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<body id="MyBody" onload="MyBegin()"> <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> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="6">CULTURE</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Exploratory Essays in the Science of Cultural Anthropology</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1995</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">This is another e-publication by Lewis Micro-Publishing.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright 200</font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">1</font><font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> 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>  <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="center"><font size="5">Contents</font></p> <p ALIGN="left"> </p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#one" target="main">INTRODUCTION: THE REALITY OF CULTURE</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#two" target="main">1. NATURAL SYSTEMS THEORY</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#three" target="main">2. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AS NATURAL SYSTEMS THEORY</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#four" target="main">3. CULTURAL SELECTION AND EVOLUTIONARY HOLOGEIST</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#five" target="main">4. CULTURAL PHOBIA: THE NEUROSIS OF MODERN BEING</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="Culture5.htm">5.</a></font> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#six" target="main">PAN-HUMAN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#seven" target="main">6. PAX-AMERICANA</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#eight" target="main">7. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL FIELD</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#nine" target="main">8. THE RAISON D'ETRE OF EXISTENTIAL ETHNOGRAPHY</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#ten" target="main">9. THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#eleven" target="main">10. CULTURAL RELATIVITY</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#twelve" target="main">11. CULTURAL SYSTEMS</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#thirteen">12. SYMBOLIC DIFFERENTIALS OF</a> </font><a href="Culture12.htm" target="main"><font FACE="Book Antiqua">PSYCHO-CULTURAL     DEVELOPMENT</font></a></p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#fourteen" target="main">13. THE SYMBOLIC MEDIATION OF THE PHENOMENAL FIELD</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#fifteen" target="main">14. THEORY AND METHOD OF SYMBOLIC FRAMING</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/CultureFrames.htm#sixteen" target="main">15. CONCLUSIONS</a></p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="one">INTRODUCTION</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">THE REALITY OF CULTURE</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>A great deal of controversy has been occurring in academic forums that have to do directly or indirectly with the ontological status of culture and of our ability to study and come to terms with culture, especially through the social production of ethnographic texts that to some extent come to symbolically represent and iconographically stand in place of cultural reality.</p> <p>Despite over a century of study of cultures and cultural phenomena, we are still without a single accepted definition or theoretical description or explanation of culture. This lack of preparadigmatic consensus that Thomas Kuhn identifies as the initial foundation of a science, has a consequence of generating a great deal of argument over fundamental questions about cultural reality and its influences in our life--a concept by which vagueness lends itself to the promotion of a broad plethora of alternative, competing theories and explanations.</p> <p>This text was conceived and written with the premises that culture is a reality which has a critical influence upon our lives and our world, cultural patterning is empirically available to description and analysis. Indeed, the description and understanding of culture is primarily gained through the empirical validation of first-hand experience with culture; a central theory of culture may be inductively derived from this empirical patterning, a theory which lends itself to a pan-human definition of culture, and to a systematic program for the measurement and analysis of culture and cultural differences as they occur in the world. Human culture in the civilized sense that we understanding it conventionally arose in only the last few millennium of hominid evolution and its autochthonous origin and genesis is unique to the human species.</p> <p>Cultural realities present themselves to our everyday experience as something that is largely unknown and to be reckoned with in a systematic manner. We are all novice students of cultural anthropology in this regard. Cultural realities are something which demands description, understanding and explanation, as something which has a functional, causal and determinative influence in our lives. Thus it is never suitable to attempt to explain away cultural realities in reductionist terms of analytical or interpretive categories--especially in terms which are unicausal, monotypical and prime mover. Culture is not just a consequence of genes, natural selection, history or psychology, but culture is a causal force of which much that is human in the world is a consequence.</p> <p>Cultural reality is characterized by its transparency in our lives, its contextuality in the background of our worlds, its symbolic texture, antinomies and contradictions, its irreducible holism of partially integrated patterning which resists analytical description.</p> <p>The transparency and invisibility of the force and influence of culture in our lives is due to the "naturalization" and reification of cultural constructions as if a priori and inherent--it is both embodied in our own sense of being, our tastes, habits and aversions, as well as embedded in the background context of our everyday lives. The facticity and historicity of cultural inventions, symbolisms and behavioral constructions becomes apparent or obvious only when our own cultural orientation comes into juxtaposition with alternate and radically different cultural realities of other people. The coexistence of multiple cultural realities serves as a reminder to us of the relativity of our own cultural orientation.</p> <p>What makes culture intractable and difficult to study is that it is preeminently both a psychological and a social reality. It is reinforced socially and most of its sanctioning is achieved through such social reinforcement. Culture thus is an historical process of social enactment and behavioral patterning that is corporate in the sense that it is larger than life, and extends beyond the biographical horizons of any single culture-bearer to encompass and entire community. At the same time, cultural values, orientations and traits are internalized into the mind and worldview of the culture bearer, and become intrinsic to everything that we are and do in the world. The very glasses through which we see and come to know the world, are basically cultural in composition and design.</p> <p>The recent and growing devaluation of culture and cultural studies must be seen against the background of the implicit devaluation of both cultural diversity and of the role and function of culture in our lives. At the same time there is a rise of a global capitalist mono-culture that, via sponsorship of the media, the arts and sciences, has attempted to foster and cultivate the illusion of the natural reality of its own cultural orientation. Great profits are to be realized in the breaking down of traditional cultural boundaries and in the promotion of the new global monoculture. But such profits must be seen as only short term gain when measured against the potential, and very real, long term losses: the loss of genuine cultural diversity in our world, of the appreciation of cultural differences and the opportunity to learn from these differences, and of the ability to exert some kind of influence over those forces and powers in our lives which have such a hand in manipulating our needs, views and habits, and in exploiting these for private gain.</p> <p>The science of cultural anthropology is rooted to the study of culture as a basic human reality. The five cornerstones of cultural anthropology have long been the premises of the relativity of cultural differences and their influences upon our lives; the need to step beyond the ethnocentrisms (historicity, facticity, constructions and implicit reifications) of one's own cultural boundaries; the doctrine of cultural holism--that the patterning of culture must be comprehended from the synthetic standpoint of the whole; cross-cultural comparison; the search for pan-human universals; and a firm inductive-empirical footing on the ground of human experience that is rooted to participant-observation and detailed descriptive ethnography. While it makes an important difference whether we adopt an analytical (traits, elements, schemas, etc.) or a synthetic approach (pattern, gestalt, model) and whether we emphasize an etic or emic point of view, or a realist or idealist notion of what culture is in the first and final place, these alternative orientations are but minor dialectical variations of a basic theme of the importance, pervasiveness, patterning and forcefulness of culture in our lives and our world--facts from which we cannot escape.</p> <p>However we seek to construe and define culture, it is paramount that we understand that culture as it has developed and become articulated in our world is not a monolithic phenomena. It has many levels and many facets, and multiple foci. It is a quite variable phenomena, both individually and socially. This multiplicity of culture is both its intractable weakness and its empirical source of strength as a genuine science. Nevertheless, basic shared patterns of culture may nevertheless be universal and common to all humankind.</p> <p>The reality of culture and of cultural differences will long remain to plague humankind. The need for a science of culture will also remain, even if there are no longer any students of culture left. But we are all the unwitting children of culture.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="two">CHAPTER ONE</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">NATURAL SYSTEMS THEORY</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Systems of information occur naturally in the universe based upon ordered patterning of phenomena, whether it is the eternal waltz of the planets and their moons around the sun, the chemical structure of plastic, the growth rings of an aged tree, a school of fish, or the social organizations of humans. The objective status of this phenomena is confirmed in the sense that we can scientifically predict their occurrence independent of our own subjective experiential confirmation of their occurrence. And yet the status of our ontological knowledge of these naturally occurring patterns are inseparably linked to our knowledge of these systems, such that our a posteriori knowledge can distort, relativize and explain such patterns systematic ways. The result of our knowledge of such phenomenal patterns are that our sciences constitute a coherent set of theories concerning natural information systems which underlie and regulate the phenomenal patterning of the universe. These systems theory can be considered natural to these extent that in every case, the occurrence of natural phenomenal patterning is in every instance the independent variable of our theoretical constructions of such systems theory. Such natural information theory can be considered to be operationally systematic in the sense that the things to which it is related and from which it arises is at some level of human experience statistically non-random, objectively real, minimally ordered in a manner which is propositionally coherent, predictable and hence controllable, lending itself to experimental replicability, and to the extent that its order is anti-chaotic--subject to expectable change. They can be considered to be functionally systematic in the sense that the phenomenal patterning itself is minimally nonrandom and determinative in a manner that is separate and independent of our own empirical knowledge and validation of such patterning. They are informational in that they are essentially anti-chaotic in the minimal definition of the term. They are minimally nonrandom, structured or ordered patterns of occurrence. Such natural information systems are theoretic in the sense that their operational explication is tied to and inseparable from our knowledge of such systems.</p> <p>Science as a broad generic label covering the natural and social sciences is a term rooted in the explication of natural systems theory. Natural systems theory as a covering law model of the sciences in general. Scientific theories must account for facts as these are construed, and provide facts where none exist. A fact is a datum or bit of knowledge the empirical truth value of which is considered, at least statistically incontestable and credible. Scientific theories must make aspects of our reality more available, in terms which are independent of our cultural biases or culturally defined predispositions of knowledge.</p> <p>Naturally occurring systems obey the basic laws of thermodynamics. Though they are information carrying in their implicit order which is minimally "anti-entropic" and self-sustaining, they cannot be perfectly efficient or closed or eternal in the purely physical sense. All such systems thus are subject to decay and erosion. Systems effect an internal hyper-coherence by means of demarcating a finite boundary by which all relationships between the internal patterning and dynamics of the parts of the system and the world are related. Systems also may occur in relation to other similar or different systems, and thus come to form symbiotic communities which are corporate in the sense that though individual components of the entire collectivity erode and die, the collectivity as a whole continues. Biological systems have effected continuity and natural perpetuation through reproductive replacement, and reproduction has become central to both the definition of living systems and their evolutionary change.</p> <p>Natural systems are ordered at a discrete number of separate yet interdependent levels. These are the physical level, the chemical, the biological, and the cultural. The aegis of forces and predictable patterns of relationship between the parts are distinct at each level, though each level is built up of the lower levels. Thus higher level systems cannot be analytically reduced or explained purely in terms of the lower level of analysis. Biological processes and evolutionary theory can be unlocked in terms of the bio-chemical and molecular reactions, just as these can be understood in terms of the atomic weights and numbers of the elements composing the complex organic chains, but these by themselves are not enough for comprehending the structure of patterning of the cell, cellular development and differentiation, the organic constitution of the entire organism, or the behavior of the biological organism in relation to a community of such organisms, a community situated in a complex web of different interacting communities. At the same time, theory invoked at a higher level of informational patterning is more complicated and less parsimonious or precise as that available for the lower levels--losing the mathematical precision and abstraction characteristic of the physical laws of matter. Still, at each level, super-structural organization of collectivities of systems occurs which becomes extremely complex.</p> <p>The laws of the higher level cannot be invoked to explain those patterns which occur at a lower level, and those laws and principles occurring on more basic levels of analysis appear as distinctly different from those of a higher level. This is what is referred to as the definitional hierarchy of multiple determinations. Lower level systems are more independently occurring than higher level systems. Systems of information occurring at different levels are multiply determined by forces and factors of relationship occurring at each level of analysis.</p> <p>Besides the four basic levels of analysis, there are also several discrete sub levels of analysis within each level--a componential or particulate level at the most rudimentary level, an organic level of articulation of the parts or components in the composition of a self-contained system of information, and a super-organic system of such a system in a larger collection of similar or different systems. The patterning which occurs on each of these sublevels involves principles of relationship which cannot be accounted for on the basis of the lower sublevels. These three levels of analysis--the sub-organic, organic and superorganic, occur in a parallel manner in all four levels of systems analysis, and it can be hypothesized that similar kinds of relational systems prevail upon each of the parallel levels.</p> <p>Thus another characteristic of naturally occurring systems becomes apparent--that is that all naturally occurring systems appear as collectivities of multiple similar systems. No naturally occurring system, beyond that perhaps of the entire universe itself (which itself may be just a definitional problem), is a unique or singly occurring system. Any system that can and does occur in nature, will occur in nature <u>more than once</u>. This brings up basic philosophical questions that we cannot answer at this time--such as the status of extraterrestrial life, especially of intelligent life, and the possibility of multiple universes.</p> <p>Besides the entropy, noise, anti-entropic informational capacity, the basic multiplicity and spatio-temporal finiteness of all naturally occurring systems, we can speculate other basic shared properties of such systems. First all such systems are subject at every level to a basic universal principle of change--all systems change and are subject to the changes of other systems, and these sources of change are the source of new information and noise within the system. Internally generated change is referred to as endogenous, external sources are referred to as exogenous. Change is a basic statement of the inherently dynamic inconstancy of relations between parts of of parts.</p> <p>Anther facet of all naturally occurring systems are that they are all variably subject to the same basic physical constraints--the irreversibility of time and the non-duplicity of space. Time, at whatever rate it occurs, is always experienced as a unidirectional process. One thing cannot be in two separate places at the same time.</p> <p>Naturally occurring systems occurring at different levels of analysis constitute multiple feedback systems both within and between the levels. The occurrence of such feedback networks within alternate systems is important for understanding the inherent complicity, multiplicity and indeterminancy or relational causality of such systems at all the levels of analysis. A feedback network must be defined as a partially determined cyclical hierarchy in which the inter-functioning of the parts influences the state of the whole system--either to one of growth, stasis or decay. It is the cybernetics of such partially open feedback networks which describe the dynamics and mechanics of the system as informational and regulated. Functional homeostatic equilibrium can be defined as the continued steady-state of a balanced system. The kind of positive feedback characteristic of growing and differentiating systems must be distinguished from the homeostatic or balanced feedback that indefinitely maintains the same system in an undifferentiated statuses. Furthermore, the negative feedback which characterizes degenerate or regressively decaying systems can be distinguished also from these other kinds.</p> <p>It is apparent that the study of different systems upon different levels of analysis must be approached in a holistic manner than will attempt to understand the dynamics of the system as a whole as well as in relation to other systems or in relation to its component parts. The holism of natural systems theory does not preclude analysis and the formulation of analytical laws. It does direct our attention toward the phenomena as a whole--to its patterning that cannot be adequately reduced. Analytical reductionism that attempts to explain the phenomenal patterning of the whole exclusively in terms of the analytically distinct parts, must fail to grasp the relative conditioning played by the context of other systems and levels and of the whole, upon the patterning and interrelations of the parts.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="three">CHAPTER TWO</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AS NATURAL SYSTEMS THEORY</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The cultural level of natural systems theory has not yet been fully elaborated. It is my opinion that the appropriate sub-levels of analysis for the cultural level are the individual (sub-organic), the community (organic), and the inter-communal social context (superorganic). Alternative units of analysis might be hypothesized, for instance symbols, as basic sub-organic units of meaning, but these tend to be difficult to clearly describe and identify within a naturalistic setting. The individual, situated within his sphere of social relations, forms a natural and readily distinguishable unit. Focus upon the individual also provides a natural holistic framework upon which to hang our analysis and theories.</p> <p>Of course, the individual is also a complex bundle of things (beliefs, values, emotions, goals, behaviors, habits, predispositions, motivations, hang ups, etc.) that is itself extremely difficult to figure out. A theory of culture as a natural system would therefore demand a coherent theory of the individual, one that is congruent with a larger and encompassing theory of the individuals place within the community. Likewise, the same theory would also demand a similar and related theory of the community as an organic totality. Finally, it demands a systematic evaluation of the function of the larger world of social and historical relations in situating both the community and individual in a feedback relationship to one another and the rest of the world.</p> <p>Consideration of cultural systems at the level of the individual involves what has more formally been referred to as cultural (and, by extension, cross-cultural) psychology. The ontological status of the individual as a clear socio-cultural unit of analysis is relatively unequivocal. There is a relative discreteness and completeness of biographical integrity that would be noticeably lacking in the analysis of symbols, behaviors, institutions or aspects of culture. Furthermore, the individual, above all other things, a clearly subjective and empirical unit of analysis.</p> <p>Consideration of the individual comes to focus upon basically symbolic processes. Symbolization refers to a definite process combining predictable and coordinate patterns of semantic reference, affect, objective identification and perception, cognition, rationalization and behavioral reaction. The individual is construed as living within a symbolic organization of reality, a form of mental organization which is hardwired to the brain and fundamental to the definition of the cultural construction of reality. The individual, born and raised within a web of cultural relationships, leaves within a universe, an ocean of symbolization, from which one cannot escape. Patterns of variation of individual symbolic patterning come to focus on consideration of systematically measured individual differences in regard to a number psychometric measures.</p> <p>In general, a theory of the symbolic differentiation of the phenomenal field (Werner 1957; 1963), of the movement from a more "primitive" patterning of diffuse, global, mechanical, concrete, homogeneous, uncentralized, rigid, linear modes of symbolic organization, and syncretic, which is reflected perceptually, cognitively and behaviorally, toward increasingly hierarchic articulated, objective, heterogeneous, focused, organic, abstract, specific, flexible and labile modes of symbolic organization. The primitive rudimentary mode of symbolization appears to involve relationships of a form of symbolization in which there is a more direct embodied linkage between the subject representation of experience, the affect, and the external stimuli of the experience. The symbol in this form has frequently the iconographic function of the parts taking on and often standing for the quality-of-the-whole. Such rudimentary symbolizations have the character also of a critical indefiniteness and overextension of metaphorical reference of the symbol. Such a form of symbolic organization of reality may be related to a pre-literate, oral mode of noetic consciousness.</p> <p>The role of symbols and symbolization are explored further in a later essay. It must here be emphasized that the symbol has a central importance in human experience in linking behavioral and objective experience that is primarily material, environmental and social, with the inner world of psychological experience of the individual. Symbolization is thus the principle medium of this interrelationship; an interrelationship which is dialectal and systemic in patterning. Symbols can thus be seen to reinforce subjectively objectively situated environmental relations. Symbolization allows for the mediation of the organic in terms of the subjective and the biographical, and the translation of the latter into forms which are relevant on an organic level of practice and action. Symbols serve also a unifying function for experience, serving to tie together into a whole what might be an otherwise disparate set of behavioral settings and significations. Symbolism thus have a central unifying function that enables us to deal symbolically with marginal or relativizing situations which might otherwise threaten the integral unity of our world.</p> <p>Upon the organic level of patterning of cultural systems, we can refer to the analysis of various interrelated institutions and institutional forms, some of which are behavioral, social, and others of which are symbolic, in form and function. Institutions serve to reinforce a received order of symbolically defined relations in the world, as if these relations were not the product of human construction, but were rather natural facts of human behavior and social organization. Institutions can be understood in forms which are both objectively (etically) and subjectively (emically) understood--thus institutional forms, manifest symbolically, have an inherently dual form of being both objectivated social processes embedded in human practices, sanctions, habits and social relations, and simultaneous subjectivated in being embodied in values, viewpoints, attitudes, affect, identity and motivations.</p> <p>Institutional forms are by definition corporate and organic in the sense that they tend toward a collectivity of individuals that in form transcends the biographical boundaries of any single individual. Thus, organic institutional forms tend to be independent of the variables of personality and psychological differences of the individuals who compose them, although history reveals countless incidents of the influence of psychological factors of personalities upon patterning and course of events of cultural institutions. Institutions occur and incorporate individuals regardless of personality differences and variables. Institutional forms may be more or less restrictive or liberal in the range of personality deviance which they tolerate or sanction, and the processes of sanctioning of appropriate behaviors, values, etc., may lead to the cultural promotion of certain configurations of personality over others, as a form of corporate cultural personality, and to the marginalization, rehabilitation or even annihilation of basic personality configurations, traits or predispositions that are implicitly antithetical to the predominant ethos and values of the cultural orientation. But this form is neither rigid nor restrictive. It is relative to the individual who is the primary bearer of culture.</p> <p>They tend to be organic in the sense that they are more or less relatively articulated within a larger institutional framework with other institutional forms, and each distinguishable institution itself may be composed of a number of sub-institutional forms which may be only loosely linked together under the aegis of a more general relationship or social category.</p> <p>Institutions are more or less traditional in orientation, and all institutions forms must resolve a central problem of the transmission of the institutional form in tact, and the elaboration and subsequent modification of the institution. Institutions functionally serve the needs and interests of the individuals who embody these institutions--they must meet the requirements of the production (symbolically and physically) and reproduction (socially and biologically) of the society in which it is situated. Institutional forms cohere as "facets" of a culture which define the outlines and central characteristics of a distinctive community. A community can be understood as a relatively integrated body of institutional forms which serve to incorporate and maintain the collectivity of individuals who symbolically embody the institutionalized forms of the community.</p> <p>Upon the superorganic level, we must refer to a complicated acculturative and political history of inter-communal social relations. It is analysis that encompasses a number of sociologically distinct processes (migration, accommodation, integration, assimilation, acculturation, etc.) that may be more or less destructive and asymmetrical or reciprocal and mutual, and that also involve community adaptations and stresses to the coexistence of other communities and symbolic orientations in the world. Symbolizations which are isomorphic with the organic level, also tends to be functionally isomorphic with this superorganic level in the sense that the same symbols of identity and difference as are invoked to reinforce personal identity, hierarchy and in-group solidarity, can be also invoked to maintain and mediate boundaries between in-groups and out-groups in a broader field of social action. The superorganic level of analysis of cultural forms frequently takes the the form of a general, broad based civilization that can be characterized by a unique concatenation of style patterns and symbolizations, and by the presence of "men of genius" who represent the florescence of these distinctive style patternings.</p> <p>The same increase in organic differentiation that is found to empirically occur at the individual level of symbolic articulation, can be found to occur also on the organic level with the increasing differentiation and specialization and integrative articulation of institutional forms, and the accompanying incorporation and sophistication of patterning of inter-communal relations within ever widening spheres of interaction.</p> <p>The rise of agriculture from a previous adaptation of swidden horticulture and slash and burn, and the rise of industrial agriculture from a peasant based or latifundian form of enterprise, represent the increasing elaboration and extension of socio-cultural institutions which reflects the processes of differentiation and elaboration on the individual level.</p> <p>The rise of cultural development of humankind in the world, which is associated with the advent of the alphabet, printing, literacy, the growth and specialization of the sciences and scholarly fields of knowledge, of technological sophistication, etc. represent just such a movement from a less toward a more differentiated cultural reality. In general this process of human cultural development can be referred to as the rise of human civilization. We may say that inventions and acquisitions tend to be one way. Once fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, silk, gunpowder, the compass, the domestication of plants and animals, the boat, the house, steam, the screw, the internal combustion engine, and powered flight are invented, they tend to be diffused broadly beyond the boundaries of the original culture, to become adopted by an increasing number of cultural orientations. Once they are so diffused, they are unlikely to be lost. They become added to a growing general inventory of human cultural innovations and inventions that constitutes the basic analytical foundation of human civilization.</p> <p>The role of language is central and intermediational to the processes of the articulation of cultural realities at all the sublevels of analysis at which it occurs. Language to some minimal extent may also be another source of informational patterning for a culture. Indeed, it is my contention that language is integral and extricable to the processes of cultural construction and articulation in human reality, in ways which are yet poorly understood.</p> <p>To summarize thus far, information at the cultural level is articulated upon several distinct sublevels: 1. It is symbolically embodied in the individual culture bearer's experience, 2. It is institutionally embedded at the level of the organic cultural community. It is a collectivity of individuals functionally organized by the integration of these cultural institutions, 3. It is historically dynamic and expressed in terms of inter-communal patterns of relationship and in terms of the development of human civilization which is immanent from processes of cultural acquisition and transmission.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="four">CHAPTER THREE</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CULTURAL SELECTION AND EVOLUTIONARY HOLOGEIST</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Life upon earth has evolved in a self-organizing and "anti-chaotic" manner--blind chance and natural selection has guided the directions of changing species. We do not fully understand these natural processes upon earth, but we know that the dynamics of evolutionary change are central to the definition of biological life upon earth. We know these processes best at the level of speciation as they are generally studied and understood, but little is known about the global level of the whole fabric of life. The entire biosphere. It is almost certain that the fabric of life upon earth has evolved in unknown ways into an intricate, interwoven state such that the selective factors that impinge upon the speciation of one population are indirectly linked to the selective factors influence a myriad of other species.</p> <p>During any particular evolutionary age, the global patterning of the web of life was fundamentally different than previous periods, and this global patterning had an indirect selective influence upon the kinds of species which evolved. Mass extinction events, the most noteworthy being the end of the age of the dinosaurs, have periodically occurred that radically altered the profile of the overall patterning of life on earth. Species surviving these historical episodes reemerge in altered and diverse forms under a new selection aegis. These episodes represent critical junctures in natural history in which the lifeways and web of interrelationships of the previous period becomes radically transformed and replaced by a new patterning. This overall patterning I have termed "hologeistic" and refers to the global and regional selective aegis of interspecies relationships. Undoubtedly, many minor events also occur, with an expected but unpredictable patterning of periodicity of earthquakes, and this patterning may be implicated to models of punctuated equilibrium that are applied to the species.</p> <p>Hologeistic patterning is self-organizing. It is driven on a local level by processes of natural selection and random genetic change. The informational patterning which occurs at several levels (i.e. genotypical, phenotypical, and ecological) becomes affected differentially.</p> <p>At any given level of articulation of the ecosystem (i.e. local, regional or global), there occurs a hologeistic patterning of interspecies relationships which provide a selection "regime" under which aegis the evolution of those species are channeled in certain directions.</p> <p>The higher level relationships are also the most basic, and underlie and predetermine the patterning of organization of more local level regimes. On the other hand, the patterning of interaction at the more local level may statistically influence in a cumulative manner broader regional or global patterns. There is in this sense a feedback relationship between the global and local levels which is largely indirect and invisible, and articulated in terms of the underlying selective determinants which occur at those levels.</p> <p>A bio-quake is an apt description for the kind of critical episode which occurs when there is transformation of hologeist. In terms of biological time, these "bio-quake" events are relatively rapid in occurrence--taking place in terms of decades, centuries or millennium, rather than in terms of millions of years. Unlike earthquakes which occur in a matter of seconds, these events are too slow, regionally widespread and diffuse in effect to be readily apparent or empirically noticeable.</p> <p>This has an influence on our understanding of the basic processes of evolution--in particular, we cannot fully comprehend or reconstruct the natural history of life on earth if we pursue an exclusively analytical and non-synthetic understanding of this patterning--especially one that is "species-centric" by definition. A hologeistic approach to evolutionary theory provides a contextual framework appropriate for placing the genetic processes of speciation, perhaps allowing us to avoid some of the taxonomic dilemmas of cladistic versus a phenetic approach, or of punctuated equilibrium versus continuous evolution, or of the apparent paradox of a reduction to a primogenitorial "Eve" as the mother of all species and the related construction of "trees" from a single root stock.</p> <p>We have thus an understanding of how biological diversity and ecology may be articulated with a global biosphere that takes on certain basic patterns of relationship. Natural systems theory provides the larger framework for the understanding of how the biological hologeist may be patterned and articulated at different levels, and come to have a stochastic influence upon the direction of evolutionary change.</p> <p>The end of natural selection as it has been, and the emergence of human cultural selection, mark the contemporary evolutionary epoch. The human biomass has become the largest single species biomass upon earth. While it speaks of the evolutionary success of the human species, principally by means of cultural adaptation, it also speaks of an important critical interruption in the predominant biological processes of natural selection. As development makes increasing inroads into the remain natural habitats, natural ecosystems are becoming increasingly circumscribed and interfered with. As many species become extinct or endangered, more of the biological diversity is entering into a critical period of human management (and mismanagement)--no longer will the survival of these species depend upon natural selective forces for survival, but exclusively upon the vagaries of human good will and ecological consciousness. Cultural selection has replaced natural selection for most species on earth. Often this cultural selection is indirect or unintentional, as many species adapt themselves quite successfully to niches created by the artificial reconstruction of the landscape.</p> <p>Cultural selection to a large extent has displaced and destroyed the processes of natural selection. Evolution is surely occurring, but under a radically transformed selective aegis of factors--factors that are now mostly man-made and cultural in origin than an intrinsic part of the evolutionary process. Cultural selection involves a number of processes upon the cultural level of informational patterning, and must be understood in terms of the sublevels of cultural systems. Superorganic cultural development of human civilization must be understood as a developmental process of increasing elaboration and sophistication of information which is essentially different in form, function and processes of transmission from the evolution of genetic information in the natural world.</p> <p>It is a paradox that while the world is becoming thus transformed through the depredations of industry and human society, nature as a commodity is enjoying increasing popularity. Nature programs depict the "survival of the fittest" that not only have symbolic connotations of economic competition in the capitalist market-place, but also portray the vital process of natural selection in their most brutal and picturesque forms at the very time that these very processes are becoming interrupted. Surely, raising of ecological consciousness will become one of the principle forms of awareness to emerge--a consciousness that includes an enlightened sense of responsibility in the cultural management of natural systems.</p> <p>The fate of the modern world remains unknown and very much an important and open question. The fact that it is in question should awaken us to the fact that something may be vitally wrong in our world. Human society as it has developed will continue for some time to come. Up to an unknown point we can rely upon our science and technology to provide many of the kinds of solutions we want in the cultural refashioning of the natural world. But we must take into account certain basic and unequivocal facts. Natural selection and life have been continuously operating forces upon earth for a few billion years, by contrast human culture and civilization has been in existence scarcely a few tens of thousands of years, and has only risen to ecological predominance in the last few hundred years. It is certain that we are undergoing as one consequence of this age a fairly rapid period of mass extinction of a broad variety of species on earth. What we do not know and cannot predict is the periodicity and timing of future events upon the earth. How soon and how sudden, nor what critical, relatively innocuous factors, may trigger such events.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="five">CHAPTER FOUR</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CULTURAL PHOBIA</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">The Neurosis of Modern Being</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>We and our children are facing a world that will be characterized increasingly by signs of over-development: destruction of rain forests, increasing sterilization and pollution of the oceans, desertification and soil loss, and global circumscription of the human population.</p> <p>Still, modern development is continuing to be pursued at all costs and at a break neck pace by most nations on the earth, without much regard for environmental standards or preservation. The fiasco of over-development will not be experienced environmentally. But it will become increasingly expressed socially and culturally in terms of the cultural loss and reorientation of groupings of peoples who are increasingly incorporated into a vast international system of market exchange and who struggle to regain a sense of cultural identity, often in competition with or at the expense of alternate orientations of other groups of people. This is sure to be an unpredictable factor of socio-political destabilization in the future.</p> <p>In the conservative, backward looking decade of the 80's, there has arisen within American Anthropology departments a common fear of "Culture" as a human reality that is inherently problematic. Socio-biologists (ethno-biologists, bioculturalists, etc.) implicitly deny the functional reality of culture in their evolutionary-genetic schemas. Post-modernists, post-structuralists, post-humanists, critical theorists, etc. (what I shall call the post-culturalists) express a certain antipathetic preoccupation with (and appropriation and rejection of) cultural texts, the inherent dilemmas of cross-cultural interpretation, and the processes and motivations of their social production. Between these two tribes of spear wielding, shield shaking anthropologists, there is little room or tolerance left for the conventional cultural anthropologist who has become a symbol and target of everyone's frustrations and who, from a statistical standpoint, probably does not like to shake spears and who, by obligatory definition, must remain a "professional stranger."</p> <p>I believe the devaluation of culture that has been witnessed in the 1980's is symptomatic of a deeper, broader malaise; a rejection of cultural realities which is the rooted in a fear of these realities--a fear which arises, like all fear, from the unknown and the uncertain. This social "archosis" must be seen in relation to a background of development which has witness the increasing loss of traditional cultures around the world, the bureaucratic incorporation and encapsulation of the groupings of people who embody such traditions; worldwide, and increasing, capitalist penetration of market values and relations into the socio-cultural ethos, behaviors, attitudes and symbolisms of people across the world.</p> <p>"Cultural denial" that is now characteristic of social attitudes and relations in Anthropology departments is an echo of a larger process of the loss and devaluation of traditional culture that is accompanying its transformation and acculturative substitution by an international "global culture" of modern development.</p> <p>The main feature of this new global culture is that it is primarily an industrial-based, capitalist-oriented and urbanized way of living. This global culture can be characterized by values of increasing industrial production and consumption and by the prevalence of certain material symbolic fetishes--Michael Jackson, VCRs and Disney Animation Videos, Toyotas, Hondas, traffic congestion and highway trauma, Masters of Business Management with foreign accents, Shopping Malls, Toys-R-Us, Barbie Dolls with accessories and Power Ranger figurines, Computers & Fuji Film, Marlborough, Salem and Dunhill cigarettes, No-smoking areas, Espresso Coffee and poor French pastry, MacDonald's Happy Meals, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza, CNN international newscaster culture speaking standard English, MacIntosh, IBM clones, Microsoft and Internet, Iron Men, Hollywood Action Heroes, Beverly Hills 90210 and Automatic Assault rifles. We can now come off a domestic air-line in virtually any major capital city in Asia, the America's, Europe or the Middle East, and find within a short radius of a taxi ride many or almost all the "conveniences" of life that we once left behind.</p> <p>There are several common denominators of this new global culture. First and foremost is money and everything that money can buy and the concomitant and implicit devaluation of the old and the traditional things that money can't buy. Second is the increasing social inequality and asymmetry between those who have more money and those who have less. Third are the complex relations of labor and resource distribution in the world which situates groups of people along a modern scale of being, from primary producers to final consumers. Fourth are the increasing means and use of impersonal violence to reinforce or alter these relations of labor upon the modern chain of being. Finally, there is the reemergence of a new kind of cultural orientation-- an ethnic-based cultural orientation which is increasingly defined on the basis of a group's market inter-positioning in relation to other alternate ethnic-cultural groupings within the global system, in relations of ethnic schism, communal cleavage and racial markers of difference in market competition for position and access to opportunity and resources within the global system. The key characteristic of these new ethnocultural orientations are their increasing geo-political decentering and fragmentation and local recolonization within a international global economy, as patterns of migration and mobilization of labor, capital and money erode and destroy traditionally defined cultural boundaries and lead to the increasing urbanization of humankind.</p> <p>There has been a worldwide transition made by members and bearers of more traditional culture, which has witnessed a change in the status of culture in people's lives--from one of loss, acculturative adjustment, to one of anomie and cultural denial, to one of ethnocultural renaissance and rediscovery of "roots" which were severed in the great transition/transformation of the becoming a member of modern society. But the cultural orientation which reemerges from this change is not the same as the traditional, "centered" cultural orientation that was the bailiwick of the cultural anthropologist as professional stranger.</p> <p>It is culture with a difference--ethnoculture that is defined not on the basis of mechanical identity or solidarity with one's own kind, but on the basis of highlighted, frequently quite superficial, differences with other kinds of people and of specialized, organic solidarity within a complex system of social relations and labor production. Whatever the cultural background or ethnocultural orientation, all people share an increasing and increasingly common commitment to work within and compete for position and resources within a global, industrialized capitalist system. This commitment becomes frequent expressed ethnically, and more often realized individually.</p> <p>Human beings, suffering the loss of cultural traditions and its great positive orienting force, are also discovering that the material-fetishistic substitutes of global culture are indeed poor and inadequate, if increasingly necessary, in the shaping of a new existence.</p> <p>In this regard, it is especially the secular, scientific based world view of modern global culture that offers little solution for the growing sense of existential anomie and perennial human antinomies that must become increasingly felt within an impersonal, largely anonymous and spurious global system. People and their groups are returning to new or alternate religious orientations in which to find identity, symbolic orientation and to express their sense of existential despair and growing dissatisfaction. Religious as an ethnocultural and socio-political force in not on the wane in relation to the rise of global capitalism, but is being given a renewed vigor and importance in the world increasingly faced with impending ecological disaster.</p> <p>The academic culture (or subculture) that is becoming threatened and vulnerable to critical attack, is the culture of science. Heroic scientists who had once paved the way for technological development, and who were the principal rationalists and legitimizers of this development, are finding themselves caught in a double bind within a love-hate relationship to an increasingly unsympathetic host society. The world has grown to depend upon them in a neurotic relationship of technological dependency. The baton of the scientist as leader and "seer" of modernity is being passed to a new kind of applied technocratic specialist managed by a business-minded administrator-corporate organizer. The role and capacity for the scientist to work effectively is thus becoming increasingly compromised. The culture of the scientist is also becoming an ethnocultural orientation that must increasingly compete with alternate groupings on the global marketplace for opportunity and resources.</p> <p>This essay closes with the suggestion that there is a great deal of modern global culture which is fundamentally neurotic for human beings. Global culture promotes an orientation of dependency to a larger system which affects our attitudes, our behavior, our world view and which reaches by daily means of the media and our habits of consumption, into the very foundation of our being. It promotes a way of being that is increasingly, and in the final analysis, essentially, vicarious, artificial, contrived, and culturally unsatisfactory. It is therefore a reified way of being that is essentially unreal from a cultural standpoint.</p> <p>The recovery of culture as ethnoculture must be seen as an adaptive and very natural social response, even if it is also somewhat destabilizing. Groups who feel existentially threatened or overshadowed with doom will predictable turn towards violence towards out-groups as a solution. Frustrated people, displaced by machines to which they were previously enslaved, will become more mobilizable and violent in the confrontation of ethnocultural emergencies. From the point of view of the scientist, who is herself increasingly enclaved within an academic ghetto, this response quite natural and inevitable, if never very attractive, and often quite ugly.</p> <p>I leave this essay with the open, unanswered question of the place and role of the cultural anthropologist as the scientist and student of culture in a world in which humankind's basic cultural relationships are becoming transformed. The cultural phobia which we are experiencing is the sense of loss of the old and the threat of the new and uncertain. The reality of culture as a functional force in organizing the human world is not being served by retreat and denial.</p> <p>To watch an international group of children playing together in international student apartments, one cannot but notice the overwhelming fact of the basic developmental affinities of little boys and girls around the world. The differences which take on such a vital importance by the time these children become adults, are those which are by definition and in essence, cultural. They are acquired within basic cultural settings of family and community. When these settings change, and the social relations which embody them become transformed in a modern world, then the cultural processes to which they give rise much also change.</p> <p>I suggest that it is the professional responsibility of the modern cultural anthropologist, as scientist, humanist and as a student of culture, to systematically, and empirically study and come to terms with these basic cultural transformations which are occurring in the modern world, and to interpret these changes in such a way that they become more understandable, and less feared, by everyone. There is the hope that these cultural transformations may then be effectively mediated in a manner which will render them less unpredictable and safer for everyone (i.e. a more human and more humane world, in which development means, by definition, human development).</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="six">CHAPTER FIVE</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">PAN-HUMAN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>From the advent of fire and the hearth, from the construction of rudimentary shelters, from the manufacture of stone tools, to the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, the wheel, spinning, weaving, and pot-throwing, boating and fishing, and the rise of the pristine civilizations upon earth, cultural inventions and innovations have never ever long been culturally specific secrets. Generally, basic cultural inventions diffuse rapidly and widely out, and frequently similar kinds of inventions and innovations are developed independently in different, otherwise unconnected regions of the earth. In the diffusion of basic cultural inventions, we can refer to the stimulus diffusion of the basic trait and the symbolic complex, the ideas that the trait embodies.</p> <p>The rise of pan-human civilization as defined by the trait complexes of these basic cultural inventions and innovations is in a sense historically irreversible and inevitable. Thus pan-human civilization is by definition a cultural non-specific or general patterning that occurs on the superorganic level of cultural patterning. The rise of pan-human civilization has been linked to the technological developments, especially of the industrial and post-industrial ages, which are tied to the growth of science, industry and political economic institutions abroad. Development in this limited modern sense has become a dominant metaphor for human civilization, at least implicitly, though frequently discounted are other important forms of social innovation--standard forms of currency, weights and measures, infrastructure, literacy, medical institutions, democracy, effective bureaucratic administration, national armies, education, the media, and even the notion of the assembly-line itself. Development in the modern sense has meant in general a growth of urban areas, a rise in the material and economic standards of living, the concomitant rise in material affluence, security and convenience, factors of development that are normally considered to be a "trickle-down" by-product of scientific and technological progress, the basic driving forces of modernization.</p> <p>But it is important to disconnect notions of pan-human civilization and alternative forms of cultural development from the implicitly prescriptive notion of industrial modernization, the center of which is the enlightenment notion of "progress" toward some utopian dreamtime. There has been a diffusion of many religious ideas and institutions--of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, of millenarian ideas. We can see the spread of nationalisms and the growth of national forms of social organization as distinct aspects of cultural development. Different civilizations have focused upon and elaborated to a height of achievement particular symbolisms and cultural forms which are distinct, and in their style patterning, unique in time and place.</p> <p>All forms of cultural development represent advances in the sophistication of basic informational patternings of culture, patternings which tend to transcend narrow symbolic or institutional boundaries of specific cultural orientations.</p> <p>We may place the different forms of development along a similar, parallel set of continuums from the more primitive, less differentiated forms, toward the more sophisticated, effective and articulated forms. In this developmental sense, there is a general increase from simpler to more complex forms. Forms of human consciousness and of symbolization tend to reflect these similar kinds of changes, as do forms of social organization. It is in this sense that we can speak of a broad based continuum of human cultural development that has followed the same basic trends of increasing sophistication and differentiation. Modern and past communities can be ranged according to their relative positioning along different parts of this continuum. In general, on this continuum, we can see a broad, sporadic movement, a curve in which relatively small isolated groups with simple technologies are situated at one end, while there is a gradual increase in the size of the group, the sophistication of the groups institutional organization, the number of traits and inventions acquired by the group, etc.</p> <p>It is recommended that this type of continuum is what implicitly underlies our contemporary categorizations of different nation-states as more-or-less undeveloped, underdeveloped, developing or overdeveloped, or as third, second and first world economies.</p> <p>This notion of cultural development must also be critically disconnected from the idea of genetic evolution as something that is somehow progressive. Cultural development is linked to patterns cultural, and not natural, selection. Cultural development as a form of transculturation--transmission, diffusion and acquisition of new basic traits, occurs unevenly between different groups, but has the same ultimate consequences for all groups. The informational patterning of cultural development is largely phenotypic and acquired after birth--it is rooted in the cultural context in which such development and acquisition co-occur. Thus there is very little direct relationship between genetic and cultural levels of information or selection.</p> <p>There is much about contemporary modern development which has been, from a strict culture or historical standpoint, unnecessary. A clear case in point has been the growth of industrial based militarization in the world, the rise of a global arms industry, and the increasing destructive violence of modern warfare.</p> <p>There is another form of development which we must attend to as having merit in the world--forms which have largely lagged behind technological or other forms of innovation. These are the normative development of humankind and what is understood as human development--i.e. education, equal standards of health, wealth, improved quality of life for more people, etc. Conservative politicians and apologists of the predominant modes of Capitalist modernization have pointed to the trickle down effect of modern development as a case that it really works. Yet as we approach seemingly insuperable dilemmas of environmental destruction and pollution, human overcrowding, alienation, the mechanical dislocation and replacement of human labor, we face growing environmental and social problems that are not adequately addressed within the current capitalist world system. Normative development must include the realization of human rights, freedoms from numerous forms of victimization and exploitation which are prevalent in the world, the promotion of peace and pacifist values of non-violence, self-actualization and creativity.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="seven">CHAPTER SIX</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">PAX AMERICANA</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>As an American cultural anthropologist, and since cultural anthropology has almost exclusively been developed by American scholars, it is important to delineate some basic aspects of American culture that may underlie many of our biases about the world and others in it, and that serve as at least implicit points of comparison which are inevitably involved in every ethnographic text and cultural description which is produced by American cultural anthropologists. Rendering explicit what would otherwise remain only implicit is a central job of the cultural anthropologist as a scientist.</p> <p>There are several facets about American culture and what it has become in the decade of the nineties as these have become apparent to me. These facets are important to an anthropological accounting of an American point of view. The first is to point up certain basic characteristics of American character and culture which appear to be common throughout American society. These are the discrepancies represented by the promotion of democracy, equality and rights on one hand, and the promotion of capitalism, wealth, profit and development, on the other. These sets of interests are frequently mutually contradictory and incompatible. Rarely are they in clear alignment of interests and cultural policies. Related to this, but along another axis, is the relationship between a strong cultural ethos of rugged individualism, on the one hand, and a strong social pressure toward being a "good team player" or "organization man" on the other hand. These two sets of contraposed ideals are dialectal in expression, and do not appear as strongly incompatible as do the contrasting ideals of democracy and capitalism. A great deal of American mythoi--of the frontier, of a long line of American culture heroes--real and fictional-- of our legends and histories, can be understood in terms of the dialectics of these basic sets of contrasts.</p> <p>Such polar contrasts invite what is known as a grid-group comparison and representation of different segments of American society along the principle grid-group axis of "Democracy versus Capitalism" and "Rugged Individual versus Organization Man." Within such a representation we can recognize that various styles and groups fall within one or another quadrant of the grid-group representation, and from these values we might develop a number of rather specific analytical indices from which we might development more precise locational measures.</p> </font><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p align="center"><img border="0" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Pictures/culture4.gif" width="457" height="325"></p> </font><font FACE="Times"> <p> </p> <p>There are other important facets of American culture--such as a central romantic ethos and idealism, a basic "poor Richard's" protestant morality, a strong elaboration of the interwoven themes of obscene sex and violence, a culture of guns and violence, one that is expressed in a strong militarism and via the media, and undercurrent of repressed "dirty sex" or "toilet sex" that represents a strong ambivalence between sexual expression and repression, and which is represented by a long succession of serial psycho-killers, a gasoline culture of fast cars and drive-thru fast food chains and a strong sense of the achievement of an essentially middle class American Dream. American culture has also been strongly influenced by periodic injections of diverse foreign immigrant cultures from many different regions of the globe--thus there are strong ethnic undercurrents of American culture which are ideologically unified under the aegis of a cultural consensus of the assimilationist ideology of the American "melting pot." Last, but not least important, is a strong sense of racism that is tied to skin color and physical traits, and that is linked to a folk belief that "blood is thicker than water" and that social group differences are rooted to innate biological differences that are linked to race. This racial ideology is supported by a deeply rooted Christian doctrine of a Great Chain of Being upon which the white man is above all the others, just below the angels, and by a Spencerian social race ethos of "survival of the fittest" that is rooted to capitalist competition in the marketplace.</p> <p>The articulation of symbolisms at this level of American culture is not so highly developed or organized that frequently contradictory notions--gun control and freedom, prayer in school and racial segregation, capital punishment and anti-abortionism, drug rehabilitation centers and social promotion of drugs and alcohol, fast food and fitness spas, can't be brought into convenient juxtaposition in support or condemnation of some cultural orientation or ideology or other.</p> <p>It is enough to point out that in almost everything the Americans do, there is a strong intrinsic sense of cultural ambivalence about goals and beliefs--an ambivalence that is characteristic of and results from the incorporation and dialectic of so many basic cultural contradictions. To a large extent, we have successfully managed the ideal of the cultural organization of extreme diversity--a diversity reinforced by the premium all Americans put upon individual freedoms and liberty. Americans symbolically embody this diversity of ideals and the strong sense of ambivalence and contradiction they entail.</p> <p>But it is important to see how some of these basic contradictions have become manipulated and articulated in the institutional organization and symbolizations of our society. Largely, to the extent that such articulation is planned and coordinated, especially by sponsors of television commercials and programs, newspapers and news magazines, there occurs an implicit "sliding scale" of multiple standards which are applied socially and bureaucratically in a differential and basically unequal manner--hence, men tend to be treated better in the work place than women, whites tend to be treated better than blacks (except for affirmative action programs which have reversed this trend), Japanese tend to be treated better than Chinese, Germans better than Southern Italians. Underlying this sliding scale is another kind of grid-group representation--one whose principal axis appear to be those of: 1. race (i.e. darkness to lightness of skin, hair and eye color) and 2. socio-economic status-identity (i.e. acquired and achieved class background). Class differences largely underlie many of the socio-cultural differences and stereotypes which have been perpetuated in our society. These differences have largely been ameliorated by the fact that the American social system has traditionally and at least ideologically been "open" (more open for some categories and classes than others) and strongly "middle class" in value orientation and outlook. Thus, like the Chinese, the Americans value achievement and love a winner. The realities of social and economic inequalities and social class hierarchy in society is also culturally denied by the strong ideological legitimate of the principles of equality and human rights--principles which are as often as not merely a matter of ideological rhetoric than they are a matter of institutional or social practice. The effect of class differences make themselves felt upon the development youth at adolescence and these difference become set by high school age when social segregation into a social peeking order of cliques, clubs and associations becomes formative of a social identity that is carried over into college (fraternities, varsities, honor roles) and adult life. The critical factors in the promotion of socio-economic hierarchy in American culture appear to be via the development of social networking skills, the dichotomization of personality between foreground and background, and relative differential of socio-structural screens of opportunity for education, employment and social involvement. The main difference between the British and the American class systems appears to be in the "dressing down" of such asymmetries by Americans which would for British be normally naked and exposed, and by the fact that the British have a single royal "received standard" while the Americans have only regionally defined variants of a "newscaster standard."</p> <p>As money comes to mediate and define interpersonal interactions in an increasingly impersonal, spurious and alienating society, as conservative capitalists have achieved more and more political and socio-economic preponderance within American culture. It is an orientation that tends toward a conservative orthodoxy and monolithic hegemony of cultural values, and as the actual distribution of wealth becomes more and more ossified between an increasingly polarized class system in which opportunities for the working or middle class to move ahead become increasing fewer and further between, it can be expected that socioeconomic asymmetries of wealth, class and social privilege will become more pronounced, more symbolically reinforced and legitimated, and more victimizing of the disenfranchised.</p> <p>It can also be expected that the basic elements of racism and class inequality will become increasingly merged into a form of social racism in which the beautiful people defined principally by their physical appearance and their wealth, who represent a largely token "racial rainbow" will be increasingly highlighted and contrasted against the poor people whose ugly characteristics are exaggerated. Furthermore, this type of social racism will become linked to socio-biological theories which claim to demonstrate an innate, genetic basis for these--theories which will legitimate the asymmetries and status quo of social policies which protect the privileged interests of the rich while keeping the poor behind bars. This socio-structural promotion of socio-economic asymmetries is reinforced largely by a bureaucratic machinery defined by its sense of false consciousness, its structural hypocrisy, and by the systematic, unspoken application of a sliding scale of multiple standards.</p> <p>It is in reference to the Pax Americana of the 1990's that I have dedicated this essay upon the basic contradictions of American cultural values. The Pentagon, as the head of the Department of Defense, is the single most wealthy, powerful, autocratic and lethal organization on earth. It is composed of an exclusive elite of "organization" Americans who have by any standard sacrificed ideals of individualism. They, and most Americans, sincerely believe that what they are defending is democracy and individual freedom. But they make this claim without reflecting upon the history of American military intervention and involvement in foreign countries. The American military remains the most power and capable of projecting itself abroad compared to any other country on earth or in the history of human civilization. Recent events in the Middle East clearly demonstrate this capacity, and the determination of those who control it, to protect what are construed to be vital industrial (i.e. capitalist) resources abroad. Mention has not even been made to the vast, undismantled nuclear arsenal which could easily destroy the entire planet. America has promoted a kind of international peace abroad, but we must ask, at what price has it achieved this peace? American culture, from Elvis Presley to Walt Disney to Colt to Budweiser, remains strongly acculturative an influence in most third world countries.</p> <p>It is amazing the extent to which Americans have closed themselves culturally to the cultural realities and differences of other peoples in the world. On returning from fieldwork abroad, my strongest reverse culture shock impression of American culture was how inbound, uninterested, culturally circumscribed, stick in the mud it really is--so preoccupied with issues of social hierarchy and status that its individuals cannot truly free themselves to cultivate alternative points of view or orientations towards reality. America may be many different things, but, culturally speaking, it will probably never be cosmopolitan.</p> <p>American Culture has achieved a pinnacle of development and civilization by the great individual creativity that was its dynamo. It appears to be in a slow process of socially sacrificing the opportunities for the promotion and cultivation of such creativity, for the sake of private profit and an increasingly false sense of organizational-ideological security. A new closed culture is emerging, based upon spurious social relationships in the marketplace, hospitals, insurance offices and in administrative offices. It is a culture which can predictably be counted on to socially and systematically stifle strong expression of individualism and to frustrate the cultivation of creativity and opportunities for creative expression and invention. Increasing violence and destructiveness at a grass roots level, reflected in greater organizational violence and destructiveness, will be the net outcome of these cultural developments, unless the American public can reassert its cultural prerogatives of democracy, freedom and individualism.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="eight">CHAPTER SEVEN</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL FIELD</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>There is a presupposition of an a priori continuous subjective field of experience, though the actual continuity of the phenomenological flow of experience is somewhat questionable, as it appears to change, stop and undulate many times in the course of a person's day or lifetime. Actually, the discontinuities of the stream of consciousness are more interesting, as they allow us insight into the mind and the mental functioning of the brain. These discontinuities represent actual gaps and junctures of the phenomenological field of experience which it becomes the challenge of the brain to actively reconfigure and fill in, albeit in a manner which is variable in form in form and quality.</p> <p>Limited acquaintance with an activity, an idea, or a thing, be it a novice at some job or sport, or a child's first experiences with the world, or a person traveling abroad for the first time, or a student's first semester in a new program, leads to the formation of rudimentary percepts and erroneous precepts about the object of perception. Limited experience results in the one dimensional mental representation of only one or a few facets of an otherwise multi-faceted phenomena. Increasing experience with an object will lead to a fund of conceptual facets and to a more detailed understanding of the means in which these facets are integrated--the mind builds up a composite representation of the object which it can then cognitively summarize by a linguistic representation of the object. Eventually, a relatively independent (independent from the point of view of perceptual basis) objective conceptualization is constructed which symbolically stands for and helps to classify the related experiences. This objective symbolic representation can be referred to as the "thing in itself" that stands above and incorporates the many mechanical facets of experience that comprise it.</p> <p>Mental representations appear to be fundamentally non-exclusive in the sense that they may more or less overlap and share elements from alternative representations. Such mental representations also do not appear to occur only in one location of the mind, but the information which composes such representations seem to occur distributed in a number of different locales.</p> <p>The relative quality of these representations may rest upon a number of determinants, and may at the same time be quite variable. It is this qualitative differential of symbolic representation of experience which can be measured upon etic grids of analysis and which can be utilized in the analysis of relative mental integration/emic organization. In general, we can say that higher grade representations have a more articulated, organic and objectivity of design, and come across as clear, active "gestalts." Low grade representations appear to be stereotypical, primitive, mechanical and unarticulated, linear versus composite and evoke responses which are indecisive and "cartoonish" in character.</p> <p>Percepts, concepts and mental representations thus embody and summarize a great deal of meaningful information that is symbolically drawn from everyday experience--and form the substrate upon which we configure our conscious and ratiocinative comprehension of the world.</p> <p>The phenomenological field is not a completely objective, disembodied flow of perceptual stimuli that is essentially extraneous of our own processes of perceptual and conceptual integration of this experience. We cannot in this sense speak of an empirically pure percept or sensory experience that does not have already the mark of the influence of being a subjectively embodied experience--perceptually, affectively, behaviorally and conceptually.</p> <p>The increasing differentiation of the phenomenal field must be seen as the growing degree and extent of integration of psychic experience at several levels of informational processing. All experience is configured and gains its basic meaning in relation to this background phenomenological field. This process has been found to proceed in stages from rudimentary to more sophisticated forms of symbolic functioning.</p> <p>Language is important to the organization and articulation of this field--it helps to carve it up and defines the boundaries of the phenomenological continuum. At the same time, it renders areas of that continuum more or less available to our conscious awareness of them. Indeed, so intrinsic a function has language to the symbolic organization of our minds and awareness, that we cannot imagine a human mental functioning that is entirely without or inaccessible to some form of linguistic expression and manipulation.</p> <p>The phenomenological field is relatively integrated, and the form of perception in which it is rooted is referred to as physiognomic in quality. It is fundamentally a priori to and underlies conscious functioning of the mind. This substratum of subjective experience forms the material upon which consciousness configures itself and becomes shaped. Conscious experience has symbolic reference to this embodied substratum of phenomenological experience at least as much as it has behavioral reference to external stimuli and symbolizations in the outside world. Ego-consciousness is in this sense the by-product of the processes of mediation between the external world and the internalized world of embodied experience. Things which exist in the world gain symbolic significances in as much as they are isomorphic with or relatively consonant with our internalized representations of the "thing in itself." Our responses to external stimuli are symbolic to the extent that we are responding to these internalized resonances of meaning. As such, things enter into a complicated world of internal significances and meanings, much of which remains implicit and out of conscious awareness.</p> <p>Social experience in this regard has a special quality which is distinct from the objective experience of an otherwise impersonal material world. The processes of personfication and projective identification which may or may not occur in relation to material objects, are integral to the experience of other people--experience which is by definition non-objective, primitive and physiognomic in character. Thus social experience is by definition much more complex and basic than is the relatively objectivated experience of the material non-human environment. We may say that social experience is inherently, by definition reflexive in character. It also appears to be the case that a great deal of social experience, as with primary care-takers, appears as necessary to the developmental ontogenesis of the human personality. People mediate our worlds in an important way--affectively, conceptually and even perceptually, our experiences within our effective environment. It is this mediation (and to some extent "modeling") process which social interaction provides that defines human beings as basically social beings. People are then not only symbolic mirrors of our own internal subjectivities and possibilities of being, but they are more importantly the principal vehicles of the symbolic transmission of information about our world.</p> <p>Thus our experiences of our world becomes shaped at a very basic level at a very early age by the presence and symbolic mediation of other people within our world. This shaping experience is the foundation of psycho-cultural patterning which we seek.</p> <p>A critical event can lead to a crises of identity--upsetting the normal representation of things in the mind, or the status quo of relations between these things. Further experience will result in the modification of these symbolic representations. Schemas of pattern and order are constructed of these symbolic representations of experience and these schemas represent the ordering of the differentiated phenomenological field. Schemas or implicit models of experience define our expectations and normal reactions to an anticipated set of events in the world. If our expectations become violated, or prove inconsistent with experience, there results conflicting sources of information which it becomes the dilemma of ego-awareness to successfully resolve. Anthropologically, in the fieldwork experience, these are referred to as schematic breakdowns of internalized experience which becomes at odds on multiple levels with a new set of signals within a new environmental-social context. This results in a crises of "conflicting" or incompatible symbolic realities which it then is necessary to resolve. Human learning, especially in small infants and children, who hold largely simplistic and undifferentiated, inexperienced views of the world, is characterized by just such a cyclical series of schematic constructions, conflicts, breakdowns and reformulation. More formal modes of learning which largely occur in adult life are, are superimposed upon this basic level of experience, largely alienated from it as these types of reactions are largely suppressed, controlled or repressed by the adult ego--and represent a different quality of experience and type of learning that that achieved through first-hand involvement. The extent to which this type of learning may become internalized in a similar way as primary learning experiences is somewhat of an open and unanswered question.</p> <p>Memory and unconscious or preconscious mental functioning and imaginative processes are vital to the symbolic representation of experience. Memory in this sense is an ordered repository of experiences and symbolic representations of experience. Words serve an indexical function in these processes in that they serve to unlock and make available the mental representations of experience.</p> <p>It is also the case that these symbolic conceptualizations which summarize and represent the embodiment of experience do not exist in isolation, but rather are part of a complex mental landscape in which these mental representations are situated within a contextual interrelationships with other mental representations. Thus the object does not take on completely independent formal qualities, but is critically conditioned by its positioning within this mental field. For the most part the background quality of these relationships remain unconscious and "pre-logical" in our experience. Furthermore, this landscape appears to exist at more than one level, and at the same time appears to be dynamic. It changes with the incorporation of new experience.</p> <p>It is also the case that the relationships between composite mental representations of experience are regulated and ordered in at least an implicit manner. This rule-like organization of basic percepts and concepts represents yet another "meta-level" of human consciousness, directing rationalizations, modes of ego-defense and behavioral reactions to the external world. This level of directive, conscious organizing behavior is rooted only indirectly in experience, but represents the symbolic configuration and interpretation of this experience--interpretation that follows certain purposes in the attainment of basic needs of being, identity, status, security, etc.</p> <p>To some unknown and probably variable extent, the phenomenological organization of the mind is both psychologically and culturally relative. We can only hypothesize the a priori existence of genetic universal structures of mental organization. Beyond the stratification and symbol-linguistic organization of the mind itself, which have been presupposed, we know most of discrete functional centers of the brain through neuro-physiological experiments with aphasics.</p> <p>There is also a basic paradox when the most subjective phenomenological basis of experience, is also regarded as the most objective ground of empirical science as well. What distinguishes scientific from normally subjective observation most is the controlled and rigorous employment of instruments of measurement which introduce a certain consistency and reliability to the observation, upon which measurements the observation can be repeated upon multiple trials and by independent observers. It is this fact of measurement that science gains its etic objectivity, and it is by the design and extension of means of measurement of response patterns that scientific insight can be gained into the patterning and structure of symbolic and cultural phenomena.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="nine">CHAPTER EIGHT</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">THE RAISON D'ETRE OF EXISTENTIAL ETHNOGRAPHY</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Existential ethnography derives its value from the fact that human existence is not without an overarching sense of purpose or direction--but this sense of purpose is gained within a cultural context. We cannot imagine a world that is outside of a cultural framework or that does not have at least some implicit reference to such a framework. Without culture, we are like fish out of water. We depend upon regular cultural immersion for our sense of meaning and purpose in everyday life.</p> <p>Culture provides not just sanctions for behavior, but constitutes some of the most basic and focal positive values by which its members gain meaning in their lives. When cultural orientations come into historical crisis, the rise of revitalization movements that are culturally resonant, provides empirical evidence for this function of culture in the symbolic unification of reality.</p> <p>A sense of purpose is important to human existence, and is achieved in life despite circumstances or a general paucity of such meaning in the natural world. Human beings are, as symbolic creatures, goal-directed. They become goal directed whether goals begin within oneself or becomes directed by others or some ideological reference point.</p> <p>Unfortunately, human goals are rarely obvious, and their achievement usually entails overcoming certain existential obstacles or resolving basic existential dilemmas for which there may be no clear cut answers. The decision for a woman to pursue a career or to begin a family, the desire to do one's job and conform to an authority system, though such conformity may mean jeopardizing basic values.</p> <p>Religion provides the symbolic closure and unity by which a sense of purpose in life can be achieved. Such an achievement leads to dissipates existential ambiguity and leads to a sense of fulfillment or completion about life. Religion as ideology, and ideology as religion, serves the ideological function of guiding "correct" behavior toward the satisfaction of certain social goals or realization of values.</p> <p>The power of symbolic ideology is to bring belief and behavior into a form of agreement, such that we can explain what and why it is we do what we are doing. It is also a power to reify and to make seem as if supremely real what are in essence human symbolic constructions which have to substantive basis in reality except through its behavioral enactment or ideological pronouncements. Thus ideologies have a supreme power of ultimately justifying, beyond all question or shadow of doubt, whatever we want to justify.</p> <p>The symbolic unification of reality arises from the capacity of symbolisms to stand for more than themselves, and to encompass many different, even incompatible things. Symbolic unification allows us a sense of completeness, certainty and closure about reality which is otherwise lacking, and allows us to deal with those marginal events--death, separation, loss, change--that tend to threaten and relativize our sense of symbolic unity and order about the world. The unification function of symbolization is what we refer to as the process of collectivization.</p> <p>It is the fact of symbolization, and the symbolic foundation of human reality, which entails that humans must live with a sense of symbolic unity of experience, no matter how relative. It is this basic existential fact of our symbolic foundation that has eventually, slowly, pushed us toward a delineation and advancement of science as a way of objectively coming to terms with the existential antinomies and uncertainties inherent in the human experience.</p> <p>Thus existential ethnography comes out of and is a direct consequence of human symbolic organization and can be understood as the attempt to empirically understand in a holistic manner the cultural and psychological consequences of this organization, especially as it is articulated and expressed in terms of an individual's life-course, actions, world-view and expectations of experience. The raison d'etre of any individual's life can best be understood and judged from an emic point of view which takes fully into account that individuals actions, expressed motivations, cultural background and social structures.</p> <p>All individuals are confronted with certain unique existential dilemmas which are rooted in the background of their lives. The rationale and understanding of an individual's actions, views and values can only be gained in relation to the background context of the everyday world and larger events which shape their lives and to which they must respond. This entails a certain sense of biographic holism and idiographic relativism. We cannot nomothetically analyze different individuals in the same manner with the hope of understanding the reasons of their being or their actions, and we cannot simply compare the events and actions of one individual with that of another.</p> <p>All people must live with chronic existential uncertainties which can neurotically undermine an individual's sense of meaning and purpose in life. And yet all individuals are forced to act and to decide in life certain life-courses of action. The reasons for doing so may not be obvious or directly available, not even to the actors themselves. It is the purpose of existential ethnography to excoriate the context of the individual informant's life in order to discover the important reasons for being and doing by the individual, to descriptively analyze the social context of interpersonal relations which reinforces the individual's identity and responses, and to distill from such biographical profiles those common elements which are shared by members of the same culture or period and place, with the aim of coming to terms with the overarching raison d'etre of the cultural context in the culture bearer's life.</p> <p>Existential ethnography does not end or begin only with the description or understanding of the existentiality of the other. The ethnographer enters into a reflexive relationship with the other, and must undergo a series of existential crises in which which the existentiality of the author's own reality comes into question at the same moment as the ethnographer must come to terms with those existentialities of the other. These crises moments may appear as a series of ethnographic episodes of subjective experience and involvement in the field--a sequence of events which, in hindsight, appear to be almost predictable. It is the inherent existential "blindness" and the false ethnocentric expectations which leads the ethnographer, if open to the experience, on a journey of encounter, accident and learning, from which a more realistic understanding of both the self and the other may be achieved. Unless the ethnographer is open and available to such experiences, they will never occur, and, like any tourist, the goal of existential understanding and relationship with the other will not be fully, or even partially, achieved.</p> <p>It is noteworthy in this regard that the interpersonal quality of the relationship between the ethnographer and the "other" must change from that of what Martin Buber refers to as "I-it" in which the other is treated as a "thing" in reference to oneself and other things, to one of an "I-thou" inter-subjective involvement. It is a relationship of empathetic understandings of the possibilities and alternative identities of being of the other. It is not too much to suggest that this type of relationship takes on affective qualities of love, bonding and attachment that do not normally occur in spurious, impersonal relationships in the marketplace.</p> </font> <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="ten">CHAPTER NINE</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The theory of the cultural construction of reality is centered within what is known as the "Anthropology of Knowledge" and is derived from the theory of the social construction of reality as elaborated by Berger and Luckmann (1967) and theories of the psychological construction of reality (Kelly, 1955). The cultural construction of reality is concerned primarily with the symbolic relativity of cultural knowledge (i.e. symbolic and collective representations, ethos, folk beliefs, customs and traditions, common sense, rationalizations, etc.) as this is situated within a specific socio-environmental context. As such it explicitly brings into critical, reflexive focus the received presuppositions of "truth" value of our knowledge. A great deal of cultural knowledge is symbolic and operates at a very concrete level of action and affect. A great deal of such knowledge is therefore implicit within the background of the culture bearer's lives.</p> <p>The basis of the cultural construction of reality is the premised definitional and biological "world openness" of humankind which means that people are essentially unconstrained by instinctual drives and action patterns, and are instead free to mold behavior in a manner which becomes embodied "as if instinct" but that is in fact man-made or constructed. Thus definitional world openness of the human species entails that humans have been able, to an increasing extent, to free themselves from the constraints of natural selection, through the mediation of cultural adaptations, and to eventually superimpose an organized form of cultural selection upon the natural environment. The absence of instinct characteristic of human beings entails that they are open to conditioning on a very basic level which becomes biologically automatic in place of, and as if, it were natural instinct. By and large, this is the cultural level of conditioning that is achieved through life-long processes of enculturation within man-made and socially constrained environments.</p> <p>The processes of the cultural construction (and ethnographic "re-construction" of constructed realities) comes to full expression in the critical moment of the reproductive transmission, or transculturation of cultural knowledge, both through time from generation to generation, and across space, from one community to another. Cultural knowledge thus is rooted on the presupposition of the integral holism of patterning of such knowledge, and on the specific contextuality in which such knowledge is situated.</p> <p>Berger and Luckmann delineate the dialectical process of the behavioral rituals which lead to the deposition of a common stock of knowledge and the objectivation of knowledge in the carpentered environment and social organization of people. Secondary institutions serve the function of reinforcing these primary obectivations of knowledge, and symbolization has the purpose of providing existential reinforcement and unification of experience, which leads to the reification of such constructions as if these were not manmade, but natural. Subjectivation complements this process by the psychological internalization and enculturation of basic values, symbolizations and identity of the individual, such that these internalized attitudes and orientations of culture-bearer's are consistent and consonant with the institutional and objective realities of the cultural orientation. Language, both as the objective medium of the common stock of knowledge, as the principle vehicle of symbolic mediation of experience, especially in the rehabilitation, legitimization, collectivization and annihilation of knowledge, and as small talk that reinforces subjectivation of cultural reality.</p> <p>To a large extent, the theory of the cultural construction of reality serves to explain and analyze the various aspects of how mostly implicit cultural knowledge, unevenly distributed over a social landscape, coheres to create a corporate sense of completeness and comprehension to a given cultural orientation which transcends and orders the biographical experience of the individual culture-bearer, and that is conservative and resistant to the relativizing influence of alternative orientations or change.</p> <p>The cultural construction of reality also serves to reflexively de-center and deconstruct the presupposition of the ultimate truth value of knowledge, as this is culturally situated and relative, and which enables us to escape the straight jacket of our own implicit cultural values and orientation, and to overcome the invisible ethnocentric biases which stand between us and an objective comprehension of either our own or other's cultural realities. At the same time, it enables us to attempt a more objective description of culturally rooted knowledge as this is mostly implicitly and situated within specific cultural settings and contexts. This is a necessary precursor to the achievement of genuinely objective, scientific knowledge of culture--we cannot claim a genuinely etic approach to ethnographic description and ethnological explanation as long as we fail to come to terms with the situatedness of our own and other's knowledge, or as long as we take as given unquestioned primes or implicit presuppositions of truth value.</p> <p>The processes of cultural construction of reality refer to the arbitrariness and human artificiality of our knowledge as essentially non-absolute and relative in status, and to the ability of humans to symbolically reify, as if a priori and natural, such knowledge as a given reality. We normally operate under such presuppositions, and it is this normality of our unquestioned and implicit presuppositions that it becomes the goal of existential ethnography to come to terms with. It is the very basicness and transparency of our own cultural orientations, their received reification as if natural and universal, which means that, given all its symbolic reinforcement, the question of its fundamental existentiality needs never be broached, unless there is confrontation of marginal events or with alternative symbolic orientations or discrepant realities of others which leads to existential inconsistency and which relativizes our orientation. We are then led to repair or reconstruct our orientation in such a way that our reality again becomes complete and consistent.</p> <p>The fact that we construct our ethnographic texts in a similar way as we construct our cultures, entails that we never really escape the relativities of our knowledge or its existentialities, unless we make ideological leaps of faith to achieve symbolic closure, or we are able to apply relatively non-arbitrary standards of etic, objective measurement to our observations such that we can inductively derive general hypothesis and conclusions from empirical evidence.</p> <p>Because the cultural construction of reality appears empirically to be a symbolic process that involves the perceptual-cognitive organization of the mind, and the symbolic behavioral organization of an individual actions and social relations, it is via systematic means of measurement of symbolic patterning in the various facets of its expression and at its different levels of organization, that we can attempt an objective, scientific measurement of cultural orientation, and a realistic assessment of cultural variation and differences.</p> <p>In such a systematic manner, the distribution of knowledge (percepts, responses, values, beliefs, etc.) across a representative sample of cultural informants can be fairly precisely delineated, and this distribution of knowledge can be compared across different samples of informants, both sub-culturally and culturally. At the same time, the symbolic profile and cultural orientation at the individual, sub-organic level can also be systematically delineated by the same means. Such a method will never be complete, but it can be made reliable enough to reproduce systematic patterns of response at different levels of analysis such that cultural profiles of knowledge and orientation can be constructed. These profiles can then be empirically anchored in situ by ethnographic observation and other forms of fieldwork.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="eleven">CHAPTER TEN</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CULTURAL RELATIVITY</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The doctrine of cultural relativity has been a cornerstone of cultural anthropology, and, though heavily criticized, remains an intractable problem of general anthropological theory. Relativity concerns the objective qualities of different forms of knowledge in the world--relativism concerns a more reflexive notion of our doctrines and preconceptions about these qualities of our knowledge. There are many varieties of relativity and relativism. In another manuscript I have outlined at least 20 different, distinguishable forms of relativism or relativity. In general, relativity and relativism concern the ontological and existential status of human knowledge in a most basic way--the ability to know with any certainty that something is objectively true. </p> <p>The question of relativity enters in when the claim is made that certainty of knowledge is always relative--we can be more or less certain about something--but can never be absolute or final. Science in this sense is based upon a relativistic orientation, and the Popperian doctrine of falsification is implicitly rooted in the doctrine of the relative uncertainty of our propositional or observational knowledge. Thus there is nothing intrinsically inimical between scientific knowledge and the doctrine of relativism or the relativity of knowledge--in fact and theory they are actually complementary, even demanding one another. Thus there is little that is rational about anti-relativistic orientations that themselves claim to be scientific--this anti-relativism misinterprets the doctrine of relativism in a strong, deterministic form, one that is in its own absolute character paradoxically self-contradictory. It is not a question of whether or not culture or our knowledge of culture is relative, but in delineating precisely how, in what way, and to what extent, it is so.</p> <p>Relativism also entails the presupposition that all knowledge is situated within a context of knowledge, and this context must be taken into account in our formulations and presuppositions of the certainty of knowledge. This leads to what Ben Ami Scharfstein refers to as the inherent dilemmas of context.</p> <p>To understand the dilemmas of cultural relativism, we must see that the doctrine of cultural relativity depends upon a holistic approach to cultural knowledge, one that precludes analytical reductionism (but not analysis) as the exclusive theoretical approach to such knowledge. Knowledge must be construed within the context of its culture in which it originates and takes shape. It gains its full value only when comprehended from within the framework of whole patterning which cultural knowledge takes. The dilemma of a holistic approach to culture is that such holism is incomplete and partial--itself relative to the same contexts it attempts to surmount. It is the relativism of the whole of the cultural orientation in which knowledge is situated that underlies what Kuhn refers to as the dynamics of scientific paradigms and the kind of conversion experience that underlies and is a precursor to seeing the new gestalt of a scientific theory and the abandonment of old theories. The paradigmatic structure of knowledge, that systems of knowledge cohere into domains that are internally coherent and that provide a whole gestalt of understanding and seeing the world which is separate from other alternative ways of knowing, especially as this knowledge is symbolically and culturally embedded, is what best accounts for the anthropological relativism and relativities of such knowledge.</p> <p>To some extent then, the relativity of culture is rooted to the holism and internal coherence which a particular cultural orientation provides. It is beyond the scope of this essay to delineate precisely the relationships of language and culture and psychological organization of mind to foster the gestalt and realissum that a cultural orientation provides, except to not that the nexus of these relationship is in the symbolic organization of cultural psychological reality. Symbolic functioning and behavior provides the key to understanding the ways that cultural orientations work and how these might be relative in relation to alternative or discrepant cultural realities. In brief, symbol systems as cultural systems of information are semi-determined, partially closed networks--integrated to such a degree that one such system cannot easily be merged with another system, unless critical changes in the internal organization of such systems are affected. In general, such systems tend to destructive displace or replace one another, as often as they tend to merge or amalgamate. The end product of such amalgamation appears to be a relative reduction in the degree of symbolic differentiation, and the emergence of a syncretic or hybrid version that combines at different levels symbolic elements from the alternate orientations.</p> <p>We do not need to suffer a great deal of culture shock, or to review the history of cargo cult or revitalization movements which occur with radical acculturation, or to study the development of child acquisition or the anomalies of feral children, to realize that in a very basic way, culture and the anthropological realities this term encompasses are relative and we cannot escape the existentiality that this relativity entails.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="twelve">CHAPTER ELEVEN</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CULTURAL SYSTEMS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Cultural systems consist of partially closed, semi-autonomous systems of information that are primarily symbolic in its form of integration. These are rooted in the human capacity for symbolization that is hard wired to the brain, to which language is integral as a form of mediation, and that involves and integrates facets of behavior, motivation, perception, imagery, concepts, rationalizations, social relations in a holistic and coherent manner.</p> <p>Cultural systems thus are implicitly rule-determined systems, and this implicit normative structure of cultural orientations entails the possibility that its order can be propositionally described and represented, especially through computer simulations. The cultural representation of symbolic knowledge in terms of a cultural system provides a viable alternative to artificial intelligence research and cognitive science, one that has not yet been fully realized, and is aided by the fact that cultural knowledge appears to be <u>domain specific</u>, and available to systematic forms of response elicitation and rule formulation.</p> <p>Computer simulation of such knowledge entails the use of entropic information functions in the formulation of decision rules which allow the successful navigation of certain discrimination networks--networks which are constructed from the elicitations of representative cultural samples. The culturally defined pathways through these networks are predictable in terms of the decision rules. There is a certain amount of parametric learning which can be included in a feedback loop between the searching of alternative pathways through such networks, the construction of decision trees representing these pathways and the formulation of rules which lead to the successful navigation through the networks.</p> <p>A wide variety of different kinds of cultural knowledge, at different levels of analysis, are thus able to be represented and simulated within the shell of a single such computer based cultural system. What is not understood is the binding problem of the interrelationship of the different domains of knowledge and symbolization to one another--and it is at this point that alternative theoretical interpretation enters into play.</p> <p>It appears, based upon previous research, that an quaternary structure of analogical association underlies the organization of many different forms of knowledge, and this network is rendered partially determined through the superimposition of culturally defined rules of grouping and difference that direct the relationships between the symbolic associations, rendering the extension of some symbolic relationships possible, and others culturally unlikely. The extension and elaboration of these same symbolic association networks appears to occur in a systematic manner in the cognitive-linguistic development of small children, and it is in this process of elaboration that we can locate the theory of the symbolic differentiation of the phenomenal field. A case in point, involving the study of colors and color terms, and color-trait associations to a variety of objects and traits, illustrates a process which can be demonstrated with a variety of domains of cultural knowledge.</p> <p>As the result of the analysis of a series of color related tasks which involved for the most part the use of the same values and sets of colors across the same basic sets of samples, a general theory of the symbolic use of color emerged, a theory which is largely consistently with the principles of marking and differentiation outlined in the introduction. Color is a useful means of gaining an empirical understanding of the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of symbolic and affective relationship.</p> <p>The theory of color is referred to as a set of coordinate and interrelated principles of grouping and contrast between colors and sets of colors which span and differentially carve up the otherwise continuous natural spectrum of color.</p> <p>Simply put, colors occur in basic dyadic sets that serve to demarcate a specific region or range of the color continuum. Some sets appear more basic and stronger than others, and some sets seem not to usually occur. Colors and dyadic sets of colors also occur in basic sets of contrasts by which different regions of the continuum become demarcated as different. Thus the conception and coordination of color demands the complex and frequently implicit interactions between basic relationships of grouping and contrast, and these interactions may be partially determined by implicit principles which may in part be naturally based and in part culturally defined.</p> <table BORDER="1" CELLSPACING="2" CELLPADDING="2" WIDTH="678"> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">purple</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">violet</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">red</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">green</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">pink</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">yellow</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">orange</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">blue</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">grey</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">brown</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">white</font></i></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><i><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">black</font></i></td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>purple</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>violet</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>red</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>green</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>pink</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>yellow</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>orange</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>blue</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>grey</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>brown</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>white</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>black</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>-</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p>+</font></td> <td WIDTH="8%"><font FACE="Arial" SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="RIGHT">1</font></td> </tr> </table> <p>It is by these systematic principles of grouping and contrast which appear in color associations that we can gain a handle onto the psychological significance of color as it is used, its underlying semantic dimensions. Furthermore, it allows us to make certain predictions about the nature of these relationships by which we can search for patterns. Given the paradigm of all possible dyadic relationships which occur between the 12 basic colors used in the following tasks, we can expect certain dyadic combinations to recur with strong correlational strength within correlational matrices across a wide variety of samples and tasks. At the same time we can expect certain contrastive correlations to recur as well between basic colors which appear to not occur in close association. Finally, we can expect the paucity of significant correlations in those color combinations which do not appear to be reinforced naturally or culturally and which do not seem to have a strong correlation.</p> <p>The paradigm of dyadic relationships between the twelve colors above gives 66 possibilities--of these possibilities only a certain percentage (25/66 = 37.87%) might be expected to have a strong positive relationship, while the balance have either a contrastive relationship or no relationship at all, while of this subset, possibly 16 (16/66= 24.24%) might be expected to have an especially strong or naturally occurring relationship. This paradigmatic patterning of the dyadic relationships between colors function something like a list of "distinctive features" in the sense that either a relationship holds or it cannot be said to hold.</p> <p>The problem is that these relationships are not truly dichotomous or obligatory, but are a question of frequency patterning and percentage of occurrence. What can be expected is that certain dyadic combinations of colors should have a repeated significant correlation by some means of statistical analysis. The resulting matrices and networks of color combination and choice define discrimination tables which are open and only partially deterministic and relatively non-hierarchical in structure.</p> <p>Furthermore, we may speculate that: </p> <p>1. Some dyadic relations are more basic than others.</p> <p>2. Sets of dyadic relationship can occur in "complexes" or clusters of interrelationship.</p> <p>3. To some extent the strength of the dyadic relationship will determine the frequency of expected occurrence of the paired colors as paradigmatic alternates.</p> <p> 4. Dyadic pairs of colors form "chains" by which different sets of colors may be indirectly interlinked. We might speculate at a higher level of analysis triadic complexes with high correlation may frequently occur between colors. </p> <p>5. A number of extrinsic variables may interfere and influence the resulting correlational matrices of these colors, such as extraneous trait associations, culturally defined dimensions of contrast, or psychologically defined patterns of saliency or symbolic significance of certain colors. </p> <p>6.The sequence of both the developmental and cultural acquisition of color terms follows the principles of contrast and similarity defined by basic inter-color associations.</p> <p>These patterns of inter color association form an underlying symbolic structure with both cognitive and affective components and accretions, that appear to play a part in the framing and construction of other types of symbolic frameworks, and that become to some extent hard wired in the brain.</p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p align="center"><img border="0" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Pictures/culture3.gif" width="482" height="332"></p> </font> <p> </p> <p>The preceding diagram is an attempt at a three dimensional spherical representation in which polar opposites represent basic dyads and basic contrasts between dyads are cross at right angles along an intersecting plane of the sphere. Stronger, more basic relationships are located on spheres of greater distance from the origin than weaker or more general relationships and by the heavier weight of the connecting lines.</p> <p>The principles of patterning that underlie the organization and meaning of color are neither complex or of great number, nor are they obligatory. They summarize decision rule trees defined from alternate pathways of a discrimination table that describes the pattern of grouping and contrast that occurs with color. The psychological, cultural and extraneous trait associations which appear to influence this patterning of color are also not complicated, and may be described in a fairly specific manner. From these basic principles of patterning and variables it is possible that an expert system model of color can be constructed.</p> <p>Certain principles may be speculated on at the outset.</p> <p>1. There is a functional and interdependent relationship between the grouping of colors in basic dyadic sets, their extension in larger groupings, and the contrast between colors and sets.</p> <p>2. Principles of basic grouping are relatively more independent variables than principles of contrast--i.e. dyadic grouping and its extension underlies and partially determine the contrasting of different colors.</p> <p>3. Principles of color contrast are relatively dependent variables. Contrasts tend to occur between groupings of color before they occur between basic colors, and they tend to occur between non-basic colors and groupings before more basic colors or groupings</p> <p>4. We may distinguish between basic and elaborated groupings of colors, as dyadic, direct associations versus triadic, indirect associations.</p> <p>5. We may distinguish between neutral, nonspecific contrasts between colors, and non-neutral, specific contrasts which are direct juxtapositions of contraposed colors.</p> <p>6. Non-neutral contrasts tend to involve basic sets in direct juxtaposition, and can be considered to be symbolically and projectively "loaded" and of greater significance.</p> <p>7. The indirect extension of basic dyadic sets allows the substitution of paradigmatically alternate colors in contrastive color juxtapositions or constructions.</p> <p>8. Non-basic, complementary relationships may occur between different colors, either grouped or contrasted, as color primes recur in more than one basic dyad become "lost" and latent in the complementary relationship.</p> <p>9. The extension of these symbolic color complexes to other non-color traits is accomplished principally through the means of the quaternary structure of analogical association, i.e. apple is to banana as red is to yellow.</p> <p>10. The resulting "nonverbal" language of color is structured analogically in coordinate interrelationship of colors to other colors--i.e. within a color context.</p> <p>11 Symbolic associations and accretions to color therefore follow and are structured by the underlying principles of grouping and contrast in color.</p> <p>12. Symbolic associations and accretions to colors, whether they are psychologically idiosyncratic or culturally shared, influence the patterning of color in fairly specific and determinable ways: i.e., the relative level of color-terminological differentiation of the color field, patterns of color preference, coordination and ranking, patterns of color-trait association, and the order, organization and dimensions of color-dimension associations.</p> <p>From the analysis of the data and the pattern, certain dyadic relationships appear in a sequential order of saliency/basicness in the twelve color tasks:</p> <p>1. red-yellow versus black-white</p> <p>2. blue-green versus purple-violet</p> <p>3. gray-pink versus orange-brown</p> <p>Grey and pink and orange and brown especially for the Chinese sample appear to be of least contrastive significance or salience, and imply a weaker dyadic relationship which falls apart more frequently. Thus these colors which are themselves non-basic appear as the least salient and become more associated with other basic colors--orange or brown with yellow or red, pink with purple or violet and gray with blue or green or with black or white.</p> <p>From this schema we may infer a scale of basicness between colors and dyads. This scale appears to be for the six dyads: black/white, red/yellow, purple/violet, blue/green, pink/gray and orange/brown. In the contrasts which occur between these colors we cannot clearly separate the basic dyads, but it appears the entire set is being contrasted in the form of the quaternary structure of analogy in which basic principles of commutation and transition are being observed:</p> <p>1.</p> <p>red is to yellow         as blue is to green         as pink is to gray</p> <p>as</p> <p>white is to black     as purple is to violet     as orange is to brown</p> <p>2.</p> <p>red is to white as blue is to purple as pink is to orange</p> <p>as</p> <p>yellow is to black as green is to violet as gray is to brown</p> <p> </p> <p>We may then cross between sets in a systematic manner:</p> <p> </p> <p>3. red is to blue as green is to pink as gray is to red</p> <p>as</p> <p>white is to purple as violet is to orange as brown is to white</p> <p>or, alternatively</p> <p>4. blue is to white as pink is to violet as red is to brown</p> <p>as</p> <p>red is to purple as green is to orange as gray is to white</p> <p>Such a structure can be easily elaborated if we imagine the addition of other intermediate dyadic sets, such as purple-pink, red-orange, red-violet, black-gray. It appears that culture and psychological variables intervene to influence this process of elaboration of color associations in definite ways. Though there are no hard and fast a priori rules of association, and any such a structure easily breaks down in a non-deterministic manner, we may say that in such a manner inter-color associations may be easily extended, as long as they tend not to contradict more basic contrastive sets that occurs--such as between red-yellow/black-white, and that the entire structure always tends to be anchored by more enduring sets of basic dyadic primes.</p> <p>We can extend this quaternary structure to incorporate triadic sets:</p> <p>red is to yellow is to orange blue is to green is to brown</p> <p>as</p> <p>black is to white is to gray purple is to violet is to pink</p> <p>Thus:</p> <p>red complements orange as blue complements brown</p> <p>as</p> <p>black complements gray as purple complements pink</p> <p>and</p> <p>orange contrasts black as brown contrasts purple</p> <p>as</p> <p>red contrasts gray as blue contrasts pink</p> <p> </p> <p>Such relationships appear nonsensical from a rational standpoint, but it must be kept in mind that these associations are essentially non-rational and therefore non-logical in character. It is the non-logical, analogical character of the patterning of color that permits black apples and blue bananas to occur as valid possibilities color-trait associations though no such associations appear to occur naturally in the world.</p> <p>It is at this point when we consider the influence of psychology and culture that the patterning of color really becomes interesting and problematic. It appears that though almost any possible trait-color associations can be imagined, some are more basic and anchored to reality than others, and hence serve to stabilize the structure. The association of green and brown with trees and grass are a clear and strong example for which we may imagine the following structure:</p> <p>green is to foliage is to grass as yellow and orange are to sun and rays</p> <p>as</p> <p>brown is to trunk is to earth as blue is to clouds is to sky is to water</p> <p>It is interesting that in the color-trait associations of the House-Tree-Person drawings, both foliage and trunks appear as brown, and foliage appears as green, but trunks do not appear as green. A slot is created in the sample which demands "filling" in with an explanation. We would expect that slot to also occur with high frequency, the fact that it is absent raises a fundamental question.</p> <p>brown is to trunk brown is to foliage</p> <p>as</p> <p>green is to foliage green is <b><u>not</u></b> to _____<b><u>???</u></b>_____</p> <p>Among Chinese samples, the association of black to eyes, hair and eyebrows and figure outline is strong, as well as the association of brown to skin, face, arms, hands, or pink with shirt and pants and purple with shoes:</p> <p>black is to eyes is to hair is to eyebrows pink is to pants and shirt</p> <p>as</p> <p>brown is to skin is to face is to arms is to legs purple is to dress to shoes</p> <p>The association of yellow to red permits the frequent possibility of a red sun, and the apparent association of the sky and clouds to the sun permits the possibility of a blue sun. The association of the skin to the clothes makes possible the association of pink with brown, but though we have a frequency pattern of pink faces and skin, there is no similar association of brown clothes:</p> <p>brown is to face is to skin is to limbs pink is to face and limbs</p> <p>as</p> <p>pink is to shirt and pants. brown is not to <u>_____<b>???</b>___</p> </u> <p> </p> <p>Again a gap has been created in the structure that we can expect to be filled in but which for some reason does not. The creation of such gaps appears to be a normal consequence of the extension of such quaternary structure, and appears to be a basic process in developmental acquisition.</p> <p>It is reasonable to assume that affective associations follow similar paths as do the cognitive-semantic associations in the construction of colors and color-trait patterns, and that the symbolic construction of color association involves just such a system of transference of affective as well as semantic association of meaning from one color to another. In such a way, color is used to reinforce affectively and symbolically the transference and identity of symbols, such that:</p> <p> </p> <p>the purple house is to the purple flower is to the purple face</p> <p>as</p> <p>the black figure is to the black outline of a tree is to the black outline of the house.</p> <p>or</p> <p>the eye is to the window</p> <p>and</p> <p>the curtains are to the eyebrow</p> <p>as</p> <p>to the center of the flower is to the sun</p> <p>and</p> <p>the rays of the sun are to the petals of the flower</p> <p>In such a manner we can describe the symbolic construction of complementary symbolisms which have no clear, valid or logical identity but which achieve a symbolic isomorphism of identity by means of the associative transference of meaning. The fact that there are "core" underlying patterns of inter-color, inter-trait and color-trait associations confers a degree of consistency and deterministic plausibility to such structures that would otherwise be lacking.</p> <p>In the preceding structure, two conjunctive "and" relationships were introduced in place of the analogical "as", and suggests the possibility of the systematic substitution of conjunctive-disjunctive connectors in place of the "as" in the increasing logical determinacy of the patterning. "As" as a connector is a more general and less obligatory relationship than either of the logical connectors. But the substitution of "and/or" relations for the "as" allow us to group and contrast sets of analogical relationships in a manner which more gives greater constraint to the resulting pattern when we substitute all "as" relationships for either an "and", "or" or a contrastive "versus" to more accurately depict the structure which actually appears to be most salient in the pile sorts of the 12 colors:</p> <p>1.</p> <p>red as yellow as blue as green as pink as grey</p> <p>as</p> <p>white as black as purple as violet as orange as brown</p> <p>becomes</p> <p>red and yellow or blue and green or pink or gray</p> <p>versus versus or</p> <p>white and black or purple and violet or orange or brown</p> <p>We may refine the model a little further by introducing inferential "if-then" syntax into the model to define some deterministic rules of order of the relationships:</p> <b><u><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p>if </font></u></b><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2">(red versus white) and (blue versus purple) and (pink or brown) <b><u>then|</u></b> (red or brown...)</p> <p>and and or and</p> <p>(red and yellow) and (blue and green) and (orange or gray) <b><u>then|</u></b> (yell or gray....)</p> <p>and and or and</p> <p>(black and white) and (purple and violet) and (gray or brown) <b><u>then|</u></b> (white or brown....)</p> <u> <p><b>then</b></p> </u> <p>(yellow versus black) and (green versus violet) and (orange or pink) <b><u>then|</u></b>______<b><u>?????__</u></b>____</p> </font> <p>The interesting aspect of such a logical structure is that it may be read simultaneously either left to right or top down, and along alternate pathways. There is no prescribed order of reading the structure, and it permits the accumulation of conclusions at the end of each sequence and in the lower right hand corner. It may be said that there are a set of logical connectors (as, versus, or, and) and if-then. It general, and is the most obligatory relationship and describes a close association. Or describes a weaker relationship between colors, and versus describes a contrastive relationship. The "as" implies an open analogical relationship which encompasses all other possibilities of relation. Parenthetic sets are nested within the larger framework, and in the reading of the thing more specific operators of relationship should take precedence before, and hence are nested within, more general operators.</p> <p>Within this structure, any relationship becomes possible, as long as it is not contradicted by or contradict an initial premise of contrast. Principles of contrast are thus vital to the order and functional coherence of such a system, as it prevents the occurrence of circular contradictions which would render the structure incoherent. It is interesting that this model resembles somewhat the method of structural analysis developed by Claude Levi-Strauss for the interpretations of myths.</p> <p>The structure is descriptive versus "predictive" or prescriptive in nature, but it permits the possibility of the systematic creation and the inferential filling in of gaps which may occur within the structure. Such structures quickly bog down in the tremendous exponential explosion of possibilities which they encompass--it is fortunate that such symbolic constructions tend to be neither very deep or broad. Another set of possibilities exists when we consider that the same basic inference structure may be written in several alternate ways. The fact that not all possibilities can occur with equal plausibility confers meaning and a minimal order to its patterning of relationships Such a structure also suggests the possibility of the application of non-parametric statistics in its analysis, and in the association of parallel discrimination tables which express each relationship as an estimated probability or actual frequency of occurrence, and from which decision trees and basic functional rules can be systematically deduced.</p> <p>To summarize the results of these color tasks so far, it appears that it is not too difficult to imagine a green or an orange or red or blue or purple or brown or even a black banana, though it may be easier for us to recognize and eat a yellow banana. An orange may be red or blue or green, but is easier to distinguish from an apple or a ball or an unripe grapefruit if it is orange. This suggests that the semantic associations with color are quite variable and largely analogical in nature--we may imagine the possibility of black or purple apples quite easily, though there may be some imagined color-object combinations which may violate certain implicit restrictions of acceptability.</p> <p>These patterns suggest that a number of principles of contrast may be at work underlying the differentiation of the color field, and the relationships between these dimensions may be neither simple nor straight forward. The following model of the dimensions of possible contrast places along a number of multi-dimensional axis those most salient sorts of contrastive variables which may influence the functional differentiation of color, and it suggests that if we are to find color in the brain, we must look in more the one place.</p> <p align="center"><img border="0" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Pictures/Culture1.gif" width="449" height="346"></p> <p>The theory of color proceeds from the symbolic differentiation of the color continuum. The pile sort suggests strongly that there are basic groups or dyads which occur, whether or not these are named, and which carve out different, overlapping regions of the continuum. It is felt that these basic sets form complex unities. They are characterized both by their implicitness and by the lack of a specific reference to a specific region of the color continuum, and by the plurality of alternate references which point to different proximate places within this region. What characterizes these sets are their non-specificity and their generality.</p> <p><img border="0" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Pictures/Culture2.gif" width="469" height="503"></p> <p>Names for these natural sets might include grue (green/blue), "vurplet" (violet/purple), "bronge" (brown/orange), "bred" (brown/red), "grink" (pink/grey), "blite" (black/white), "rellow" (red/yellow). Other sets may be imagined. These sets are interlocked and occur on an implicit level of organization.</p> <p>The differentiation of the continuum may proceed on two levels simultaneously or in tandem--first top-down with the distinction of basic color sets, and then bottom up with the selection out of basic color from these sets. At each subsequent level, the largest complex of chains tends to be broken at the weakest dyadic relationship which also tends to be the mid-point separating the continuum into more basic sets or colors. It is predicted that this splitting point will be the best subsequent discriminator--that breakage point (or minimal points) which will result in the most coherent (least noisy) sub-groupings. Thus the color continuum pulls itself apart by polarization into smaller sub-groupings that come to be increasingly less implicit and more basic in terminology. The main split at each level comes to be seen in terms of the differentiation of the most salient color contrast at that level.</p> <p>The only exception to this rule in the cluster analysis above appears to be the early separation of orange and yellow, of yellow from red and orange from grue. It is difficult to imagine an association between orange and green or blue.</p> <p>Though the actual patterning of color association at each level of the pile sort is more complicated than this, there are basic patterns which are definitive--such as the lack of certain colors at certain subsequent levels of discrimination.</p> <p>It is extremely difficult to interpret in a conclusive manner the combined results of the different tasks. Certain inter-correlations of specific dyads of colors do appear to be consistently pronounced across different samples and tasks, but are significantly influenced by variables of sample size, type, design of the task, and the association of traits to colors.</p> <p>Several presuppositions behind these analysis must be brought into focus. The patterns presented in these analysis have been based upon the relative frequency patterns across samples. Individual variability has therefore been lost. There is no saying that culture is necessarily only what is shared, or is what is represented by shared frequency patterns of response to such tasks as presented above. Culture does appear to have an influence upon such patterns, but these are difficult to separate from psychological variables which also influence them. This analysis can only be considered preliminary, problematic and just scratching the surface of an extremely complex problem of analysis and interpretation.</p> <p>A similar type of analogical chaining of associations was found to occur in the domain of familial terms and relationships for a Chinese sample, in relation to a number of linguistic framing tasks (grids, dichotomous, apperception, sentence completion). This chaining appears to be ordered on the basis of certain elicited rules of relationship which regulate the associations. The centrality of this kind of familial model to understanding the dynamics of Chinese culture suggest that the basic mental model is behaviorally and symbolically extended and elaborated on the organic level of institutional social patterning of a culture, and that there is dynamic feedback between the sub-organic, symbolic and organic institutional levels of information patterning within cultural systems.</p> <p>There is the strong suggestion of the development of an alternative system of artificial intelligence which to some extent predicts and models the patterning of color choice and ranking above, based upon attribute-value notation, the sample frequencies and the use of a discrimination function which estimates the level of inter-color association, the probability and noise factor of each color in each position, and which searches and traces pathways through the color array, deriving rules based upon relative probabilities and likelihood of alternative pathways through the array. The same system could be set up to model and predict patterning in different tasks, and may derive rules which may otherwise remain implicit in the complex patterning of frequency distributions. It is suggested that some pathways through such discrimination networks may be more likely and better predictors than others, and many pathways are highly unlikely while a few may emerge as clearly significant.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="thirteen">CHAPTER TWELVE</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">SYMBOLIC DIFFERENTIALS OF PSYCHO-CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The symbol as it occur in the cultural context cannot be understood outside of reference to this context. A symbol is actually a symbolic process, a process of symbolization, that involves the integration of diverse elements of experience--perceptive, imaginary, cognitive, affective, linguistic and behavioral--into a coherent mental representation of some specific external stimuli or related set of such objective stimuli. Symbolisms are tied to other symbolisms, and share many elements of experience. Symbolic stimuli are also evocative of a relatively wide range of ordered responses at several levels.</p> <p>It appears that in both human ontogenetic development--in primary cultural acquisition of the child, there is increasing symbolic differentiation of the phenomenal field of experience, as marked by transition of such experience from those symbolic qualities of "diffuseness, indefiniteness, lability, syncretism, rigidity" of the part which shares the "qualities-of-the-whole" toward greater articulation, discreteness, organicism, objectification, flexibility and stability, in which the part acquires a clear mental representation as an abstract thing in itself in clear, functionally organic relationship to other parts and to the whole (Werner, 1957; Mortensen, 1991).</p> <p>There appears to be an analogical continuum of cultural development at the organic level of institutional organization, in which we can refer to a movement and basic differences of symbolic qualities from those cultures described as "oral" to those which are described as fully literate in noetic organization of consciousness (Havelock, Ong, McCluhan, Goody).</p> <p>I am concerned here with the dilemma of the part/whole--that the whole is something more than the sum of its parts, or that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts, especially as this becomes expressed in terms of social reality--that social groups and patterns constitute a superorganic whole that cannot be reduced to a mere analysis of the parts (elements, traits, aspects, individuals) that make up the whole. Is there a rational way out of this dilemma, beyond an appeal for a transcendent attitude which incorporates both the analytic and synthetic points of view simultaneously? An analytical, reductive approach seems to logically preclude the possibility (indeed demands the logical impossibility) of a holistic approach rooted in the synergism of the total pattern, and yet we inevitably run into a theoretical cul-de-sac when it comes to explaining cosmographical patterns of the whole in terms of the inter-functioning of the parts. At some point we must make a philosophical leap of faith about the a priori significance of the whole pattern which comes before, and dialectically transcends, the part.</p> <p>I doubt there is any other logical way out of this dilemma, unless we adopt a systems approach which is based in information theory and which defines the duality of patterning of the whole as a cybernetic feedback relationship among the parts. Locked in a feedback system, the concerted inter-functioning of the parts become "connected" and amplified to achieve a duality of information patterning at two separate, yet interdependent, levels of process.</p> <p>This perspective lends itself readily to a phenomenological perspective in which the many parts constituting the whole are but limited facets of the whole gestalt. What Heinz Werner refers (1957) to as an "organic" (holistic) perspective construes the necessity of formal relationships which predetermines the relationship and meaning of the parts to the whole. Organic ontogenetic development entails that the stages of progress of growth and maturation of the individual organism much be comprehended from such a holistic point of view, as a process leading from less to greater differentiation, stratification and integration of parts in relationship to the whole.</p> <p>It is in reference to the organic psychological development of human cognition, especially as this is construed to occur in a graded, scheduled sequence of stages of acquisition of basic skills, that a general theory relating psychology and culture, and nature and nurture, and the role of evolution in human genetic development, is to be found.</p> <p>From an organic, non-reductionist perspective, this process is seen to be one primarily of increasing differentiation of a previously undifferentiated phenomenal field--a process which is primarily symbolic in character. It is this basic symbolic character of human cognition and culture which accounts most for the many pieces of the human puzzle and which must be taken into account in a broader framework of understanding of this puzzle.</p> <p>The neonatal human being is understood to live in a relatively undifferentiated phenomenal field in which basic motor-coordinative functions are the principle modalities of experience. Early human experience is characterized by synaethesia of sensory modalities, by physiognomic versus formal-factual (subjective versus objective) perception, by motor-object activity in association with acquisition, and by personification of object stimuli. With maturation there occurs systematic inauguration and elaborate differentiation of the phenomenal field at ever higher levels of symbolic abstraction and integration--a process which incorporates and eclipses previous earlier phases which depended upon more basic modalities of experience.</p> <p>It is my hypothesis that this basic process of the symbolic differentiation of human experience occurs in a scheduled sequence of stages of acquisition and growth, each of which can be characterized by heightened activity and organization of particular sensory modalities. The effective ("vital") environment, which is culturally structured and organized socially, provides the principal feedback mechanism in the channeling and modifying the resulting pattern of development in distinct directions. What occurs as a possibility of the symbolic differentiation of the phenomenal field is the increasing diversification of psycho-cultural patterning along alternate directions of development. The basic, genetically defined stages of this growth and development are natural and pan-human--the socio-cultural context in which this development occurs is "constructed" and varies substantially--leading to different consequences of this development.</p> <p>Language plays a key active role in this process of the symbolic differentiation of the phenomenal field, and language is held to influence this process, as well as being a medium of expression for this process. This leads to several important points about language: 1."Naming" is an integral part of symbolization which connects the object-sign to the affective response and the cognized signification--at the same time the named word serves to precipitate, reify and embody this symbolic relationship between inner and outer worlds. 2. Language serves in symbolically embedding experience in a coherent, intelligible manner--names and symbolisms become associated and networked with other names and associations--such that the patterning of language production and structure is a naturalistic expression of the symbolic organization and differentiation of human experience. 3. Linguistic acquisition and ethnosemantic organization of knowledge mirror the patterning and organization of the symbolic differentiation of experience, and can be utilized as an effective means of analyzing and mapping this development.</p> <p>The clearest empirical example of the patterning of which exists of such symbolic acquisition is the Berlin et. al. demonstration of the acquisition of basic color terms. There is no reason not to presume that similar predictably ordered patterns of acquisition exist for other modalities of experience and domains of knowedge.</p> <p>Preliminary tasks with the Symbolic Framing Battery demonstrate that analogical chains of associations guided by principles of grouping and contrast form the early structure of symbolic experience. Within these chains, gaps of information are created which can be predictably completed by an understanding of the analogical context of the gap. The analogical extension of these association chains leads to the creation of gaps which are implicated in early development. These analogical chains of associations become increasingly constrained by a number of obligatory relations--principally, a stratification of more-to-less basic symbolisms reinforced by experience, by superimposition of exceptional rules of disconformity, and by the hyper-compartmentalization and subsequent hierarchization of such chains into specific to general domains, which themselves can be abstractly symbolized and represented. The result is a semi-determined network of associations, reflected in the ethno-semantic patterns of the language, which can be implicitly represented with rules which define the most likely or preferred pathways.</p> <p>Culture appears to be determinative in this process of symbolic elaboration at a number of levels. Foremost, to the degree that a cultural orientation is focused and coherent, it serves to orient this schematic elaboration of associations with a wider world in a constrained manner, based upon certain primes that are cultural defined. The style of affective reinforcement of acquisition, and the social agencies of this reinforcement, are also culturally defined. From a behavioral point of view, oral gratification/restriction and physical or verbal reinforcement appear to operate as basic mechanisms of stimulus response which reinforce these patterns of symbolic acquisition. We may also look to behavioral patterns and implicit values of the socio-cultural context which serve to structure the child's symbolic relationship and expectations in relation to the environment--patterns which are principally expressed through children's patterning of play. Pre-adolescent patterns appear to involve primarily "psycho-social" and "psycho-object" relations with a social and material environment. Post-adolescent stages appear to involve the inauguration of "psycho-sexual" and "psycho status" patterns of reinforcement related to patterns of sexual gratification/restriction and reinforcement.</p> <p>Symbolic construction appears to involve several analytically discrete components--naming, an affective response, a percepto-cognitive association or set of associations, and an externally objective frame of reference. The symbol must be seen as the whole construct that emerges from the interrelation of these components--and in a sense is as much a process of symbolization as it can be seen to be a "thing" in itself. Basic to this process is one of symbolic identification--apparently in its early stages a form of primitive personification of objects, that later becomes a more polarized form of anthropomorphization. In the process of symbolic differentiation, acquisition appears to occur in an ordered manner in a discrete number of developmental stages. It leads to the development of a rationally ordered framework in which the affective aspects of the symbol become normally constrained and suppressed, often subconsciously projected, via systems of cognitive rationalization and symbolic abstraction.</p> <p>We may speak of a broad genetic analogy which amounts to a developmental parallelism between ontogenetic, cultural and phylogenic levels of informational patterning--such that the relative levels of achieved symbolic differentiation of the phenomenal field will vary in similar ways at these different levels of analysis.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="fourteen">CHAPTER THIRTEEN</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">THE SYMBOLIC MEDIATION OF THE PHENOMENAL FIELD</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Cultural cybernetics constitutes a general theoretical framework for the understanding of human processes and patterning of reality. It is a paradigm which is rooted in information theory, cognitive sciences, gestalt psychology, and an anthropological theory of the symbolic construction of reality. Within this framework, the arrangements of cultural artifacts in the ground, language, the ritual arrangement of sacred objects on an altar, all share in common an underlying cultural paradigm which determines phenomenologically that these various instances are but particular facets of a larger gestalt of cultural patterning.</p> <b><u> <p>Natural Systems Theory</p> </u></b> <p>From a scientific point of view, we may understand the informational patterning of a language, or its material expression in an environment, as manifestations of an underlying cultural codification that is homologous to the developmental expressions of human genetic information, or to the organic molecular configurations which may be expressed precisely in bio-chemical formulas, or on an even finer, subatomic level of discrimination, the information contained in the electron shells about the nucleus of an atom.</p> <p>We may speak analytically of different natural levels of informational patterning with a general hierarchy of determinations. Upon each of these levels, there exists fairly precise formulaic codifications of information which control and account for the patterning of natural cosmographic processes that are largely complex and chaotic. Thus it is the same physics which which precisely describes the atomic weight of atoms that describes the composition of stars light years distant, that discovers black holes in other galaxies, and explores the patterning of galaxies in their waltz across the universe. But physics alone cannot explain complex chemical reactions or the crystallization of mineral compounds in precise geometric forms, nor the processes of the genetic transmission and reproduction that underlies and drives the processes we call evolution. In a similar way, it is not enough to invoke the biological theory of evolution in order to understand the patterning of language and meaning production, in the dialectal divergence of separate cultural groupings, or in the separate historical development of human civilization in diverse regions of the earth.</p> <p>We must understand that explanation and description of events at one level of analysis cannot be reduced or directly translated into another level--we do not invoke theories of physics for the understanding of evolutionary processes, and we do not invoke understanding of organic photosynthesis for the understanding of cultural phenomena. To do so, especially in an exclusive sense, is a form of analytical reductionism which destroys the sense of order and implicitly the denies the patterned order at a higher level of natural systems integration.</p> <p>Natural systems theory which seeks to understand in precise forms the structural principles of patterning of information at various levels of analysis that occur in nature are all rooted in a structural-functional presupposition which stipulates that patterned relations are to some extent deterministically ordered--in effect, patterns of relationship at all levels of analysis are causally dependent upon specific variables which account for the resulting pattern and which in part determines the predictable, recurrent dynamics of the functioning of the system. The order which exists between the parts of the whole are thus functionally interrelated such that they constitute a dynamic system of interactions and relations which are minimally interdependent. A change in one part of the system will result in reverberations of changes in other parts.</p> <p>But this functional order of a system is never itself an entirely closed affair. At all levels of analysis, natural systems, as information systems, are part of a larger continuum of a universe of relationships at the same and at lower levels of analysis, relationships which may, however indirectly, affect the functional pattern of the system. It is this partial openness of natural systems that render their patterning chaotic and open to random variation of pattern. It is this systemic openness, or lack of complete closure of the system that guarantees that any natural system is always subject to change and modification, and will only be partially deterministic.</p> <p>The concern of this work is approaching description and general theoretic explanation of the socio-cultural level of human systems in a naturalistic way in terms of a central set of systemic propositions which are partially determinative of the informational processes and patterns which occur at this level. Furthermore, it constitutes an attempt to empirically demonstrate this analysis with consistent elicited patterns of data, generally from a methodology developed around a central theoretical premises and referred to as symbolic mediation.</p> <b><u> <p>Symbolic Mediation</p> </u></b> <p>Symbolic mediation can be considered to be a form of field theory that has as its basis the developmental symbolic specialization of the phenomenal field which is defined as "the entire universe, including oneself, as it is experienced by the individual at the instant of action."</p> <p>The precise mechanism of this specialization is held to be the neurologically programmed apparatus of the human brain to terminologically recognize, or nominally designate, a set of external/internal relations both as: 1. a separate subset or whole part; and 2. as a part-whole of a larger nexus of relations.</p> <p>The external/internal relations are composed of both cognitive and affective components. <u>All "symbolizations" of the phenomenal field are accompanied by some relative level of both components: 1. the cognitive differentiation of the field; 2. the affective dynamics of relations within the field</u>.</p> <p>The central neural mechanism accounting for these processes is regarded as the symbolic mediation of the phenomenal field in which cognitive and affective associations of a differentiated sub-field of phenomenal experience becomes configured and mediated by the lexical naming which gives central symbolic definition and form to this configuration, and which brings this fragment of awareness into a gestalt as part of a whole field of possible relations.</p> <p>The human brain has evolved neural apparatus for speech production and for human language which has special design features of duality and symbolic reference of meaning. As such these developments of the brain were part of a development of the physiological apparatus for speech production and processing, and in a nonspecific sense its unique evolution can be considered to be the cerebral specialization for such speech recognition and production.</p> <p>If the nominal function of the word as the symbolic mediator of human experience rests as a pivot point in understanding the foundation of human consciousness and systems of symbolization, we must look beyond the word itself as an isolated name to the question of language structure itself as the syntagmatic production of a chain of paradigmatically alternate words.</p> <p>In this regard, it can be seen that each statement made or sentence, no matter how short, constitutes an implication of meaning that is always subject to question. A statement is thus an implicit inference about reality, the validity of which is always open to demonstration. Validity in this sense is bound up in the relative context of the symbolic frame of the sentence--the unstated understanding and knowledge that is required to complete the question that the statement implicitly asks us.</p> <p>Sentence construction in language is therefore a form of symbolic framing that serves to link together spaces, events, or regions of the phenomenal field, across time as well as space, and that enable us to resynthesize and reunify the whole in relation to the parts. In this regard, language construction always implicitly has at least indirect reference to the whole. That we will unconsciously tend to construct and contextualize our sentences in terms which are consistent with our other symbolic frames and preunderstandings of how the world is framed speaks for the close linkage between language and socio-cultural context, on the one hand, and language and the subjective phenomenal field of experience on the other.</p> <p>Sentence construction is therefore bound to and structured by the need to make symbolic semantic inferences which can be subject to the validation of phenomenal experience in the world. In this regard, the structuring of language can be seen to follow the function of language in the construction of complex spaces or gestalts of differentiated phenomenal regions, and the transference of significance from one such gestalt to another. The job of a sentence is to link the subject as a figure to a larger frame that consists of the implicit background space of the sentence--the phenomenal field itself. This process of construction is influenced minimally by the aspectual form that the sentence construction normally takes in a language.</p> <p>We can refer to a form of relational inference in which the main task of linking things designated by nominative reference to other things or to relations or events which occur in a hypothetical space is controlled by a relatively underdetermined model of plausible multidirectional inference. Normal direction of inference will be inherent to the syntagmatic, aspectual and marking of the sentence structure.</p> <p>Coherence of these semantic linkages is guided by a loose form of relational or relative inference and relative contextuality of the implicit frame of the sentence. Relative contextuality can refer to some variable pattern of differentiation of the part-whole relationship, in which the entire whole of the universe is always an external and implicit context to the configuration of a variable set of parts.</p> <p>Relative inference refers to inferences which are guided by posited semantic primes of relational linkages between the parts or differentiated spaces and by a relative nonrestrictive form of plausibility of inference that is constrained mostly by the principle of explicit direct non-contradiction--in other words, any direction of semantic inference is permitted in the transference of significance between parts in the construction of mental space, as long as it is not directly contradicted.</p> <p>Universal semantic relational primes are given by Hamil (1991: pg. 42) as the following list:</p> <p>1. X is a kind of Y. 2. X is a part of Y.</p> <p>3. X is a place in Y. 4. X is oriented with respect to Y.</p> <p>5. X is contingent on Y. 6. X is a reason for doing Y.</p> <p>7. X is a place for doing Y. 8. X is used for Y.</p> <p>9. X is a means of effecting Y. 10. X is in a sequence including Y.</p> <p>11. X is a characteristic of Y. 12. X is similar to Y.</p> <p>13. X is different from Y. 14. X is an example of Y.</p> <p>15. X is equivalent to Y. 16. X is the opposite of Y.</p> <p>17. X is the source of Y. 18. X is X.</p> <p> </p> <p>The relative plausibility of the inference within the context of its implicit frame that is what is ultimately determinative of its truth value--there is no final, non-arbitrary truth value of any language, and this is the flexibility of language for prevarication, and for alternative interpretation.</p> <p>The structure which a language takes can thus be understood directly in terms of this semantic space building function function as a central mechanism for the symbolic framing of reality and the intermediation of internal and external realities.</p> <p>It is possible to describe the structural syntactic patterning of different languages in terms of this requirement of language in the construction of credible mental spaces which map to some extent and have implicit reference to the external world of relations, without making reference or inferring universal "deep structures" of language. This process of space construction in language may be stated symbolically in explicit propositional form without requiring the adoption of a rigid mathematical model of language that hasn't room for ambiguity of meaning.</p> <p>Linguistic articulation thus allows for the building of complex symbolic spaces, and even of symbolic constructions within symbolic constructions that can be linked by relational inference to yet other symbolic constructions. Thus language has the effect of forging chains of complex inter-linkages which may subsume a variety of different sets of cognitive and affective associations, and from which a symbolic complex of an internally coherent system of rationalization or belief system can be created, reiterated and linguistically reinforced.</p> <p>In reference to the relative contextuality and relative plausibility of the inference structure of language, it is important to emphasize the relative contextual dependency of different language constructions and the relative degrees context-boundness of alternative implicit semantics, and even the relative levels of contextuality exhibited by different languages and reflective of the degree of differentiation and symbolic specialization achieved within the culturally defined language system.</p> <p>The foundation of symbolic human awareness can be seen to be the hardwiring of the brain for the function of naming and terminological definition attached to an articulated and differentiated nexus of cognitive and affective relations and associations, such that the evocation of the name can lead to an evocation of the pattern of relations thus designated.</p> <p>This naming function of the human mind is fairly specific, such that discrete regions of the mind are neurologically wired to fairly specific names. But these named regions of phenomenal life-space are not exclusive in the sense that they stand separate or unconnected to other names. Both names and the associations they index are interconnected within a context of other names and patterns of association, and these patterns of interconnection are organized along several overlapping principles of organization--analogically, homologically, and functionally.</p> <p>Thus for instance, perception of color and production of the term for color become learned separately, until a certain region of the brain links up the color with the term such that its recognition can lead to its automatic naming. This does not normally become learned until 3 or 4 years of age, at an age when the neuronal linkages are being made in a fairly specific location of the brain between those designating areas of color names and color perception--before this time the child knows the word "red" and can perceive red as a color, but cannot clearly recognize and name red as a color at the same time.</p> <p>It is also very certain that the order of the acquisition of terminological recognition and probably the perceptual differentiation of the color continuum is almost universally predictable and ordered in a fairly definite sequence of acquisition. Furthermore this developmental sequence is parallel for both the ontological development of the individual and the phylogenic development of the culture, such that cultural orientations may be more or less differentiated in terms of color terminology is concerned. Individuals of those cultural backgrounds will, like children, be able to recognize by naming only those colors which are culturally available, though they may be capable of perceiving a much more highly differentiated spectrum of color differences.</p> <p>What has been demonstrated to be the case with color terms can be demonstrated also in many other natural domains of basic terms--for instance basic forms of flora and fauna, basic shapes or objects, parts of the body, categories of food, categories of natural things, etc. Furthermore, as will be demonstrated later in this work, the analysis of the symbolic framing of color does not end with the demonstration of the acquisition of color terminology, but involves the analytical elucidation of a plethora of cognitive-affective associations to colors, patterns of color preference and rank, underlying ethno-semantic dimensions by which colors are ordered and differentiated. This becomes the case with many other natural symbolic dimensions.</p> <p>In general, the following set of propositions are made. It can be said that in general there is a tendency that:</p> <p>1. More basic terms underlie and come sequentially before more elaborated, derivative terms.</p> <p>2. More basic terms designate a region of differentiated field, or part-whole relation, which is somehow more naturally "prototypical" and more deeply embedded than more elaborated terms.</p> <p>3. More basic terms show greater agreement and consensus of sharing within a culture.</p> <p>4. More elaborated terms have less agreement, and more ambiguity associated with the designated meanings.</p> <p>5. More basic terms tend to be simply and more efficiently encoded--more elaborated terms tend to be more expressive and less efficient in code.</p> <p>6. More basic terms are less likely to have been borrowed from outside, and are less subject to be "loaned" outside than more elaborated terms.</p> <p>7. More basic terms are less likely to change morpho-phonologically than more elaborate terms.</p> <p>8. Within any category that is constitutive of a natural continuum--for instance colors, animals, insects, plants, shapes, etc.</p> <p>a. There will be a sequence of acquisition in which more basic terms will come before more elaborated forms.</p> <p>b. The number of available terms will determine the range and level of differentiation of the resulting spectrum.</p> <p>9. Basic terms will tend to be more unmarked than elaborated terms.</p> <p>10. Basic terms will be less symbolically specialized than elaborated terms.</p> <p>11. Basic terms will be taxonomically higher and more general than elaborated terms.</p> <p>This points up a critical factor of human acquisition and symbolic functioning. It is tied to an effective cultural environment within which symbolic acquisition becomes reinforced and structured. Language is inherently a social phenomena. It is situated and takes its shape in a community of speakers and cannot occur or be realistically considered in isolation from this socio-cultural context. We cannot therefore fully account for language in terms the language apparatus for speech production ontologically centered in the individual organism.</p> <p><u>The locus of socio-cultural phenomena as a natural system of information is therefore objectively situated in the external environment and is evolutionarily and inextricably situated within a socio-cultural context.</u> As such it is out there and takes its shape largely independent of its subjective character in the mind of the individual culture-bearer.</p> <p><u>There is an isomorphism of patterning between ontogenetic, developmental acquisition and socio-cultural acquisition, just as there is a parallel isomorphism between the objective patterning of information in the external socio-cultural context and the subjective patterning of information in the internalized phenomenal field of the individual.</u> This isomorphism is due primarily to <u>:1. the evolutionary dependency of human development and linguistic apparatus upon a socio-cultural context; 2. the developmental ontogeny of the brain, the hardwiring of symbolic framing of the world being dependent upon the socio-cultural context.</p> </u> <p>In general, the ontogeny and cultural phylogeny of developmental acquisition is in the direction of greater symbolic framing and dynamism of this phenomenal field along different, successively embedded principles of organization. It is important to recognize the developmental aspects of the emergence of the symbolically mediated phenomenal field in the life-world of the individual and the socio-cultural group.</p> <p>This emergence of the phenomenal field begins with the embryo, and in early stages consists of a "multitude of transient mental experiences that are not linked together and vanish past all recall in a few second. Perhaps such mental experience are all animals and very young children have, all their learning processes being subconscious and strictly speaking unremembered." (Eccles, 1953.). It has been postulated that "The emergence of a part of the phenomenal field is a cognitive event always accompanied by some degree of affect." (Turney, 1955: 5)</p> <p>We speak of the emergence of an increasingly differentiated field from a cognitive standpoint and of an increasingly dynamic field from the affective standpoint, and an increasingly specialized field from a symbolic standpoint. This refers to the analytical separation of a whole and previously undifferentiated phenomenal field into a mosaic of subspaces which are then composed into a configuration in relation to the whole. This reconfiguration is part of symbolic framing of the phenomenal field. In all symbolic frames, there is always an implicit part-whole relationship. It has been hypothesized that 1:"The whole field determines the nature of each of its parts." (Turney, 1955: 9) and 2: "Any part determines in part the nature of the field and affects its dynamics at any moment of action." (Turney, 1955: 11)</p> <p>The organization and structure of the patterning of mediation of the phenomenal field is held to be variable and dynamic, though become more stable with maturity. Because of the complexity, the polythetic constitution and the inheritance of both lexical, cognitive and affective associations, realistically mapping regions of this field for any particular person was held to be extremely difficult if not impossible, at least before the advent of the computer revolution.</p> <p>It has been hypothesized that "The potential of parts in the dynamics of the field is a function of the affect, but is not a constant." (Turney, 1955: 12) and that "The differentiation of the field (or any part) is a cognitive function, its associated affect changing in direction and intensity with each stage of differentiation." (Turney, 1955: 15)</p> <p>The affective component of the symbolic articulation of the field may lead to the cathectic fixation of feeling within an ossified and static structure of symbolic relations which to some degree locks up the potency of the field for adaptive acquisition. It entails that all events are filled with relative embodied meaning and that we respond to them as "lived" or vital experience, and all symbolic structures of meaning are inherently "loaded" from the standpoint of affective associations which engender some level and kind of dynamic organismic response or reaction.</p> <p>The affective component of meaning should not be understated, as it determines that the core structure of a cultural paradigm cannot be merely comprehended as a cognitive, abstract model, but entails a nexus of values, feelings and states of subjective being which are integral to the core.</p> <p>Affective universals of meaning have been empirically documented by Charles Osgood. et al. Osgood located a universal set of primary dimensions of semantic meaning which differed cross-culturally. These basic dimensions of affective meaning are Evaluation, Potency and Activity.</p> <p>We may refer to relative levels of symbolic mediation of experience, both externally in the socio-cultural context and internally in the subjective mapping of the phenomenal field--relative levels which will be reflected in terms of terminological categories and distinctions, language, and symbolic specialization of function.</p> <p>These relative levels of symbolic framing allow us to refer to an acquisitive/developmental scale which holds isometrically for both ontogenetic subjective development as well as for wider cultural development, along which both individuals and different cultures may be relatively ranked in order of their achieved degree of symbolic articulation of reality. Higher achieved articulation of reality makes available greater degrees of cognitive differentiation--higher levels of achieved differentiation allows for a greater more specialized symbolic articulation of reality.</p> <p>Two related postulates posit a connection with this proposition to general neurological activity and functioning: 1. There is some degree of awareness of each and every differentiation of the field, awareness that may be linked to the reticular system of the brain stem in both ego-trophic functions of excitability and tropho-tropic functions of activity inhibition as well as to involvement of the cerebral cortex in the selection of the content of experience and to the control of the direction of thought--i.e. attention and set. These are linked to corresponding levels of consciousness, and to the general proposition that:</p> <p>The precision and clearness of the cognitive event and the intensity of the affect associated with it are both determiners of the degree of awareness.</p> <p>Awareness with the implications of waking consciousness or some alternate or relative or dependent state of consciousness does not take into account the unconscious influence of "parts previously differentiated" that are completely out of awareness.</p> <p>It is a central hypothesis of this theory that such unconscious background processes have a critical influence upon the symbolic articulation, dynamics and differentiation of the phenomenal field and is constraining, unavoidable, and empirically available to validation through indirect, circumstantial evidence. We may state that in every symbolic articulation there is some degree of unconscious unawareness which influences the event, and that in part influences the relative level differentiation and dynamics of the event.</p> <p>It is this extraneous factor, of the influence of the ground on the perception of the figure, that is the source of noise and ambiguity of identity of relations within our awareness. It is tied to both the external context of background associations and relations, as well as to an internal unconscious process that is largely constituted by potential memory associations--or trace residual patternings which remain embedded in the neural connections of the brain.</p> <p>Thus the symbolic mechanism underlying the articulation of reality is not entirely deterministic of the patterning of the phenomenal field, but must be accounted for in terms of a wider, less deterministic and more open role of the processes of symbolization which allow the symbolic construct to tolerate some ambiguity, to carry more than one meaning, to be designated by alternate terms, or to stand for different, even mutually contradictory things at the same time. Thus, the part-whole relationship stands in some measure of funny irrelation.</p> <p>Symbol systems allow for a relative degree of achieved unity of the whole over and above the parts, or for the part to stand in place of the whole or the whole to stand in place of the part. Thus a symbolic reunification of a differentiated phenomenal field can be achieved symbolically, but never completely.</p> <p>We may account for and define the role of symbolization neurologically on two levels: 1. in the analytical articulation of the phenomenal field from a previously undifferentiated whole into part-whole relations, principally by means of terminological associations of cognitive and affective components and; 2. a synthetic reunification of the part-whole relationships into a previously differentiated whole, principally by means of terminological abstraction, concretization, reification and rationalization--such that the term comes to designate and stand in place of the region of the phenomenal field which it articulates.</p> <p>It is the secondary symbolic function that we find the proclivity of the human mind to strive to reconfigure an analytically differentiated world to achieve some form of synthetic gestalt of sense of overall pattern of part-whole relationship--a drive to find order among parts that may be neurotically tied to the reduction of ambiguity inherent to its analytical differentiation, as well as to a normal need for order among the parts. It is the capacity of symbolizations to achieve effectively this second function that we speak of the integration of phenomenological reality as a symbolic achievement which is correlated to some extent with adaptation to a dynamic, changing world. The ability to achieve conscious awareness in this second form of a gestalt is determined in part by both conscious and unconscious processes involving both affective and cognitive dimensions of association.</p> <p>Psycho-cultural gestalt is the term I have adopted to refer to the second achievement of a sense of reunification of the part-whole relation, and its frequency and clarity are relative measures of the adaptive integrity of both the individual culture-bearer and the socio-cultural context in which the member of culture is situated.</p> <p>It points up the dynamic, cybernetic relationship between internal process of symbolic articulation and external patterns of the socio-cultural contexts. It suggests that the interdependency between the internal and external orders for a dual processing system in which feedback can be both resonance amplifying and resonance dampening and in which long term patterns may lead to destructive or constructive patterns of interference. Thus cultural gestalt is a relative measure of the state of patterned interference of relations between external context and internalized subjective constructs.</p> <p>This theory can lead to the precise articulation of 1. A systematic conceptioning of the socio-cultural contexts which define the objective, external foundation, with the aim of explaining the central, underlying implicit structure and functioning of this system. 2. A systematic conceptioning of the internal processes of symbolization and recognition which parallels and to some extent subjective maps the external order, especially accounting for the unconscious dynamics of the process. 3. The implementation of a body of methods which will allow for the empirical and experimental exploration of these processes, their analysis and graphic representation in a realistic manner.</p> <b><u> <p>Cultural Paradigms and Scientific Codifications</p> </u></b> <p>Socio-cultural contexts depend upon the establishment and reinforcement of a minimal level of coherence and order which tends to follow certain principles: it is simple and focally oriented, based upon the relationship between a few core variables or values: it tends to appropriate basic forms or categories, such that it becomes embedded in a level that is largely unmarked and indirect in its constraining function: it becomes focally elaborated and symbolically represented in highly stylized codifications which define and positively sanction the focal orientation; its focal and basic elaborations are relative conservative and resist change or alteration; a secondary system of direct negative sanctions may arise which define alternate or relativizing orientations as antithetical and which may contain symbolic apparatus for managing marginal events or relativizing orientations when they arise.</p> <p>This central orientation of a culture will be more or less highly differentiated, and constitutes the basis of an implicit cultural model of a focal cultural orientation. Every cultural system, in order to be coherent, maintains implicitly some core or central paradigm that defines and orients the world in a focal and coherent model. The capacity for individuals within a cultural orientation to achieve and maintain an effective sense of cultural gestalt rests upon their ability to realize and positively reinforce in their everyday lives and social relations the implicit paradigm which underlies its patterning and which becomes largely ossified and ritually elaborated in a conservative sense in the form of core traditional practices, beliefs, teachings, and texts.</p> <p>The paradigm of a cultural orientation is meant in a generic sense of "a basic set of beliefs that guides actions". This paradigm is usually implicit as a guide, and its integration is largely invisible on the surface of everyday behavior. A paradigm is rooted in a socio-cultural context of interaction. It is this context which largely, conventionally defines it as received and normal and that reinforces it in everyday life.</p> <p>So basic and transparent is it in our everyday judgments and decisions and actions that it informs our understanding of the world as pragmatic common sense. Its function of sanctioning and constraining behavior are largely indirect. Paradigms are, in a structural, and largely ideal sense, rule-bound and this deeper sense of order can be propositionally represented in a rule-based system.</p> <p>The central thesis of this work is that for any cultural orientation to be minimally coherent, like any language to which it is largely attached and expressed, a cultural orientation must exhibit in terms of patterning of behavior and social relations a centrally oriented paradigm against which the entire world becomes ordered and understood. It is this paradigm by which we come to recognize and understand culture and cultural differences, and by which we come to understand that cultural differences are largely relative to the orientation in which they are situated.</p> <p>To say that this paradigm is largely symbolic and behavioral should go without saying--as such it provides unity not only within the culture, but to the entire universe which becomes oriented around it. It functions symbolically in our lives, and is constituted symbolically in our own being, even at an organic level of our perceptions, feelings and bodily reactions to our world.</p> <p>This paradigm is from a culture historical standpoint not unlike the Hegelian geist, but it does not stand as the hub around which all action depends. People may or may not act in relation to it. People may choose and often do so act independently of it or in its contradiction, but it remains there, embedded in the background of the action, to give it social significance and symbolic form, and whether we go with the grain or against it, we all at least implicitly know what it is.</p> <p>The paradigm itself is not a changeless or static structure. It changes as well, and its changing often entails major disruptions on the surface flow of events in our shared lives the origin or reasons for which we may not clearly understand. When our paradigm changes, our world changes with it.</p> <p>When we refer to a paradigm shift, we refer to a socio-cultural revolution in which conversion from one symbolic orientation to another is at the heart of the process, and in which the symbolic orientation of the paradigm becomes subjectively embodied in not only the way we do things, act and think about the world, but even in the way we talk about it and perceive it. Thus, a conversion experience that accompanies a paradigm switch, something referred to as alternation of subjective identity, is in a sense total, leading to a new way of seeing, talking about and behaving in relation to the world, as well as a new way in which the world itself becomes related to us.</p> <p>The effectiveness of the cultural paradigm is measurable in terms of its consequences for symbolic framing, and in terms of its effectiveness in the achievement of cultural gestalt in the relations and lives of its culture-bearers. It is the contention of this paper and this work that the implicit structural patterning and function of the underlying cultural paradigm which is based upon focal cultural models as indirect sanctions for belief and behavior, can be expressed in terms of which are propositionally explicit and lend themselves to naturalistic, scientific codification which are independent of the cultural expressions or codifications found within the context.</p> <p>It is an outcome of this line of thought that this theory of human socio-cultural realities as natural systems theory of informational patterning is <u>scientific</u> because it is by definition and demonstration effectively independent of any particular socio-cultural context of interpretation, and hence can be considered non-ethnocentric and objectively unbiased, though it is equally amenable to virtually any different cultural orientation.</p> <b><u> <p>Symbolic Framing</p> </u></b> <p>Symbolic framing is a term coined for a very basic perceptual and cognitive process of filling in the ambiguous gaps of a figure-ground relationship such that a gestalt configuration is achieved in the comprehension of an external stimuli. It is referred to as symbolic because it is held to be the fundamental neural mechanism underlying our capacity for symbolization and the construction of symbolic meaning in reality. A series of symbolic frame tasks were devised and administered in the course of an extensive ethnographic study with the intention of analyzing in greater detail the hypothetical process of symbolic framing and its variations in a number of different tasks.</p> <p>It may be said at the outset that symbolic framing is a form of pattern recognition in which the achievement of a "gestalt" or comprehension of a unified configuration is tied to our capacity for processing and organizing the figure-frame or figure-ground or figure-field relationships both perceptually and conceptually. Reference to a phenomenal field as the ground of both perception and cognition refers to a basic neural unity of mental activations which are rooted in the base nervous sensory perception of the world, and works its way up to the level of abstract conceptualization and conscious rationalization.</p> <p>In this regard, we cannot consider the abstract thought of some ideal notion to be fundamentally, in essence, any different or separate from the perception of, say an apple or the feeling of a slimy fish in our hands. We may speak then of a presupposed psychic-phenomenal unity of experience which states not that all of us sees things necessarily in the same way, but that the things we see tend to see also to be the things that we think. A mental disorder like schizophrenia may be the rudimentary disunification of this relatively continuous field of psychic integration. Perceptions and conceptions no longer stand in any necessary one-to-one correspondence or in homologous or even analogous relationship.</p> <p>Behind this psychic-phenomenal unity of experience exists an innate predisposition of the mind to superimpose a sense of order, or, to put it another way, to prefer and select for a sense of field coherence such that there is continuity and consistency of experience. Perceptual constancy is but one fairly well studied aspect of this general mental tendency. This is a very basic proclivity of the mind, and occurs on a level which is automatic and usually, normally, well out of our conscious awareness. It may be argued that this predisposition is so fundamental to human mentation that it actually frees our conscious mind the problematics of attending to details to attend to more focal and adaptively significant tasks.</p> <p>To a large extent, symbolic framing shares a very similar and, it is argued, derivative function of both smoothing the ripples of the phenomenal and psychic field, and of maintaining the coherence and unity of experience.</p> <p>As it often happens, disruptions and disunities of experience frequently occur at many levels of our experience. These threaten and tend to undermine our sense of unity of experience. They result in confusion, disorientation, cognitive errors of mistaken identity, tricks of the mind, and cognitive dissonance are the result of such states of disrepair. Thus it largely becomes the psychological function of the mind in our recognition and relation to the field of experience to be able to repair in a sufficient manner these disruptions of our field in order that they do not pose a threat to our sense of order any longer, and a sense of unity and gestalt experience can be restored.</p> <p>Cognitive repair occurs continuously on very unconscious and even in very fundamental perceptual ways. The famous blank spot in the corner of our field of vision at which the optic nerve connects to the inner surface of the eye, is almost always filled in by information from surrounding rod and cone cells such that a spot never comes to our awareness. The mind has a tremendous facility in filling in the gaps of the perceptual field such that we perceive as continuous what may in fact be discontinuous signals. The net effect is the generation of an illusion of animated consciousness or of a continuous stream of experience. The point by point focal awareness of our focal awareness or consciousness is another case in point. The fact that awareness is rarely if ever steadily focused, but continuously networks a configuration of focal points in our field of awareness, demonstrates that even at a higher level of consciousness our experience is rarely if ever a steady state though it appears so.</p> <p>It is this proclivity and inherent organizational facility of the human mind that, it is the claim of this paper, constitutes the foundation of symbolic awareness as a distinctively human form of mentation and that underlies the constructive and productive processes of allow our systems of symbolic representation of reality. To dismiss this process as merely "pattern-recognition" misses the point of the complexity of the process as an innate patterning of both the brain and human mentation. It is a form of pattern-recognition which may be like the frog's visual recognition of a fly in motion or of a shadow. But it is a form of recognition with a difference as the frog instinctively responds to the fly's motion or the presence of a shadow, but the human must think about it, symbolize it, even name it, and then decide on a course of action, whether this is reflexive or not. In fact, human's cannot but help think about it even in the basic sense that much of the filling in of gaps of lower-order sensory fields may actually be accomplished at a higher level or from a higher level source. Thus, human brains are thinking machines in a very basic and fundamental ways, and have probably evolved as such. We are thinking all of the time--even when we are asleep or when we are dreaming, our brains our thinking. And the basic way that we think is by definition and function symbolic.</p> <p>In the process of elicitation of symbolic frame tasks, several patterns of response became quite evident:</p> <p>1. Memory material stored deeply in the mind is frequently used for filling in the gaps of the phenomenal field in order to achieve a gestalt.</p> <p>2. Such memory material, itself symbolic, is often times incorrect or erroneous in that it does not "fit" the field.</p> <p>3. Memory material seems to come from different, and probably stratified levels and these levels reflect the working of thoughts from perceptual substance to full blown abstract rationalizations. Memory material that comes deeply from the mind tends to be more abstractly symbolic than surface content. Thus the filling in of perceptual gaps may require only the material available from short-term memory--the color of the surrounding background of the object, for instance. If unavailable, or if the gaps are of a more complex sequential or arrangement pattern in a figure field relations, then the memory information may be drawn from a deeper source of a working or a medium term memory. Finally, if the gaps represent a basic figure-frame ambiguity or inherent thematic ambiguity of the figure itself, then memory information relied upon to disambiguate the figure-frame relation or to make thematic sense of the figure may be drawn more deeply from within the memory, drawing upon psychic content or material which may be more symbolic as well as rationalistic in the conventional sense.</p> <p>4. It is evident that these processes of "psychic repair" of the phenomenal field are largely unconscious and, furthermore, compulsive. We cannot but help but do these things, because we are driving in a fundamental, perhaps "squamous" way to configure pattern and structure in our world.</p> <p>5. The process of disruption and repair are fairly continuous background processes, and normally this can be considered a subconscious form of basic learning. It can be expected that the mind will come to habitually rely upon similar or the same memory materials that it successfully applied to previous similar contexts.</p> <p>6. But there results a certain potential for negative or degenerative feedback such that greater disruption generates greater repair which generates a greater likelihood of disrepair or mistakes, which leads to greater disruption or the process of disrupted information as if it were normal. Uncorrected problems of vision or hearing, or problems of visual or auditory integration, may lead to deeper seated problems of cognitive disrepair, or the creation and filling in of gaps deeper within the processes of consciousness. I refer to this as basically psychically pathological processes of secondary disrepair.</p> <p>7.It appears that there are within the mind basic forms which are good to think and that the mind uses to fill in and on which to construct more elaborated forms albeit in a stereotypical, analogous or simplified manner. There is a marked tendency to rely upon such basic forms at very early stages of the process of symbolic disambiguation.</p> <p>8. Furthermore, it appears that with the deeper, more expressive, processes of symbolic repair, there are certain basic, paradigmatically alternate directions of stylization, as well as mixed, inbetween, hybrids, that such reconstructive repair can take, and these basic symbolic directions appear to be affectively and symbolically tied to the psycho-social identity of the self in relation to the other, as well as to the juxtapositioning of the ideal in relation to the base or vulgar.</p> <p>9. These tendencies appear to take on a pattern similar to that elucidated by Claude Levi-Strauss in the dialectical interplay and synthesis of opposites, and elicited forms of thematic rationalization can be referred to as forms of ego-defense mechanisms in the conceptual definition of the boundary and symbolic mediation between these dialectically contraposed symbolic forms. These structural patterns appear to be deeply rooted in the psyche and in a sense predetermine our symbolic recognition and interpretation of the world. They are mostly unconscious processes which shape our conscious awareness.</p> <p>10. At all levels, these forms of consciousness tend to take two or three basic modalities--a normal mode, a neurotic mode, and a psychically or organically disturbed mode that can be distinguished on the ability to achieve a clear gestalt or relative level of psychic integration of the figure-ground relationship, and by the noticeable absence or presence of latent processes of secondary psychic disrepair.</p> <p>11. Furthermore, these forms of conscious process can also be said to be distinguished on the basis of their relative level organic articulation between internal and external realities and relative level of achieved symbolic differentiation and sophistication of elaborated forms. In this regard, there appears to be an acquired form of disordered characteriological dependency in gross relation to the environment which can be thought to be a kind of passive responsiveness to the environment versus an active participation with it. This form of phenomenal dependency upon the whole to frame the part can be considered as an overall and nearly exclusive over reliance on the external cues of the context of psychic perception, to the ignorance or inability to effectively separate or disambiguate as definitively distinct the object of focus from the framework</p> <p>Symbolic framing procedures offer a productive new methodology. Not only are a wide variety of symbolic frame devices able to be designed and administered in a controlled and reliable manner, but different procedures allow for multiple or similar forms of analysis and representation of the response patterns which enable a systematic mapping of these patterns and an exploration of the symbolic spaces which they open up for us. Furthermore, symbolic framing methodology readily lends itself to the construction of alternative computer systems which allow for the complex modeling of socio-cultural patterning.</p> <p>We may refer to the ability of the same symbolic framing devices to approach the analysis of symbolic framing in its several respects simultaneously:</p> <p>First, it allows elicitation of knowledge, domains, terms and their relations which are indicative indirectly of the external patterning of information in the socio-cultural contexts, especially as such knowledge is a shared pattern.</p> <p>Secondly, it allows the detailed analytical means of indirectly demonstrating the internal processes and patterning of the cognitive differentiation and affective dynamics of the phenomenal field, as well as the basic symbolic processes which allow the intermediation between internal and external worlds.</p> <p>Third, they allow us a form of control over the process which enable us to situate the administration and pattern of response within the socio-cultural milieu which is a naturalistic context of their normal occurrence. We can then speak of experimentally manipulating the cultural context or of observationally analyzing it in order to more fully investigate the patterning of influence this may have upon symbolic framing.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="fifteen">CHAPTER FOURTEEN</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">THEORY AND METHOD OF SYMBOLIC FRAMING</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The Science of Anthropology has yet to define itself paradigmatically, though some would claim that it is essentially a non-paradigmatic humanity, while many others, especially in the United States, have attempted to fit it into a biological model of Evolution--which from the standpoint of culture is a little like trying to fit the model of biological evolution into the physical model of Einstein's theory of relativity.</p> <p>Socio-biological and bio-cultural studies that attempt to explain social behavior and patterning on the basis of genetic and evolutionary causes while at the same time explaining away or euphemistically redefining human culture as biology represents a kind of persistent folk biology which is deeply rooted in nature/nurture dichotomy and in the belief that "blood is thicker than water." These orientations indirectly serve to legitimate very conservative and essentially racist "do nothing" attitudes and structural relations which continue domestically to discriminate and victimize by "benign neglect" certain minority groups--largely blacks, homosexuals, and poor women and children, and internationally to promote "coca cola" policies of aiding the elite while starving the poor.</p> <p>Not only have no clear cut genetic linkages ever been found to explain complex individual behaviors, but no genetic linkages have ever been clearly proven to underlie complex social patterning. These attempts when applied to cultural explanations of reality represent a kind of pseudo-science which, because they ignore the problem of human history and conflate and fail to clearly discriminate at several levels (early socialization, development, secondary socialization and social sanctioning) the influence of environment and culture in the patterning of individual behavior.</p> <b><u> <p>Theory</p> </u></b> <p>There have been five cornerstones in cultural anthropological research--relativism, cross-cultural comparison, a strong inductivist empiricism, participant observation and a quest for universal's of human nature. It has been upon these cornerstones that a genuine science of anthropology must be built.</p> <p>The concept and study of human ethno-culture has been posed as a viable alternative to implicitly racist biological approaches to the study of human society and culture. Ethnoculture outlines not only an attitude towards the importance of historical relations and events in influencing the patterning of culture, and of the resulting relativities of culture history, but also the intrinsic and unavoidable historicity of our hermeneutical and critical interpretations of the evidence, both from a standpoint of internal and external validity, that renders all our models of the other largely reified "constructions" of our own making.</p> <p>The science of anthropology can move beyond these limitations, but only slowly and carefully and not by committing the majority of its funding to genetic short-cuts or grand leaps of evolutionary faith.</p> <p><b><u>Cultural gestalt</u></b> is the distinctive pattern of characteristics--including mental attitudes, affective dispositions, perceptions, language, systems of belief, value, knowledge, technology, customs, arts, styles of social interaction, sanctions, roles, behavior, habits of dress, tastes and eating habits, material and symbolic artifacts and relations with an environmental context--shared by an <b><u>ethnoculture</u></b>, a corporate community of people existing in a common time and place, that is defined both internally by shared cognitive structures of mind and externally in social relations and reference with other people and groups.</p> <p>The emphasis upon ethnoculture as a viable theoretical alternative provides a critical emphasis <u>upon the reality of culture</u>--not as an end-product or by-product of other theoretical explanations (as something to be explained away), but as itself a viable social and historical phenomena which causes things to happen to people in the world.</p> <p>The study of ethnoculture has become particularly important in the post-colonial world where new asymmetrical nationalisms have encompassed diverse cultures and have served to highlight ethnic differences and identities in the struggle for resources and power in the world, even to the point of ethnic schismogenesis.</p> <p>Symbolic framing constitutes a general theory about human cultural phenomena. <b><u>Culture</u></b> from this standpoint <u>is the whole gestalt of symbolic connections between external social-environmental relations and internalized mental representations of these relations, and the consequent behavioral, emotional and social patterning which represent responses to these relations</u>. Culture takes shape, has reference to and is always 'situated' within a larger nexus of historical, social and environmental relations. We cannot consider human identity or social phenomena outside of or apart from this cultural context which serves to relativize cultural orientations and differences between groups.</p> <p>Socially, culture comes to define itself through processes of interpersonal objectification at several possible levels (familially, locally, ethnically, regionally, nationally) in terms of a shared corporate sense of community that is larger than life and to some extent has a superorganic life of its own. At the same time, culture comes to express itself psychologically in terms of individual identity and personality, through processes of subjectification involving internalization and identification with group values and norms, a distinctive profile of shared traits or range of behaviors and symbolic orientations, rationalizations, attitudes and motivations. The collective sharing of a suit of traits, and its sanctioning, reinforcement and reification as if natural and given, both socially and psychologically, constitutes the basis of cultural reality.</p> <p>The general 'Symbolic framing theory' informing this study can be outlined by seven main principles and their corollaries:</p> <p><b><u>1. Culture is causally effective and thus functionally real. </u></b>Maintaining cultural gestalt is vital both to the functioning of human society as well as to the ordering of human consciousness, and is an expression of the natural cybernetics of culture.</p> <p><b><u>a:</u></b> <u>Cultural reality is holistically integrated.</u> Cultural Gestalt can be best understood at the level of cultural phenomena itself, within the context of its historical occurrence, and analytical reduction of such patterning is inadequate to the representation of culture, though acceptable and demanded from the standpoint of cross-cultural analysis.</p> <p><b><u>b: </u></b><u>Cultural reality is symbolically mediated and subjectively embodied</u>. The implicit cultural gestalt becomes internalized through processes of enculturation and socialization, and humans have evolved explicitly for this process of internalization which is accomplished through the symbolic mediation of language.</p> <p><b><u>b:</u></b> <u>Human reality is culturally and psychologically relative.</u> The cultural gestalts of different peoples follows different patterning, and these differences are in many ways incommensurable and incompatible with one another.</p> <p><b><u>2. Cultural reality is always ethnoculturally situated in an historical context of asymmetrical acculturation. </u></b>Cultural Gestalts are the historical consequence of ethnocultural groupings maintaining their distinctive cultural orientation in background relation to other ethnocultural groupings.</p> <p><b><u>a:</u> </b><u>Ethno-culture is an enduring, corporate institutional form of symbolic expression</u> that is characterized by: 1. a shared sense of identity; 2. a shared sense of community; 3. a shared implicit patterning of gestalt symbolization.</p> <p><b><u>b:</u></b> <u>Ethno-cultural realities are embedded within larger social historical realities</u> and is but one level of human reality which is itself integrated with other kinds of social, historical and biographical patterning.</p> <p><u>3. <b>Cultural change due to historical influence is inevitable.</b></u> Cultural realities are always changing historically and are part consequence of inter-cultural contacts or patterns of acculturation from alternative cultural realities which become the primary source of discordance and change for a cultural grouping.</p> <p><b><u>a:</u></b> <u>For a variety of different reasons, cultures may change at different and variable rates.</p> </u> <p><b><u>b:</u></b> <u>Acculturation is the primary source of cultural change.</u> Though cultural change may be both endogenous and exogenous, extraneous acculturative influences have been historically preponderant and are usually the independent variable while endogenous changes remain the dependent variable.</p> <p><b><u>c:</u></b> <u>Cultural reality is contextualized and relativized within a multicultural continuum.</u> All cultures exist within a larger socio-historical continuum which serves to contextualize inter-cultural relations. We can speak of an historically defined, multi-cultural continuum which constitutes the larger social realities of humankind and which always serve to contextualize and relativize the realities of any single culture.</p> <p><b><u>4:</u></b> <b><u>All cultural groupings face a common and chronic existential challenge of adaptive integration in relation to change.</u></b> Because of the inevitability of cultural change, groups always face the existential problem of adaptive integration. The problem of cultural integration is the chronic consequence of change, of always being only partially and incompletely integrated.</p> <p><b><u>a:</u></b> <u>Cultural Gestalt is cybernetically structured</u> on the basis of the functional need to always maximize cultural coherence and minimize cultural chaos.</p> <p><b><u>b:</u></b> <u>All cultural groupings are preoccupied with the problem of reconstruction, defined as the reciprocal problems of primary production and secondary reproduction of the predominant cultural patterning. </u>Production concerns the utilization of basic resources vital to the survival of the population. Reproduction concerns the replacement of the population and the symbolic continuation of the cultural gestalt. <u>In order for a culture to adapt in the long run, reproductive strategies must be consonant with productive strategies.</p> </u> <p><b><u>c:</u></b> <u>All cultures are inherently conservative, some more than others. </u>The conservativeness of cultural orientations, usually expressed as tradition and the resistance to innovation, is a natural and normal predisposition of all cultural orientations, and is the principle expression of the cultural interests in the priority of cultural reproduction.</p> <p><b><u>d:</u></b> <u>All cultures are minimally shared</u>. Culture is mostly a social phenomena, and cultural integration is mostly achieved through sharing of cultural traits and the minimal achievement of cultural consensus.</p> <p><b><u>e:</u></b> <u>Cultural reproduction depends upon primary enculturation and socialization, i.e. direct and indirect sanctioning of appropriate traits, ideals, patterns, habits, tastes, models, roles, interpersonal relations and symbolic and institutional forms of culture.</u> Cultures are transmitted through time and conserved principally by the means of enculturation and subsequent sanctioning of appropriate behavior by adults.</p> <p><b><u>f:</u></b> <u>Cultural reconstruction is reinforced by its positive valuation, its social sanctioning, symbolic reification and its focal elaboration in patterns of secondary socialization and enculturation.</p> </u> <p><b><u>5 The challenge of cultural integration results in the construction of cultural reality structured in terms of the gestalt patterning of human symbolization.</u></b> Cultural reality is symbolic and the symbolic organization of cultural reality forms a "gestalt" patterning.<b> </b>Symbolization is a pattern-matching process in which externally framed figure-ground relationships are perceived as isomorphic or discordant with internalized information about such relationships. The cultural construction of human reality is primarily symbolic, and this symbolic basis of human culture underlies the mental, emotional, linguistic, relational, behavioral and even material organization of human existence.</p> <p><b><u>a: </u></b><u>Cultural reproduction involves the dialectical processes of social externalization and psycho-social internalization of symbolic forms.</u> Humans have externalized as a part of their objective environments elements which are both natural and cultural in origin, and have simultaneously internalized the same elements, and there is a constant feedback between these internal and external realities. The results of this dialectical process can be referred to as the <u>cultural construction of human reality</u>.</p> <p><b><u>b:</u></b> <u>The human capacity and evolutionary possibility of cultural reality is cognitively embedded in the organization of the brain and has its origins in human evolution.</u><b> </b>The cognitive foundation of cultural organization is primarily symbolic, built upon the gestalt pattern-matching competence of the human brain, and we can properly speak of the symbolic organization of cultural realities and of its many aspects--its language, art, religion, technology and practical or "reality culture" as well.</p> <p>The symbolic organization of human reality has its foundation in the neuro-physiological organization of the human brain, and in the developmental ontogeny of the individual as a culture-bearer.</p> <p><b><u>6. The reconstruction of cultural reality becomes symbolically reified as a unique and distinctive "gestalt" of adaptive integration and expression of individual and cultural identity. </u></b>The human reconstruction of cultural reality is an adaptive response that becomes symbolically reified. Human nature and culture are dialectically intertwined, such that culture defines and is defined by human nature. The symbolic reification of the cultural construction of reality depends upon the <u>perceived and recognized </u>isomorphism between internalized and externalized versions of that reality.</p> <b> <p><u>a:</u></b> <u>The principle consequences of cultural integration and reproduction become expressed primarily in symbolic forms of contradiction and consonance affecting the organization of everyday life</u>. These contradictions and consonances are manifest upon several levels of cultural reality, in the dialectical problems of symbolic boundary maintenance both within and outside of the cultural grouping of people, and in terms of status-role identification of the individual within the group, and in the existential dilemmas which are commonly shared in the life-worlds of its members.</p> <p><b><u>b:</u></b> <u>Culture is socially externalized in interpersonal relations and institutional organization and psychologically internalized in the status-role identity of the individual.</u><b> </b>The realities of culture are mostly subjective and socially expressed by its members via their values, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, knowledge, language, behavior, external and material representations, and social institutional forms, in relation with one another. The internalization and externalization processes are mutually and dialectically reinforcing, and are necessary in the reification of cultural reconstructions of reality.</p> <p><b><u>c: </u></b><u>Inconsistencies in social-psychological identification, interpersonal relations and boundary maintenance are the principle forms of symbolic expression of the contradictions and discordance of cultural realties. </u>This proposition is more of an hypothesis that some forms of illness and social pathology will be symbolic expressions symptomatic of deeper and broader psycho-cultural dilemmas and conflicts.<u></p> </u> <p><b><u>d: </u></b><u>Language is the principle means of the symbolic mediation, communication and expression of cultural reification.</u><b> </b>Language is the central symbolic mechanism mediating between external patterns of culture and internalized maps of culture. Linguistic analysis must ultimately be framed in terms of this symbolic function--i.e. language is symbolically structured.</p> <b><font FACE="Times" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> </font></b> <p>The difficulty in approaching the problem of cultural reality is its 'non-reflexive transparency'--an inherent invisibility of the facets of one's own culture that is the consequence of its deep internalization and contextualizing in the background of everyday life, and thus its tendency to become 'naturalized' as a taken-for-granted aspect of human nature that is usually out of awareness.</p> <p>The theory of symbolic framing in the formation of cultural gestalt brings us to the central problem of the integration of human reality simultaneously at several levels of its psychological articulation and differentiation. Symbolisms allow the integration of diverse and eclectic elements into a coherent and otherwise unnatural order. This is the power of symbolization to merge and fill in gaps and to overcome the contrasts represented by contradictory or incompatible elements.</p> <p>Cultural gestalt, moreover, is more than just a predominant patterning of a culture as defined by the average or modal personality. It is a set of consistent relationships between variables which is both externalized in the cultural landscape and internalized as a cognitive map in the brain of the culture-bearer.</p> <p>Cultural Gestalt is a mosaic of traits and affinities, except that individual patterning varies markedly--more like a variable cultural moire. Though the individual components and relationships of the gestalt may vary, there are consistent patterns within these relationships--frequencies of occurrence, marked salience of certain objects, remarkable lack of salience for others that remains unvaried and which give a distinctive form to the gestalt. Though individual components of the mosaic may be continuously juxtaposed with one another, these broader relationships remain stable.</p> <p>The external stimuli of a symbol can be thought of as only a single tile of the cultural mosaic, but it should not be construed as just an artifact or objective entity. A symbol is more of an expression of a relationship and a process of interaction between the external and internal worlds, and can be thought of rather as a mediator or "interface" between these worlds. It is more precise to speak of symbolization than of symbols per se.</p> <p>Symbolizations as human percepto-cognitive constructs "fill" in and "repair" gaps in the cognized field of environmental relations, thus smoothing out and rendering this field coherent and apparently integrated.</p> <p>All symbolizations share a number of common features rooted to the symbolic psychology of the mind, one that underlies the psychology of culture. Anything can be symbolic and most things have a symbolic aspect. Symbols are composite constructs. All symbols have an external reference--a perceptual stimuli configured against an expected context of relations with other stimuli. All symbols have a multifaceted, emblematic structure composed of multiple signs, multi-modal percepts and alternative associations. All symbols also have an internal reference--a set of semantic, affective, linguistic and evaluative relations or associations which define the internal locus that is rooted in the memory. Symbols thus chunk the landscape of cultural knowledge in distinct ways.</p> <p>There are several important characteristics of cultural knowledge:</p> <p>1. Cultural knowledge is historically influenced, principally by processes of acculturation.</p> <p>2. Cultural knowledge is materially embedded in or 'situated' in a local social and environmental context.</p> <p>3. Cultural knowledge is psychologically embodied within the mental and behavioral constructions and response of the individual as a culture bearer.</p> <p>4. Cultural knowledge is primarily symbolic, comprising both internal and external components of symbolization.</p> <p>5. Symbolic functioning of the human mind is organized on the basis of gestalt pattern recognition, therefore cultural knowledge is deposited in the human mind as such gestalt patterning.</p> <p>6. Cultural knowledge is linguistically encoded and is linguistically relative to the group in which it is situated.</p> <p>7. Cultural knowledge is unevenly distributed across a group, hence we may speak of different levels and orientations of cultural competence within any group.</p> <p>8. The patterning, function and organization of cultural knowledge is mostly implicit, unconscious and contextual to human awareness, both psychologically in the mind of the cultural informant and culturally in the arrangement and patterning of the socio-cultural context.</p> <p>9. The patterning of cultural knowledge is therefore normally transparent and invisible to the cultural informant.</p> <p>Gestalt symbolization thus describes a complex cultural psychology--an understanding of how cultural knowledge becomes embedded in the mind of the culture bearer as a distinct set of psychological affinities and processes that are shared within a community.</p> <p>Gestalt symbolization represents a simple extension of the principles of gestalt perception to the process of symbolization, or the human cognition of symbols, which is held to be primarily a perceptual process and secondarily a cognitive process.<sup><font FACE="Times" SIZE="1"> </font></sup>The symbolic 'chunking' of human experience defines those gestalt patterns that are culturally appropriate and which are perceived in a relatively unambiguous manner.</p> <p>Symbolization may occur in a fairly discrete number of steps--each representing a distinct psychological process. These steps are ordered along a single continuum ranging from gestalt perception to conception and, though discrete, seem to share in many of the same fundamental cognitive processes of the brain.</p> <p>It is evident that language intrudes upon and is implicated in these processes as early as the stage of focal attention. But language identification is clearly present in the process of objectification and all subsequent processes, and language can be seen as inherent to the indexical functioning of the cognitive mapping of the external world. The internal cognitive 'map' of reality is mediated by language and linked to the function of the memory as well as to the development of passive 'pattern recognition' of an internalized semantic field.</p> <p>Memory is stratified on at least four or five levels of functions: short-term memory, working memory, daily memory, medium-term memory, weekly, long-term memory--life-long. Memory is symbolically structured and mediated via linguistic indexing. Memory provides a mental map of symbolic reality. This map is constantly being tested against the perception and interaction with the external world.</p> <p>It is also evident that there may be clearly divergent alternative cognitive styles of problem solving and cognitive task performance as well as of personality orientation, that may be adequately encompassed within any single cultural orientation. Any cultural orientation is inherently flexible enough, and the processes of human symbolization so complex, as to allow for the coexistence and mutual functioning of a virtual infinity of alternate psychological orientations and profiles to coexist.</p> <p>The cybernetics of culture are that the internal patterning of the map and the external construction of the cultural environment are mutually reinforcing but not entirely symmetrical or exactly isomorphic. The mind is not the perfect mirror of the world. It is more an anagraphicl distortion of the stimuli received from the world in different ways. Culture is, therefore, the overall gestalt which results from this cybernetic interaction and integration of a shared symbolic field.</p> <p>The cultural landscape is nothing other than the embedded field of symbols situated in time and place--in the effective cultural environment within a specific ethnocultural community. The relative coherence and integration of this field is a measure and product of the degree of fit between external and internalized realities.</p> <p>There are a set of centrally important hypothesis to be tested by this research. These are:</p> <p>1. All human symbolization depends upon and involves basic processes of human perception and cognition that are fundamentally gestalt in structure and organization, therefore all human symbolization is also gestalt in design and function.</p> <p>2. Basic cognitive processes of memory, cognitive mapping, reason, are indexically organized by linguistic symbols, therefore language is also symbolically structured in both the mind and as spoken discourse.</p> <p>3. Cultural and psychological realities are integrated principally by means of gestalt symbolization, therefore cultural reality is also symbolically organized and its patterning follows the gestalt of human symbolization.</p> <p>4. Cultural symbolization is minimally shared and this sharing constitutes the basis of predominant cultural patterning, therefore, for any given community or sample, we may hypothesize an 'average level of cultural competence' defined by the degree of sharing manifest.</p> <p>5. Cultural symbolisms are emically salient and subjectively available to the average member of a culture, therefore patterns of cultural symbolization, cultural sharing and cultural-based cognition are etically available by the elicitation of shared patterns of response to similar symbolic stimuli.</p> <p>6. While anything may be symbolic, at any one time some symbols are more salient than others, and different cultures pick and choose focal and peripheral symbols from among a wider field, therefore, generally speaking, the more salient a symbol from among a field of alternative objects; 1. the more focal is that symbol to the cultural orientation; 2. the greater number of psychological processes are involved in the definition of the symbol.</p> <b><u> <p>Methodology</p> </u></b> <p>The objective of this study has been nothing less than a systematic description of Malaysian Chinese cultural gestalts in terms of the correlations and relationships manifest between a number of discrete variables--colors, objects, words, phrases, symbols, shapes, values-- as indicated by response patterns to a series of symbolic frame tests. The patterning of interrelationships defined between these kinds of variables can be said to characterize the community upon a distinctive cultural symbolic landscape.</p> <p>The basic design of symbolic frame tasks is rooted in the empirical efficacy of several basic principles of gestalt perception. Human perception is held to be consistent with the psychological integration of information as well as behavioral or symbolic response associated with such perception. Problems with perception are held to be primarily a problem of the interaction of the figure-ground or part-whole relationship, and are indirect indications of deeper seated problems tied to the percepto-cognitive pathway of the integration of perceptual information.</p> <p>The central principles of gestalt perception are:</p> <p>1. The principle of inhomogeneity--the figure must be in some way incongruent with the ground in order to be readily recognized as such.</p> <p>2. The principle of interaction of figure-ground--different backgrounds influence the perception of the figure. The more congruent are figure and ground, the more stable is perceptioin--the more incongruent, the less stable the perception.</p> <p>3. The principle of the laws of grouping--each figure has its own separate properties aside from those of its ground such that when certain conditions are achieved between the parts, namely proximity, similarity or common fate (i.e. same rotation or relative position to the frame) the more cohesive and unitary the figure appears to be. The less the proximity, similarity or fate are acheived, the greater the internal ambiguity and less stable is the perception of the figure.</p> <p>4. the principle of the law of Pragnanz--the tendency to get a decisive structuration of the perceived object with true orientation, such that a perceived "gestalt" tends to become sharply, correctly defined, more precise and stable as conditions permit.</p> <p>According to these principles, there is a greater cohesiveness and stability of the figure-ground relationship as these principles hold, and inversely, greater ambiguity and instability of the figure-ground relationship as these principles fail to pertain to the perception. Between these there is a continuum of more to less ordered or integrated gestalt perception. The failure to achieve gestalt or to achieve only a poor gestalt in perception may be credited to the application, or lack of realization, of these principles.</p> <p>"Psychologically, an organizing process occurs in perception which involves both internalization of objects and externalization of a subject's differentiation in this regard. Thus, adaptive behavior depends upon the quality and direction of a person's response to perceived objects in terms of inner needs and outer realities." (Fuller, 1982: 85)</p> <p>Other gestalt principles also play in the operation of perceptual response to symbolic frame tasks. It became evident that there is a constancy of perceptual field that may be carried over from one gestalt to another and that may influence the perception of gestalt. The need to control the local, immediate ground in the elicitation of the tasks points out the influence of this tendency towards perceptual constancy.</p> <p>Another principle that appears to hold across samples is that certain basic forms are inherently "good to think" and are implicated at the early stages of perception and influence the ability to achieve gestalt recognition. To the extent that the perceived figure-ground relationship appears to resemble such basic forms, the prestructuring of such forms may facilitate the gestalt perception. Related to such basic forms are also what appear to be culturally defined 'stereotypical' forms which are "cartoonish" and that prefigure in the perception of the gestalt. An extension of this principle is to hypothesize that more basic and regular shapes, forms, figures and things will tend to be preferred over more elaborated, irregular forms, and that to some unknown extent, culture will dictate the preference for and selection of some kinds of things over others.</p> <p>Another principle which emerged strongly in at least one pattern recognition task was that in at least visual stimuli, asymmetrical objects are perceived earlier, more correctly and more easily than symmetrical objects. The rational is that asymmetrical objects show greater incongruence with the ground, and provide a handle for the laws of grouping and pragnanz to be achieved in the gestalt perception of the figure. We might hypothetically extend this hypothesis to conclude that intrinsically imbalanced forms are more readily perceived than balanced forms.</p> <p>Finally, and most importantly for the understanding of symbolic frame tasks, it can be said that the context of the ground has a significant influence over the perception of the gestalt of the figure or of the figure-ground relationship, such that the greater the complexity, ambiguity and interference of the ground, the less stable and more imprecise is the perception and configuration of the figure in relation to the ground.</p> <p>Within symbolic frame tasks, it is possible to distinguish several distinct types of part-whole relationships--a figure-ground, a figure-frame and a figure-field relationship.</p> <p>A figure ground relationship is a simple figure against a neutral or unconfigured background--usually a white or blank piece of paper or the neutral tan of a task elicitation board.</p> <p>A figure frame relationship is a more complex presentation of a central figure oriented around either an explicit or implicit frame, both of which appear against a background--thus figure-frame relationship by design are inherently more complex and tend to be more interesting and provocative than simpler figure-ground relationships. A rod and frame relationship is a typical figure-frame relationship--the perception of a figure through a window, or in relation to the implicit frame of the edge of the paper or outline of a card, are forms of such figure-frame relationships.</p> <p>A figure-field relationship consists of a presentation of a central figure in relation to a surrounding field of other similar or different figures, or an array or arrangement of figures, as a "+" in an array of "-"'s.</p> <p>We may also specify a specific form of a part-whole relationship which consists of a marked part of some structure against a shared background, as an alternative form of such relationship.</p> <p>All or some combination of these relationships may pertain and be controlled for in the construction and elicitation of different types of tasks. <u>We can thus manipulate these constraints to systematically vary the degree to which they interfere with or intrude upon the perception of the figure or part-whole relationship, with significant consequences for patterns of response. In general, the greater the complexity of the figure-ground/frame or field relationship, the greater the interference of the background to the perception of the gestalt, and the greater the likelihood of error and ambiguity in the perceptual integration of the figure background relationship.</p> </u> <p>Tasks also vary along a continuum to the extent to which they response can be evaluated by some criteria of "correct" performance, or the achievement of a "true" gestalt, versus tasks which lack a "correct" or even a normal standard, but aim at eliciting a variety of different responses. In general, a more "performance" type tasks is one in which the individual learns through systematic error, and will, over time, "improve" performance upon repeated elicitations. The distinctions between these types of tasks may not always be as clear-cut as we may think them to be. Standards of what is correct or "better" or preferable may be culturally implicit in the context of the elicitation of the task.</p> <p>Since the central set of hypothesis of this methodology depends critically upon establishing such significant patterns, the empirical efficacy, validity, reliability and inductive interpretability of the symbolic frame task remains the methodological cinch pin of this entire study.</p> <p>In general, the design of the various symbolic frame tasks share the following features:</p> <p>1. A general, controlled local background defining the frame, field or ground of perception.</p> <p>2. A partial, incomplete or otherwise ambiguous focal "structure", stimuli or object of attention defining the figure of perception.</p> <p>3. A standard protocol of instructions and an instrument for the "filling" in of the frame in a more or less constrained manner.</p> <p>The symbolic frame can be regarded as an incomplete visual or oral stimuli to which the interviewee must respond by completion of the frame. Such frames vary considerably in the amount to which they are both internally constrained--the degree of completeness of the inherent structure of the frame--and externally constrained by the degree to which specific protocols or instructions inform the completion of the task. The resulting elicitations and patterns of response to such tasks have semantic, cultural and projective content. The completion of the frame, whether partial or total, minimal or exhaustive, is sought and is regarded as leading to the full contextualization of the frame.</p> <p>All frames share a basic, hypothetical attribute, in that they are:</p> <p>1. somehow minimally constrained in terms of the figure-ground perception of the symbolic frame and the manner of elicitation.</p> <p>2. somehow have a minimally controlled local context and ground.</p> <p>3. a somehow incomplete in the part-whole relations, creating a "gap" in the phenomenal field which becomes the task of the subject to fill in to complete the frame.</p> <p>4. are provocative of some kind or level of ambiguity of part-whole relationship and alternative response which creates room for variability of response pattern and for incorrect type responses--i.e. controlled error of response.</p> <p>The boundary where one kind of task ends and another kind begins is often unclear, as many of the perceptual and ethno-symbolic tasks certainly involve an amount of apperceptive and projective response, while many of the originally projective types of techniques also involved definite perceptual and cognitive and symbolic identification. Rather than obfuscating the linkages and distinctions between these types of tasks, the considerable overlap between them is an important source of information and reinforcement for the response patterns that emerged from them.</p> <p>In general, a distinction can be made between linguistic type tasks or linguistic components of task design, and non-linguistic components. It is hypothesized that the linguistic components of tasks primarily elicit information which is conscious, which functions at the level of conscious awareness, and thus secondarily and only indirectly at the level of unconscious awareness. On the other hand, non-linguistic components of tasks, for instance, the selection of colors, drawing, recognition of form and pattern in inkblots, function largely and more directly on the unconscious level, which, while rendering them perhaps more directly insightful of the background of cultural knowledge, at the same time render their analysis interpretation inherently more problematic.</p> <p>The types of symbolic and cognitive processes the informant is using to perform the tasks are the same that the informant will use everyday within a cultural context, thus the consistent patterns of response to these types of tests and the correlations between them will provide insight into the cultural gestalt of the informants--insights which will yield understanding to be confirmed by more emic forms of analysis and description of the ethnocultural context.</p> <p>However personally idiosyncratic the overall patterning of response by any one informant, there is hypothesized a minimum amount of overlap which constitutes the basis of culture in context--the sharing of cultural traits and attitudes. Sharing is rooted in consensus theory and hypothetical agreement--the greater the agreement the greater the level of sharing that can be hypothesized, while the greater the level of sharing hypothesized, the greater the degree of agreement can be expected. Those traits which are most shared should also be those which are more salient, more central and more contextual, and are also those traits which are more consistently reinforced and valued within the cultural context.</p> <p>Primary symbolizations which are more basic in the cultural context and more fundamental in human personality are reinforced by secondary systems of symbolization which modify, reinforce, manipulate primary symbolizations and which annihilate or rehabilitate alternate symbolizations. These secondary symbolizations involve ego-defense mechanisms and culturally shared rationalizations which are highly schematized, formalized, and stylized.</p> <p>All significant, intentional behavior has symbolic components, and many of these symbolic components are culturally organized. It is in terms of both the psychological and cultural organization of these components that they have significance--within the context in which they occur.</p> <p>Though no single test or technique is adequate or sufficient for either the diagnosis of personality or the analysis of the internalization of cultural symbolisms, all tasks together elicit to some degree two kinds of "psycho-cultural" information at two levels of analysis:</p> <p>Direct, manifest symbolisms are externalized and projected onto the stimuli of the technique. These are usually culturally sanctioned and defined, even if anti-structural in character, and they are primarily indicated by content of response: "what" it is, and by marked "positive" or "negative" valuations or judgments as to the basic "goodness" or "badness" or a stimuli--whether "pretty" or "ugly", nice or bad, etc.</p> <p>Indirect, latent symbolisms which are repressed and internalized and which constitute the motivational basis for: 1. the strength of response as indicated by salience and attention; 2. the direction of response as indicated by choice and focus of attention; 3. avoidance or blocking of stimuli which evokes threatening feelings, or by rationalization, in the explanation of "why," 4. what can be referred to as apperceptive or self-descriptive elaboration.</p> <p>The challenge in such task construction is the effective combination of ethnosemantic elicitations of indigenous cultural knowledge with the use of "contextualized" projective stimuli that enable the elicitation and clear demarcation of response patterns at both levels of analysis:</p> <p>The stimuli of any symbolic frame tasks must minimally:</p> <p>1. be symbolically effective--they must be evocative if not provocative of response; 2. be culturally relevant--available to the normal, everyday awareness and perceptions of the average informant;</p> <p>3. have some kind of 'contextual incompleteness' either in terms of a figure-ground relation or in terms of the internal design of the object;</p> <p>4. provide space for the filling in of the frame in a non-leading manner; and</p> <p>5. be constructed with as little structure as possible to allow a distinguishing between alternative response patterns.</p> <p>In terms of the symbolic response expected to be elicited by all such symbolic frame tasks, we may hypothesize that all such tasks are more or less symbolic, according to the extent to which they are internally ordered, consistent and culturally shared. As such, all responses contain some minimal manifestation of cognitive and affective associations and content--and as such can be evaluated both in terms of cognitive dimensions and affective components. Response patterns will also likely contain some level of terminological definition and secondary rationalization--both of which are critical to the full understanding of the pattern of response a frame elicits.</p> <b><u> <p>Analysis, Representation and Interpretation</p> </u></b> <p>Symbolic frame tasks can serve a number of purposes simultaneously--to get at different levels and units of analysis in the symbolic stratification of meaning, to assess the individual in depth, the individual and group nomothetically in cross-reference to other individuals, to assess the small group or family unit, and to get at broader shared cultural or national meanings and associations.</p> <p>A system of classification of symbolisms can be constructed according to the following dimensions--basic versus elaborated symbols, and simple versus complex symbolisms. We may refer to the location of any particular symbolic response to a simple two-by-two matrix according to the features which it shares--simple/basic, complex/basic, simple/elaborate, complex elaborate.</p> <b><u> <p>basic elaborated</p> </u> <p>simple </b>simple-basic simple-elaborated</p> <b> <p>complex </b>complex-basic complex-elaborated</p> <p>According to this correlational table, we may categorize and analyze symbolic response patterns according to a variety of criteria into one or another of the designated classes. We may also non-parametrically analysis the statistical pattern of the occurrence of different kinds of symbolisms within frame tasks and across samples.</p> <p>We might hypothesize the following criteria for the classification and analysis of patterns of response according to the above table:</p> <p>1. Simple-basic symbolisms consist of simple single associations which, when terminologically recognized, elicit linguistic codifications which are short and prototypical. They are recognized by their generality and lack of specificity of detail--a vagueness that nevertheless is belied by their concreteness. In a drawing task, a example of simple basic symbolism is the drawing of a circle, or a heart shape, or a simple smiling face.</p> <p>2. A complex-basic symbolism consists of a set of associations which are in themselves single and simply aggregated, or which form a larger gestalt which is itself basic and general or nonspecific in nature. The drawing of an unadorned, simple figure with only the rudimentary components of limbs, torso, minimal indications of clothes or features, etc. is an example of a complex-basic symbolisms.</p> <p>3. Simple-elaborated symbolisms consist of derivative single associations which elicit non-basic terminological designations and which are subject to a wider variety of paradigmatic alternation, or, in terms of consensus, a lack of agreement or variability. The overt aspectual marking of the symbolism in terms of specific dimensions or characteristics is also greater. Hair that is braided, with zigzag bangs and a ribbon, is an example of an elaborated but simple symbolisms that may be brought into association with an otherwise unadorned happy face.</p> <p>4. Complex-elaborated symbolisms consist of a concatenation of elaborated or elaborated-basic symbolisms into some larger configuration which are never merely an aggregation but form some larger gestalt. The figure of a girl with bangs, ribbons, pony tails in a dress that has pockets, buttons, frills, elaborated patterns, and a simple face with dimples and eyelashes is a clear cut example of an complexly elaborated symbolism that may be readily compared to more "primitive" drawings that lack such elaborate marking of specific details or characteristics.</p> <p>We may say that the principle difference between the two sets of dimensions is that between the iconographic function of a symbol that is composed of objective signs, and the emblematic function of the symbolism that is composed of subjective associations. The iconograpic function of the symbol is that it points referentially to something, or to a category of things. The emblematic function of a symbolism is that it integrates diverse internalized significations into a coherent and holistic unity of meaning. All symbolisms are emblematic in that they integrate more than a single kind of sign into a coherent unity that is synergistically more than the signs which compose it and thus incorporates them.</p> <p>Another dimension of symbolic constructs is the presupposition percept-concept isomorphism such that a symbol is simultaneously an object situated in an effective external context in meaningful relation to other objects, and also an affective, linguistic, behavioral, noetic or visual-auditory association, or set of associations or combination of such associations, which psychologically represents or stands cognitively in place of the object itself. It is important to reaffirm that the necessary connection between the external object and its internal associations are fundamentally, and critically, culturally arbitrary, except for some basic patterns which maybe more-or-less pan-human. It is the cultural arbitrariness of symbolisms which allows for their great productivity, creation and destruction.</p> <p>Analysis and interpretation of symbolic frame tasks rests upon certain presuppositions of inferable levels of cultural competence in domains of knowledge or cultural understanding, in consensus patterns in the sharing of cultural knowledge, values, and symbolisms as represented by nonrandom frequencies of consistency of response to the same task, and in the finite distribution of cultural competence and knowledge as elicited by a frame task across a sample. Any given task can be expected, if it is effective in its design and implementation, to elicit for any given sample a limited range of alternate response patterns, within which a nonrandom pattern of frequency saliency will emerge which confers on this range a central foci. Consensus theory that allows us to presuppose an average level of cultural competency upon which we can presume sharing to occur, entails that sample sizes do not have to be very large in order for significant patterns to emerge. These patterns will reemerge and remain consistent over a number of small sub-samples.</p> <p>There are a plethora of ways of analyzing the data from various symbolic frame tasks, but no single "correct" way for approaching such analysis. Data may be analyzed both across a sample of the same task, and across different tasks of the same individual, and across the different tasks for the same or different samples, and across the samples for the different tasks. Analysis of each task can proceed on the in-depth interpretation of the individual pattern of response, or the statistical analysis of the average or conflated patterns of response for different individuals within or between samples. Analysis of each task can also proceed at several levels and in several ways, with different consequences.</p> <p>There is some debate as to whether the consensus theoretic approach to the analysis of the data does not effectively conflate important individual differences of patterning, and, in effect, construct a reified and hypostatized structure that does not in fact exist. The alternative has been to investigate and compare the patternings of individuals within the sample, and to find common or alternate pathways. But from a statistical standpoint, there is a law of averages which states that, whatever the individual variation, the average does not lie, even if no single individual is represented by the average. Thus, the comparison of average scores between tasks or between samples or sub-samples serves to precipitate and concretize basic underlying dimensions of difference between individuals and samples. This statistical description of response patterning among and between populations cannot be ignored.</p> <p>The fact that symbolic frame tasks are united under the aegis of a common theory, allows us to hypothesize some degree of relationship and comparability of response pattern between different types of tasks, and that when we find such relationship, especially if it is found to be highly significant, then we may posit this as at least circumstantial evidence in the partial validation of the theory.</p> <p>The type of analysis involved in these tasks was largely correlational and what I have referred to as "inter-correlational"--involving the construction of derivative correlation matrices from primary correlations, and the emergence of basic underlying dimensions of inter-correlation. Whether or not correlation matrices can be correlated is a moot point, but it appears to be the case that comparable correlation matrices appear to move in ways which are frequently similar or markedly different. It may be impossible to figure out the statistical significances of these inter-correlations, but the resulting composite correlations are often significant and suggestive.</p> <p>We might only speculate as to the meaning or appropriate labels of the underlying inter-correlational dimensions which allow us to link together different samples and different tasks in complex space, but they permit a form of scatter-plot and tree representation that enables us to recognize and possibly interpret such dimensions in a non-relative way. The problem with a direct approach in inter-correlational representation is that the inherent relative structure or dimensionality of the correlational matrices become squashed into the principle axis along which the inter-correlational structure is plotted--hence the inherent relative structure of these matrices becomes lost in the process of their transpositioning in inter-correlational space.</p> <p>Nevertheless, such inter-correlation graphing appears to bring out a certain kind of multi-dimensional structure which pertains grossly between the matrices and their categories. Furthermore, these representations are ordered in an absolute sense about the origin and permit a variety of statistical manipulations--in terms of non-parametric, rank order and ordinal data--of the resulting plotted points. It is possible to see at a glance of such graphs the extent to which the correlational matrices themselves are strong or significant according to their relative proximity to the origin. Furthermore, regression relationships become apparent in these representations, and it allows us to postulate that a high inter-correlation score at one level is indicative of some form of regression functional relationship at the lower level between correlational matrices. The extent to which these aspects of this form of representation are useful or productive remains to be determined, but they are definitely apparent and suggestive.</p> <p>The inter-positioning of multidimensional scaling of the correlational matrices and the inter-correlational graphing of the transformed MDS scores along contraposed axis may allow us to plot the underlying "relative structure" of the correlations in a manner which enables us to preserve this structure in its transposition and inter-dimensional comparison of different matrices, or even of derivative matrices. One way of doing this would be to inter-correlation the dimensional scores of the different matrices--the number of rows or columns being equal and the same, and then either directly plotting these inter-correlations of the different MDS matrices, or correlating them and then running a multidimensional scaling of this composite matrix.</p> <p>There is a sense that different matrices of variables and relationships in the response patterns of scores can be plotted in the same hypothetical space that is absolutely oriented around the same origin. The orientation and rotation of dimensions around the origin in two or three dimensional space may not be fixed, but the coexistence of different matrices within the same space is suggestive of the representation of implicit dimensions of the symbolically mediated phenomenal field itself--dimensions that may be in a fundamental sense basic and even universal to human symbolization and the organization of experience.</p> <p>This manner of graphically representing the latent structure of correlations of symbolic response patterns may only go so far in resolving the problematics of comparing and usefully analyzing such patterns for their underlying structures and unities, but they and the symbolic framing techniques on which the correlational matrices are based open a door upon an alternative mode of analysis which may offer many productive techniques toward the resolution of the theoretical problematics of symbolic framing.</p> <p>Beyond the problematics of analysis and representation of the patterns with the aim of elucidating the underlying patterns within the data, exists the problem of interpreting the data in a manner which lends itself to a propositionally explicit explanation of the pattern, without a priori presuppositions of universal dimensions or categories of significance which frequently accompany and bias such interpretations.</p> <p>Interpretation of the symbolic frame tasks is made problematic not only by the inherently inferential and implicit nature of the patterning of response to the tasks, but by the fact that such response patterns themselves are not occurring within a locally, immediate natural context, but in a contrived local context which is rigidly controlled. This control permits the comparison of scores between individuals and across samples to the same and different tasks, but they leave unaddressed either the question of the larger relationship and relevance of these elicited patterns to the cultural context or life-world of the individual, or possibly other important but unelicited forms of response patterning which may be critical to the understanding of the psycho-cultural patterning.</p> <p>Part of this problematic is resolved in the development of normative, controlled samples among clinical populations with known characteristics--or alternatively the anchoring and cross-references of such tasks with comparable related tasks that do have such norms empirically established. The other partial resolution of this problematic stems from the inferential interpretability of the tasks on a number of levels, and from a premise that at least a part of these tasks are in fact eliciting underlying patterns of response which are in some sense basic, primary and possibly even universal in the structure of their symbolic patterning. Inkblots do seem to consistently elicit patterns of response which seem to be drawn symbolically deeply from the psyche, and this appears to be more or less the case with almost any individual or population sample.</p> <p>Related to this problem is the related dilemma of the reliability of any particular symbolic frame task to actually do the job, consistently and repeatedly, for which it is designed, and whether the response pattern itself is a reliable response. There appears to be a great amount of variability of both individual and inter-individual patterns of response to the same tasks--this free play within the task elicitation and response process opens the door to a variety of problematics inherent to symbolic framing. Related to this is the weakness of any single symbolic frame to decisively point to or indicate any definite pattern of response or underlying inference. Thus, high scores on an MPDT task may or may not be related to organic dysfunction of the brain, though within a sample and average high scores is within a norm definitive of such a condition. In other words, an individual who is organically impaired is bound to score highly on the task, but these high scores alone will fail to differentiate between this organic response and the response pattern of an individual who scores abnormally high due to extreme "task anxiety" or to having "a bad day."</p> <p>Again, a partial resolution to these problematics of interpretation lies in the "triangulation" between different scores, tasks and types of tasks which appear by definite indicators to point in the same direction. But this is also only a partial solution, because the same nervousness which led a normal person to score highly upon the MPDT task might lead the same individual to prefer dark colors over the primaries, or to block or see pathognomic responses in the inkblots--though it can be expected that an individual over a variety of tasks will tend towards an average, individually normative performance.</p> <p>But the triangulation and implicit comparison of tasks--itself a problematic project--does allow us to make plausible inferences about relationships and patterns of response which may otherwise be absent from a superficial analysis of separate scores of individual tasks, and many of these inferences may allow us to partially and predictively fill in gaps between the tasks which may be filled in by subsequent tasks or by extensive reference to ethnographic or other forms of data.</p> <p>Related to the empirical efficacy and possibility of linguistic frame tasks is a theoretical understanding of human language as an "oral-aural" symbolic codification of reality. Symbolic linguistics has as its principle object of understanding the function and processes of language in this symbolic codification of reality, both psychologically and socially in terms of the collective objectification of knowledge and understanding. It also seeks to understand how these functions and processes influence the "structure" and patterning which language and language changes take on several levels of analysis, especially when expressed and reiterated in "key" terms which may be symbolically central to the understanding of the cultural patterning. Linguistic frame devices, the normal cultural use of such devices in naturalistic socio-linguistic settings, and their analysis have yet to be fully explored.</p> <p>The inferable coherence of cultural gestalt as an inherent sense of nonrandom order and "structure" implies to some extent a semi-hierarchical and non-random, constrained network of relations at several levels of analysis which may implicitly embody a "rule system" the explicit representation of which would allow a summary, concise understanding of the cultural gestalt. This possibility exists in the translation of the frequency patterns of responses to frame tasks into probabilistic "discrimination networks" from which decision trees and "rule-based" knowledge systems can be inferred. Such a rule system would serve as a means of representing and modeling the cultural gestalt.</p> <p>To claim that implicit rule structures may underlie cultural gestalt, and by deduction, linguistic and cognitive patterning, is to insert a claim that cultural systems may, in their integration, be ultimately semi-structured "rule-based" systems of knowledge and interaction that guide and make predictable behavior and response. Such rules that underlie cultural gestalt must be considered as relational linking devices in the integration of reality--they stipulate a given direction and order of relation in this pattern of integration. Such rule systems may be more directly worked out and elaborated in some areas of cultural patterning than others. While some such rules may actually be explicitly, formally codified within institutions or records of a culture, they are mostly latent, a posteriori and implicit in the patterning itself, and function as indirect constraints upon behavior. Thus we come to know and learn about these rules not so much from bringing them into clear direct awareness, but from the history of their violations and contradiction which temporarily make them visible until the condition of their violation is somehow reversed.</p> <p>We may also learn these rules not so much from their codification or being made explicit or taught, but from their repeated performance by which we become adept in their practice. We may never be able to clearly explain why or even what it is we are doing in objective, anthropological terms, but we can clearly demonstrate their efficacy through their reiteration. Explaining them objectively in anthropological terms does not necessarily mean that we understand them or have acquired them in any implicit sense. The task of the objective anthropologist is therefore to be distinguished from the interests of the participant.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHAPTER FIFTEEN</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CONCLUSIONS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>To acknowledge the reality of the way culture works in constituting social, psychological and even biological differences between people in the world, is to confer upon the notion of culture a certain theoretical legitimacy it otherwise lacks in the contemporary political state of academia. To acknowledge the continuing vitality and importance of ethnocultural realities in separating peoples of the world and to recognize the cultural factors and patterning which make people different, and often socially unequal, is to point to the empirical foundations of ethnocultural studies and cultural anthropology.</p> <p>To emphasize the ethnocultural foundations of complex social realities as prevalent in radically plural societies and to play down racial categories and terms and ethnobiological attributions, as well as to refer to the symbolic organization of cultural life- in behavior, thought, feelings, belief and even in language itself, is to advance a new claim for a cultural relativism.</p> <p>To say yes to relativism is itself an entirely different can of worms. There are more and less obvious differences between many distinguishable kinds of relativism which become largely lumped under at worst a single and sometimes a mutilated handful of different headings. Issues concerning linguistic relativity are not the same issues which concern social, cultural, psychological or ethical relativity. Likewise, issues of scientific relativity are not the same as issues of historical relativity. All of which leads back to the central question of what is relativity of knowledge in general, if there is even a common denominator for its conceptioning.</p> <p>To ply the relativistic road is not to acknowledge what amount to absolute boundaries and absolutely irreconciliable differences separating peoples and realities in the world, nor is it to deny the reality of common and universal laws of nature which influence human behavior as much or more than the behavior of subatomic particles, nor is it to implicitly legitimate fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany, nor deny the necessity and possibility of a pan-human meta-ethical foundation for normative behavior in the world, nor is it merely a 'delight in diversity' or a 'celebration of difference' to the ignorance of the common foundations of human experience.</p> <p>It requires a deliberate and concentrated effort to pay attention to the details, the differences, the inescapable contexts and the inherent and irresolvable complexities which invariably intrude upon the scientific question of what is human reality, but to do so is also a basic requirement of an empirical human science, especially of the anthropological science of culture. To systematically address the question of relativity in human reality is to push to its utmost logical limit the question "relative in relation to what," and the systematic attempt to answer this question adequately constitutes the scientific foundations of an authentic anthropology.</p> <p>A strong emphasis upon cultural relativism does not entail a non-ethical stance for the researcher and theoretician alike nor the impossibility of a commonly shared meta-ethical norm. Recent political history in the 20th century, World War II and its aftermath, led to the formulation of certain international legal paradigms which define the rights of nations and peoples, which outline a common valuation of a foundation of human political order in the notion of human and state's rights.</p> <p>We usually know the reality of human rights mostly by its massive and extreme violations, and the common repulsion we feel in such violation. Indeed, the moral and cultural legitimization of human rights lies in our own human capacities to empathize and sympathize with the plight of others, in the creative imagination to put ourselves in other peoples moccasins and to see ourselves in their tragic circumstances, and is, paradoxically, the direct outcome of the cultural relativist stance which urges tolerance and empathetic understanding of such differences and the suspension of cultural blinders and ethnocentric bias.</p> <p>Thus, cultural relativism and the ethics of fieldwork puts the ethnographer, especially one from a rights-based cultural background, squarely upon the horns of an insoluble dilemma. On the one hand there is a universal call for human tolerance of human difference, and on the other are the paradoxes of morally tolerating cultural orientations in which the violation of human rights may be everyday and commonplace.</p> <p>Somewhere between these two extremes lies a further dilemma which concerns the gray area where one society's definition of absolute, inalienable and universal human rights and freedoms becomes another society's definition of a threat to national security and gross social irresponsibility.</p> <p>Thus, account must be made of significant variations in the patterns of different societies in definition and reinforcing different conceptions and kinds of human rights, and in differential emphasis between responsibilities and rights. Rights-based societies such as America are often short on the problem of cultivating a strong sense of responsibility in the individual, whereas in responsibility-based societies which are more historically hierarchical in orientation, the call for responsibility can often become the true-believers call for blind and unquestioning conformity and unfreedom of state control and censorship.</p> <p>Gross or extreme violations of the doctrine of human rights--the propagation of violence--can be generally clearly recognized and such instances are almost uniformly condemned for the revulsion they cause in the human community. No society, no matter how non-violent, can tolerate mad dogs, homicidal maniacs, mass murderers or psycho-killers.</p> <p>About the only pat formula one can reasonably offer is for each individual, anthropologist or else, to define for oneself the acceptable moral limits of one's own behavior in everyday contexts, and the principle of historical precedence in deciding the moral legitimacy of individual cases as they arise.</p> </font> <font FACE="Arial"> <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> </p> </font> <p align="center"> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript" Src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/MyCounters/MyCountera"> </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript1.2" Src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/MyCounters/MyCounterb"> </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="javascript" Src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/MyCounters/MyCounter1"> </SCRIPT> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  </body>