by Hugh M. Lewis

In this second paper, it is my intention to roughly outline what I feel to be the structural aspects of traditional Athabascan ethnoculture from the standpoint of the anthropological construction of reality, and to attempt an explicit comparison and contrast of this hypothetical structural patterning with similar structures of purported traditional Tlingit and contemporary American systems. I wish to define thereby a common range of multidimensional metaspace within which significant aspects of all these systems can be located. In general, I wish to illustrate how it is that internalized symbolic structures that are socially sanctioned and find expression and articulation through ritual process, myth and other symbologies, and come to reflect and reinforce the patterning of social relations and order as these are institutionally structured and reproduced with successive generations. In such a manner, worldview comes to interact dialectically with the world, and vice-versa, in a manner that tends to perpetuate tradition and to adapt tradition to changing ethnohistorical circumstances. It needs to be reiterated at the outset that this analysis and comparison is quite rough and tentative, based only upon class notes, readings from assigned texts, and my own background in Anthropology. A much more thorough study would be necessary to do justice to a problem of this complexity and magnitude, including extensive fieldwork observation and elicitation of informants' knowledge and understandings of the world.

At the outset I would state that traditional Athabascan culture, particularly of the precontact era and of the protohistorical era, until the advent of missionary influence in the mid to late 19^th, century, can be characterized by a relatively rich symbolic ecology in which symbolisms are drawn directly from and refer directly to the natural world in which the Athabascan dwelt. This symbolic ecology served as the foundation of social relations and social structuration processes at a basic level of primary institutions--primary institutions of "reality culture" that served these people's basic requirements of adaptation and survival in a world in which natural conditions and constraints are extreme. Other functionalist and materialist accounts can be legitimately invoked, but none do justice as sufficient explanations of the structural patterning of the Athabascan peoples. At the center of this was an animistic spirit complex that directly mediated the human relationship with the natural world. Briefly, it can be said that symbolisms directly mediate the boundary between people and the social group, and their relationship with the natural world. Symbolisms serve to locate, mobilize and transform people within natural landscapes. Symbols will also locate nature and the social body or state within the body. Symbols serve to express and to map the relations between the body and the primarily social, humanized world of nature, and then between the world and the cosmos. In this we can see the projective function as expressed in symbolic framing tasks in the ordering of disordered perceptions and in the resolution of contradiction by the superimposition of symbolic significance. There is a general sense of the anthropomorphization of the natural world and a corresponding, anti-thetical naturalization or natural reification of the subjective inner world and the cultural order it produces.

These symbols are primarily spatial and a-temporal in orientation. It is this same boundary-mediating mechanism which defines the ecological relationship, the relative equilibrium or imbalance of people within their world, that also defines human social relationship and identity with one another, and which thus serves to bridge the important gap between natural and historical patterns of adaptation and change. In the world of the Athabascan, symbolic structuration constitutes the basis for social order and indirect sanctioning by means of customary authority. The connection between symbols and the human world does not need to depend upon a functionalist, materialist or ecologist account. Symbols are "direct metaphors" of experience which allow both apperceptive disembodiment of the experience through the symbols incorporation and representation of that experience. It is therefore no great surprise that symbols should be widely employed by human beings to for the expression of relationships and significances which are either not directly available to experience, or for one reason for another, must be repressed from experience.

There are several basic traits that can be expected with this animistic complex: 1. The belief in a supernatural spirit world which interpenetrates the natural order such that a pantheon spirit beings, ghosts, local deities and spirit-familiars may inhabit local sites; 2. The use of a shaman who may go into trance or spirit possession; 3. The use of magic amulets, potions, poisons to affect human beings in certain ways; 4. A belief in the supernatural power which suffuses the natural world and which may come to reside differentially in powerful human beings; 5. The use of ritual ceremonies in affecting cures, purification, fortune telling. It can be argued that this kind of animistic complex is to be found wherever a traditional non-hierarchical style of society is found. The key quality of this complex seems to be in its encompassing and syncretic character, in its capacity to absorb new symbolisms and to coexist with contradiction, and to adapt itself to a wide range of situations and alternative interpretation.

Symbols and the systems they construct, have played an important part in Southeast Asian Civilization and its scholarship. Symbols mediate the boundaries of identity between person, place, experience, the social world, and the supernatural cosmos. In Southeast Asia, such symbolizations are commonly "spatial" in organization, and time is conceived as circular. Power which symbols contain, which pass through symbols, becomes centered in local places, and levels of power are concentric rings from the center. Such centers exist in the thoughts, in the being and body of the individual, in the home, in the public realm, in the state and the nation, and in the world and universe.

In regard to this spatialization of symbols, several points can be made (Lewis, Southeast Asian Sources: Explorations in Critical Reconstruction, 1993):

1. Symbols come to express and contain a spiritual energy invests the universe and can come to reside in certain places, persons or things which are centers of power.

2. Symbols as spatial metaphors of place mediate the boundary between the body and person hood and the state and social body, such that the state becomes embodied in the person, and state becomes the embodiment of the person.

3. Symbols as spatial metaphors of centers mediate the boundary between the state and the cosmos, such that the humanized natural world becomes the mapping of the supernatural world and the supernatural world becomes the projection of the state.

4. Symbols also spatially mediate the boundary between the individual, his/her body and person hood, and the cosmos, such that they orient and locate the individual spiritually in the cosmos and spiritually map the cosmos in the individual.

5. Symbols form multiple overlapping "network hierarchies" of relations that serve to locate power differentially in people, places, social relations and the cosmos.

6. Symbols serve an anti-structural mediating function which allows for the manipulation of power relationships which are otherwise uncontrollable and can be expected to be emphasized or exaggerated when power relationships are inherently, structurally ambiguous.

7. Symbols come to coalesce into chains and complexes, which define topographically uneven regions of a shared, social "symbol scape" that form the multiple network-hierarchies. In these complexes we can recognize core and dominant symbols, distinguished from peripheral and antithetical symbols. We can distinguish as well between "basic" symbols and "elaborated" symbols.

Magic and Animistic religious beliefs were originally held by Western observers to be chaotic. Subsequently scholars have taken notice of an underlying order of such symbol systems, the parallelism between "micro-cosmos" and "macro-cosmos." "...According to this belief humanity is constantly under the influence of forces emanating from the directions of the compass and from stars and planets... Harmony between the empire and the universe is achieved by organizing the former as an image of the latter, as a universe on a smaller scale." (Robert Heine-Geldern; Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca, New York 1958: p. 1)

This parallelism between the state and the cosmos, occurs also between the macrocosm of the universe and microcosm of the person, as well as between the macro-cosmos of the state and the microcosm of the person. Symbolism mediates the relationships between spirit and matter, and their ritual manipulation as "receptacles of spirit" is a means of manipulating and regulating these boundaries. The manipulation and management of symbols through religious ritual and magic, is a form of power, or a "playing with power" that is supernatural.

Clive Kesseler notes a similar parallelism between "the body personal and the body politic" that is evident in the ritual performances of the Malay bomoh--"....the body is a realm, at once unitary and multiplex. Its various components are ideally coordinated and integrated, subordinated to a governing center, the palace of personality, the head. Since this conception of the body as a realm is not merely abstract and static, it permits illness or disorder within the person to be presented in political terms." (Clive Kesseler "Conflict and Sovereignty in Kelantanese Malay Spirit Seances" in Case Studies in Spirit Possession, edited by Vincent Crapanzano: pg 319)

According to Kesseler, this parallelism is not simply a dualism, but a parallelism between the body, the state and the cosmos, and in this matter the state is the political embodiment and mediator of the power--"Hence, mediating between person and cosmos, the state, in its concretized conceptual form as the balai, provides the appropriately potent instrument or receptacle...for ritually manipulating and transferring powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, spiritual essences." (ibid: p. 321)

And if the social body constrains how we define the human body, as Mary Douglas would have it, it might also happen that the human body may become the metaphor for the state. The political idioms shared by a variety of symbolic complexes becomes the fundamental organizing idea or design of a culture.

To what extent do symbolic complexes, as partially integrated networks in the patterning of culture, overlap or are congruent with the ecological patterns of adaptation, as well as the historical patterns of borrowing and alteration. For instance, if we compare two cultures known to be historically related, that nonetheless diverged in different environments, would we be able on the basis of their comparison to select those aspects of symbolic complexes that remain basically unchanged. Alternatively, if we compare cultures that are known not to be related but which seem to share similar kinds of environments, or cultures which are distantly related and which share similar kinds of environments, though they presumably have never been in contact.

Based upon ethnocultural fieldwork in Southeast Asian studies, I would remark that in traditional tribal societies in which some combination of hunting/fishing/horticulture and trade are significant forms of subsistence for most people, there occurs an emphasis in religious form upon animistic supernaturalism in which few clear boundaries exist between the world of nature and the supernatural. Self and society are isomorphically mapped directly onto the geography and ethology of the natural world, and the patterning and perceived order of the natural world becomes symbolically imprinted onto consciousness of the people, and, even more importantly, unconsciously upon the collective order of the society. There is a valid psycho-analytic model of this process in the processes of internalization/externalization of the psyche upon the physical environment of one's habitus and significant relations. This has been demonstrated for instance in Aboriginal worldview and social relations in Australia, as well as in other contexts.

In this we can see the interior Athabascan groups a tripartite structure of the supernatural world that is reflected in the tripartite structure of the sib organization of this society. Lineage structure is not as well developed regionally in Athabascan territories as it was in Tlingit country, though like the Tlingit it was mostly matrilineal with bilateral reckoning and an emphasis probably upon the primary kin group and the extended kinship relations of the kindred. Lacking is a sense of socio-political or economic centralization of the society, and similarly, the lack of a central organizing principle in the symbology of their worldview. Authority resides with elders, sages, shamans who demonstrate wisdom and the skills of survival by their age and feats. Similar to many other Native American ethnocultures, dreaming, spirit familiars and vision quests were important facets of this patterning of symbolic structuration--often marking critical events and turning points in an individual's life. Like the Tlingit, the potlatch was an important anti-structural reinforcement to the normal social order, though it appears to have been utilized for a broader range of aims and purposes and possibly without the marked status-positioning of the latter. These former forms of potlatch may have had a more direct and generalized function of symbolically reinforcing social relations and repairing marginalized or disrupted social relations, as well as in the mediation of important life-transitions and events.

We can account for the tripartite sib division of Athabascan society as reflected by the tripartite division of the Athabascan cosmos, and the human as the intermediary between the two, as a consequence of the structure of the Athabascan relationship to the natural environment in which this ethnoculture has been articulated. By contrast, the strong dualism that is apparent in Tlingit moiety division and the emphasis on hierarchy both in social relations and in its symbolic cosmology, reflects a general shift that accompanies a growing central organization of state. The dialectic shifts away from being a symbolic statement between man and nature, and towards one between first: the person and the social order; and secondly, between the social order and the nature. The person becomes a more direct embodiment of the social order, and the social order a more direct embodiment of the person. We have a more direct dialectic as is evident in Claude Levi-Strauss, and we have an emergent form of mechanical and functional solidarity that we expect with Emile Durkheim, in which symbolism becomes a direct reflection and legitimization of the state.

I would go one step further, and bring in a basic contrast of both of these societies, with contemporary American society. On the surface, an emphasis upon familial and individual independence and autonomy would appear to be quite similar to that of the Athabascan social orientation, while a lack of an apparent centralization of symbolic ordering is replaced by a kind of symbolic idioscynratization of worldview that reflects a very complex topography of knowledge and belief structure. What I would claim is that there is an increasing degree of embedding of symbolic control structures and internalization of sanctions in the modern ego, that reflects a deep stratigraphy of collective symbolization and knowledge. One consequence of this is two-fold: a loosening of direct sanctions on personal and social behavior in society, and a "derepression" of the personality within such a context of embedded symbolic sanctions.

Somewhat like John and Beatrice Whiting's classic study of the children of six cultures, I would place Athabascan, Tlingit and American culture along two sets of dimensions. I have taken the liberty of bringing hypothetically in one more group, the Navajo, by which to complete the sense of dimensional contrasts. The exact labels for the dimensions are not empirically decided, and it is possible to add more than two sets of dimensional contrasts in a more complex space.

In keeping with the previous paper, I wish to conclude this rough outline with a brief consideration of the role that Christianity may have played on a symbolic level in Athabascan identity and society. It might be said that a Christian worldview, particularly a Protestant one that emanated from Anglo-American culture, would have at least a sense of bringing or pulling the different contrasts represented above to a common center ground. It is evident that in the sense of symbolic transactionalism, animistic beliefs and practices would be backgrounded, as would be many other elements of traditional Athabascan culture and symbology. At the same time, it is a remarkable quality of all animistic spirit complexes that they exhibit a degree of syncretic incorporation of foreign symbolisms which can be reinterpreted and integrated into a heterarchical worldview. It is evident, as with Burmese Supernaturalism, that a degree of normal repression of ego would develop, to be contrasted and punctuated at times by a return of the id, or rather, the antistructure of an animism that would underlie an orthodox worldview. Christain belief, especially Protestant, would permit little symbolic alternation to occur. We would expect to find a "captured" convert and the contradictory coexistence of fundamentally discrepant psycho-social realities. People and social relations might fall perchance into disrepair, without the symbolisms or adequate substitutes being available any longer to repair the damage in a manner that would be satisfactory and effective. In this we might refer to the prevalence of "adaptive stress disorders" in a global political economy.

Finally, in closing, I would speculate once again on the impact of modernization and radical western acculturation on deep traditional cultures such as the Athabascan. If there arises a sense of symbolic loss and discontinuity between a traditional way of life and the limited choices that modernization has to offer most native Americans, this sense of deepseated loss and frustration may be offset to some degree by the gain that can be found by material wealth and individual achievement in American society that permits and in the best of times promotes individualism and idiosyncratic patterning. Revitalization of "symbols of acculturation" through the arts especially, might be an expectable and beneficial outcome.

It is the purpose of this brief paper to compare and contrast worldviews of the Traditional Yupiit of the west coast of central Alaska with contemporary worldviews implicit to the modern culture primarily of Americans and many Western Europeans, as these attitudes relate specifically to issues of environmental relations and natural "resource management." To concisely summarize the issue, I would claim that traditional Yupiit views of nature resembled more "supernatural resource management" compared to modern American beliefs relating to the environment and the market ecology of modern civilization. The distinction between ecology of culture and a culture of ecology can be used to distinguish these two sets of viewpoints. For the American system of the culture of ecology, there can be said to be two predominant, and at some point, dialectically contraposed sets of ideas, each with their own sense of history. The first and dominant of these relate specifically to econometric models of resource management that views natural resources primarily as biological commodities to be mass produced, managed and harvested as frequently and prodigiously as possible. The second environmentalist perspective has its origins in a spiritual and philosophical tradition in American literature, known as Transcendentalism, and consists of the affirmation of the subjective sense of self in the context of nature. The first set of views has led frequently to environmental disaster, general loss of biodiversity and even frequent extinction of species. The second set of ideas has led to the Sierra Club and to the setting aside of the first National Parks as wildlife habitats and refugia in North America. This concept has been subsequently adopted by many nations of the world, and has resulted to some extent in the braking of the main trends represented by the first point of view.

Anthropologically, we can draw a finer distinction between an ecology of culture and a culture of ecology if we understand that the former principle underlies the symbolic and social organization of traditional ethnocultures in relation to the natural world, that tended to regulate on an implicit level (i.e., behaviorally) relations between people and nature, particularly as this concerned food-getting strategies and the regulation and control over subsistence resources. The social construction of reality emphasized the continuity of cultural resources of production and reproduction by means of a continuous round of rites that symbolically mediated the world of the natural, cultural and supernatural. This pattern must be seen from the standpoint of a substantive economy of social organization in which there is no well developed market system or monetary currency for the exchange of goods and services, but there is a common moral and symbolic set of shared cultural values attached to basic resources and their distribution within a community. The symbolic function of exchange in a substantive system is more concrete and opaque to who are participants in the system. Such systems are regulated by informal rules and formal sanctions, and by symbolic mythologies that serve to explain and validate the system as consonant with the ways of the larger world. Collective belief and behavior regarding natural relations are isomorphic with beliefs and behaviors relating to supernatural forces and spirits in the world.

The Yupiit, wonderfully adapted through millennia to the challenges of survival in Arctic seas, are a fitting example of an well worked out and extremely effective cultural ecology. Within Yupiit worldview, everything is a cycle and a circle, and souls transmigrate from earth to heaven and back to earth again, to become renewed and reembodied in the regeneration of life on earth. The bladder festival is a fitting example of this system, in which the souls of seals, captured within the seal bladders, remain inflated and are feted with a ceremonial party before being returned to the ocean. These ritual activities are directly tied to another form of first-seal party of young men and boys who hunt their first seals. The mothers give away seal meat and blubber as well as other commodities like diapers and gum to non-relative women of the village as a way of "coming out" for the young man into social manhood. The symbolic reproductive aspects of this festival should not be underestimated--as special gifts are given to those "cross-cousins" who are singled out for marriageability with the young man. These parties relate to the Man-Woman exchange dances on Nelson Island, in which men and women pair-up separately as transvestite couples who dance and give away gifts to members of the opposite sex while they are mocked and ridiculed. In both ritual performances, both people and goods get "recycled" both physically and symbolically, and this recycling of basic resources of the community serve to symbolically reaffirm the integrity and reproductive continuity of the culture on a basic level of belief and behavior. In a similar way, the name of deceased relatives are recycled with the bequeathing of young infants, symbolically embodying the soul of the dearly departed, and the souls of seals and other game are similarly recycled from whence they came to reincarnate with a new generation. This relationship between male and female, and implicitly between culture and nature, is evident dialectically in the arrangement of houses in a village, with the female eneek surrounding and providing the domestic context for the male house.

To focus on a more concise view of Yupiit cultural ecology regarding the management of natural resources, it is a commonly held belief by these people that the seal will "give itself" to the worthy hunter who is pure in his sense of relation to the world, both socially and naturally. The seal was a moral equal of the human, and its soul would migrate to the bladder if its worthiness on earth as a good catch were realized. Thus, the good hunter must care for the spirit of the seal that resides within the bladder, and these, collected together at the appropriate time, and inflated, will be hosted to a party in their honor that lasted for five days, until, on the fifth day they were returned to the sea. The spirits of the seal in turn will care for the well being and welfare of the hunter by offering its body as a form of symbolic sacrifice.

To contrast this point of view with the predominant attitude of Americans in their elaboration of a culture of ecology, I would claim that such a culture of ecology is clearly a secondary institutional elaboration in both symbolic belief and behavior that is based upon not the desire to maintain equilibrium and harmony with nature, but upon the determination of American cultural system to dominate and exploit nature in every conceivable manner. Management often is construed as "crises" management that is the result of a failure of natural populations to rebound from overharvesting or the destruction of the habitat upon which their ecology is founded. Management is, in this capitalist model, defined as renewable natural resources that are essentially unbounded and without limit. In this cultural model, natural resources are commodities that are on a symbolic level fetishes. These resources are individually defined and labeled, and are thus culled, without regard to the ecosystem of relations in which they evolve, and often are taken indiscriminately in relation to other "bycatch" resources that are simply in the way and then discarded as unprofitable. The concepts of sustainability of natural resources and also net yield arise as important principles governing such management systems, but sustainability and yield are often oxymoronic contradictions that are incompatible to one another. The culture of ecology that arises in this first instance is a culture that is economically dedicated to the exploitation of certain forms of natural resources in the environment--extensive and intensive capital is devoted to these forms of exploitation, to the point that profit drives the system to the point of near total resource exhaustion, beyond which point either the economic system collapses or "moves" on to more fertile fields.

The second sense of a culture of ecology that has arisen in America is to some degree contrapuntal with the first, and yet it is not identical with a traditional sense of cultural ecology. Transcendentalism is the belief in a higher form of knowledge or spiritual enlightenment than that found in the senses or by means of pure reason, and it leads to a dichotomization of reality between the spiritual on one hand and the material world on the other. In traditional worldview, belief between the supernatural and natural were rarely if ever dichotomized, and the supernatural was viewed as a reflection and direct extension of the natural, and vice versa. The rise of Western Transcendentalism can be found in Platonic idealism, and in the major Western religious doctrines that stated that God was transcendent above nature. Transcendentalist philosophy and literature as it developed in the United States was a reaction to an earlier rationalist and puritannical religious doctrine, and represented a form of romanticism that celebrated the sensual self, individuality, and the beauty of nature and of humankind. Transcendentalist writers like Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed spirituality towards nature and emphasized individual creativity, and a direct connection between the self as microcosm and the universe as macrocosm. Intuition was regarded as superior to reason, and human fulfillment could be accomplished through a mystical realization of the subjective beauty of the natural world. Simplicity of lifestyle that was in harmony with nature was a major theme of such thought and discourse.

Transcendentalist thought formed the touchstone for the early environmentalist movement in the United States, particularly by the pioneer John Muir whose writings stimulated a growing concern and movement for the America's wilderness and for its salvation, leading to the establishment of Yellow Stone as the first national park in the world, followed subsequently by many others. There is a sense that rising concerns for the environment, and a culturally sanctioned appreciation for nature, (in camping, hiking, hunting, nature programs, coffee-table books, etc.), has led to a sense of "recycling" of discarded things (and sometimes people and other animals) that can be said to be analogous if not homologous to a sense of Yupiik cultural recycling of things and beings.

This second sense of a culture of ecology is unlike either a traditional ecology of culture or the first sense of an economic culture. It was fully and dialectically a part of the Western tradition of belief and behavior relating humankind to nature, based as it was upon a fundamental dichotomization of thought between the real and the ideal, and, if we are to believe Havelock, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong, etc. marked the interface between the literate and the oral in culture historical tradition. In this view, the cultural ecology of the Yupiit would be like the Dionysian spirit of the muses that was embedded in an oral ecology of being, while the culture of ecology of the Modern Americans is rooted in an Appollonian dramaturgical production in which reason and emotion found their dialectical counterpoint in an ecology of mind rooted to the textual reproduction of knowledge and information. This noetic transformation of symbolic organization of culture is an important one in the cultural history of humankind, and to some extent reflects the rural-urban transition many people in the world are still undergoing in the throes of development that never happens.

In closing this brief digression, I would not claim that any of the three points of view presented herein are either right or wrong, or best or worst, either the Yupiik supernatural resource management, the capitalist market management of natural resources, or the transcendentalist spiritual management of the environment and the self. I would not necessarily express a preference for one or another, though I am by my own upbringing a transcendentalist. I would think that a proper solution to the world's growing problems rests in a common meeting ground between these three points of view. If we can triangulate ourselves between these reference points, perhaps we can discover the wisdom of living both in nature and with nature at the same time without necessarily having to master nature. Perhaps we can learn from theYupiit means of the cultural management of resources that will not lead to the total wanton destruction of species and habitats. Perhaps we can learn from the Americans a fundamental sense of appreciation of the beauty in nature and a sublime sense of being in the natural world. Perhaps an econometric worldview will sooner than later develop its own sense of natural ecology of culture that tells it that if it destroys utterly its own resource platform, then it will have nothing left to exploit.

I have chosen to compare and contrast the kinship patterns and social organization of traditional Tlingit culture with contemporary American culture. The models and generalizations I draw in this paper are necessarily rough and tentative, and the conclusions are only hypothetical. My experience with clan based organization is derived from doctoral research with a clan organized Chinese fishing community (Lewis, 1996), genealogical and ethnohistorical research with French Canadian lineages and various Native American tribes (for instance, the Ioway & Oto-Missouria; Lewis, 1998, 2000), and other ethnographic research drawn from a variety of places (for instance, the Trobriands, 1993-4, and the Vietnamese 1986).

Traditional Tlingit society can be characterized as a form of kin-based clan organization. In making this general statement, it should be recognized that clan organization is common ethnographically throughout the world among "traditional" societies and the general term therefore encompasses a fairly broad range of forms and circumstances. These types reflect a generalized form of political organization based upon the central principles of kinship and are commonly found in tribal societies that are tied to various modes of stable subsistence food-getting. The moiety (or phratry) based clan system of the Tlingit was in a diluted or variant form not uncommon throughout Native America. In the Pacific a different kind of clan system can be found as for instance in the Trobriand Islands and in the New Guinea highlands, and in Micronesian high islands and atoll groups. Clan organization in Africa is also common, and like the Chinese, is associated with land holdings and segmentary lineage structures. The Chinese clan system as I studied it in Malaysia was a variant form of a more common patrilineal segmentary lineage system of Chinese social order in which the operant principle of family and kinship has been the centerstone of social organization. Surname clan organization characterized groups lacking great lineage depth or land holdings. The members of the clan are closely bound together in social relations. Members are connected not only by kinship but by mutual obligations and privileges--sets of implicit reciprocal obligations between members and families that are mostly indirect and informal and which can be very powerful. Authority is vested in the clan as a group, and when a clan is strong, the families that compose it are developing and prosperous. The clan provides its people with a central sense of social orientation and represents an intermediate and often alternate social orientation between the family and larger socio-political levels. The clan is seen as a variant of a lineage structure, in which corporate identity of the group emphasizes common descent. These groups are associated with the requirement for the mobilization of manpower for common defense and subsistence, and are often set off in contrast with other similar groups with which they will be bound within reciprocal networks of marriage and trade patterns.

Religious symbolism plays an important generalized role in reinforcing primary social institutions of the clan, and will include some form of ancestor worship that will institutionalize and legitimize symbolically the authority and sense of the political community as a corporate institution. When these patterns are strongly sanctioned, they often do not permit individuals to maintain friendly relations beyond the bounds of the kin-group, and strictly proscribe the field of relations for the individual. Kinship relations will define the personal field of relations for the individual. Social organization will be institutionalized to cross-cut lineage boundaries and bound lineage groups together in a larger structure of reciprocal obligations.

The foundation of integration, from this theoretical standpoint, is that all these levels should be expressed simultaneously in every social relationship and activity. There occurs as a consequence of such social integration a complex process of social stratification in which "members of the society are distributed in different, non-identical schemes of allegiance and mutual dependence in relation to administrative, juridical and ritual institutions." (Fortes 1951:166) Individual allegiance within a number of intersecting organizations serves to reinforce the overall structure. Personal identity becomes conceived as "an assemblage of statuses." (Fortes 1951:171)

Within the framework of the Hokkien world that I studied, ethnocultural patterns of health, labor, diet, social relations and religion are inextricably bound up with one another. Sense of physical well being is tied symbolically and behaviorally to patterns of oral socialization as well as with values of material fortune and social success. A clan organized community consists of an arrangement of persons that serves the attainment of legitimate social and personal ends--"the gaining of a livelihood, the setting up of a family and the preservation of health and well being." (Fortes, 1953:170) Maintaining harmony and balance by a continuous round of propitiation of the tutelary Gods that look over and protect their community ensures their continued survival, fortune and identity as a people in a larger, uncertain world. This relationship between the Gods and the people of the Jetty is articulated in a very direct manner.

It is within this ethnological context that I will briefly describe traditional Tlingit social patterning as I have learned this through coursework. Tlingit society is divided into two traditional moieties or phratries in which brotherhood or sisterhood to a single clan totem is emphasized. Nested within this are clans, sublineages and lineage houses that hold several families together as a common social unit. The phratries are symbolically identified by totem familiars, the Eagle and the Raven. Among these moieities are several interrelated clan groups that are also identified by totem familiars. These totem familiars become the clan name for all members of the clan group, used to identify and contrast them in relation to other clan groups. The two moieties are tied together by means of rules of clan-exogamy and by obligatory reciprocal ceremonial rituals. Clan groups all live together in the same large clan houses. Tentatively, Tlingit kinship is matrilineal and partly avunculocal, in that the nephews of a family will go to the clan house of the mother's brother to receive ritual training. It appears though that the wife will marry into the clan house of the husband, and will leave her own clan house. Her daughters will remain in the clan house of the father as well, and will marry into this or other clan houses of the opposite moiety. The daughters keep the surname of their birth-mothers. Principles of hierarchy strictly define relations between different families of the clan, and even between different members of the family, such that first-born children are given preference over later-born children in the accordance of privileges and rights.

Tentative componential analysis of kin terms as presented in Olson (1997: 39, 43) suggests an isolating and elaborated version of a basic Haiwaian kin structure that replicates the clan structure at every level, and that extends vertically three generations from ego, and bi-laterally across basic clan lines once removed. Sister's & brother's are identified as older or younger, emphasizing the tacit dimensions of age and sexual stratification. Subsequent lateral removal is represented by a gloss of classificatory relations under the same rubric of brother and sister, and this appears also to be extended diagonally to include ego's father's brothers & sisters and one's mother's brothers & sisters. The two emergent operating principles regulating social relations in the family appear to me to be that of age and gender stratification, and this should be reflected in the religious symbolism and in socio-political rank & privilege.

To contrast this with contemporary American social patterning and kin structure, we must realize that a traditional kin-based pattern of social organization has given way within a state organized and market-oriented, post industrial society to a form of social organization in which the role of kinship is minimized in the elaboration of social life. Though kinship is ambilineally or patrilineally reckoned in a modified form, the children acknowledge both sides of the mother's and brother's family with almost equal symmetry. In the American kin structure, the concept of the "kindred" becomes important in identifying the significant kin relations of ego--all the people who will come to ego's marriage or death ceremonies. Kinship is not directly symbolically linked through religion or social structure to larger institutionalized forms, though it is evident that family patterns affect indirectly socialization and the discrepant behavior of ego in society. Children are expected to find spouses within a larger social network defined largely by the marketplace and by one's class relations. Sociability is emphasized, even before a sense of familial responsibility. Whereas in clan organized society any individual is a unique "assemblage of statuses," in modern American society an individual becomes a unique "combination of roles" through one's lifetime that are played out in the larger social context. In industrialized society, neo-local residence patterns of small nuclear households has become the rule and not the exception, and the importance of one's extended kin is attenuated and often lost completely. Rather than polygamous situations, strict legal and moral codes prescribing monogamy induce patterns of serial monogamy, and hence, a distinctive form of legal (versus blood) kinship in which half-brothers and step-kin frequently occupy important places in ego's life and household.

Tentatively, to summarize, I would hypothetically establish a kind of structure for comparing the Tlingit kin-based traditional system and the American non-kin based system by drawing two contrastive poles between an industrialized state society, on one hand, and a traditional tribal society tied to patterns of subsistence on the other, with another set of dimensions that are related to relative adaptive equilibrium of the society in a larger context of environmental and socio-historical relationships. I would assert that industrialized social forms are recently emergent and are not necessarily symbolically adapted to a new sense of equilibrium in a basic way, hence the classic rural-urban transition is rarely realized in a symbolically balanced manner. Nuclear families arise as a result of the atomization of larger lineage structures due to conditions that foster the breakdown of these larger structures. Such families live without the sense of social-symbolic equilibrium that can be alleged to occur in elaborated lineage based systems.

I would want to correlate this difference with other sets of factors. For instance, I feel from other research, as with French-Catholic lineages in North America (Lewis, 1998) and Vietnamese peasant social structure (Lewis, 1986), that large lineage structure is probably correlated with high relative local population densities, high rates of infant mortality, high birth rates and large family sizes. With declining infant mortality rates, there is evident declining birth rates, and a downshifting of average family sizes to nuclear proportions. There are many other variables that would play into this kind of contrast (Orality/Literacy; Mechanical/Organic; Traditional/Modern; and Paternalistic/Competitive; etc.)

In closing, I must speculate upon the consequences of radical and frequently destructive acculturative influences in the modernization of traditional Tlingit peoples. Beyond deculturation as made evident by the loss of traditional language and folk-arts & crafts, I would relate the rise of a high incidence of behavioral patterns reflecting personality disorders that are the result of fundamentally discrepant realities and the need for situational and behavioral alternation between primary and secondary (derivative) social orientations. I would suggest that a process of desymbolization occurs, as is suggested by the Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton in relation to refugee children of the Vietnam War. I would suggest that the patterning would be chronic and endemic, but not generally acute as was described in Vietnam. This will affect familial relations and larger social organization in various ways, with a number of expectable outcomes. This was a central conclusion born out with the Jetty Chinese and the reservation Me'tis of North America.

On the other hand, we can look to the emergence of a common national culture among a younger generation, largely developed through media, education and governmental policies, that serve to foster a common national symbolic identification at a very basic level. The net result is the emergence of a very complex socio-grid of "ethno-classes" that cross-cut and transect traditional social categories. This was evident in Malaysia, and I believe to hold true in the United States and Canada as well.

The challenge of any human socio-cultural grouping is that it must, in adaptation to its home range, reproduce itself both as a biological entity and as a coherent social-symbolic world order. This challenge is met by different societies in different ways, and the approach taken by one society will be in large measure determined by the structure of environmental relationships maintained by its members. Symbolic world order and successful survival and reproduction in the world come to share an important noetic equilibrium that is traditionally reinforced. Each is necessary for the other to happen, and both are necessary if people are to get along in life and the business of living. So enmeshed are these processes on a basic level of human experience that there is no separating them in terms of a sense of self, other, time or place. Such a complex noetic-behavioral equilibrium becomes particularly manifest and marked in human social relational patterns, and is so embedded in human experience at such a basic level that they are in essence inseparable.

Exchange is vital to human cultural adaptation on both a biological level and a symbolic level of maintaining a complex anthropological equilibrium. So called primitive human exchange systems regulated social relationships beyond the reproductive boundaries of the kin-group and the larger socio-political context that bound the kin-group to a larger bundle of relations. Such exchange was manifold, and carried with it highly symbolic as well as material functions, serving both purposes not only at the same time, but in a coordinated or isomorphic manner. In such exchange, symbols are as concrete as the things that stood for them, and things were as symbolic as the values they represented. In non-western cultural exchange systems, we make reference to substantive economies that lacked aspects of the existence of a standard monetary system and the structural alienation of labor value. In such economic systems, exchange was integral to the problem of the normal and naturalized order of social and environmental relations--exchange relationships and events often came to precipitate and focus these roles in a ritualized context that served to reinforce and reaffirm the sense of reality and integrity of the culture thus represented. Exchange in such a context was a half-open door to an otherwise closed world. It was a manner for regulating potentially dangerous foreign relationships and acculturative influences that might threaten the status quo and even survival of the traditional system. Thus, maintaining good trading relationships was a basis for social harmony of the system that tied directly to the success and survival of the group. It reflected a symbolic harmony with a larger world that was of critical importance to the group's sense of well being and social solidarity. In such a manner, the ritual sanctioning of trading relationships served also as a means of mediating potential conflict and aggression in generalized social relations in a context in which survival depended upon cooperation and the elimination of competition. As in the case of the psycho-geographical relationships of long-established hunter-gatherer communities, sense of self was mapped directly onto the environment, and regulation of the environment became a matter of regulation of the self in relation to the environment as well as in relation to others in the world.

If we study the remarkable detail, refinement and elaboration of Inupiaq art on all objects and household belongings, in clothing, tools, utensils and other possession, we can see a direct symbolic mapping of the sense of self and society onto the material environment--we can also expect a reciprocal mapping of the material environment onto the internal worldview of the self. This dialectic is fundamental to human symbolization, and it assumes focal importance in the act of gift exchange. Such an act can serve to summarize the life world of the Inupiaq--it is much more therefore than just the periodic reinforcement of social relationships. It brings to concrete realization the statuses, strategies, values and social relations that are important to people as social creatures.

In this way, basic acts of exchange come to represent the power of the symbolic mediation of reality in everyday adaptation. They allow for the adjustment and articulation of relations, status, and material conditions in the everyday life-world of the inhabitants and participants. At the same time, such relationships were inherently ambivalent and were therefore prone to risk, calculation, manipulation and prevarication. The dangerous aspects of exchange had to be ritually circumscribed in order to be controlled. Ritual contextualization of exchange allowed for its symbolic definition and determination in a manner culturally available to all parties involved. Witchcraft and sorcery often represented malevolent forms of exchange that had negative outcomes.

In a continuum of social relations defined by competition and cooperation on either extreme, those relationships which could be potentially harmful or dangerous from a competitive standpoint, which were uncontrollable, needed to be brought within a framework of ritualized and symbolically defined cooperation in contexts where the consequences otherwise might be disastrous. The case of the Inupiaq system of long distance trading relationships is a clear example of the basic relationship between concrete symbolization on one hand, unformalized, ritually constrained, materially mediated through acts and events, with the requirements of survival in one of the harshest and most forbidden environments known to humankind. It is an environment that has been marked by relative isolation, the daily struggle for survival against the elements of nature, and very high risks of failure in any venture undertaken. In such an extreme environment, long distance trading relations would have provided a tether and a life-line to a larger world that would have been seen as crucial to survival as hunting and protection from the cold. Such a life-line would have permitted the possibility of contact and communication, and the transaction and trade of much needed and valuable goods in a dependable manner. A network system would have assured that trading relationships would reach far and wide to be able to pull into the system those things upon which survival and success would have depended. Relatively simple things would have also been the source of much happiness.

In a very real way, such networks in such a context served the purposes of maintaining not only a modicum of material plenty, but a minimum of genetic diversity as well. It provided a mechanism that allowed for gene flow and migration to occur between small groupings when and where the chances for frequent association were very few and far between. Such an institutional form as long distant trading partnerships would not have been intended or rationalized in such a way, but the necessicity of biological survival and reproductive value would have been implicitly important to the situation, and such would have been the outcomes upon a basic biological level. Such an example would occur in contexts where the domestic value of the female was too vital to the welfare and success of the kindred as a whole to be relinquished by exogamous marriage to distant outgroups.

If certain vital life threatening forces could not be physically controlled, they at least can be symbolically manipulated and managed--things that were uncontrollable came to have strong symbolic mechanisms of control. At the same time, relationships that were safe and highly manageable, such as domestic arrangements between husband and wife, could have a tremendous degree of symbolic freedom and elaboration. In such a context, symbolic focus and attention in one context or aspect of the relationship, as in a long-distance trading partnership, may have entailed symbolic freedom from restriction and licence in other areas or aspects. It is evident that the trading partner relationship took on connotations of social marriage/brotherhood system, even to the point of tolerating, indeed, valuing, sexual relations between the partner and one's wife. A similar kind of thing was recorded in the American revolutionary frontier, in which French soldiers were encouraged by the families to have sexual relations with their daughters. In a world marked by inherent life-threatening uncertainty, and a preoccupation with future outcomes of an venture undertaken, the trading partner in such a system of ritual exchange would have come to have a certain symbolic value as a productive, and possibly reproductive resource that was vital to the future interests and prospects of the small group.

We must contrast the ideal of a successful trading partner relationship, that might have lead to an offspring that embodied the success of the relationship, and may have stood as well as for the symbolic success of the group that was behind the relationship, with the realistic possibility of female infanticide or alternatively geronticide in a context where a group is failing to meet the harsh requirements for survival in a kind of life-boat ethics. It is therefore an ideal relationship that was frequently sought out in long-distance terms, but perhaps rarely realized in the way or to the extent that cultural tradition would have demanded. Hence, trading relationships had an inherent weakness in their structure--they could be undermined by duplicity, unreliability and shifting loyalties or commitments over time. Promises made are often broken, both of which are curious human habits. In such a case, what was a relationship of symbolic cooperation, would soon become a conflict with real competition, and frequently violent outcomes.

Secondary institutions would have been developed for the mediation and reinforcement of such relationships to forestall the possibility for such violence, but such mediation could never be guaranteed of success in all cases. We can anticipate certain kinds of joking relationships or song contests that would permit the playful resolution of potential conflict between parties with vested interests. Thus, attached to such an institution would be an intrinsic sense of inherent uncertainty, ambiguity and insecurity that would be the counterpart of the symbolic realization of success and achievement. This insecurity would be unconscious and deep seated, and would negatively reinforce the entire trading relationship as a form of cognitive dissonance, in a manner as how we understand the Protestant belief in the Select as the foundation for a captialist ethos. Thus the symbolic dimensions of the trading relationship would have a sense of depth and importance, a sense of vitality that connected in concrete ways to the risks of life and death in everyday life. Trading relationships, successfully transacted, would have assuaged such insecurities.

I believe the valuable thing about trading relationships is that they were forms of mutual or balanced exchange--they tended to work both ways at the same time, bringing distant groups into the same symbolic universe as a single entity in a world in which any other form of connection would be impossible. They also tended to be dialectically loaded in the sense that they took on focal importance and elaboration in the lifeworld of the individual.

The fundamental importance of exchange in regulation of human life and in resource distribution as so clearly exemplified in Inupiaq long distance trading relationships, remains today at the forefront of human social activity and involvement in the modern global Capitalist system. Status, security, sense of well being, are all tied up in a complex system of class and social relations now regulated by an impersonal market economy--underlying all this complex patterning are the same basic human needs and symbolic mechanisms for the mediation of experience as existed in the traditional trading partner relationship and in traditional contexts worldwide. In such a system, and in similar settings in the world, we can find something very fundamental and unique to the human condition--the direct and indirect symbolic mediation of human experience in adaptation to the physical world. This takes us back to the era of the dark cave where culture began, when our precursors watched fanciful shadows dancing upon the walls, and feared with curiosity the dark night beyond the entrance.

There is an important aspect of analysis of these trading partner networks, akin to exchange relations in the Trobriands, the New Guinea Highlands and across the Pacific.We can refer to a cultural embedded system of implicit rules governing such relationship, by which standard forms of inference can be used to deduce expectable outcomes from certain kinds of situations and partnerships--we might refer to this as an implicit calculus of the cultural symbology of the Inupiaq worldview, institutionally structured as it was by the trading partner system. Such patterns allow for a chunking of shared experience that renders the world mutually intelligible for all the participants in the game of life, even if it were relatively opaque to the outsider attempting to understand such institutional arrangements.

In closing, and in keeping with my previous papers in relation to Alaska native culture, I must ask once again the relationship of acculturative changes in affecting the worldview and social relations of the Inupiaq, in this instance in terms of the trading partnership. I could see that perhaps the Inupiaq saw early encounters with White people in a way symbolically structured by the mutual expectations of the trading partner institution. If they were given bibles to read, they read them diligently, even without knowing fully or even remotely the meaning of the words, such that there would be a kind of mechanical action forthcoming that might assure them of a better relationship with the world than before. And if a group of wealthy White hunters should drop down from the sky in a helicopter unannounced, it is without a doubt that the Inupiaq would have seen such a visitation as a portent of things to come in the future. I would expect that the trading partner relationship would become something passe in a new global economy marked by snow-mobiles, cash and a UPS truck. A new set of distant trading partners might be established, but in an economic framework without the balanced reciprocities that existed in the traditional times.

The following brief summary of key points is derived from my own background of field research with Vietnamese Refugee families, Hokkien Chinese working class families, and with peasant and proletariat working class mainland Chinese families, as well as from research in primary acquisition of children and in symbolic framing research.

The concept of the family as a system is important both theoretically and in an applied sense of human development. It is a testament to the validity of this approach that it has been successfully employed as a model for the rehabilitation of disrupted families. It has also clear and central theoretical and methodological constructs that relate several important sets of behavioral phenomena. These concepts are: Symbolic-behavioral integration of the family as a function of culture and acculturative stress; the primary socialization and enculturation of the individual within the familial context; the concept of the differentiation of the phenomenal field that is linked to increasing sophistication of articulation of behavioral reponse sets and symbolic mediation of reality; the rise of discrepant reality orientations in the subjective experience of the individual as a result of contradiction and conflict of psychological, familial and secondary cultural institutions; the symbolic-behavioral disorientation and disintegration of both the family and the individual that is the result of such stress, and that can be manifest in varying forms either in terms of conversion reactions, impulse control disorders or other forms of adaptive stress disorders; the relationship of the notion of field dependency/field independency to the occasion of chronic stress and anxiety in the context of the family, leading to the acquisition of certain perceptual, cognitive and behavioral patterns of response that mitigate against adaptive functioning in changing contexts. Once acquired, it appears that this trend is relatively set and irreversible except through rather intensive therapy and training. One result, in terms of social psychological theory, is the tendency of such individuals to exist in a mode that can be described as 'subjectively self-aware' versus 'objectively self-aware.' People who slip in to 'SSA' modality of response will be more hyper-suggestible to environmental stimuli that leads to blocking of psychogenic response patterns that are part of a strong sense of ego-identity, or what can be referred to as a consistently 'OSA' orientation. It can be said that a family is a natural system of the individual human being, by which that person gains a fundamental sense of symbolic identity as a self, as a social being, of others, and of reality itself. Children at an early age are naturally inquisitive and seek in their effective environments certain kinds of feedback that can only be mediated by significant others in relations of trust and love, security and protection. If they cannot find this kind of mediation from their primary care-givers, then they will seek it in a larger environment, albeit in a form that may be fundamentally distorted or disturbed. I propose a modified paradigm based upon the Freudian theory of psycho-sexual development in which psycho-social development is the basis for the formation of personality and for subsequent patterns of behavior and symbolic response that endures throughout adulthood.

The basis of a family system is maintaining a level of equilibrium that can be described as a consistency of a sense of well being of the members of such a system. There can be no isolation or detachment of the members of such a system from the system as a whole. Psycho-social identity of the individual is critically tied to the concept of the symbolic-behavioral stability and well-being as a family. All family systems must exist within some larger cultural framework of symbolism, sanctions, institutions and interactions in relation to a larger community of other families and people. Family systems that are traditionally organized in general can be described in terms of implicit rule structures that organize relations and interactions between members of such systems in consistent ways. These rule structures can be elicited and described in ways that are empirically consistent. It is apparent that modernization trends worldwide, accompanied by strong effects of globalization and western acculturation, tend to have basic disruptive influences upon such systems that affect the family and the primary cultural contexts in which such family systems achieve their equilibrium. In general, modernization achieves a sense of displacement of the family and the individual in terms that are analogous to what is discribed as a rural-urban transition. Families are often atomized as nuclear entities in apartments or flats that lack the features of traditional village in which cultural stability and homogeneity is recognized. If these processes are extreme and dramatic, then they can have results that are extremely disruptive and destructive for both the individual and the family system of which that individual is a member. Displacement is not just geographical, but historical, social, cultural and symbolic as well. Many families and individuals do not, indeed cannot, make a full transition, but are caught 'betwixt and between.'