largely like genes, and the process of cultural transmission is in many ways analogous to genetic transmission. The levels of significance for the two systems are different, and yet many of the basic processes are the same-both may be seen as different levels of articulation of the same field of relational meaning. Both may be construed as dual or parallel-processing systems that function cybernetically and anti-chaotically in a complex kind of dialectic. The kinds of forces and factors impinging upon one level are separate from those operating at the other level. If selection is occuring at the level of cultural evolution, it is governed by paradigm very different from the kind of selective regime operative upon a genetic level of evolution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can speak of basic and derived traits. The .i.invention; or innovation of basic traits is virtually irreversible, and once coming into being in the world, their subsequent transmission becomes practically inevitable. Fire, the bow and arrow, the wheel, ideas of zero, all were basic cultural traits which once having come into being, became more or less permanent features of cultural reality. All fires may go out, but the idea of fire will long remain to burn in the human imagination. Furthermore, these kinds of basic innovations have been transformative of the cultural universe of humankind. They permanently alter the calculus of ratios upon which cultural selection and human success in the world are based. Of course, these transformations often result in unintended consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Derived .i.innovations; can be seen as the subsequent revision, elaboration and refinement of basic traits to meet a broader range of applications in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is this aspect of cultural evolution which has made the advance of human civilization a fundamentally transcultural and irreversible historical process. It ushers in a whole new era of change. It is essentially a transcultural phenomenon because no single culture can forever claim an exclusive monopoly upon a particular trait. The transcultural transmission of traits, even just as an idea, becomes virtually guaranteed by the acquisitiveness and interest of people who are able to see the consequences of such innovation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What kinds of selective factors have been operating in the course of human evolution and human history, and how have these influenced the subsequent development of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Early .i.selection; must have favored certain capacities and characteristics--these include the capacity for cultural acquisition, linguistic competency, the physiological capacity to endure extreme physical privation and stress such as hunger, long term thirst, etc. It may well be that the character and capacity for aggressive violence has also played an important part in human development--the stronger and more dominant have long been selectively advantaged over the weak and submissive. In a similar way, the capacity to make tools may have been a selective force in the emergence of humankind--the capacity to make superior tools confering upon an individual, and a group, an adaptive advantage. We see a similar force still operating in human history when the possessor of superior technology comes to quickly dominate and control those who lack such technology. Social dependency may also have been a trait selected for--humans coming to increasingly need and depend upon the joint labor of the group, and the resources of other groups, for cultural adaptation and survival. It follows that the more sociable would gain selective success over the less social. Evolution for human sexuality, for sexual receptivity, may have also been selected for. Those children who could bear children year-around, and those men who could steadily and dependably provide for young mothers, were selected for.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The early evolutionary epoch of humankind must be characterized as one of survival under conditions of extreme hardship and physical stress. The lifespan of the average adult must have been relatively short. The human body must have been adapted as an organism for enduring such deprivation. Famine must have been frequent and pervasive, infant mortality high, and degree of physical injury also high. Early life was brutal, bloody and short, offering little hope for escape. The value of a woman would be measured by her reproductive capacity, combined with her productivity in procuring basic food resources to support herself, her offspring, and any other attached people. The value of a man would have been his fearlessness and ferociousness in attacking and dominating others and in defending himself and his group against predators or other aggressors.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We confront a basic paradox in our model of this early phase of human development. Human population, perhaps a driving force in subsequent culture history, was always in a local sense "dense" but in the global framework small. Early groups could have produced offspring limitlessly. Excess population would always be drained off by an exogenous pull. High mortality and early depradations tended to set natural limits to the rate of increase and survival of the offspring of these early populations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A continuous transgenerational fissioning and splintering of locally overgrown groupings into smaller, dispersed groups, and the gradually movement and spread of these groups across the uninhabited frontier landscapes, must have been a fundamental pattern for most of human prehistory. Early groups must have been highly susceptible to long periods of isolation in which they had to be self-sufficient for their survival, and to frequent episodes of violent, aggressive contact.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Early eras must have been characterized by a high rate of transience and a basic lack of regularity or stability of social patterning. Early transience may have been such that contact between groups may have been unpredictable, erratic and irregular. Small bands may meet peacefully one year only to vanish without a trace by the next. Human development was marked by increasing regularity and stability of social groupings and relations between groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we are to mention other early selective factors influencing early human evolutionary development, we might include selection for a group orientation--in-group-out-group conscience--for an inherent conservativism as well as for creative adaptation, and for a capacity for long range strategic planning which allowed a group to calculate, and anticipate in advance, the movements of other groups, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There must have been an optimal range of adaptation for survival. Groups that remained too home-bound or tied to a central place for subsistence, probably faced the prospect of eventually being wiped out. Groups that ranged too far out and abroad, and which wandered aimlessly without a sense of habitual orientation, were probably quickly eliminated. There must have been an intermediate range in which groups maintained a relatively wide arc of external contacts and relations with a range of environments, but focused this range upon a central home area, or even set of places to which they could periodically retire. Such central places must have provided certain safety nets in times of hardship--protection from predators or intruders, access to fresh water and to some kind of dependable food resource.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Early existence involved a daily gamble for survival. One wrong move could spell final disaster for an entire group. Those willing to risk everything, or daring to risk nothing, eventually lost out. Only those who could play the odds, risking here, sandbagging there, stood a chance of winning out in the long run.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Selective forces and factors must have long been at play in the development of humankind. These factors and forces must have been complex, tending to cumulatively or synergistically add or detract from the anthropological complex that was at the core of anthropogenesis. It an erroneous misconception to try to link special significance to a single kind of selective mechanism as decisive in the history of human evolution, or to a single trait or even genetically linked set of traits that would be systematically, overwhelmingly preferred over any other traits.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What we know is that all human groupings tend to be relatively heterogeneous in their overall genetic composition. Biological differences that exist between groups, differences in height, stature, skin color, stamina, blood type, etc., tend to be minor and inconsistent when compared to the complete profile of human traits and the total arc of human possibility. Genetic inbreeding tended to favor a loss in overall fitness for a group, and probably spelled the eventual demise of the group. Heterogeneity was long maintained in the human gene pool by frequent cross overs between groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We do not yet know exactly how selective factors may have worked in the course of human history. They were certainly variable in their influence. Selection working at one level or in one context may have been overridden or reversed or neutralized by counter-selective forces operating at another level. Selection must have been a complex set of influences operating upon several levels simultaneously--it was rarely if ever a single cause with a single set of consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And the question remains unanswered as to how much selection is necessary before its influence is noticeable or even decisive in determining the direction of human development. What percentage of a population over a given area must come under the purview of a given selective regime, and how completely, before selection can be said to have been effective in altering the subsequent course of human history.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And then there is also the necessary chaos that must always be taken into any account of selective processes. Chaos may yield the entire field to a single random event, a butterfly effect, and yet may prevent a widespread selective agency from coming to fruition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The chaos operating in the earliest phases of proto-human development must have been at a sub-critical level. Local events or minor perturbations, though many and frequent, would have little net consequence on the entire course or sum of events in this evolutionary process--while the chance for a single, major cataclysmic event affecting most human remained relatively small.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It also remains fairly certain that the kind of selective regime operating when humankind first emerged was not the kind of selective regime which was operating at the neolithic dawn of human agricultural civilization, or at the later dawn of historical civilization, or now in our scientific technological epoch. The kind of selection operating today, if there is any that is not canceled out in the complexity of the global system, may be producing a kind of human very different from what we have witnessed in the past or might imagine today.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must distinguish between natural selection, cultural selection, social selection and human selection;. Whatever kind of selection we are referring to, we may talk about the same basic consequence of selection--conferring reproductive success upon a specific individual, and similar kind of individual, as well as success in trans-generational transmission. Selection which leads to the procreation of a certain males offspring may not have a net positive contribution if none of these offspring survive and in turn continue procreation. The selective regime favoring the procreation of the father may in fact disfavor the procreation of the offspring.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A particular selective regime cannot be demonstrated by the success of a single individual or even by a single generation--its transgenerational success must be shown before its net value can be measured.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Selection must be seen as an entirely statistical kind of phenomena, conferring advantage to one group over others entails game of odds. Single instances may well prove to be the exception to the norm. Furthermore, we can only hope to find measures of correlation between different factors, or between different causes and their associated consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The issue of the total effect and net complex of selection cannot be taken in an exclusively particular or local context--it must always be measured from a global standpoint of chaos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Theory of human evolution recognizes the value of selection for prosocial behavior. Those actions that favor the interests of the group survival over and above the interests for individual organiismic survival. In this regard we must refer to a kind of symbolic selection for sycophancy, for the capacity to identify so strongly with the reified interests of the group as to lead to self-sacrifice. We refer to kin-fitness, as well as to species-fitness, and recognize as evidence of such eusocial behavior altruistic and heroic acts of self-sacrifice for others survival. Similarly so, we might as well also refer to self-fitness, or to class-fitness or caste-fitness or to ethno-national-fitness. We must see in the willingness to victimize and exploit another in order to advantage oneself the alternative to much rarer ability to sacrifice oneself for one's family or for one's group. Does a eugenic program by an upper caste necessarily build a super-race, or will whatever effects that are produced be ephemeral and quickly nullified by subsequent episodes of miscegenation. Does a program of genocide have a net consequence unless it is 100 percent complete in exterminating a group--and can the group that is doing the exterminating really be sure that they do not have any heterozygous "bad blood" coursing through their veins. Will countless years of "higher" education or innumerable sessions of psychotherapy necessarily produce a newer, improved generation of World Systems Managers. Any formula for human fitness must beg the question of whose fitness, and for how long.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Finally, what is the net product of all this selection. We must somehow account with all our evolutionary algebra for the human being--modern Homo saipiens saipiens--multicolored, a fast talker, big brained, narrow-minded, variable stature, short-sighted, two-footed, hairless, family oriented and helplessly dependent creature with a history of violent tendencies. This is a strange and unique combination of traits that no single, simple formula for fitness can fit. </p> <p> </p> <p><a NAME="twelve"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">11</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">REDEFINING ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROCESS</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropology at the Critical Juncture of Past and Present</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Our human condition is the state of being forever unfinished</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The Anthropology of Knowledge, elucidating the anthropological construction of reality mediating the boundary between the psychological and sociological, between self and other, subjective and objective, must come to terms with the related concepts of Culture and cultural character as these have played a critical part in the scientific and humanistic integration of knowledge about human reality. Anthropology is confronting its ultimate crises of its own boundary definition in the rapid and mostly irreversible loss of cultural variability and viability on earth. As different cultural orientations continue to converge and become submerged within a globally stratified continuum of developmental modernization, the opportunities for anthropologists to study their traditional subjects in the time-honored manner of extended participant-observation, become correspondingly fewer and further between. As a consequence, Anthropology is left to either redefine its objects and methods of inquiry in a world which is increasingly changing and becoming increasingly complicated in its social patterning, borrowing upon other research traditions better equipped to treat and investigate modern social settings, or else to risk its continual erosion of identity as a crucial, critically relevant discipline of inquiry. It is suggested that the solution to this anthropological crisis of identity will not be found in bio-cultural reconstructions of a mythical past, in developmental or applied anthropology projects, or in the retroflexive critically styled self-alienation of the anthropologist but it may be found in the confrontation and role of mediation of the challenges and contradictions of a changing world.</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font>The relative presence of Culture has been of critical importance in both human evolutionary development as well as in individual human development. The many parts played by culture in human development can be referred to as "cultural process" and this process can be seen as having had a continuous and continuously changing influence upon the anthropological construction of reality, the ongoing definition and redefinition of human beingness, or "humanness" and of the human condition in the wider world. Culture itself, lacking any well-agreed upon definition, can in part be defined by the shaping role it has played in this developmental process. Risking a tautology, we can describe culture as roughly those external, material, symbolic and social components that are necessary to the normal, natural development of the human being. Personal adornment and dress, language, aesthetic sensibilities and affective expression, familial relationships, social values and attitudes toward social relations, strategies and economies of food-getting and material acquisition, technology, religious beliefs, collective representations, ritualistic ceremonies, values of work and play, all must be seen as important cultural components which have some differential bearing upon the development of the human being and the human group from the earliest moments. Of course, child culture can be seen as rudimentary or lacking in many of these respects, but child-culture is in fact a sub-cultural extension of a broader adult world, and the child normally has little if any choice but to share naively in the full cultural life of its care-takers and compeers.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human beings have come to depend upon culture as if this were a vital "need" or condition for their survival and successful development. Culture serves to continually support us and mediate for us basic conflicts and existential challenges which we may be ill-equipped to deal with if left to our own, organically defined resources. Indeed, we might well reverse the conventional formula in this regard and say that it has not been genes that have determined our cultural possibilities, but culture that has constrained our genetic possibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Humankind cannot be conceived of without culture. Culture has long been a critical component of human reality--and yet for the most part the role of cultural process in this most fundamental aspect remains largely unexplained and unexamined. We search for culture in many strange places in the world, and yet consistently fail to define the place of culture in anthropogenesis and human development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Culture undergoes a process of organic internalization as it embeds itself upon the primary levels of human character. Simultaneously, the sense of human beingness, the expression of organic drives, becomes externalized upon a cultural constructed world, and comes to depend for its expression upon such externalization. Culture, from a social-psychological and psychosocial point of view, comes to mediate the boundary between the culturally defined internal world of the individual and the organically defined external world of living culture. Culture becomes vital in the sense that it is an active, living linkage in human beingness. Cultural elements mediate this boundary while simultaneously constituting the boundary. Culture lies somewhere between the self and the other, the product of relation between these two worlds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of internalization, the emphasis upon the subjective side of cultural process, in particular as a distinctive contribution by anthropology to the understanding of human reality, is as equally important as the focus upon its external "objective" manifestations. Subjective evaluation and reevaluation of culturally derived characteristics have an historical consequence in human development and change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we define culture as that externalized and internalized portion of human acquisition and adaptation, those means of cooperative social behavior which have helped to free humankind from the natural preoccupation with survival to pursue other interests, including the development of the intellect, we must see the very important and original evolutionary place of culture in human development, and we must recognize the importance of culture as an externalized facet of human organismic adaptation, one which entails concommittant internalization of "arbitrary" or constructed or conventional elements, the tight connection of culture with primary acquisition. If the original cultural connections are not made in the early years of life, all subsequent development will be retarded.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This aspect also accounts for the tight linkages to culture and personality, and to the intransigence of culture in the formation of individual character. It constitutes the basis for claims of a deep-seated cultural relativity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard, language, systems of symbolization, as well as technology and systems of social organization, must be seen to play a central cybernetic role since the earliest transformations of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Neurological evidence and case histories of severe childhood deprivation support the hypothesis of critical stages of brain development during which new capacities of mind become inaugurated. If missed, permanent retardation of brain development will be the long-term consequence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The delayed development of the brain among higher mammals, and especially marked for humankind, can be seen as a critical period of cultural nurturance during which the relative presence or absence, deprivation and enrichment of an effective cultural life-world, will have a critical influence on the subsequent characteriological development of the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must speculate whether the ontogeny of characteriological development, such as the timing of learning to walk, the acquisition of speech, or learning the principles of classification and conservation, may in certain fundamental aspects reflect the general order of the phylogenetic sequence of human cultural acquisition--the rate and timing of the process being pushed further and further forward in both the life-cycle of the individual human being as well as in the sequence of evolutionary emergence of new capacities and characteristics.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is crucial in this regard to view culture as integrally, historically holistic and organic. It is a living process that has its own unique sense of history and of rootedness within a particular home-environment. It is important to realize that it is not enough to analytically dissect the socio-cultural world in order to discover its functional order. It must be observed naturalistically in its cultural environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultures as social and historical realities are not without contradictions or loose ends, but for the most part they present themselves to the newborn as full-blown, fully coherent systems--they are effectively complete and total, and "subjectively inevitable" in their influence upon human development and environmental adjustment. It is by virtue of their completeness that they must be studied as if complex and holistically integrated systems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">They constitute the basis for the channeling, externalization and displacement of internalized controls and "needs" or "drives" which become posited in external forms. By virtue of this innate cultural dependency, humankind in its development has been always incomplete in a sense that most animals can be considered genetically finished. This unfinished state of the human condition entail that without culture, humankind would not be merely animals, but as "monsters" without even the kinds of coordinated instinctual patternings which animals possess. We therefore cannot conceive of humankind without culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Emphasis early in life upon some styles and genres of cultural components, including expressive and affective modes, aesthetic sensibilities, casual normative and social evaluations, symbolizations and ordering of behavior must be seen to confer upon cultural processes a sense of historical conservatism and resistance to change, and a lasting intransigence to superficial, subsequent modifications.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must refer to basic cultural factors which underlie and give rise to subsequent complex, anti-chaotic cultural patterns constrained and reinforced by the sanction of custom, the force of habit and acquired traits, and the easy preference for the conventional.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It remains the principle purpose of the anthropologist to elucidate this cultural process and the part it plays in human adaptation and integration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Culture has been the special provenience of the field of anthropology. With the rapid disappearance of cultural differences on earth, a disappearance that parallels in some respects the loss of species and genetic variability, the varieties of cultural forms have been rapidly diminishing. Anthropology has not only been losing the principle object of its investigation, but with it, the loss of its own identity and raison d'etre as a science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">With the disappearance of culture from earth, we are facing an anthropological disaster in the rapid reduction of the variability of cultural patternings-the historical evolution of which probably required at least a few million years.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is upon the anthropologists shoulders to carve out a new science of culture, one which has no other reference than its own object of study, and yet one which is by definition cross-disciplinary in its resources. The science of human culture has not yet been written. It must borrow from biology, genetics, neuroscience, as well as from systems science, artificial intelligence, and from history, philosophy, economics, psychology, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And yet it must remain to the anthropologist to define for the world the critical place which culture plays in the human scheme of things.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology must seriously take up once again the question of cultural acquisition, and the role which cultural process has played in human development. If culture plays a crucial role in human acquisition, then we must discern which of those aspects and elements are more basic, which are derivative, and which are primary and which secondary in importance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This brings back into view the problematics of cultural focus of elaboration, and the continuum or arc of cultural variability.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such a study comprises a renewed foundation for comparative research--the broad-based search for similar cultural correlates that together comprise basic cultural categories, categories which are empirically, statistically derived. Cultures vary widely in the kinds of cultural institutions and in the way in which these institutions are constituted and reconstituted within the cultural configuration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is up to the anthropologist to recover ground that has been lost in the wake of the advances of other human sciences and studies.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology cannot continue to contribute critically to the discourse of the human condition if it remains too attached to archaic intellectual attitudes and canalized by a narrow academic tradition of scholarship. On the other hand, Anthropology could make crucial contributions to this dialogue in terms of its holistic and cultural orientation, as well as in terms of being able to cross the traditional academic boundaries and to assimilate into a coherent order different, often contradictory traditions of knowledge. If anthropology cannot carve out for itself a niche in a modern state of knowledge, a niche that is regarded as vital and necessary, then anthropology must face the consequences of becoming increasingly narrowly defined as specialists in the esoteric nature of things.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological process refers to the psycho-cultural dynamics that underly change and development in human historical patterning. It describes humankind making itself in the anthropological construction of human reality. But anthropological process also refers to the primary acquisition of the young child in its human world. It refers to the process of becoming human in the world, and to the process of humankind making itself in the world--the process of the human construction of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It should go without saying that anthropological process is never complete, that it remains unfinished business well into an elder's senescence. Being an unfinished part of human reality, it also has the virtue of being always open and subject to change and modification in a way that is not available to species more instinctively "set" in their ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we seek a finished definition of what is human reality, or human "nature", we fail to realize that such a definition can never be unequivocally determined, but must itself remain open and subject to modification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a virtue in the openness of anthropological process, for it affords humankind the possibility for becoming something other, something different, and perhaps even, something better than what it was before. At the same time that such openness threatens the human condition with the vertigo of moral relativity, it offers the paradox of a ground for the justification of the enlightenment and emancipation of humankind from the violence and bondage that has been its predicament in the past. The ideal of progress and moral improvement finds its metaethical justification in the fact of this possibility for becoming afforded by the openness of anthropological process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At the same time, there is also the dilemma that the possibility for greater evil is also realized at the same time as the possibility for improvement. Becoming then is always a double-edged sword, fraught with as many problems as solutions, threatening as much bondage as it promises emancipation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox of anthropological process is that humankind has a choice to become what it can make itself, and yet has no choice but to become what it makes itself--choose or not it is the predicament of the human condition to become something other than what it is.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropological process lies at the root of the human condition and explicating anthropological process shall shed light upon the foundations of the human condition. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twelveback">back</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="thirteen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">12</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ETHNO-CULTURES</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Emerging Anthropological Categories</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Rich and poor alike, we are all cultural refugees of modern development.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></b>The process, prospect and presence of global stratification has brought with it the emergence of a new sense of social solidarity and new anthropological categories and models of identity and difference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is appropriate to refer to "ethno-cultures" in a similar sense that Immanuel Wallerstein refered to "ethno-nations" which are defined primarily by their interrelationship and positionality within a Capitalist World System. Ethno-cultural identity, process, praxis and boundary must be seen as defined primarily by its relative social-structural interpositionality within a regional-interregional framework, in relation to other ethnocultural categories and groupings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The social and structural relations that serve to demarcate these emergent categories and groupings can be principally defined by a multi-factorial model of religious affiliation, political-economic role, and social, symbolic-ideological reference within the System.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These categories share some characteristics of previous social anthropological categories--class, caste, corporate organization, party, ethnic grouping--but in their unique recombination of these different facets they tend to be historically unique and unprecedented, and also they tend to be crosscutting most of the other categories. In one sense, they resemble castes by virtue of broadly defined roles in specialized economic sectors, by certain endogamous or hypergamous marriage patterns among some groups to the exclusion of others, and by relatively closed vertical mobility. In another respect, they are more like class institutions defined by their relative dominance and command (or lack) of the critical moment of the marketplace in the uneven acquisition and distribution of status wealth and material and social resources, in the availability or desparateness of screens of social opportunity and support, and in their defined sociality as dependent, dominant, desocialized or prosocial. Within ethnocultural categories there is a certain degree of class hierarchy and mobility defined by the relative degree of openness of the grouping. They resemble ethnic groups as ethnization and ethnic identity tend to be principal modes of social mobilization and organization within ethnocultural groupings. This kind of ethnic stratifications vears off into a form of "rainbow racism." (Koreans are good businessmen, Vietnamese women have tricky, nimble fingers, poor Blacks are indolent, poor Whites are trash") One's nominal identification within one ethno-racial type or another becomes broadly determinative of one's status positionality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In such a context "Social racism" also becomes an exclusive prerogatie of the "Beautiful"--it will not matter what color the multicultural anti-drug squad is, as long as they are all young, talented, handsome and athletic. In this regard Americans are not the only global consumers suffering the burden of high-speed trauma, over-dieting, overweight and cosmetic surgery.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In regard to axis of stratification, it is useful to regard such ethnocultural differentiation as being based upon a form of "diagonal stratification." It lacks the verticality of a strongly class stratified system, and the horizontalness of a caste-stratified system. Diagonal stratification is characterized by the competitive coexistence of multiple, skewed, overlapping hierarchies. Individuals within a broader social order may come to occupy a place in several different hierarchies simultaneously. It is no longer useful to make distinctions between Jews and Catholics, or between Blacks, Browns or Whites. It becomes more important to determine whether we are refering to an Orthodox Jew or a Jewish American, whether we are talking about a professional Black from Diamond Bar or a poor black teenager in Compton, or White Italian Americans or Anglo-Americans from upper-middle class suburbia of New Jersey or their West-Coast counterparts in Anaheim Hills or Irvine. These kinds of fine-tuned distinctions of contemporary, domestic American Society, can be extended to practically any continent in the world today. The San bushpeople now are defined in their present ethnocultural identity not so much by their distinctive, and anthropologically romantized past, as they have become encapsulated by a dominant African society. An educated, westernized Malay from K.L. is not the same kind of social creature as his/her bumiputra cousin from an ulu kampong in the hinterland provinces. An educated Japanese businessman from Tokyo is a different kind of person than an Okinawan sugarcane grower.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This points upon a peculiar characteristic of ethnocultural groupings--from an outsider's point of view, the internal differences and sub-ethnic distinctions are invisible. To a large extent one's relevant social identity is situationally and contextually defined. If one were a U.S. serviceperson in the gulf, relationship to Saudi's or Iraqi's would be measured principally by their shared "Americanness" rather than by their being black, hispanic, southern white or male and female. These are distinctions that may yet continue to make a critical difference in regard to within-group social relations, chances for promotion, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is important to recognize from an anthropological perspective is not only the cross-cutting nature of these distinctions and their emerging preemience in the contemporary world scene, but that an individual's existential predicament, life-chances, perspective, and life-trajectory will be to a significant degree predetermined by their local, specific ethno-cultural identity. Chances are good that an abandoned child in the streets of Rio de Janeiro will become a victim of the Brazilian death squad if that child cannot find an adoptive American parent, but are virtually nil that s/he will make it to Harvard. On the otherhand, a third Generation son of Havardians stand prettty good chances of graduating with honors from Harvard, but will most likely not be assisinated in the backstreets of Rio. These examples are not exceptional by their extremeness--compare the likely life-trajectory of an average poor black kid in South Central L.A. or a Chicano in neighboring Southeast L.A. with that of an average son of a Korean or Vietnamese Businesss man in the same areas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are some noteworthy properties emergent from the rise to predominance of ethno-cultural identity. One's local ethnocultural context will present coherent models and categories and cognitive cultural landscapes for interpreting the world which will likely take precedence over other, alternative schemas which may be broader-based or more strategic. More often than not the high visibility and marked character of these local identities will be overwhelming for the average person caught upon in the daily predicament of social adjustment and survival. They will be seen to have more immediate relevance and will present a stronger force of social solidarity than other agencies of order. Under such circumstances, the voices and points of view of one's compatriots who share the same ethnocultural identity will be heard before the distant, often anonymous voices of social workers or representatives of a big, impersonal system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One does not need to look to the dramatic historical events in the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe to see the importance of the emergence of new ethnocultural categories and identities. One can see a parallel and similar phenomenon here in the U.S. in gang activity of inner cities which spill out into many suburbs and commercial districts. But again, we can interpret the activities and political maneuvering of an Orange Country republican, of a university administrator, or of a presidential appointee of the Bush administration as being guided by a similar set of ethnoculturally defined interests and models. From this standpoint, American government may not be generally regarded as inefficient and disfunctional because of an over-weaning bureaucacy or a top-heavy administration, but because the predominant motivations and incentives which lead critical actors to make choices may have become redefined within an international order of ethno-cultural stratification. In such a context, the only genuinely spurious fool is the ultra American Hero--a young reservist veteran of the Gulf War--who believes naively in doing duty to his country. But even then, the socio-cultural relativity implied by the notion of ethnocultural stratification assures us that even this actor has a deeper sense of history and may most likely simply following the tune to a different drummer.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Several interesting aspects emerge from this consideration of ethnocultural stratification. Competition and cooperation may be defined by a differential, variably defined range of group reference. At one level, one may be an hispanic employer cooperating with all who may however vaguely fall under the umbrella of "hispanicity" in competition with any and every Gringo. Upon another level, one may be competing for economic survival against other hispanic businessmen, and on yet another level one may in fact not be so much symbiotically cooperating with one's ethnocultural subordinates, as taking advantage of their ethnocultural predicatment or even grossly exploiting them. Of course, when and if it comes to government sugar, it may behoove the same person to emphasize one's American citizenship or residency before one's hispanicity. And if your Gringoized daughter ends up marrying a southern white Texan from a poor white trash background, one may feel obliged either to disown the daughter or make one's new son-in-law a manager in one's business--a choice in some measure determined by which alternative will be the least expensive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The important point to emphasize is that however it is defined, ethnocultural solidarity becomes fundamentally framed within a competitive/cooperative framework. In such a nomothetically defined social context, history is likely to be contrived and convenient, and prejudicial attitudes and authoritarianisms based upon group-reference, comparison, structural interpositionality, and perceived competition for the same resources.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another dimension of this ethnocultural emergence is that in one sense it comes from a human response to the near total alienation and depersonalization of the global system. It fills in important socio-cultural gaps in the human condition that the imperative to develop or perish has created. The other side of the coin of this facet of ethnocultural solidarity is that it is greatly manipulated and maintained through the mass media. It is a modern village mentality of a global, electronic village stimulated by daily doses of eletronic drugs. Three blacks who pull a white truck driver out of his cab to beat him with bricks and kicks to the head are not doing it because they hate or even know that individual, but because they hate the ethnocultural category that the person symbolically represents. It may have been any white in the same context. Fifteen white police officers standing around and beating on a single black with their batons are not beating on a person, but on an impersonal object of their ethnocultural scorn and derision, an ambassador of intolerable difference. The mass media has proven to be an effective agent in mobilizing or immobilizing the mass mentality of the individual. Leaders of ethnocultural groupings have come to increasingly realize and deliberately exploit this potential of the mass media--Hitler was one of the first and most effective in this regard. Reagan as an actor was also a convincing leader. The media can be used to cultivate a sense of urgency or immediacy of a distant reality far out-of-proportion to the relevancies of one's daily life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Yet another dimension of ethnocultural stratification has been that people who occupy similar or parallel positions in one society or area may actually have more which is in common in terms of values, outlooks, life-chances and adaptations, with their counterparts in other, foreign societies, than with their neighbors in the next neighborhood, on the next street, or even in the house next door. Within such a world, the most tactically desirable place to be is well situated within a broad and extensive ethno-cultural network, and the worst place to be is without any network or sense of ethnocultural identity at all. It does little good if one's only true brothers under the skin live clear across town or on the other end of a vast, annonymous city. On the other hand, with the worldwide availability of fax machines, crystal clear telephones and computer party lines, one does not have to live next door to keep in constant touch with one's closest allie. We can expect far-fetched, "multiplex", sophisticated lateral networks of ethnocultural groupings to continue to coalesce and emerge from supercity to supercity, university to university, to the point at which one may share more in common with one's computer processor-pal than with one's neighbors, compeers at work, department colleagues, or even other memberss of one's family.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Family patterns and values must also be expected to become altered within an emergent ethnocultural framework. It would be virtually impossible to maintain a healthy, reproductive sex life with one's partner via a fax machine or modem. On the other hand one can give birth to virtual strangers and be a natural sibling to one's worst competitor. Family will become ad-hoc and modularly customized social unit to fit the temporary needs and concerns of the immediate arrangement. Lifetime monogamy and true love may increasingly become the anachronisms of a bygone, romantic era, an exception to the rule of single parent families and latch-key kids.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This promises that ethno-cultural groupings will be largely ephemeral phenomena, coming and going about as rapidly as fads or publishers of modern poetry. The factors that would guarantee the long-term stability and survival of an oxymoronic "natural culture" would not be present to ensure the long-term, corporate continuation of ethnocultures. Ethnocultural 'miscegenation,' rediffusion, transculturation, and intermigration between groupings would spell the rapid rise and demise of such units.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We might also expect the rise of a increasing number of "ethnocultural inbetweenies"--children of the ethnocultural interstices who, like homeless refugees of the world, have no coherent cultural orientation to give thems a sense of balance. These individuals would not fit strictly any particular ethnocultural category-and instead would become the hapless citizens and heirs of a global seventh-World- a new "Third Culture" defined by its lack of attachment to any particular cultural orientation. Initially, they would be defined by their nondescript social annonymity and chameleoness. No one factor or even group of factors would be critical to the determination of their identity. They may coalesce to form their own siblinghood of mutual codependency, or they may be cast to sea by host societies that demand some specifiable, certifiable kind of passport for entry. And yet we may find among these unique "grey" people, a unique identity of ethnocultural diversity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Certain persistent, broad dimensions may be expected to emerge from the process of ethnocultural stratification. Particular groupings may become rapidly supplanted by others, but all may come to fill in a continuing, long term fold in the manifold social topography of the world system. The corporate persistence of this broad social categories and ethnocultural models of identity may be likened to what Oscar Lewis refered to as a self-sustaining "culture of poverty." Ethnocultures may come and go with the changing winds of time, but Ethnoculture and Ethnocultural differences are likely to remain for some time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a world characterized by ethnocultural stratification, a common experience of social contact and relation may be one of "culture shock" and the emergence of an increasingly chaotic "multi-cultural continuum". The relations between workers and managers in a factory may be made problematic by the chronic condition of ethnocultural differences. One may be forced to work and interact daily among a whole company of people who are essential foreign from one's own ethnocultural orientation--such interaction may either lead to greater tolerance and understanding of such difference, or else to aggravation of competitive tension and conflict. But never will the sense of identity or solidarity be complete in such a context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In such a context, new "inbetween" groups who serve as mediators in potentially violent relations can be expected to emerge, groups who may be used as scapegoats.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is an urgent challenge to contemporary anthropology to define and explicate the lineaments of this new, emergent kind of ethnocultural process. Within a global context of world development, Culture has acquired new parameters of significance and new models and categories of value and relevance. It can be expected that with growing human overpopulation on one hand, and increasing global environmental circumscription on the other, the increasing inequalities and disparities in resource acquisition and consumption will lead to greater tensions and conflicts. An emerging state of worldwide social "supercriticality" can be expected within the next generation. The precipitating "episodes" can be expected to have a strong "ethnocultural" connection. Structural inequalities and a status quo based on a hierarchy of resource control will demand an increasingly heavy hand in order to ensure stability, and will witness and increasing frequency of "ethnocultural" movements--extemporaneous revolutions of rising expectations and demands for equality. World peace based upon democratic principles of human rights, equality and common prosperity may prove to be anthropologically elusive and unrealistic in a world based upon the emphasis of ethnocultural differences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In such a world, one is very likely to be raised in one or a mixture of several ethnocultural orientations only to find oneself spending the rest of one's life or rearing one's children in a completely different ethnocultural framework, only to feel a chronic sense of personal emptiness, anomie, confustion, disorientation or a sense of vital loss without knowing what it is or why it is so.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It remains up to anthropology to resolve the question of what kind of world it really is that we have created for ourselves. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#thirteenback">back</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fourteen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">13</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">RELATIVITY, RELATIVISM, WORLDVIEW, MIND, BRAIN, CULTURE, the Structure of Complexity</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And Other Dangerous Anthropological Questions</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The universe may well play dice with God.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </b> <p>There are identifiable more than twenty broadly generic and different classes and kinds of relativism or relativities, each subsumingmultiple problems or distinct instances that may represent spurious, pseudo- or lese basic issues of relativistic understanding. A quick list of the categories include: scientific, historical, social, cultural, linguistic, dialogical, hermeneutic, textual, exegetical, literary, symbolic, religious, rational, psychological, cognitive, experiential, epeistemological, philosophical, nonwestern, aesthetic, normative and, finally, miscellaneous. Each category may subsume several different problem areas that may only be relatable on the basis of being subsumed beneath a broad generic heading. For instance, the category of scienfitific relativism includes diverse issues of physical reltivity, biological relativity, anthropological relativity, as well as issues in methodology, theory, philosophy, history and science as social praxis, and also including problematics of the relativity of spatial perception and temporal measurement.</p> <p>From the consideration of so many different kinds of relativism and relativity, we are left to query a few main points. First, a rationalistic orientation by philosophers, scientists and other people interested in thequestion of relativism has largely precluded a more thorough examination of the issues involved, and has led to the conflation of relativism with an extreme version of determinism and thus to its dismissal as a tractable issue, when in fct there is nothing intrinisically inimical between a relativistic and rationalistic orientation, and though relativism and determinism are actually separate and even contraposed issues. As Melville Herskovits so aptly noted, and as Elvin Hatch so blithely ignored, relativism brings into doubt the possibility not of general or even universal knowledge, but only of absolute meaning.</p> <p>Secondly, the on-going debate by anthropologists and others over whether or not there is such a thing as relativity is largely a misplaced concern, one that has resulted in the general obfuscation and neglect of more critical questions. The central question is not whether there is in fact such a thing as relativity or relativism, but exactly how relativity work and what are its relativistic implications for our understanding of reality. The rejection of relativism from its outright denial by rationalistc Western-oriented philosophers steeped in their canons of Platonic idealism and Aristotelian logic, to severe criticism and resistance by pro-positivistic social scientists, has been so strong, that we must inquire, like Clifford Geertz, into the social and psychological reasons for such a reaction.</p> <p>Thirdly, because so many different kinds of relativism appear to coexist in the same general sphere of understanding, the question must be posed as to whether these different forms share anything in common, and whether this constitutes a sufficient basis for claiming such a thing as a single form of general relativism, or whether we can speak of "Relativism" per se, without actually meaning many different kinds of relativism implicitly. There seems to be some basic features shared by many forms of relativism. These are concerns with relationality, contextuality of knowledge, conditionality and interdependency, the horizons of knowledge and limits of understanding, paradox and dilemma, the polythesis and multidimensionality of meaning, emphasis upon difference and the unique, the particular, concerns with the intentionality, metalogicality and reflexivity of human knowlege, holism, change, and the problematic of universality and infinity. Relativism entails the critical indeterminancy and fundamentally "statistical" probability of knowledge, and a basic problematic of theoretical "complexity" that has not yet been addressed.</p> <p>The claim that something in the world is relative is by itself insufficient, but we must go on to specify precisely what it is that such a thing is relative to, and how, and it is in this demand for specification of our relativistic understanding. This inherent conditionality of our understanding constitutes both the principal virtue and primary problematic of relativistic understanding. There is no such thing as knowledge that is unconditional and, hence, nonrelativistic. The basic paradox of relativistic understanding is that though there is no such thing as "absolute" knowledge int he world, even relativity is not absolutely so, such that the possibility of absolute knowledge, however remote, cannot be rejected by a relativistic orientation. From a rationalistic standpoint this kind of dilemma would make relativism seem inherently contradictory, hence unreasonable, and yet is is from just such a relativistic orientation that the possibility and tolerance for such paradox and contradiction emerges.</p> <p>A general doctrine of relativism poses the problematic of an inherent constraint and insuperable conditionality about human knowledge in the world. Beyond the boundaries of our fields of inquiry and domains of knowledge lies the encircling horizon of our own ignorance and a vast, potentially boundless, domain of the "Unknown." Relativism then becomes a way of approaching and expanding the boundaries of our own knowledge by means of identifying and critically questioning what remains only "half-known" upon the margins of our worldview. From the standpoint of a non-dogmatic scientific approach that is primarily concerned with expansion and verification of our understanding and knowledge in the world, such a relativistic attitude is prerequisite orientation.</p> <p>Issues of relativity, relativism and relativistic understanding address more basic issues about the nature and structure of a reality that remains inescapably human from our observer's and subject's standpoint, providing as well critical insight into how our understanding of reality may be intrinsically organized. Thus such questions are critical to an "anthropology of knowledge" that asks how humankind has constructed its own realities.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p>Consideration of the possibilities of a general relativism must eventually resolve the so-called "Worldview Problem"--the attempt to explain systematically the interconnections between cognition, language and culture, as well as the traditional "Mind/body" dichotomy that has been so basic a question to Western philosophy and psychology.</p> <p>Science has demonstrated basic differences in brain function between males and females as well as with mentally ill versus "normal" subjects, and yet we must simultaneously account for a central held tenet of the psychic (and linguistic) if not cultural unity of humankind. We have posited and generally accept the existence deep or basic structures of the brain that underlie and predetermine our behavior and that are similar to all normal human beings, and yet we still have to account for the role that linguistic variation plays in structuring human consciousness, and that primary cultural acquisition must play in the relativity permanent early formation of basic character and personality traits, in both individual and cultural differences. Evidence from the few extant cases of severe childhood cultural deprivation strongly support the hypothesis of early critical stages of cognitive brain development in language structure and basic behaviors, that is critically linked to cultural acquisition, and which if deprived from an "effective environment," results in the irreversible retardation of the individual.</p> <p>The problematics of disentangling the roles of language, culture and cognition in how we see the world, and of the relationship between the mind and the brain, leads to the conjecture that the different elements are themselves inseparably fused into basic constituent components, that are not only encoded in the structure of mind, but are "imprinted" in the functional patterning and cerebral organization of the brain.</p> <p>To suggest that these components might be "symbolon" disguises the possibility that symbolism is the principal mode of expression of these elements, and that this external symbolic expression is itself a vital and necessary constituent part of these components. It is via this externalized modality of psychic expression that a doorway, or "window" is provided onto the world, and that by this doorway change is introduced into the internal world of the mind's eye. Such internalized modification always takes the form of the fusion of new elements with previous ones, and a "reinterpretation" of the whole that introduces a sense of order and coherence to the internalized vision of the world.</p> <p>The mind's eye can be said to internally map the external world upon the brain. The brain becomes the biological substratum upon which is imprinted the mind, and by extension, the externalized elements of culture. This imprinting can be said to occur both upon the levels of primary and secondary process. While the brain is universal, human mind is relative to the cultural and linguistic context in which it finds its expression.</p> <p>The mind from this standpoint cannot exist in isolation. It exists only within the cultural context of its own construction and externalization. It is the synergistic sum of the functioning of the brain within its cultural environment. The brain, without such an effective environment, cannot realize its fullest capacity of development.</p> <p>From this standpoint we cannot clearly separate things or causes or relations that are cultural, linguistic or cognitive. Culture, language or cognition cannot exist decontextualized and independent of one another, and as symbolic forms of expression they are simultaneously and inextricably composed of all three elements, though replacement of elements by new, alien elements occurs in the reconstruction of basic symbolic forms. Thus such forms are continuously modified and reshaped to fit the changing cultural conditions of the external world in which they are adapted. The adaptive significance of this process in anthropogenesis hardly needs further elaboration.</p> <p>It is possible, though, that symbols and their elements form distinctive complexes in certain areas of the mind-brain, and these complexes may in turn come to compose entire, nonexclusive and yet distinguishable domains. In this regard, it is suggestive to consider the reflexive role that relativism may play in our ability to apperceptively recognize and distinguish some of the boundaries between such areas of mind--primarily because the relativity of understanding become the most clearly apparent along the margins of such domains. It is upon the receding horizons of such regions of mind that the certainty and unquestionable firmness of our knowledge gives way to unknown possibilities. Relativistic recognition becomes then the awareness of the limitations of our realities.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p>Relativity of values, beliefs, language and worldview seems to contradict the idea of a "psychic unity of humankind" or of a universal structure of mind that is similar for all people. The hypothesis of a "deep structure" for language, mind and cognitive process has always presented an important and insuperable paradox. Intuitively there must be some biological basis to language, thought, and conceptualization 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 in symbolic expression of "worldview" or of human attitudes and behavioral response patterns. A firm faith in the notion might allow us to take a leap of faith and to dismiss outof 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, and of how precisely it is biologically grounded, as well as the related questions of how much the surface variation of patterning constrains and is in turn constrained by this hypothetical "deep" structure. Though no one is likely to soon have any definite or detailed answer to this important question 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 quite productive.</p> <p>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 worldview 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 undergoan infinite variety of shapes and yet retain the same basic structural features. These would be regionally defined topographies of mindscape that are quite unique and different from one another and yet may be mutually traversed and transfigured in terms of a basic universal rational structure of "Mind" in a hypothetical or ideal sense of possibility or potentiality.</p> <p>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 and in some ineffable sense, the emotions and feeling itself as phenomenological experience. It is important to distinguish what may be quite normative and evaluativeprocesses of reasoning from more mathematically non-arbitrary processes of logicality and mechanical process of computation and counting. We must sooner or later come to terms with symbolization, pattern recognition, naming, reference and inference, language, collective representation, emotionand that always vague but ever powerful monstrosity of the human unconscious. Somehow e 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 een extra-sensory perception or paranormal cognition.</p> <p>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 person's 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, heritibility, experience, intelligence and basic ability, special talent, individuality, identity, personality, psycho-somatic connection between the body and the mind, and yet such humility makes seem all the more absurd so many premature proclamations for the bottomline on human consciousness. Simple solutions or sophicated confabulations of enormously complex problems betray our human intellectual hubris.</p> <p>The general problem is not uncomplicated by basic theoretical and philosophical problems that are definitional and terminological. We might distinguish between rationalist and epiricist approaches, between a priori and noumenal presuppositions of rational ideals and solipsistic conceptions about trees falling in silent forests. We may distinguish between presentationalist and representationalist conceptions.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p>It becomes entirely plausible that when we speak of such things as mind, culture, brain and worldview, we are dealing with a level and "structure" of order the principles and patterning of which we do not yet understand in any formal sense, though all of us are everyday experts in all these areas in an implicit and functional manner. They imply a level of chaotic complexity of patterning that suggests an underlying sense of order and unity. Lacking a clear theoretical framework required to deal efficiently with such levels or order, we are compelled to fall back upon theoretical designs that are inherently inadequate to the job. This level of order is described by scientists as "complex adaptive systems" and is seen to recurrently underlie many naturally occurring patterns of order. They transcend by orders of magnitude nonlinear, chaotic systems that "are ones in which the shape of the whole is not easily predicted by looking at its parts." (Scientific American, October, 1992) that are nevertheless multiply underdetermined by a handful of basic "attractors" or "choices of behavior" and an unlimited number of variables. This level of order is referred to as "complexity" that is made up of an infinite number of possible variations derived from a limited set of relationships. They constitute open productive systems upon one level while remaining restrictively constrained upon another level. "Defining complexity more tightly becomes a problem in its own right..." (pg. 20)</p> <p>It might be said that because complexity is infinitely determined, its determinative factors cancel each other out as they approach infinity and thus are essentially underdetermined systems that nevertheless exhibit a coherent pattern and sense of historical unfolding. Such systems go beyond being merely "self-organizing systems approaching criticality" because they are continuously adapting, rather than being nonadaptive reactions to critical events and thresholds. They are composed of agents that, though simple, gather information from the environment around them, "sifting out relevant details from random noise. The agents then compress that information into models or schemata that they use to anticipate and react to changes in their environment. Over time, they modify those schemata to reflect new information." (page 20)</p> <p>Might we speculate upon the possible characteristics of complexity and its implications for our understanding of relativism, worldview, mind, brain and culture. Gregory Bateson, in his work <u>Mind and Nature</u> (1979), defines stochastic as "a sequence of events which combines a random component with a selective process so that ony certain outcomes of the random are allowed to endure." (pg. 253) He outlines a theory of the necessary stochastic unity and complementarity of the system of mind and nature, and distinguishes a dialectic relationship between form and process, such that "as form is to process, so is tautology to description." (pg. 210)</p> <p>It is not too much to suggest that complexity is constituted by emergent self-sustaining, cybernetic systems that adjust to, incorporate, and seek to overcome constraints encountered in a randomly changing environment. Because such systems are cybernetic, they can be described as complexly dialectical. Many mutually conditioning elements that constrain one another and jointly undergo change. Richard Shweder applies such a conception of complexity to his study of "cultural psychology" that deals with the interpenetration of identitites of "subject-dependent objects (intentional worlds) and object-dependent subjects (intentional persons)" (1991: page 100) and in which the declared aim " is to develop an interpretive framework in which nothing really realis by fundamental nature fixed, universal, transcendant (deep, interior) and abstract; and in which local things can be deeply embedded, but only for a while...."</p> <p>Because such systems incorporate a "constrained randomness" into their structure, their emergent patterning cannot be predicted in any precise way. But it is by their very virtue of such incorporation of random change that such systems remain adaptively self-sustaining. Such systems are seen to be able to incorporate and thus tolerate a certain threshold of contradiction. They do not have to be fully "coherent" systems in any traditional sense of the term to remain viably "functional." Rather, they comprise an "organization of difference" and an "anti-chaotic" order upon the verge of disorder. Because they incorporate such contradiction, they can be seen from strictly rationalistic points of view to be inimically paradoxical and antinomial. But it is seent o be the very flexibility of underdetermined structure that confers upon it both an adaptive long-term stability and a fundamental sense of relativity.</p> <p>Human reality is inextricably complex. It is a complexity that is inexorably reflected in anthropological understanding. To seek too strict a rational parsimony in our anthropological science is perhaps at best a misguided following of the lead of the physical sicences, and at worst a pro-positivistic dogmatism that is counterproductive and fundamentally anti-intellectual. The presumption of relativism does not inherently preclude the possibility of generality of theory or privilege the emphasis upon the particular to the exclusion of the general. Relativism only demands that we precisely define the limits and conditions of our knowledge, and through such definition lies the resolution of the paradox that it poses for our understanding of human reality.</p> <p>Diversity of surface patternign may belie an underlying universal structure of order, while surface similarity may be the epiphenomenon of completely independent and different underlying structures of order. There remains nothing inherently inimcal between a relativistic orientation and the presupposition of a rational universality.</p> <p>A systematic theory of general relativism that goes beyond mere pronouncements of faith might provide the necessary formal handle upon our understanding of such anthropological and naturally occurring complexity in the world. Such an elaboration of theory can be seen in terms of a relational logic that defines everything in terms of its possible sets of relations with other things, with each thing having a dual identity as both an element in a larger system of relations and as a variable set of relationships itself. A theory of interference patterning, and an anthropological understanding of humanmade projective systems, that in turn may lead to a systematic anthropological theory of meaning, symbolism, mind and its relationship to the brain, as well as to the Worldview Problem.</p> <p>Relativism not only poses for us the problem of basic anthropological paradox, but it also asks questions of us and about our world in such a way that, if we are better anthropologically attuned, we might then search and fine the kinds of answers we have been looking for in the first place. </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fifteen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">14</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CULTURE and CHARACTER</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Our character is the measure of the culture we bear.</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b>"Culture and character" refers to the attempt to examine the interrelationships between the individual personality on the one hand and the culture on the other. There have been various formulations of such studies--some showing how the culture recapitulates the personality, others how personality recapitulates the culture, still others seeking a modal or basic personality configuration, while "cultural psychology" construes a dialectic between culture and person as mutually constraining and interpenetrating one another. It's origin in a culture history approach has tended toward the racist ascription of stereotypes to cultural orientations, to a faulty kind of "anything goes" relativity of values, and to an extreme reductionism. But the problem remains worthy of some critical regard, because of its bearing upon so many other interesting questions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It remains problematic from the first place because neither of its key terms, personality or culture, are well defined in any fixed, deterministic fashion. Lacking central definitions, we are then asked to explain the relations between what very well may amount to being two fictive entities. Given such critical indeterminancy of our key terms, there is a tendency to be lulled back to the complacency of our folk conceptions, our theories of attribution of traits to people and groups which constitutes so much of the ground of our common sense and that so informs our world with the appearance of truth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important that we accept, for the time being, and in lieu of anything more precise, provisional and "operational" definitions for our key terms, and that we separate the problem which results from a systematic attempt at the study of the relationships proposed from the facile folk theories which otherwise usually stand in their place. While the latter always suffers from ethnocentric bias, the former may or may not, more or less, suffer the same bias. Indeed, one of the primary motivations for the former mode of study is the very attempt to get beyond the veil of our own preconceptions, to bring the fact of their otherwise transparent "facticity" into clear view, to expose their bias and fallacy for what they are, and to attempt to render a more correct and satisfactory version of the world which is not the product of the same kind of fallacy and which opens itself to empirical verification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems as though the principle motivation for undertaking such systematic inquiry is not only the attempt to dispel the ignorance of our own preconceptions about reality and to discover the "really real," that it fulfills some fundamental need and curiosity in humans to seek the "truth," but that such discovery offers us the promise of some kind of empowerment in human reality, as well as the promise of emancipation from power. In terms of our existential and ecological adaptation to the effective environment of our world, it offers us the possibility for more adaptive responses. But the problem has been perennially important to us for an even deeper reason, primarily because to broaches directly what is at the crux of our very sense of human reality. In other words it asks one of the most fundamental existential questions about our subjective experience of human reality, namely "what is it?"</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First, it is evident that how we define the relationships between culture and personality will be predetermined by how we define both culture and personality, such that both concepts are in some way or another mutually complementary or compatible within some general framework. We might sidestep this issue somewhat by trying to control our primary definitions of the key terms, assuming that they are general variables of our equation. In this sense we might posit a kind of a standard, polythetic, and basic "prototypical" definition for both culture and personality--assuming that both describe central tendencies of certain domains of reality. We can claim then that "culture is whatever it normally is for most people, and that personality is whatever it is for most normal people." Though this leaves out the possibility of there being in fact no prototypical examples of culture or personality, or that several competing, even contradictory prototypes may exists within the same continuum, and though we run the risk of again falling back upon our own preconceived notions of what these in fact may consist of, such a presumption may serve as a useful, even necessary, "base-line" upon which to build and amend our model of the interrelation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In such a manner, if persistently applied, we carve out a kind of "negative definition" of the problem, not by directly describing what it in fact is or may be, but by ruling out by a process of elimination all the things we know it is not. Thus over the long run we hope to narrow the negative outline of the relationship to the point that we come down to a fairly limited "paradigm" of possibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question of the overlap of the two continuums of culture and personality is central to the notion of the anthropology of knowledge and the so-called "anthropological construction of reality" and it comes to focus at the critical moment in which cultural realities reproduce themselves in the character of the individual--at the moment, in otherwords that anthropologists call "enculturation" and others "socialization" or "acquisition." It is a kind of imprinting process upon the personality, and subsequent in the complementary process in which the personality makes its mark upon the cultural world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The relationship between the primary acquisition, and what has become referred to as secondary acquistion, is part of a complex theory of systematic cultural constraint, conservativism, elaboration and change known generally as "Cultural dynamics." Individuals are made in the image of their primary cultural orientation, and then subsequent remake their cultural orientation in their own image, but during which the possibility for error and variation introduces modification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If humanness is defined by its world-openness and unfinished state in nature, then we are faced with the paradox that this same openness which creates the possibility for cultural construction of reality in the first place, also assures us that such cultural acquisition and its cultural construction must always be imperfect, partial and unfinished business. In otherwords, no matter how thoroughgoing the indoctrination, there is always some room leftover for other possibilities, in both culture and character development. Several well-accepted corrollaries come from this conclusion. While most tradition bound cultures are quite conservative, all are subject to some modicum of change and reconstruction. Such cultures are mostly integrated, but not completely so. Such cultural integration is usually adaptive, or geared towards adaptation in a larger environment, but such adapation is never a perfect fit and is always subject to alteration. The cultural dynamics set up in the dialectic between culture and character can be seen then as both a conservative force for stability and as an adaptive mechanism for change. Thus the transmission of culture is the primary vehicle of its continuance and alteration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because of this paradox for culture and character posed by human openness upon the world, we must understand that the possibility, indeed likelihood, for "discrepant" reality sets up a dynamic process of interference and reconditioning which further complicates our study of the culture and character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural character has a way of becoming implanted in the individual in such a ways as to remain largely beneath the level of everyday consciousness. In otherwords, it is defined informally and functionally in terms of is praxis and the implicit rules and values that are derivable from the integration of this praxis. The formal aspects of culture which are marked and thus made more available to consciousness may very well be the aspects of culture which would otherwise, if left unmarked, remain only weakly conditioned and hence more susceptible to modification. Formally framing certain features of a culture is a way of preservering these features against the likelihood of amendment. It is the unconscious substrate of culture, those everyday aspects of culture as performance and phenomenological process, and their "implicit" structuration, which demands and defies explanation. It is this underside of culture, as this has been characteriologically implanted in the individual personality, which remains the more problematic mystery.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may accept several other conclusions on the basis of this thesis. One is that no culture exists wholly independently of its primary cultural carriers--the individual character in the group-context is to be seen as the principle vehicle for the expression and transmission of culture. Conversely, no personality exists outside or beyond the purview of some cultural context within which it is normally configured and construed. Culture and character are inter-dependent and inseparable sides of a single continuum of anthropological process of transmission--it is an on-going process which forms an unbroken chain from its first, remotest beginings, to the very present. To avoid unfortunate connotations, I will refer to this basic anthropological process arising from the dialectic between culture and character as "culturation".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This being the case, we cannot imagine such a thing as a culture that is entirely apart from its carriers and human agency, as somekind of bounded or boundable phenomena, a "culture circle" or little hermetic garden. Such boundaries, if they exist at all, exist more as temporary, permeable, ephemeral markers of difference and distance between peoples in place and time--they are a function of the different heritage and history of different branches. Likewise, it is difficult to imagine an individual human being in vacuo, totally beyond the purview of some kind of culturative context--the few examples attest to the monstrous consequences of such isolation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The inherent interdependency between culture and character assure us that any facile labels or definitions which seem to separate one from the other are bound to be spurious and fallacious conceptions. Also, this interdependency assures us that neither culture nor character can be studied or sufficiently understood wholly independent of the other. Also, we are ourselves, as agents of our own cultural backgrounds, to some extent locked within our own sense of history, rendering the unreserved attempt to cross cultural boundaries entirely specious, at best. We cannot simply "suspend" culture or "control" the effects of character in order to better analyze or study them.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Interdependency between culture and character does not preclude the probability that to some unknown extent both culture and charater exist in their own spheres as separate and independent from one another. People can behave outside the conventions or sanctions of their culture, and cultures can continue inspite such deviance. The amazing fact of the matter seems to be that cultures continue making sense despite so much deviance, but the final analysis remains that no individual can behave entirely without the umbrella provided by culture, and that no culture can continue without some human agency by which to carry it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can surmise that the evolution of culture--the real culture history, has been something of a branching and braided rope or chain resembling somewhat the purported evolutionary tree, with perhaps the main difference having been that cultural divergence and branching has probably proceeded at a much faster rate, eventhough within a shallower time depth, hence yielding a much more variegated and complex picture. This picture is probably also rendered more problematic in that the principle vehicles for such transmission are not "genetically isolated" as members of different species are--different peoples and cultural groupings have regularly come into contact, with different consequences. Furthermore, the stability of a cultural orientation is conditional to certain extraneous factors and may not be intrinsically guaranteed--culture history, perhaps much more than natural history, has been largely a history of happenstance and unintended consequences. Part of the chaotic patterning of cultures is that relatively minor causes may have major consequences, while major events may have only mild effects.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may assert that human character was fundamentally less variable and thus human culture less variegated in the earlier phases of human culture history than later. The increasing variety of cultures made possible an increasing range of characteriological differences of personality, and the widening range of interpersonal differences and possibility of such difference opened the door for further cultural variation. Sophisticated cultures permitted, even demanded, a much wider range of individual variation--and the trend towards individual differences demanded more sophisticated, variegated cultural contexts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must construe the evolutionary function and historical role of the process of culturation as primary "antientropic" or "antichaotic" as the extension of the human response to its own natural condition of unfinished world openness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We will refer to the long term patterns which result from the process of culturation within a group as the "cultural pattern" or its configuration, and we must acknowledge the basic stochastic complexity of such patterns, that may nevertheless, in relation to their adaptive, anti-chaotic function, settle into a fixed number of finite possible states.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another conclusion that can be drawn is that there has been a rather wide range of variation in how different cultural traditions and orientations have developed, and that given different, and changing circumstances, some cultural orientations may at times be better adapted than others, some more tradition bound or settled than others, and some more capable of incorporating change than others, and not all for the same reasons. Cultures succeed in different ways, for better or worse, and the developments of one cultural orientation may at any given moment of its history be convergent, divergent or parallel with that of another. Furthermore, given the complexity and the role of historical circumstance in culturative processes, we must conclude that form the most part different cultural orientations, and their carriers, are only superficially commensurable. We might derive numerous interesting and unexpected correlations from such cross-cultural comparison, but rarely if ever any "causal" conclusions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These conclusions might seem to relativize the possibility of establishing any universal or general framework for the understanding of the relationship between culture and personality, but we must see that whatever the form or patterning that either culture or character may take, the fact of both culture and character, or rather of the process of "culturation" itself is based upon a universal problematic of the human condition, and it is upon this basis that the common, universal substrate for both culture and character may be found.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What we find whereever we find culture, are similar basic processes, whatever the form by which they are expressed and whatever the circumstances by which their expression is defined. Likewise, all human beings exhibit, differentially, similar basic processes of personality and character development, processes to some extent organically conditioned and predetermined. It is upon such basis that we can legitimately speak of a science of human society or a genuine science of human psychology. Because we recognize in humankind the common capacity for culture, we can systematically approach the study of culture and character as if this were a "science" beyond the purview of our folk models and our own culture-bound common sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such study merits critical scrutiny along many points of the continuum of culturation. Where there is close conformity and alignment of culture and character, where certain cultures appear inordinately conservative, we can inquire into the role and nature of certain "authoritarian character traits". On the other hand, the examination of deviance and extreme characteriological pathology may better serve our science in instances where such tight conjoining of the configuration of culture and character appears broadly discrepant or contradictory. We must also carry to our studies the sobering recognition that the study of cognitive structures or cognition may have little bearing on the study of emotions or the affective life of individuals, or the understanding of symbols or collective representations may not lead us to the source of cultural values or ethos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see culturation as both a process that is both biographically integrative in terms of an individuals lifetime, and simultaneously as transcending or crosscutting such biographical experience, as integrative of the diverse heterogeneous mosaic of cultural space. In the former sense it is primarily a subjective, phenomenologically experienced, temporally constrained and existentially problematic process of the expression of character and its development. In the other sense it becomes "objectivated" in externalized forms of familiar sets of values, ideas, terms, beliefs, symbolisms, practices, etc., that occupy certain proveniences within a larger framework we call a culture, and which may be mutually and differentially shared by different members of a culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At every point, a cultural context provides is carriers with a range of "schemata" by which its agents and construct and reconstruct its patternings. At no point in the process of culturation does such human agency not come into play. In highly stylized or ritualistically constrained contexts, the amount of choice that the individual agent may have in the expression may be quite limited or virtually nil--in less formal circumstances greater degrees of varition may be permitted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we refer to such processes of culturation; as production we must understand that culture and character requires a satisfactory degree of integration in order to be successful, when such integration occurs, a "meta-relation" becomes established which confers upon the entire process its "larger-than-life" or synergistic sense of significance. On the other hand, when such integration between culture and character fail, as it sometimes does, then we can properly speak discrepant and discoordinate realities, and hence of psychosocial pathology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in terms of the study of the integration of culture and character that we can speak of "human reality" per se. In this sense, Levi-Strauss's concept of the mythological reversal of contraposed themes, including the metathemes of nature and culture, can be seen as nothing more than the expression upon a symbolic plane of a process of dialectical reversal in the integration of reality which is already apparent in more basic and organically human ways. First, it is important in such reversals that culture is originally artificial, therefore unnatural, distorted, and, then that it substitutes status or place with its natural counterpart, and thus becomes seen as natural. In such a reversal, natural elements then come to be construed as culturally constructed, unnatural and distorted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To the extent that a culture can be defined by its tradition, we can expect a certain degree of differential and variable integration between culture and character, but we must always see this integration as historically situated and environmentally circumscribed. It makes a little sense to speak of Vietnamese Character as in certain fundamental ways different from American or Chinese character, but it makes more sense to distinguish between South Vietnamese Character of the precolonial era and North Vietnamese Character in the contemporary era, and to see that the character of Vietnamese grandchildren living in the U.S. may have been fundamentally altered from that of their Grandparents who spent most of their lives in a war-torn Vietnam.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must always see also that it is extremely difficult to frame such study in terms that are exclusively or entirely "etic" and "objective." Such study demands an "emic" and primarily "subjective" orientation, because the principle mode of expression of this relationship is subjectively experienced and expressed. This subjectiveness makes calling this kind of study "science" in the conventional, positivistic sense of the term very problematic. In the experience of difference or the crossing of cultures, we are left with few familiar landmarks by which we can stake our new science. </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="sixteen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">15</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The OTHER In US</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And Ourselves in Others</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">If we search for Identity, we are bound to encounter difference, and if we look only for difference, we are sure to run into our own identity.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></b>Human reality presents itself caught inextricably somewhere between the internal world of the psychological and the external world of the social, between the constraints of nature and the contexts of culture, between the projects and purposes of the future and the memories and mistakes of the past. The inescapable anthropological predicament of our human reality is the paradoxical liminality of this existential betweenness. In all our complexities, we cannot ever clearly separate the inner world of the self from the outside world of the "other." And if we attribute great objectiveness to the latter, we also attach great subjective importance to the former. Humankind is defined anthropologically by its "world-openness"--its volitional freedom from the dictates of natural instincts, and by the possibilities of its own cultural plasticity. In otherwords, we are by anthropological definition "human-made" and our "culture" and the possibilities of its construction are as much an intrinsic part of our nature as our own biological nature are a part of our cultural constructions. We are by our very unfinished nature the creatures of cultural creation, and this has been both our blessing and our curse to the world. Without the primary process of our enculturation, we remain but unfinished creatures of the world--virtual monsters that bear only a superficial resemblance to the other beasts of nature.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because of this we are also, as a consequence, the creatures of our own existential complexity. Put more simply, we are all unique bundles of "things" and the relations between these things. It goes without saying that no two people ever share exactly all the same sets of things between themselves, but that everyone shares a few things and relations in common with everyone else, which includes among other things the existential facticiousness of our own humanness and subjectiveness. And it is these common connections which normally constitute the ground of relationship between people in the world. We normally seek and find psychosocial identity in the world on the basis of these shared connections between ourselves and others in the world. We might call this process one of symbolic identification, and acknowledge that it constitutes a primary need of our being in the world, one as necessary for our survival as the food we eat or the air we breath, and see in this basic requirement for our survival as much of a functional foundation for our sense of order in the world as any other primary need. It might be referred to as our inherent and vital sociability in the world, which, along with our need and natural capacity for culture, we cannot neglect without dangerous consequences and which has several important anthropological implications.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First, if put in alternative, but equivalent terms, it gives rise to an important anthropological theory. What we call the "Self" or the "anthropological ego" is vitally interdependent and inseparable from what has come to be called the "Other"--so much so that it is better to see these as two sides, the heads and the tails, of the same coin. In other words, it is not so important that we seek to locate the identity and provenience of the "other" as exclusively in the external social world, but that we recognize that symbolically the other in the external world is but a projection, and a reflection, of the invisible "other" that is part of our internal world of the self. This internalized other is not normally recognizable in its externalized form because it remains invisible, transparent, and hidden from our conscious awareness. The externalized form of the other becomes then a mere surface apparition, a stereotype, a confected illusion, of what remains symbolically planted within our selves. It involves an internalization of "subjectively discrepant" realities which entails the inevitably compartmentalization or dichotomization of "ego" between a fore-grounded or emphasized, positively valued set of things and relations, and a "back-grounded" or deemphasized, negatively devalued traits. This can normally take the form of the strengths of the "ideal self" versus the "weaknesses of the real self. Psychologically this must involve the repression of those aspects and elements of the self that are seen as threatening to one's ego identity in the world, and which is subconsciously reinforced by the suppression of those social aspects and elements of the other which symbolically represent or reflect those internal aspects. This process of psychosocial projection is an intrinsic component of the process of anthropological identification in the world, and can consist of either unconscious repression or else of deliberate denial or deceit that works as a rational defense mechanism for the maintenance of ego-identity. Either way the consequences are the same, and include both ignorance, in the sense of "ignoring" that which does not fit, or else of prejudicial evaluation. Labeling, closed-minded belief and behavioral discrimination are the usual means of reinforcing such preconceived world-views.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of processes of psychosocial identification we can see that these are an intrinsic functional component of social integration. The formation and reinforcement of anthropological ego-identity in the world requires psycho-social "reference" and coordinating "correspondence" between internalized "maps" and externalized orientations. We may refer to primary reference as the direct social sources of positively valued "otherness" in the formation of ego-identity, and to the concomittant, secondary "counter-reference" as the indirect sources of negatively valued ego-identity in the world. Thus when we speak of the Anthropological other, we must distinguish between the primary "reference other" and the secondary "counter-reference other." This process of symbolization underlies all forms of and expressions of in-group/out-group consciousness, and is correlated with the functional demands and constraints of social integration and organization. The greater the emphasis upon conformity to ideals of in-group uniformity of identity, the greater the internalized hierarchy of relations between people of a group, the greater the need find an externalized "anti-thetical" form upon that to project differences, deviance, and the potential for equality of relation. This externalized form of outgroups often take the form of "scape-goating" or "blaming the victim." The persecution of those who are most vulnerable to persecution and the most helpless to resist such persecution, and, in cases where direct confrontation may be impossible or undesirable, the persecution of an intermediate, third party which is interposed between two potentially conflictual groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As an anthropological aside, it is not unreasonable to suggest that this very process of psychosocial identification and inter-group symbolic boundary mediation underlies the very "collectivizing/relativizing" and "incorporating/nihilating" function of anthropological knowledge. This is the anthropological "other" that the student anthropologist confronts in the field and is expected to come to terms with ethnographically is nothing more or less than the "disembodied" projection of the other "self" and the repressed "other" within the anthropological ego, one which must entail the implicit denial of the "self of the other" as well. Part and parcel to the romance of relativistic difference and the "making the strange familiar" is the internalized repression of "otherness" within the self, and its external projection, and "rediscovery" in the world. It also follows that a reflexive anthropology seeking to come to terms with its own imperialistic functionalism as a mode of representation in a colonially hieratic world must at some point recognize the basic importance of identification between self and other, and its implications for an anthropology free of its own unconscious biases.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another dimension of the necessary anthropological interdependence between the "sense of self" and "otherness" in the world is that the relations of mutuality and interdependency can be either symmetrical, hence reciprocal and mutually symbiotic, or else, as is more usually the case, assymmetrical, unequally exploitative or parasitic, and more "relations of dominance and dependency" than of mutuality. In this regard we can seek critical relationship between the internalized discrepancy and dichotomization of the self between "top-dog" and "repressed underdog" and the externalized symbolic forms of superior "in-group" and inferior "out-group." When we seek to persecute others in the world, the "other" we are actually, symbolically persecuting is that otherness which is hidden within the self. It follows also that when we seek to liberate other's in the world, what we are actually, symbolically intending is the liberation of our own otherness within ourselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A consequence of this tendency towards assymmetry in psycho-social integration of reality is that we must always contend with and resolve the contradictions posed by the facticity of our own reification in the world. The fallacy of reification can be seen as the consequence of our symbolic faculty in the integration of reality and of our own forgetfulness or ignorance of our symbolizations of the world. It is the misidentification of human constructions in the world as if a necessary and natural part of the world, and of natural elements in the world as if humanmade constructions, and it involves both the apotheotization or transformation of a thing, a mere symbol, into an entity which transcends its own thingness in the world, as well as the transformation or reduction of what is living and trancendent, into a mere thing. From the standpoint of selfness and otherness, reification involves turning the human being, and its implied realities, into something either less or greater, or "other" than what it really is. "Otherness" and the anthropological construction of the other in the world can therefore be seen to be the inevitable consequence of the reification of the self in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The role of reification in the symbolic boundary identification separating the anthropological self and other in the world brings back into focus the issue and problematics of the unavoidable "subjectiveness" of our anthropological knowledge. Martin Buber, in his distinction between "I and Thou" (1958) notes the notes the necessary complementarity of two ways of knowing, but also the transcendent understanding and metarelation which comes from the appreciation and union of identity with the subectivity of the other, the sudden realization and reading of the separate and independent subjective self of the other as if an "unpetrified text"--as a sense of identity that no longer regards the other as a objective "thing," as merely an extension of one's own ego-identity in the world. Eric Fromm reiterated this basic relation in his distinction between the authoritarian conscience and the religious conscience, and so too Abraham Maslow in his distinction between "fear-motivated" and "love-motivated" ways of knowing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Most ethnographies have failed to accomplish this feat of establishing, via the text, a transcendent meta-relation between the anthropological "ego" as observer and the other. Even those few accounts addressing the subjective other only barely accomplish such metarelation, and never without critical reservations--Kevin Dwyer's <u>Morroccan Dialogues</u>, Paul Radin's <u>Crashing Thunder</u>, Ganath Obeyeskere's <u>Medussa's Hair</u>, Vincent Crapanzano's <u>Tuhami</u>, Oscar Lewis' <u>The Children of Sanchez</u>, Sidney Mintz <u>Worker in the Cane</u>, George Devereux's <u>Reality and Dream</u> (1951)<u>,</u> and none of these as fully as possible or uncritically without a veneer of Western-styled objectification and reification or with the sublime power of John Neihardt's poetic <u>Black Elk Speaks</u> (that is also not without authorial voice and bias.) This seems to be a form of relation that is more approachable through autobiography than biography per se--perhaps because it involves as much a journey in self-discovery as it does an exploration of otherness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Several important points emerge from this consideration of the necessary relations between self and other in the world. First, the complexity of subjective human reality is such that the multiplicity of factors which impinge upon any one person's life, that unique "bundle of things and their relations" upon which we confer a name and refer to as an individual personality, render that life fundamentally incommensurable in any but a superficial and conditional way to any other person's life. It follows that social measures of identity which take a nomothetic, classificatory or statistical approach to human reality necessarily cross-cuts and undermines the possility for the kind of biographical, historical, idiographic and longitudinal perspective which is only capable of dealing with human subjectivity, hence "otherness", in its own terms. In other words, human reality cannot be conveniently or sufficiently comprehended in spurious objective terms that label, analytically dissect, and categorize the "things and relations" which constitute subjective identity. A corrollary of this in understanding of the phenomena of modern evil, is its bureacratically reinforced impersonalness which constitutes an implicit denial of the subjective value of the other. The capitalist exploiter cannot afford to personally know the existential plight of those whom s/he exploits. The slave owner must necessarily deny the humanness of her/his slave. The upper class must paternalistically regard the lower classes as if unsophisticated and childlike in nature. The true sign of any fascist sychophant is her/his cold dedication to an anonymous, "larger than life" order, and denial of the subjectiveness of those whom s/he persecutes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Secondly, we must again acknowledge the paramount significance which the symbolic legitimation and validation of the subjectiveness of both self and other entail for our world. The journey in discovery of the otherness in the world is inseparable from the journey in self-discovery, and only by discovering the other within us can we hope to come to genuinely understand the self in others. Perhaps the most we can hope to find in our anthropological explorations of the human field is a more genuine sense of our own identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Finally, only by widening our boundaries for the tolerance and incorporation of human differences in the world, as well as in the possibilities within ourselves, can we hope to create a more peaceful and more human world. Our greatest anthropological challenge is the problem posed by our own subjectivity in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <b><font FACE="Helvetica" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Identity cannot exist without a sense of difference, nor can Difference exist without a sense of identity. We cannot recognize identity without the recognition of difference in the world. Human identity in the world is measured in contrast to differences. Human differences are weighed by one's sense of human identity. Cultural variation in the world constitutes a relational field for the dialectic of Identity and Difference; it is the role of the dialectic of anthropology to embrace and explicate this dialectic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The concepts of both Self and Other exist in terms of the dialectic of Identity and Difference. The. The identity of the self could not be defined except by contrast to the difference of the other, and, similarly, the difference of the other could not be constituted but by the identity of the self.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Concepts of Identity and Difference, and of Self and Other, are relational concepts of anthropological knowledge. As relational concepts, they are ordinal, continuous variables that lack any fixed referents, though they constitute the ground of the field of reference and inference in human reality. They describe the basic dialectical dimensionality characteristic of anthropological understanding. They confer upon the relational field a differential topography of anthropological saliency.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Identity is never complete or total, difference is never absolute. Self and other cannot exist independently of one another. Self and other merge as a single anthropological relation in the world, one that is nevertheless multifaceted and variably defined.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The illusion of our knowledge and our reason are that the world is fundamentally dichotomized--self is separate from other, identity is the opposite of difference, and this illusion results in our failure to realize the original undichotomized unity of the basic dialectical relation. We rely upon this dichotomization of reality in order to disambiguate an otherwise ambiguous experience of the world. When we speak of finding the other within us, or of recognizing in others ourselves, and when we speak of the Identity of difference and the difference of Identity, we are recognizing and acknowledging this original, a priori unity of the dialectical relation, and are attempting to reconstruct its sense of unity from behind our reason.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We find identity and security with the familiar, and difference and fear in the strange. We tend to find in identity the collective center which gives our life a sense of completeness, balance, focus--we find in difference the threat of relativistic tendencies, chaos, lack of a center of balance. And yet there can be no center without an edge, no left without a right.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we look for difference in others, then what we discover is the difference within ourselves. We we seek identity in the world, we then discover ourselves in others. </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="seventeen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">16</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">HUMAN BEING and BECOMING</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We cannot know it so much as we are known by it.</p> </font></b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The central question of a subjective anthropology is to ask: "What does it mean to be a human in the world?" "Humanness" and "Human Being" might be regarded as synonymous in terms of "the sense of being human." And we cannot sunder this meaning of human reality from its presence in the world--for humanness has been autochthonous in the world, and in its most basic nature remains inalienable from it. So however we may make over our world to fit our own image, we can never finally make over that primordial world that remains rooted within our own being. It underlies our sense of reality like a gigantic slumbering dragon, unaware that we have built our civilization upon its back. We are no longer part of the world from which we came--it became destroyed in the process of our birth. And the world of which we are a part is no longer a part of our innermost selves. In our all too human world, we cannot but help suffer a fundamental sense of alienation and separation from our own being, from our original world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This alienation has led us to an endless search for our own being in the world. We seek many different directions to find it and it is never there. This need to discover ourselves in the world becomes insatiable, driving us to ever greater heights. It has been a mythological journey of legendary proportions, leading us to accomplish great feats and even greater mistakes. Homo Saipiens Saipiens, for all his wisdom, has been an aberration in the natural world. And never do we find what remains locked away within ourselves. Our only reminder of its proximate presence in our world is the shadow that always follows us underfoot.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Rarely do we stop to think that the being we seek in the world is found hidden away within ourselves, and is not a being of the world that we know, but of another world far removed from our own. Every fragment of that other world we find upon our journey is but a partial reflection of our own sleeping being, each time point back along the way we've come.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being human and human beingness is something all people share. It is the universal substrate of human reality. This beingness is marked by human sentience, that special symbolic capacity has set us apart in the animal kingdom. From the standpoint of anthropogenesis, we can distinguish a special complex of uniquely human characteristics which together constitute and account for this sentient capacity--name the human brain, prolonged post-partum dependency and delayed physiological maturation, vocal apparatus, bipedalism and tremendous manual dexterity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It has been this common sentience and human beingness that has served as the justification and foundation for the doctrine of human equality and the universal rights of humankind. It is the source of our capacity to recognize in the suffering of others the possibility of our own suffering, and in the emancipation of others our own liberation. It is the source of our sense of justice by which we weigh and ajudicate the guilt and responsibility of others and our selves for the parts we play in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because of our humanness, our sense of being human in the world, we all share, however unwittingly, in a common anthropological predicament that has come to be called "the human condition", as well as in a common anthropological imperative to recover the sense of alienation we suffer by our sentience.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The adaptive significance of human "beingness" in the world, and its relationship to human "becoming," must not be discounted. Beingness is based upon a sense of identity between internal frames of experience and the on-going encounter of the world. It entails the accommodation and readjustment of our frames to fit the on-going challenges and changes of our world. It mediates and integrates our experience of the world with our internalized frames. Beingness, then, is the expression of this integration and the dynamic that results from its mediation. Beingness, then, entails an orientation, a predisposition, an attitude of adjustment and adaptation to the world of the senses, to experience and encounter in the world that always brings change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Becoming in this regard can be seen as a form of "non-being," or rather a vicarious form of "being other than what is." The orientation of becoming is one that strives to alter the world of experience, and to control changes in the world, in order to fit preconceived frameworks of the mind. In this sense, as "non-being" becoming constitutes a form of denial of the reality of the senses.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It should be apparent to the astute that part of the contemporary anthropological predicament of humankind is that of a civilization, from its enlightenment ideology of progress and its anti-religious science, to its anti-death medicine, to its cosmetics and materialism, that promotes, and cultivates in the human being an orientation of becoming and demotes and denies to the human being a more genuine and adaptive orientation of being in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our orientation of becoming in the world has been one that has been rooted in our denial of death as an intrinsic part of life. Becoming has represented our vain and desperate attempt to overcome the dilemmas posed by our fear of death as the ultimate of marginal experiences. Thus we obsessively, neurotically reenact the separation of death in our everyday life, and come to build our world such that it is organized around such separation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The consequence of the contemporary human condition is that the sense of alienation and separation that is intrinsic to human being is not lessened or repaired in anyway as would be by the promotion of a sense of being in the world, but is rather exaggerated and made greater by the promotion of orientations of non-being and becoming. We are today further removed from the realities of our own humanness than we have perhaps ever been in our entire human history. Not only are we paying a heavy price for this alienation in terms of our inconsolable and desperate soul, but the world itself of which we have been a sui generis part has also payed for our becoming.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The possibility of our sentience in the world has lead both to our recognition of our own separateness in the world, or sense of difference, and to the possibility of our nonbeing in the world, of being different than who and what we are.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We look out upon the world and we are a part of that world and yet we are also separate from it. The side of us which remains part of the world is our sense of being in the world, and the side which remains separate is our sense of nonbeing. The former finds identity with difference in the world, while the latter finds the difference of identity in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is this beingness and non-being that creates the dilectical tension in our humanness, a struggle for control over the human psyche and spirit. Being involves the fusion of differences in the world such that though they exist they are transcended by common identity. Nonbeing leads to the differentiation of anthropological ego-identity from the world, such that an insuperable boundary is placed between the sundered self and the sundered world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We commonly switch between modes of being and nonbeing in the world, depending upon circumstances. Insecurity and uncertainty can precipitate separation and nonbeing, a kind of rational defense mechanism to protect our anthropological ego-identity in the world. The attempt to maintain this sense of separation leads to the erection and reinforcement of such defense mechanisms as barriers mediating the boundary between ego and the world. Within the bulwarks of such defenses we seek protection from separation and death, and foster an illusionary sense of anthropological ego-identity that is separate from the world. Invested with vital energy in their props and supports, our ego-identity in the world becomes seen as something necessary and unexpendable in our lives, though they remain in essence spurious to a genuine sense of being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our anthropological ego-identity then becomes as a transparent bubble surrounding our selves and distorting all light that enters our world. Because it is transparent, it becomes invisible in our perception of a distorted world, and we soon become oblivious to the possibility of a different, undistorted vision of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The differences between being and nonbeing in the world, and their respective promotion or demotion, become the basis for the fundamental schism of human reality and for basic differences between people in the world--of experience, mentality, world-views, and ways of relating to the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While being seeks the identity of relationship and difference in the world as a means of adapting to the world, nonbeing seeks to cope with difference and change in the environment by controling it. They are two different strategies for adaptation and survival in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible that anthropological knowledge seeks the human "reason for being" in the world, and this constitutes the fundamental basis for its pursuit. "Reason for being" is not a rational purpose, and cannot be simply explained or objectively understood. Though we may give many reasons for our being, Reason for Being is distinguishable from those we may bring to it. It happens to and around our reasons, inspite of and because of our intentions. It informs our reasons with anthropological reason. It expresses itself through us but not because of us--we are its vehicles and its vessels, carrying it and infusing it into our lives. Such Reason for Being informs our anthropological research, it constitutes the basis for our anthropological discoveries. We seek to excoriate its reason behind the veil of our many illusions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reason for being can be contraposed to the rationality of becoming that confers upon human existence a sense of divine purpose. The rationality of being covers over the dialectic of being and nonbeing in its principle of progress and the control of change, reversing its counterpoint, and thus, unlike Reason for Being, fails to transcend the dialectic and to achieve a transcendent sense of metarelation above and beyond separation. The rationality of becoming can never discover the reason for being, but instead consists of a tacit denial of the reason for being in its embrace of the nonbeingness of the possibility of change--the principle of progress, or "change with a purpose." Rationality of Becoming lives in the world, but cannot be a part of the world in the same way that Reason for Being is.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The principle of perfection arose from the substitute of the dialectic of becoming for that of being and nonbeing. It arose from the denial of nonbeing and hence entails a concomittant denial of being. Its purpose is a perfect logos, a paradise of eternal time and place in which death and dialectic of being and nonbeing are exorcised.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In our world dominated by a strict scientific rationaltiy, simply "to be" as an uncontestable "fact" of experience is no longer enough. Being human in the modern sense of the term has entailed much more than simply anthropological human being. It entails that we imbibe into our very blood and bones the principle of progress and its presumptions of perfection and make it imperative to our social success and survival that we will "become" something more than we "are" or else "unbecome" something that we were before. Of course, this extreme need to "become" something else has its own superhuman methods and madness that makes merely becoming more anthropologically human never quite enough. </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eighteen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Part III</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Anthropology of Humanity</p> </font></b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must acknowledge the wider roll which anthropological understanding plays in the world, whether anthropologists accept this role as appropriate to their identification of anthropological knowledge or not. This role has certain constraints for the identification of anthropological knowledge that entails a need for its elaboration as something wider than its academic circle. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#eighteenback">back</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="nineteen"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">17</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">TRANSCULTURATION</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Historical Process of Human Civilization</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Humankind's first fire may have been extinguished, but the fire of the imagination that it ignited has never since stopped burning</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have so far been considering primarily the cultural process I have termed "culturation". It is now worthwhile to consider a complementary and derivative process that I call "transculturation"--it is the "civilizational" process, or the process of human "civilization" and is basically culture historical in its sense of evolutionary development. It is the process and patterning which results from cross-cultural contact and inter-group relations which are in a sense a special case of inter-human or interpersonal relations which involves some sense of appreciable cultural or historical boundary or distance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must disinvest this notion of human civilization from the received, ethnocentric notion of an evolutionary framework of human culture along which we can locate various peoples in terms of their technological advancement, barbarism or savagery. We will not contrast the "civilized" with the "primitive" though in an implicit sense primitive might be construed simply and tautologically as anything that is not "civilized."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human civilization has been the special prerogative of no single power or people in the world. It is the common heritage of all of humankind, whether they possess its elements or not or even are aware of it. Civilization is an inherent transcultural process. It can be taken as the measure of the cultural achievement of humankind in terms of our science, our arts, our religous and moral beliefs, our technology and even our anthropology. In this regard the human ancestor who first played with the idea of fire was the first scientist on the dawn of human civilization. Once the "idea" of fire was invented, it quickly caught on in a way that would be essentially irreversible and fundamentally transformative for human civilization. Its spread throughout all cultures was an inevitable matter of time, because the obvious advantages of fire far outweighed the disadvantages of remaining without it. The idea of fire not only transformed human civilization, but the human imagination as well. It was one of the first elements of a growing fund of human knowledge that we can now call the "Mind" of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Fire was a basic element of human civilization, one of the first many such basic elements to come, from which many derivative elements have been subsequently elaborated. We need only mention a few--the bow and arrow, the flaked stone, the wheel, silk and sinew, metal, the arch, the concept of zero, counting, inscription, the graphic image, money, God, the Bomb, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Once invented, we cannot simply go back to a time, either in our daily lives or in even in our imagination, to a world before fire. These elements of civilization serve to create the basic boundaries of our human imagination and our reality. And though conditioned by human agency and power, civilization as a panhuman, transcultural process remains basically beyond the purview of any power that be to prevent its diffusion or reverse its development. Thus the perspective of human civilization and the historical process of transculturation basically transcends the structural horizons placed upon knowledge by power. Civilization has been a process of augmenting human empowerment, whether we measure this in terms of energy amassed or expended, anti-entropic efficiency, or in terms of number of human "bytes" stored. This empowerment, in the long term, is never the exclusive monopoly of any single power or set of powers--though many may try to appropriate it and make it so.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of what defines us anthropologically as human beings is our common capacity to create and share in human civilization--our human "genius" that is the creative mark of our special sentience and world openness. The defining mark of any civilization at any particular point in place or period is the frequence of "Genius" that it has cultivated and achieved in expression. When we speak of such "Genius" I do not mean to imply an Hegelian "Geist," but rather am refering to what Alfred Kroeber has referred to as the particular and historically unique style patterning of different cultural orientations that is coordinate with a unique kind of human character. We can speak of the Genius of the Kung bushmen to track large game and to find water in the middle of an arid landscape, or the Genius of the Australian Aboriginie for their sophistication in kinship organization, as much as we might refer to the Genius of the Americans to invent televisions or reapers, or for violence, and the Genius;of the English for their literature and Rock music, or the Genius of Afro-Americans for Jazz and the Genius of the Japanese for corporate organization or the Genius of the Germans for leadership and making war--and these are not superficial stereotypes of "national character"--the oral French or the materialistic American or the ambivalent Japanese or the lonely Russian or the anal German or the cunning Chinese or the indolent "native" nor are all Englishmen Shakespeares or all Americans violent inventors or all Germans Hitler.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Each cultural orientation must allow for and encourage or discourage among its constituency certain kinds of talents and abilities in ways that are culturally defined in form and function, and it is by the genius of a cultural orientation that we may know it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sense of history and civilization that is the distinctive mark of a cultural tradition comes to constrain and influence the on-going cultural forms and identities of the people in a basically dialectical and cybernetic way. Shakespeare has been a model for generations of aspiring English writers and poets, and the functional presence of such models serves as templates for the continuing reconstruction of a tradition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basic designs implicit in a particular patterning of civilization may fall into rather stable states of "acceptance"--something like the fundamental stability of the basic morphological forms of life on earth which guarantees that human's will not likely soon evolve a third eye or a spineless back or a third arm protruding from its chest.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basic forms of patterning among cultural orientations determines a relational "paradigm" of possibilities which will constrain in basic ways all subsequent developments. Traditions may elaborate in an endless patterning of expression its same basic Genius and its derivative meta-themes, and may even exhibit some degree of "Drift" by which its "focus" and "style-patterning" gradually shift. But when left on their own, all such orientations seem, from an endogenous perspective, inherently conservative and "tradition-bound."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see transculturation as an inherently destabilizing force of cross-cultural contact which leads to irreversible changes among the cultures involved. Such transculturation is usually accomplished in contexts involving the assymmetry of power, and thus tends to "flow" down the human hierarchy of power. By and large the history of acculturation has born witness to the tragically destructive effects of such uneven processes in human history. Though sometimes culture contact may take the form of diffusion, selective borrowing, stimulus generation and lead to the creation of new forms from the amalgamation of older ones, it more often seems to result in the destruction of one tradition and its substitution by another. But in the longer term, transculturation can be seen also to be primarily a creative process that is the source of new patterns and designs in human civilization. It leads to the transformation of human reality and to the realization of new possibilities for human development in the world. We may not like how it's being done or who is doing it, but we can be assured that, whether we think it necessary or not, it will eventually happen somehow by someone.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The overall trend seems to be something like the following scenario. Though whole groups may be induced to commit murder or genocide, or compelled to mass suicide, and whole nations can and have marched down the imperial path of war to utter self-destruction, if and when people are given a choice, they will select those forms which, from an adaptive standpoint, are the most apparently "sensible" and which lead to either their own empowerment or else liberation from constraint. In the long term, the optimism of human history has been that people can be counted on to choose freedom over security, sanity over simplicity. In terms of human civilization making sense of the world, our science has led the way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All peoples exhibit some threshold value to the resistance to change and the force of the new. But once overcome, people can prove to be quite accommodating.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Given this optimism and the inevitability of transculturation, its acceptance in no way implies that we cannot or should seek to exercise greater restraint in its praxis or seek in every way possible to prevent or ameliorate the tragic mistakes which such processes are prone to. If recent world history teaches us anything, it is that we must be sober about our optimism. Humankind may be sentient, but it is also inherent myopic. We must learn to proceed with caution and exercise greater control over the forces of change in our world, and we should not be so willing to rush headlong to our own premature destruction or stagnation, or others to theirs. Transculturation in the world is reaching a state of supercritical mass--changes are occuring at an accelated rate that is proving more and more beyond our limited ability to predict or control. We should greatly appreciate the value of a human tradition of conservatism that teaches us to proceed slowly, if at all. <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#nineteenback">back</a></p> <p><a NAME="twenty"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">18</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">EARTHBOUNDNESS and ANTHROPOCENTRISM</p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Beyond the Bounds of Anthropologos</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">We have become bound by a world of our own making.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If we can find the anthropological unity of humankind on no other ground, then we can find it in terms of the common, contemporary global predicament that humankind faces today. If nothing more, we are united anthropologically by a common existential challenge and question of our own civilization--a common challenge for survival in a humanmade world which threatens to rapidly undermine its own foundation in the natural order. Today a Bushman cannot hunt an elephant or a giraffe with the same sense of moral complacency that his grandfather may have had even a generation ago, for the Bushman now must share with the Spaceman the same global vision of a world of finite dimensions. In a world facing mass extinctions, the taking of any life must have major reverberations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The common existential predicament of humankind today I will refer to as the human condition of "earthboundness," an unavoidable horizon of our anthropological perspective which proceeds from the sudden realization of the finiteness and interrelatedness of life on earth, and which leads certain kinds of constraints which condition everything we are, know or do in the world. We can now no longer perform even minor tasks without having to take into consideration the earthbound implications of such actions. This has created for us an inescapable existential and moral imperative to "know" the possible consequences of our own actions on earth. Our earthboundness has created a new horizon upon our anthropological knowledge, and a new normative and cognitive need to come to terms with its implications and limitations for our life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our own earthboundness of perspective has been a relatively recent and sudden collective realization. Its fullest implications for our lives has not yet fully sunk in, and is not likely to until and unless its consequences, like our bad Dharma, come ringing at our doorstep. Local and individual actions have a critical, if indirect, consequence upon a whole field of relations. Acts may set in motion long chains of events reaching around the globe and the other end of which may end in our own or other's backyard.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our earthboundness has created for us a new kind of dilemma that we must now resolve. Our earthboundness constrains and presents a common global horizon upon our world, we must seek somehow to satisfactorily transcend and emancipate ourselves from the boundaries it imposes upon our perspective and our lives, while at the same time learning how to live satisfactorily and successfuly beneath the aegis of its earthbound imperative.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must construe our own earthboundness from an anthropological perspective. From such a point of view we must see that earthboundness is not a natural state of the world, but a human state, a state of our cultural construction of reality being bounded in all our thoughts and actions by the dimensionalities and proportionalies of the entire earth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It begets a state of "earthmindedness"--a "whole earth" state of mind that regards the entire world as a single, solitary home for humankind and for life. It comprises a whole world-view and new transcultural orientation in relation to our new world environment. It is a new philosophy and way of relating to our world that is circumscribed in everyway by the earth's natural boundaries. It concerns principle the global ecology of human being on earth, the human ecology of the world. Its concern is one of human adaptation in a human constructed world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard we might refer to our "earthbound epoch" as a new age of humankind in which our earthboundness will increasingly constitute the common anthropological foundation for our sense of human reality, identiy and humanity in the world. We can speak of our "earthbound civilization" as a kind of intrinsic boundary to the development of our transculturative processes. We can speak of our emerging "earthbound environments" as the many local, regional and global spheres and webs of interdependency in which we are all inextricably enmeshed. We can refer to our "Earthbound ecology" as a total self-organized system of relations in human reality, of our "earthbound synergism" and our "earthbound imperative" for survival.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Within an Earthbound perspective, we must learn to see that our most pressing problems today are irreducibly human problems. Anthropology thus has a crucial role to play in the unfolding and elaboration of this perspective and the problems it presents for our world. These are the problems of overdevelopment, conspicuous consumption, overpopulation and poverty, environmental pollution resource depletion and ecological degradation, global stratification social pathology, militarism and the threat of total war, the problems of the realization of peace and human rights. From an anthropological perspective, the complexity of these problems tells us that they are all inextricably interrelated with one another, and that their principle culprit, modern development, is part of the inevitable process of "transculturation."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The realization of our earthboundness points up yet another boundary of our anthropological knowledge, the boundary presented by our own anthropocentrism. We have largely taken for granted that all language must necessarily be human language, all sentience human sentience, all culture, human in orientation. The likelihood of our reaching out into deep space to encounter other alien creatures with the intelligence, civilization and technology to journey to our world reminds us that we may believe in our anthropological truths in ways we have not thought to question, and that our anthropological science may thus be limited by our common "human sense" in ways which defy scientific sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We do not have to venture so far afield to run up against the fallacies and boundaries of our own anthropocentrism. Our daily interactions and encounters with other forms of life on earth, from primates to sea mammals to insects and plants, reveals to us our inability to be a Dr. Doolittle or to understand the communication systems or cultural patternings developed by other species. Even our encounters with other people's of very alien cultures has frequently brought to bear the point that our anthropological understanding of human reality was often as anthropocentric as it was "ethnocentric," and that therefore anthropocentrism has the same source of prejudice and hubris, and the same consequences of ignorance, as does ethnocentrism. Many groups have referred to themselves as "human beings," and by implication, to other's as something less than human.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must acknowledge our basic anthropological hubris that sees our needs and interests on earth as the exclusive or most important one's to consider. We must recognize our hubris when we recognize our sentience as something sacred, special and superior to the qualities and sentience of experience that is the condition of other forms of life on earth. We must recognize our hubris when we promote policies of our own development at the expense of the natural world. Our's is neither the only nor the best of all possible worlds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Upon the boundaries of our anthropological knowledge, we come to a "no-human's-land" where different fields of inquiry and understanding interpenetrate and fuse into an indistinguishable whole. There upon the edge of the unknown, we meet the ultimate relativity of our deepest selves.</p> <p><a NAME="twentyone"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p> </p> <p><b><font SIZE="5">19</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">WORLD CAPITALISM, CULTURAL ECONOMIES</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and the ANTHROPOLOGY of ECONOMICS</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Some Unasked Questions of Human History</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">One person's pain may well be another's pleasure.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></b>Some have hailed economics as the most "scientific" of the social sciences, but those who do so fail to distinguish between capitalist or Marxist version of economics, or between formalist versus substantivist economics. Such "science" typically has too much of an ideological component-- a "self-fulfilling prophecy" of "see, I told you so" about it to warrant calling it legitimate science. Underpaid Anthropologists, for the most part, have been far to critical and astute to fall into such a trap, and thus economic anthropology has come to make important contributions to an authentic science of economics in terms of conceptions of reciprocity, redistributive and market economics, in terms of political economy, primitive money and economics, and cultural defined systems of ritual prestation and exchange. In this one area, at least, the real vision and virtuosity of anthropology as an authentic human science becomes clear, and the fallacy of the positivistic presumption of ideologically embedded social sciences become plainly evident by contrast.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But economic anthropology itself has been strongly criticized for failing to address critical questions regarding human economic behavior and its relationship to wider cultural patternings. It often presumes away such questions in its formulation of research and theory--leaving the whole area of human economics to be taken for granted by those more interested in other questions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The materialist emphasis of political economists have not helped the matter very much--in fact the adoption of an attitude of the "World according to Marx" has served as much to obfuscate some of the more important questions as much has it has helped to enlighten anyone.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in regard to these questions that I address the following critique of "the anthropology of human economics."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Political economy has by and large stressed the "economics" over the politics, and has failed to see either how the policies and processes of bureucratic encapsulation and administrative colonization and cooption have gone hand-in-hand with capitalist development and underdevelopment of the first, second, third, fourth and fifth worlds. Further, its attempt at a dialectical history of the transition of feudalism to capitalism has failed to implicate the role of militarism, the armaments industry, military imperialism, and the threat and power of violence have played in the establishment of political economic spheres of control in the world. Economic incentives stood behind Hitler's rise to power and march upon the world as much as did political motivations. Also, the role of social relations and the structure of social organization in the determination of historical events and political-economic processes has been largely downplayed as of secondary and derivative importance. Servitude and Slavery in the middle ages, and growing class inequalities in Europe have played a major role in the determination of economic and poltical life. Many wars have been class wars, many markets have been common markets. Also, the role played by the major world religions, Christianity in its many forms, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Judaism, in the promotion and extension of economic and political spheres of interest and influence in the world has remained largely an unaddressed question, eventhough a great deal of historical evidence survives that the role played by merchants and missionaries alike were, if not synonymous, then very complementary.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we speak of the World Capitalist System, are we implying as well a domestic analogy between the relations between core, semi-periphery and periphery and in global stratification between first, second, third and more worlds in the international system? Are we construing development in its proper perspective, in the sense that classical economists would want us to see it, without taking into account in our economic profit formulas the social costs of development, the underdevelopment of human resources and the undevelopment of natural resources. Furthermore, are we to regard the entire History of this capitalist world system as begining with some mysterious transition point between a feudal and a capitalist "mode of production" somewhere in Europe in the 15th century, or might we regard the entire system as a bit more heterogenous, and speak instead of many different capitalisms that together have a much longer history than just Europe since the Renaissance. Markets, the flow of capital, trade networks, specialization, have been aspects of human civilization since its inception. Has rational, modern, "economizing" humankind been all that different from its first progenitures? When can we first locate the "economic specialist" that was once called a "trader" and that today we gloss with the word "businessman".</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our tendency to want to localize traditional humankind in one point in space and time, and our tendency to see the "primitive" humanity as a wandering, homeless vagrant, tends to prejudice our view of our prehistoric forebearers who may have had, from the very earliest times, quite extensive and well developed trade networks. A prehistoric process of "transculturation" that integrated vast regions of the earth. In this regard, the role of coastal and riverine adaptations, and the part such adaptation may have played in stimulating human civilization, has not been thoroughly enough addressed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left with a version of the history of capitalism somewhat more complicated and confused than either the good Marxists or the faithful capitalists would have us believe.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To recurperate our anthropological perspective of human economics, we must distinguish in the first place between what has conventionally become known as economic anthropology and an limited application of the anthropology of knowledge that we might call the anthropology of human economics. Sidestepping the debates and theoretical issues of the former field, I wish to focus instead on some of the implications and insights of the latter alternative.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">First we need to address a basic paradigm of the anthropology of economics.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All or most human behavior has an economic component or entailment. Human economics can be defined as the dynamic relations between humans and resources and is an important measure of human adaptation to an environment. In this regard we must consider as much the distribution of humans to economic resources as the distribution of such resources to humans. In otherwords, economics concerns and is the measure of the relationship between humankind and its environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Economic exchange is human exchange of resources, and has been a fundamental mechanism of culturative and transculturative integration of human reality. Such exchange can be part of other cultural processes, and can itself be the center for the elaboration of other cultural processes. Exchange can accompany war parties or missionaries, and exchange itself can be elaborately, ritualistically formalized. In otherwords, all human economic exchange is inextricably cultural and "constructed" exchange. It is one of the fundamental ways in which humankind realizes and makes its world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All exchange, whatever its form or function, is always also symbolic exchange. The symbolic aspects of any kind of economic transaction cannot be discounted or ignored in our economic formulas, as such exchanges and things exchanged become the principle symbolic vehicles for the expression and communication of power, prestige, status, and other human emotions, feeling and beliefs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because it is both cultural and symbolic, all economic exchange is always culturally defined and contextualized. Different cultural orientations will define economic values, resources and their significances different. French fur traders may have given the Mandan beads, trinkets and baubles in exchange for the favors of their daughters, but the Mandan were secretly gaining from the Fur Traders the spiritual source of their power. Which point of view is the most rational and which makes the most sense?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this respect we can refer to "cultural economy" as part and parcel of the life ways and traditional orientations of different culture groupings, and to "transcultural economy" as the dynamic regional integration of different "cultural economies"--and we have always probably always had such a perspective of a "dual economy" in which we distinguish between local interests and involvements and globally oriented involvements. Can we necessarily say today that the global marketplace is necessarily more predominant over the local economic context than it was 10,000 years ago? Might we not neglect to see that in the absolute impoverishment of three fifths of the worlds population, that the poor have economically adopted to their local environments in ways fundamentally oblivious to the gaze of the Western Economist bent upon achievement motivation, profit incentive and resource acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The conception of cultural and transcultural economy invites consideration of the interrelationship between the economic component of human culture and its many other facets. Economic motives become but one, rather efficacious element in the complex calculus of socio-cultural value and performance. At few points in human history can we clearly separate what is pure economic behavior from other forms of interest and involvement. This brings up the point of the rise of increasing role differentiation and specialization, or subcultural compartmentalization in more complex societies, such that we can legitimately speak today of full-time professionals involved in banking, finance, insurance, business management, sales, marketing, advertisement, stock-market brokerage, economic analysis, education, etc, where several thousand years ago a hunter may have also been a part-time trader, shaman, raconteur, teacher, warrior, politician. But even today, given the need for cross-cutting integration of life in a complex, overspecialized world, can we still distinguish all that clearly between the personal economic activities of the individual caught up in webs and economies of exchange and the professional role of economic specialists, and can we clearly distinguish between pure "achievement motivation" versus "power" or "social" or other forms of motivation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human economics has always been and always will remain a vital component of human cultural integration of reality. Our economic involvement is as basic to our behavior and being as is our language and other forms of symbolic communication. In fact, as much as economics involves the human exchange of resources, it can be deemed to be an intrinsic component of the transmission of culture itself--intrinsic both to the processes of culturation and transculturation. Because all transmission is a form of economic exchange of cultural value, we can more clearly see how such transmission is traditionally constrained and negotiated. The openness of such transmission sets up the possibility for both reciprocal evenness and unevenness of exchange, dependency and dominance which can over the long run result in marked assymetry in the the distribution of humans to resources and resources to humans.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Humankind is in part defined by its economic behavior. Conceptions of rationality, of finding or fixing proportion, and of justice itself, are rooted in the reciprocities of human relation intrinsic in economic exchange. It makes sense to refer to humankind as Homo economicus as this is the kind of symbolic animal we are. Economy is an intrinsic condition of human reality. Human beings are not social insects. We do not form ant colonies divided between queens and workers and soldiers. We do not instinctually offer up our life for the sake of another or of the "whole" without some measure or weighing of our positions, of the relative merit or value to be gained or lost. We calculate and negotiate our transactions with reality to the best of our interests and abilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">********</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important in the anthropology of economics to distinguish the historical rise of specific corporate institutional forms and practices which have an economic component and character, and to distinguish these institutional phenomena from the economic behavior of people who may compose these institutions. Slavery in the Southern United States in the pre-Civil War era was a unique institutional form that should be distinguished from the form of slavery practiced among North American Indians prior to European Contact, or during the Roman Empire, or in SouthWestern Europe during the middle ages. The Dutch East India company was a specific institutional arrangement which is to be distinguished from the British East India Company. The kind of banking institutions that chartered and financed early explorers or colonists are different from the credit institutions which promoted economic development of the hinterlands of colonial Southeast Asia, or banking and finance institutions of today which promote research and development. Government, whether local, state or national, must be seen as a specific form of institutional arrangment made possible by taxation and a redistributive economy. The Catholic Church, in promoting monogamy and inhibiting the inheritance of land in Medieval Europe, became one of the richest and most powerful institutions in Europe, replete with its own armies, bureaucratic machineries and ideology. Kinship organization and Chieftaincies and early city-states and state empires are all organized around the principle of the exchange and distribution of resources among an institutionally defined community.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must clearly recognize the historical factiveness of human economic institutions, and the economic role of corporate institutional organization in general, in the control, distribution and utilization of resources. Such institution can be seen to be a basic social innovation of cultural groupings, the invention of social organization, which can become culturally sanctioned and integrated in many different ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, panhuman reality is replete with instances and functions of institutionalization. We can see that institutions once incorporated, take on a superorganic form and life of their own which is "larger than life" of any individual. We become actors in roles cast in a larger frame of significance. In this regard, sex stratification, the role and importance of kinship in providing screens of security and resources, can be seen to carry forms of institutional significance that cannot be adequately explained in a phenomenological or existential way, and yet which are inextricably enmeshed in the experiences of its participants.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of the anthropology of knowledge, institutionalization involves the objectivation, reification and symbolic legitimation of humanly constructed practices, in relation to the world, on the basis of the human relation to resources. Institutionalization in this sense is fundamentally cultural economic in foundation. Because human beings have an investment in the stability of the status quo, and are enmeshed in its web of interdependencies, the institutional structuration of human society is inherently conservative and resistant to change. Human habits, however acquired, are difficult to change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The institution of black slavery in the American South no longer exists today, and for most people, the whole idea of such slavery seems abominable and aversive to our tastes, even though today we continue to tolerate and legitimate other forms of human institution which promote a comparable amount of human misery and inequality as did black slavery. The historical factiveness of human institutionalization of economic behavior does not preclude the facticity and historicity of our own institutions. Because a great deal is usually invested in an certain kind of institutional arrangement, there is usually some cost to their transformation. Such institutionally defined interests and investments are usually construed and evaluated in terms of their cultural or transcultural economics. It took a bloody long war to bring black slavery to an end in the world. What will it take to bring relative economic equality to the World System? <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentyoneback">back</a></p> <p><a NAME="twentytwo"></a></p> <p>  <hr> <p>  </p> <p><b><font SIZE="5">20</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">HUMAN RIGHTS and RESPONSIBILITIES</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Development of Human Resources</p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <b><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The "Solution" to modern development is human development.</p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The exclusive emphasis upon industrial development in the world today has led to a deemphasis upon the possibilities of human development, even though it is generally acknowledged that even small investments in human development yield large, if ultimately unmeasurable, dividends for any society. Seeing that we are rapidly developing ourselves to death, it would behoove us to reconsider alternative possibilities for human development than are available to us today.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Capitalist development ideology has critically ignored the importance of finite natural resource bases in its formulas for economic success, leading to irreparable loss or ruination of many natural resources available to humankind. On the other hand, it has also critically ignored the possibilities of greater human resource development, construing for the most part the "masses" as a vast "docile and obedient" reserve labor pool for its industrial production and service, and as the vast market for the consumption of industrial goods and services.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A consideration of the cultural economy of the world would lead anyone to the conclusion that the best solution to our ills of overdevelopment/underdevelopment is to shift the emphasis from material development which rapaciously exploits the natural resource base, and instead to begin developing the human resource base as a vast, potentially untapped reservoir of energy, talent and cultural capacity while adopting a more conservative policy towards natural resource expenditure. The means for effecting such a transition in the cultural economy of the world are readily available, and the benefits accruing to humankind for such an institutional transtion are much greater than will be otherwise if we fail to develop our human resources.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">How shall we define our human resources? We can refer to the energy, intelligence, creativity and spirit to accomplish great feats with restricted budgets as a sure sign of the maximization of such a resource. Bringing human talent and potential to full fruition, in the realization of many different styles of cultural genius, can be considered a means of developing and realizing our human resources.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such development does not require a marketplace of human talent in which only the best-payed brains are winners--human talent does not require the same kind of economic motivation as does human greed and power mongering.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One thing remains clear. The development of human resources will depend directly upon our capacity to bring to the world greater realization of human rights and responsibilities. We are left to reconsider the issue of human rights, their honor, their meta-ethical status, their realization and failure, their philosophical and scientific basis of justification, and their prospects for fulfillment. We must distinguish between basic and derived human rights, as well as the sense of social responsibility that accompanies the freedoms that are concommittant to their fulfillment. We must also identify some of the many means of their systematic subversion, as well as non-violent strategies for their promotion in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Ideally, human rights can be said to be the foundation of human law and political action in the world--it underlies all legal and political structures at every level of social organization. Its relative fulfillment or failure constitutes the moral basis by which we can ajudicate the legality or illegitimacy of a particular law or legal action</p> <b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></b>Rights and responsibilities cannot be separated--each entails the other. The basic rights have in the course of development become extended and include a much wider base than they were conceived to in their formulations in the doctrines of the late 18th century. Today we can easily include among the basic rights of humankind the right to health, to home, to education, to work, to job security, to a natural, clean environment, to volunteer to fight and give one's life for one's country. We can also distinguish basic human rights from more specialized, derivative forms of rights and responsibilities which are more context specific.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to understand how forces in our world have persistently, deliberately and systematically striven to undermine and usurp and prevent the realization of human rights. This kind of activity has especially occurred in the gray areas of derivative and pseudo-rights. It is important to understand also that human rights protect basic human freedoms, assuring liberity and emancipation from exploitation or domination, and is our best guarantee for relative equality in the world. The primary motivation behind the systematic usurpation of human rights in the world has been the desire to deprive human beings of their basic freedoms, to exploit and dominate them, and to block their access to resources. But freedom, and our rights, can only be assured in a democratically organized society, and only if human development includes the cultivation of basic human responsibilities towards one another, their social system, and to humankind in general. One person's freedom ends where another's rights begin, and only one's sense of responsibility and the other's sense of justice can determine this line. In general, rights and responsibilities are negotiated and transacted. The basis for our conception of a metaethical moral order for humankind and of our sense of universal justice lies in our faith in the virtual, sentient equality of all human beings. We are, from the standpoint of our sentient humanness, all potentially equal.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can see clearly the relationship between a pacifist and nonviolent orientation and the realization of human rights; and freedom. The greatest threat to human rights and freedom is the tyranny of fear and threat of violence that defines ultimate political authority in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It should also be apparent that human development rests upon the realization of human freedom, which in turn rests upon the realization of human rights and responsibilities in the world. We can properly speak, in a functional, if not "utilitarian" sense, of each person's pursuit of freedom, and of the "invisible hand" that leads democratic, open social organization to prosper culture economically.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">American society has always been hooked upon the horns of a basic contradiction. On one hand it has framed and mostly upheld as the foundation of its constitutional democracy the values of human liberty, justice, equality and human rights. On the otherhand, the same doctrine frequently dictates a univeral moral attitude based on the assumptions of global humanitarianism, which places its most vital moral interests at odds with its more predominant national interests in the pursuit of power, military strength, economic prosperity, etc. In other words, when the realization of its basic moral doctrine in the world must lead it to compromise its national interests in strength, security and solidarity, the pursuit of the latter national interests frequently leads it to compromise its higher moral ideals. And this is a basic ethical dilemma which all of us must face in one way or another whatever our specialization in the world. In an earthbound world, we can only be assured of the greater urgency in resolving this dilemma both collectively and in each of our lives. We now live in a world in which socio-economic success and prosperty frequently runs counter to our more global earthbound interests, and in which the pursuit of earthbound interests may amount to practical social suicide.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The human development of responsibility then must be seen to include the resolution of such a basic ethical, existential dilemma. It would seem to ultimately dictate a kind of normative education for independence and responsibility that will lead to the positive valuation and embodiment of the altruistic ideals of Kohlberg's post-conventional stage of moral development. We urgently need an active army of many minor Gandhi's and Kings who walk the common paths of the world and effect many small changes in people's lives. Perhaps such an expectation is too idealistic to come true, but if we can easily convince young adults to sacrifice themselves for patriotic ideals of national interest, we can just as readily induce them to give themselves for more human matters of peace and justice. The optimism of humankind is that if given a real choice, they will have the courage to decide for themselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural and psychological evidence strongly suggest that the realities of modern development rarely if ever live up to its promise. Developed peoples give up the chronic diseases of poverty for the diseases of overconsumption. A sense of belonging in a simpler world is exchanged for a sense of isolation, anomie, chronic separation and purposelessness. Those who have achieved development do not construe their own lives in the same way as they are seen by those who most desire to be developed. To be sure few people in the developed countries would willingly give up their lives of material plenty to lead a life of misery, poverty, lack of opportunity, that is the common lot of most undeveloped people on earth. But development does not come without its psychic, emotional and cultural costs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an anthropological perspective, it is not too much to suggest that the viable alternative to the kind of economic development the world has been so hurriedly and so single-mindedly pursuing would be the kind of human development; that would raise the human collective consciousness, lead to the greater emancipation of humankind from the evil which has long beset our civilization, and promote the prosperity of peace through the greater realization of human rights and equality in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a paradox that in the long run, and in the final analysis, such an alternative would most likely cost much less and yield much greater profits for humankind than if we continue down the path we've been upon.<a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentyoneback">back</a></p> <p>  <hr> <b><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">21</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">MISANTHROPY</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">And the Anthropology of Evil</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Human Beings fear the unknown, and failing to face it, grow to hate what they fear.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Knowledge creates responsibility. We recognize our humanity by sense of responsibility created our knowledge of the evil in the world, by our ignorance, our complicity, our prejudices, our deceit and our hypocrisy. Our knowledge may be measured by the gulf of our own ignorance and hypocrisy, by the lies we tell about the world. We measure the moral boundaries of humanity by the knowledge of its possibility for evil in the world. The historical and panhuman basis for a meta-ethics of humanity is rooted in the perennial recognition and experience of evil across time and throughout the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evil has many faces in our world and many causes. There can be as much evil in unwanted or misplaced love as there are in indifference or hatred. Evil can be personal, cultural or transcultural in expression. Money may be the root of all evil, as can human power and arbitrariness, as well as the vagaries and disasters of nature. Evil is rooted in human suffering, fear, aggression, the tolerance for violence, the violation of human rights. Evil can be institutionally legitimated. It can be highly impersonal or neurotically hyperpersonal. It can be random or targeted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever its character, all evil shares certain basic attributes. Whether intentional or deliberate or not, evil always involves the enactment of a relationship of victimization between a "victimizer" and a victim. Evil is what people do to other people when they violate their basic rights. It is social action that causes suffering or violation. Symbolically, the victimizer depends upon the hapless fate of the victim--victimization entails a kind of neurotic persecution or incrimination of the innocent of the sense of guilt and fear of what remains unresolved within the self. It thus involves a moral repression of the victimizer's own responsibility for involvement, its projection onto the victim in the form of victimization, and an invisibility of such responsibility which allows the victimizer to act, to victimize. In other words, the victimizer has no internalized form of contraint or moral boundary which would preclude the possibility for or prevent victimization. The transparency and invisibility of the victimizer's role in victimization is part of the conscious repression of the responsibility this role entails. We can see that victimization is always a symbolic "acting out" of basic conflicts that remain unresolved in the life of the victimizer.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can find the source of these conflicts in the moral immaturity or malformation of the individual in society, and of the sense of discrepancy between the victimizer's worlds of primary acquisition and subsequent social development. Strongly discrepant realities can be the source of a great deal of contradiction, confusion and hence frustration at its resolution. Chronic victimizers failed products the processes of the normative production of human reality. They suffer internalized conflicts that prevent them from carrying on a normal moral life, and compel them to symbolically act out their conflicts in the world. We are, in our unfinished states, partially frustrated and failed victimizers. We all share in our common capacity for evil in the human heart of darkness. Only most of us are able to bring this capacity under control, even transforming it into a beneficial creativity. In order to bring it into control, we are able to render it visible to ourselves, to reflect upon it and to recognize it within ourselves. It requires a kind of "moral vision" which is reflexive and apperceptive--able to penetrate the veil of illusion that surrounds our own involvement with the world. Victimizers suffer a common predicament of normative blindness that precludes the possibility of their coming to terms with their own evil.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of this blindness is the inability to see or sense the suffering of others. But beneath this is the inability to see or sense a deeper kind of symbolic suffering that remains repressed and unresolved within.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is invisible because it is repressed and indirectly available in our lives. It may be rooted in our context in the world as much as in our subconscious expressions. Like culture and character, context and unconscious are dialectically bound to one another, and constitute a kind of processural substration of our symbolic representation and expressive behavior in the world. We organically incorporate the world within ourselves, and extend ourselves into the world--and we cannot have one without the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It can be seen as a failure to incorporate the moral values that would lead the individual down a path to philanthropic humanity. The victimizer is moral monster who does not know how to become human, and instead becomes inhumane in its frustration. Evil in this sense is a kind of anthropological perversity of the human character--the possibility for our perversion that is rooted in our condition of world openness and unfinishedness.</p> <b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></b>Misanthropy and evil are not just moral problems, they are human phenomena that require anthropological attention as well. It is important that we understand the origins and causes of misanthropy in human nature and culture. It is important that we seek an anthropological definition and solution for human evil that like any disease has an etiology and an explanation, and understanding that will allow us to approach such phenomena in a more realistic and humane manner. Human history has been replete with both, so much so in fact that it is difficult to believe that humankind or its society may be in constitution morally good--goodness seems to have been the far too uncommon exception to the rule. And of course, as a mentor was fond of reminding me, people are neither good nor bad, and nothing is wholly evil or wholly good. We must understand that a definition of evil must be based upon some notion of anthropological goodness, and that misanthropy must be understood against the phenomena of philanthropy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an anthropological standpoint, such questions are extremely relativistic in the best and worst senses of that term--so much so in fact as to lead to serious doubt whether we can legitimately speak of any such phenomena or principle as anthropological, pan-human good or evil. But there is a sense that every empirical problem and epistemological question that an anthropologist might ask must always have a concomittant normative consequence or entailment. Questions of meaning, fact, and value cannot be clearly separated even for the purposes of anthropological analysis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must acknowledge though, that some higher, meta-ethical and panhuman standard of moral injunction or imperative is regarded has valid, though this is most only presumed and implicit, and though its exact prescriptions or specification resists clear elucidation. This is so because though we all act within a self-enclosed moral-symbolic-rational universe that tends to construe whatever we do as just and appropriate, history and the world will still come to judge us by the net human consequences of our actions, whether we will inflict suffering upon others or alleviate their suffering. Though we acknowledge the cultural origins of many forms of evil, we cannot thereby anthropologically legitimate such evil.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But the anthropological perspective which regards the expression and constraint of evil to be based upon culture, sees that it shares as a cultural phenomena a normally wider and more complex sphere of causality and influence than those who want to point fingers find exceptable. Spheres of involvement are cultural and usually to some extent institutionally incorporated. Thus many people will be found who share partial involvement in the perpetration of evil in the world, and few who will share total or exclusive responsibility. It is true that when such evil happens, those who are perhaps the most to blame for it may be the least susceptible or suspect of its guilt.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sense of evil, of being wronged, has the same source in the human right and in symbolic sentience as does our sense of justice. We understand that we have been wrong, that some value or norm that we hold has been violated, even if it is not exactly clear how or what the ramifications of the violation may really be. Indeed, the possibility for being or doing evil stems from the same source of world openness as does our possibility for goodness. Though cultural norms and values and the sanctions taken against their violation vary widely among different cultural groupings, it is clearly that there is no culture on earth that does not have some such normative system by which to weigh and reward people's behavior. People are neither born good nor evil, but must learn how to be either. This learning will carry an individual through many trials and tribulations over the course of a lifetime. There is a sense that before we can learn well our lessons, we must make many mistakes, and this inherent proneness to error in our cultural acquisition can be the source of much "evil."</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can see the possibility and likelihood of evil as rooted in the moral immaturity of humankind. It is a humankind that fails to transmit or acquire the level of responsibility toward the rights of others that the amelioration of evil requires. In our daily lives, we are immersed in a stream of action which always has moral ramifications and entailments steming beyond the narrow spheres of our own self-interest or even our own particular cultural orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evil can be seen to proceed from the default of the affirmation of the sentience and equality of the subjective other that is at the heart of nonviolent action. It can be rooted in either a profound indifference and ignorance of the suffering of others, or for a hatred of the differences and plight of others. It leads to the form of rationalization in which the victim is blamed for victimization, and the responsibility and involvement of the victimizer are invisible. This transparency of misanthropy has the same character as ethnocentrism, and thus can be seen to largely have a cultural character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can see that misanthropy is a form of evil that comes from the projection onto others of the feelings of inferiority, weakness, difference, that are repressed within oneself. Misanthropy is usually attended to with such intensity of feeling and intent that is disproportional to the nature of the real relationship between people based upon their cultural differences. Misanthropy proceeds from an undeveloped and frustrated sense of self-identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The immaturity or maldevelopment of misanthropy can be seen to be part of a larger cultural complex of the relative cultural dependency and boundedness of people in relation to a larger world, webs of neurotic relationship that frustrate and prevent people from achieving the level of liberation and self-realization that might otherwise be possible. Such dependency always has its appeal to the darkness of people's hearts--to the sense of terror or aggression, greed or avarice. Cultural orientations may either foster such dependency, and reinforce patterns of neurotic adaptation in a kind of "archosis" which, like a crutch and a placebo, promotes nonbeingness and a failure to face the separation and marginal experience of death in a realistic way. Whole cultures and even nations may be wrapped up in a mythoi of symbolic, collective representations which entails the regular denial or "forgetting" of negative experiences or the suppression of the kinds of contradictions which might otherwise seem to threaten one's "sacred" sense of order. People without courage will fear what they do not know, and then will grow to hate what they fear.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such patternings of social archosis and neurotic interdependency can become institutionally incorporated, and then acquire a certain objectivity and "facticity" which obfuscates their human-made origins.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this sense, much of the modern evils in the world can be seen to be rooted in the symbolic reification of humankind--the turning of the human being into a "thing" that is something less than fully human. The legitimation of the institutions of slavery in the past had as their basis just such a reification of the human other as something less than human, or as human at all. It is clear that in the human world, what we are actually dealing with are the socially circumscribed categories of the imagination which casts human differences into a differential, stratified field of relations and dependency. The master mentality and the slave mentality go hand in hand and dialectically require one another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The level of mass destruction and bloodshed on modern battlefields, and the increasing victimization of civilian citizenry in warfare, is founded upon this incorporation of evil and the kind of collective social pathology of militarism and nationalism which promotes this evil. The tyranny of war is that its has removed the element of choice from the threat of violence--it compels and literarily forces otherwise good people to commit immoral, atrocious acts of violence. "War is hell whenever men are forced to fight--when the limit of consent is breached." When we have state machineries of mobilization for war and of mass conscription, we have the transformation of both the soldiery and citizenry alike into a common cannon fodder--grist for the bureaucratic, administrative mills which always carry an impersonal face and which always hide and protect and inner, elite circle.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot discuss the anthropology of human evil without taking a moment to consider the problem of reform. We must liberate the notion of reform from its relativistic connotation of "veritas"--that there may be a "true" way of which evil is a "false" or untrue" way. Reform must begin with the acknowledgement of the possibility and valuation of human differences in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evil, like any human phenomena, must also be seen as holistically complex. It presents to us a problem for which there are no simple or straightforward solutions. In this regard, reform projects that look to rehabilitate or ameliorate all the causes and consequences for evil, <u>at the same time</u>, are perhaps the most efficacious means of reform.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This often entails a form of radical reidentification, a "conversion" experience which causes a radically split between present and previous lives, involving much reinterpretation of prior experiences in terms of a new world-view. The therapeutic value of religious conversion in this regard must be recognized. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, such conversion experiences entail the "displacement of libido" and the transference of libidinal associations onto new symbolic forms which are external to one's inner world. This is precisely the kind of rehabilitative therapeutic transformation that the psychiatrist and the shaman try to effect in their patient's lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But we must also see that extreme evil will be so deeply rooted in the organic and primary processes of the individual as to prove impervious to even the most radical kind of conversion experience or the most total form of holistic reintegration. At this level, the kind of therapy that seems the most remedial if not completely effective the kind of permanent, organic transformations which come with behavior modification and stress-induction associated with brainwashing. The trouble with this is that such stress-induction results in a kind of irreversible kindling and "deindividuation" the consequences of which may be worse than the original "problem." It leads to the breaking down of the individual's normal adaptive faculties and to patterns of withdrawal which may compound or aggravate an originally unresolved problem. In this regard, radical therapies like lobotomies, or extensive drug programs or electric shock treatment, torture and radical deprivation, will result in irreversible damage that may or may not entail the elimination of the original problem.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such therapy and our individually oriented theories of psychology downplay the role and importance of a socio-centric and cultural orientation in the understanding of social pathology and thus for the possibilities for their reform. Entire social systems or cultural orientations may be maladaptively perverse and "diseased" or inherently evil. By and large, anthropology has not given us any theoretical framework upon which to evaluate cultures, and we are left to place almost the entire burden of pathology, disease and evil upon the psychological constitution of the individual, without paying much attention to the alternative, of normal people trying to adapt to a diseased and evil social system. Edward Sapir drew a useful distinction between "spurious" and genuine societies based upon the quality and normal character of social relations and to the place a society will give to the independent life of the individual. In a similar way Alfred Kroeber associated civilization with the cultivation and rise in frequency of culturally stylized Genius, and the demise of civilization with the demotion and infrequency of talent. One marker of social pathology is to the surfeit of value it provides to the subjective life of the individual, as well as to the extent that its system results in the violence and victimization of human beings. In this regard, any system that demotes human differences, devalues individual freedom, and promotes extreme uniformity or conformity must be regarded as spurious and therefore pathological. The character of the "true believer" cannot be adequately comprehended outside of socio-cultural context of its cultivation and fulfillment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We lack the kinds of innovations that will therapeutically rehabilitate and bring reform to entire societies or institutions. These kinds of reforms will not be found in prisons, churches or schools built upon the principle of seeking exclusive guilt in, persecuting and reforming the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The common symptom of a diseased, inhuman system is its structures which obfuscate reality, creating an inner circle of deceit, and which impersonally deny, implicitly or systematically, the subjective value if the individual human being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anthropology must come to examine the role and effects which strongly authoritarian power structures come to play in human stratification and the perpetuation of "organized" forms of human evil in the world. People worldwide exhibit a strong tendency to organize themselves into hierarchies of dominance that exclude human freedom and that eventuate in evil. In this sense, "power corrupts." <a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Anthropologos.htm#twentytwoback">back</a></p> <p><a NAME="twentythree"></p> <p>  <hr> <p></a></p> <p> </p> <b><font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">22</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PEACE and POWER</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Anthropological Challenges of Our Future</p> <font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The suffering of the few is the plight of the many.</p> </font><font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have yet to consider the ultimate challenge to our anthropological knowledge--the problem of peace in the world. We have a long tradition of intellectual and social movements in the West that have had paradise and perfection as their professed project. Enlightenment, capitalism, and even communism all shared wholeheartedly in this common culture historical tradition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must see and seek peace in the world not as some absolute state of the absence of war or violence in the world. We must seek it rather in terms of the relative pacification of humankind and the reduction of the evil of war and its effects. The realization of relative peace on earth entails more than the absence and demotion of war, but also the liberation from the tyranny of war and the treat of violence and violent victimization in all phases of life. Furthermore, it is inextricably tied up with the emancipation of humankind from the bondage of its own prejudices and ignorance, and the promotion and realization of human freedom, dignity, equality and rights on earth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The cultivation of a pacificist orientation entails a new perspective and a new way of life that has no more room for guns, bombs, for violence and victimization, or for the suffering of any life on earth. A pacifist orientation is of necessicity an orientation of nonviolence.</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center">*******</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What are the anthropological implications of pacifism in an earthbound world? Violence is seen to come from a perverse attachment to power in the world--a kind of ego-empowerment based upon the principle of becoming which promotes its own security and realization over that of other life. Liberation from the common human heart of darkness comes from the coming to terms and embracing of that heart of darkness such that it opens onto the light of the world. The appeal of the non-violent demonstrator is to the awakening of the common spirit of humanity--with both its potential for violent action as well as for justice, that is found in the heart of the potentially violent executor. The common ground of humanness, of human sentience shared by victim and victimizer, makes such an appeal a possibility, and potentially powerful agency for nonviolent action. In this regard the capacity for violence and for impersonal victimization must be seen to depend upon the denial of the subjective humanity of the other--in otherwords upon a basic complex of "misanthropy." This common denial of the subjective other has as its root the denial of the subjective otherness within the self. Consequently, the appeal of nonviolent action is ultimately to the subjective sentience of the victimizer, and to its power to heal the human heart of darkness. The awakening of the potential capacity to feel, to empathize and find sympathy with the suffering of others, ultimately comes from the realization of the imagined possibility that the suffering of others could be our own suffering.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This entails a Buddhist prescription of "active" versus passive resistance to violence. It entails a demonstration to the victimizer of the consequences of victimization in a way that does not invite or encourage retribution. We should not seek blood for blood, but to turn tears into blood and blood into tears. It is the sharp but harmless rapping on the head of the violent to invite the opening of the doors of consciousness. To victimize the heart of the victimizer is to transform the monster into a pacifist soul sister.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is apparent that from a psychological standpoint, the cultivation of a pacifist orientation entails the letting go of anger and hatred, and a coming to terms with the things which cause such anger or hate. Anger, hatred, jealousy and false pride are feelings which are inherently destructive of human relations and which can eat up the human heart. One must seek out within oneself and exorcise the sources of one's negative feelings about the world, no matter what its external, objective symbolic manifestions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">*****</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Peace and power; have been known in human history to stand in uneasy relationship. Power is often wielded by the threat of war, while peace can only be sometimes had at the cost of such power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The pacifist doctrine holds a fundamental nonattachment to power. All forms of empowerment in the world bring with it the potential for violence. Cultivation of a pacifist orientation therefore dictates a renunciation of all external forms of power, and an actual seeking of "depowerment" in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But there is, anthropologically speaking, another form of empowerment which is not inimical to a pacifist way of life, and is in fact necessary to the fulfillment of such a way of life. This is the cultivation of independent, internal forms of power that come from the liberation and freedom from the constraints of external forms of power. These independent forms of empowerment consist of many different means of self-fulfillment and the normative expression of individual creativity in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Peace demands a dual ethos of tolerance and respect for human differences in the world, and of moral responsibility to honor one's obligations and the rights of others over one's own prerogatives of power. In this sense, peace in the human world must await the realization of human rights and equality on earth. </p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.</p> <p>Last Updated: 08/25/06 </p> <hr> <p> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <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>