CHAPTER TWO

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AS NATURAL SYSTEMS THEORY

by Hugh M. Lewis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 which constitutes the basic analytical foundation of human civilization.

The role of language is central and intermediate 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.

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--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.