The concept of ethnoculture fits the anthropological study of culture in situ to real historical and biographical details of people's lives, as well as into the hermeneutical context of scholarship upon a particular group in time and place and in literature by or about that group. The concept of ethnoculture also serves to fit the anthropological study of culture into larger methodological and theoretical frameworks that, in the largest frame of reference, encompasses most knowledge about and by humankind. It serves in this sense to put culture into the framework of the individual in a number of ways and from a number of dimensions. Furthermore, it takes the study of the culture as a shared, group identity, and fits this into a framework of a larger social stream of different kinds of peoples traversing different periods of time. We can extend the concept of ethnoculture to the study of the complexities of modern society, as well as to the study of the relative symbolic-behavioral equilibrium of well established traditional societies. We can extend the methodology of ethnoculture to describe what is of central importance about human systems theory in general, and this in turn can be fit within a framework of natural systems theory that encompasses almost all that we call the sciences.

How can one small concept like ethnoculture accomplish so much? Its development through various field studies has been approached from an integrative and complementary perspective that has sought to achieve a holistic and comprehensive view of human reality within a larger frame of reference that includes science, history, the humanities. It is a view about human knowledge as much as it is about people who know or who are at least capable of such knowledge upon some level. It stems from the view that culture is something very basic in our separate lives and in our collective identity as human beings, and it is something that we have shared with other people, even our most remote common ancestors. The important revolutions to have occurred in the rise and development of human culture has not been material or social, these have been the consequences of this development. It has rather been noetic and informational. Humans have made a progressive and cumulative series of noetic breakthroughs of comprehension that has enabled them to articulate technology with reality and to construct cultural patterns in the world that are arbitrary and of their own design. This rise is upon an organic level associated with the human brain, of course, but we must realize that this brain was at no time in its evolutionary history developed in social isolation. It occurred in the concurrent context of the development of language and a peculiar manner of human sociability. Human culture is inextricably both symbolic and social in its construction, from the beginning. It is for this reason, more than any other, that I have chosen the term "ethnoculture" to distinguish it from the more common usage of "culture" within especially anthropological frames of reference.

We can therefore make certain basic statements about human ethnoculture, about what it is, and also what it is not.

1. Ethnoculture is historical and traditional.

2. Ethnoculture is shared and transmitted socially.

3. Ethnoculture is environmentally constrained and materially expressed.

4. Ethnoculture is socially situated.

5. Ethnoculture is symbolically organized and subjectively real.

6. Ethnoculture is linguistically and behaviorally encoded.

7. Ethnoculture is organically rooted.

8. Ethnoculture is developmentally dynamic.

9. Ethnoculture is biographically organized and existentially necessary.

10. Ethnoculture is institutionally incorporated.

Note that this laundry list to the definition of ethnoculture is both similar in a few respects and quite different from a typical definition of human culture that is found in many introductory textbooks. Each of these ten points will be elaborated in turn for its primary significances, but it is important to consider briefly all ten points together as constituting what can be considered to be an alternative paradigm to the understanding and approach to the anthropological study of culture, especially from a comparative and nomothetic standpoint. We may add to this list an eleventh and twelfth point:

11. Ethnoculture tends to be ethnocentrically and ego-centrically orienting.

12. Ethnoculture tends to be ideologically self-serving and opaque.

We may take a step back from this general definition of ethnoculture, to make a few statements that:

A. ethnoculture is anthropologically constructed

B. ethnoculture solves a basic evolutionary problem of human adaptation and survival.

C. ethnoculture is cybernetically systematic and functional

D. ethnoculture is partially predeterminative of human thought and action.

We may say that ethnocultural studies properly fits within a larger framework of human systems theory, as the latter is a formal scientific study of the patterns of human systems at all levels of their integration and manifestation.

Beyond theoretical and definitional aspects of the concept of ethnoculture, there are as well methodological aspects to its understanding that are coordinate with this digression. There are several sets of methods and their corresponding methodologies that are attributed to ethnocultural studies. Ethnocultural studies shares many of these methods with other fields of inquiry, but the methods and methodologies central to ethnocultural studies can be said to be unique in both combination and in kind to this form of research and scholarship and common to no other form of inquiry.

Methods as these have been developed include the following:

1. The extensive and intensive use of various forms of interview, both structured and unstructured.

2. The use of symbolic framing methods in conjunction with other ethnosemantic methods of knowledge elicitation to obtain what can be called complex behavioral response profiles characteristic of ethnocultural orientations.

3. The use of naturalistic observation and various recording methods for the systematic observation of behavior, especially under natural experimental conditions.

4. The use of various forms of survey and behavioral scan/time allocation studies that are synchronous to what can be referred to as complex networks and ethnostructural patterns of social organization and behavior.

5. The use of what I call existential ethnography in conjunction with what I term phenomenological participation in the event structures relating to ethnoculture.

6. The use of hermeneutic and critical analysis and interpretation of all texts, of all kinds, that are associated with the main area or objects of study. This includes content analysis of various forms, including application to non-textual documents and artifacts.

7. The use of various forms of multidimensional data analysis techniques and computer-based informational systems for the analysis and synthesis of data obtained from ethnocultural studies.

These approaches to the study of ethnoculture can be rationalized within the framework of the operationalization of human systems theory in a manner that is sufficient to the larger intellectual and theoretical goals of this kind of work, as well as to the natural patterning of the data itself. Ethnocultural studies, taken together, therefore represent a complementary and comprehensively integrated mode of study that spans many different disciplines and knowledge domains. For the first time, via symbolic framing methods, we can claim a systematic standard scale by which to compare and contrast in an empirical manner what can be called cultural traits and patterns, and we can demonstrate systematically as well how these relate to observed patterns of behavior and relationship as well as to reported or elicited patterns of knowledge by informants.

In this regard, I would venture to claim that ethnocultural studies represents the operational heart of human systems theory as a form of scientific metasystem that concerns the questions and problems of integration of knowledge at this level of reality. Other methods and fields of inquiry certainly may and do contribute significantly to the development of a human systems paradigm, but the concept of ethnoculture, as this is articulated through and by ethnocultural studies, remains its heart and soul.

The point of origin and reason for development of ethnocultural studies arose from a preoccupation with the status and importance of human knowledge in its distribution, function and influence upon the patterning of human thought and behavior and upon the patterning of human society and history as well. It is not too much to claim that the central concern of an anthropology of knowledge is what can be referred to as the anthropological relativism of all knowledge, and, from this standpoint, what might be called the noetic relativism of human understanding, as this is articulated through ethnocultural patterns and its study. The reflexive and paradoxical aspect of this study should not be either underemphasized or overemphasized. In other words, we are attempting to study ourselves vis a' vis one another in a reciprocal and objective manner. We are attempting to describe the car we are riding in, while we are in the car riding. It is important, but it is not so critical to an understanding of ourselves and one another that it precludes the role of science or objectivity of knowledge and relation.

Having briefly defined ethnoculture in terms of what it is, it is useful to also delineate some of the things that it is not. Ethnocultural studies is not:

1. A form of hyphenated academic agenda based upon the preferential and exclusive study of an ethnic or minority group, though it may incorporate some aspects of this kind of study.

2. A variant of traditional anthropological ethnography, though it incorporates such study at certain levels.

3. A well received and program based field of study within academic institutions.

To date, ethnocultural studies have been developed by my own hand over the course of a couple of decades of involvement in anthropological inquiry and study. In this regard, while I would like to see such an approach more widely adopted, especially within a contemporary anthropological framework, I have no other investment in their development than in my own studies. I have learned enough about humility through anthropology that I should not expect that ethnocultural studies will become anything more, or less, than what they are at this time.

Ethnocultural studies were developed during an era of anthropology that witnessed a great deal of criticism of received ethnographic method and critique of anthropological method in relation to the study of the so-called "other." They were therefore designed to be a constructive anthropological antidote and alternative to such post-structural, reflexive critique. Anthropology is faced with the dilemma of moving past the objections and limitations of past approaches, and of adapting itself to a changing global context in which the position of the other is no longer framed or bound within a colonial worldview. Some of these criticisms were aimed toward legitimate and intrinsic limits to anthropological method and interpretation--including the exclusion of a sense of history, the exclusion of the sense of self, either of the informant or the ethnographer, the exclusion of a sense of the situation and situatedness of people or a group within a larger, modern, contemporary framework of relations with other people, etc. Thus, ethnocultural studies emerged as an anthropological answer to these kinds of criticisms, in a more or less integrated and deliberate manner.

The basis for ethnocultural studies stems from the requirement to manage the inherent complexity and volume of knowledge about human reality in a systematic and organized manner, in a manner that furthermore serves to interrelate various levels and dimensions in a significant and holistic manner. Ethnocultural studies allow us to tend to complex problems, and usually involve efforts that are themselves relatively complex and involved.

The potential for ethnocultural studies is, I believe, a thorough encyclopedic approach to the understanding and documentation of human systems, in all their cultural variation and through their entire natural history. This approach would encompass as well a comprehensive theoretical paradigm that incorporated divisive and different theoretical agendas and perspectives within a common framework of complementary understanding. Such a system would provide a frame of referene for the further research and study of human systems in general, and provide a common, or should I say, universal point of departure for any study in particular. In this regard, as an encyclopedic reference, ethnocultural studies encompasses and replaces the goals of an earlier and rudimentary approach that I had developed, that I had referred to as humanological studies. Ethnocultural studies effective substitutes, and enlarges considerably the scope of this previous model, which I would define now alternatively in terms of human systems theory rather than as "humanology."

Some in anthropology may claim that ethnocultural studies is a kind of eclectic methodology without a central organizing theory, unlike the privileged operationalization of research methods in frameworks like cultural materialism, Marxism or historical materialism, or structural-functionalism, or socio-biology or biocultural studies, etc. In this sense, ethnocultural studies resemble more a broadened form of ethnographic study, such that they are almost universally applicable to any theoretical perspective or domain of study. In fact, there is nothing further from the truth of the matter. The theory with which ethnocultural studies is bound up is the theory of the anthropological construction of reality, which falls under the broader aegis of the anthropology of knowledge, and this theoretical framework fits within a larger context of human and natural systems theory, which can be best thought of as a form of information science applied to natural phenomenal event patterning at multiple levels. Privileging information over social relation, material function, or biological determination. It does not stand the normal hierarchy of determinations back upon its head, so much as it claims that human reality, in its complexity, is inherently underdetermined.

At least on a manifest level, if we are to look for determinacy in human systems, then we must first seek it in the thoughts and deliberative actions of people. If we look behind this, we see that these thoughts and deliberative actions of people are as often as not critically influenced by unconscious motivations and what can be called implicit knowledge structures, and that these in turn are critically shaped by aspects of cultural patterning that is shared and socially distributed. People are of course driven to fight for survival, and to adopt methods of production that assures their reproductive success and biological continuity. But it is also evident as well that what methods people adopt are left more or less open to manipulation and choice, and that they and their interpretation are inherently symbolically mediated such that it is impossible to determine where considerations of functional necessity and biological determination leave of and matters of choice, preference, appetite and aversion, take over.

This approach does not stand in place of or abnegate the possibility or validity of alternative theoretical perspectives--for instance cultural materialism or bio-culturalism. Rather, it merely seeks to contextualize any such alternative approach into a wider framework of possibility and realism. Thus, cultural materialist approaches can be adopted as useful within an ethnocultural framework, but not as exclusively so. The value of any alternative is, within an ethnocultural framework, partial and incomplete at best.

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I first developed the concept of ethnoculture, and its approach, in the ethnological problem I had in describing in as objective a manner as possible the culture, civilization and historical background of the Vietnamese boat people with whom I had been conducting ethnographic research for my Master's cycle of seasons. The challenge I met at first was that I had only the word of my informants' to rely upon, and I considered their stories to be both insufficient and fundamentally biased by the stressful events of their checkered past, to be reliable enough to paint the background of their lives with a broad brush. The majority of texts at the time found in the University library dealt in one way or another with the history and consequences and causes of the American involvement in the Vietnamese war. This war it seemed, had occluded in basic ways a deeper and more thorough understanding of the people whom they were fighting and about whom they seemed to know so little, and possibly even care less about. I felt a bit frustrated at the time in achieving my main aim, as vague as this was at the time. And yet, among the many texts upon the shelves, a few titles caught my eye on subjects that managed a bit of parallax around the official government documents and formal military reports and histories. In time, through inter-library loans and persistent searches in a broadened range of subject titles, I was able to cast a fairly broad net over the problem I was seeking to define.

What exactly was the problem? That was perhaps my first question I needed to answer. I wrote a preliminary paper as part of my research proposal entitled Vietnamese Tapestry for the Master's thesis that provided the general formulation for the kind of model I was after, though it was ill received by my main mentor at the time. I had also composed a shorter term paper for a course in Medical Anthropology entitled "Stress-related Disorders of Vietnamese Americans" which was better received by my instructor. It was derived from my own impressions with key informants in fieldwork, as well as with what I had gleaned from refugee reports, newspaper articles and informant gossip concerning sudden unexplained deaths among young Vietnamese men especially. One of my key informants was reporting to a medical doctor with claims of headaches and dizziness and even nausea, and yet the doctors repeatedly found no organic explanations for her maladies. Further acquaintance with this individual revealed periodic episodes of almost complete psychological dissociation and what I would call derealization from her surroundings, and there were a few awkward moments when it was apparent that she was not in the present but somewhere in her past in another time and place. The question, or rather the problem I faced, was how to get around the huge issue of the "Vietnam War" in a manner that still allowed me to gain insight into the reasons the Vietnamese boat people were doing what they were doing in their new homeland. I felt like too much attention upon the War as a scapegoat for every issue and as the standard frame of reference for every explanation was both insufficient and inaccurate, and did not do justice to the real sense of meaning that the Vietnamese refugees had brought to their new world.

What I wanted to accomplish with the research was to try to make sense of the lives of my key informants by means of a deeper and broader and hopefully more realistic understanding of their cultural background and heritage. It seemed perhaps that, as a community, their greatest sense of loss was not the Republic of South Vietnam, the ill-gotten war, or even their own family members, which each seemed to suffer in their own way. It struck me that their greatest loss was of their basic cultural identity and sense of cultural equilibrium in the new world. Of all those who wrote about the Vietnam War, both good and bad, it was Robert J. Lifton who summarized the sense of loss in his term of desymbolization of traditional Vietnamese culture, or what I would call symbolic deculturation that was attended by the war and the dislocations and destruction this had caused the people. Imagine an entire group of young boys taking rat poison in a pact to end their pain. The dead after all are quite comfortable--the living must get on with business. I wanted to be able to personalize their experiences in terms that made sense both emically to themselves, and etically to those who sought to understand them in some objective manner. At the same time, I wanted to try to personalize their sense of history and loss of culture in a way that made sense, both of their suffering and interpretation of experience, and in terms of their larger framework of what it means to be a Vietnamese.

As I gradually made headway in this endeavor, I came soon to the realization that ethnocultural studies were inherently interdisciplinary. In quest to get the right information, one should not be prejudiced about what field or disciplinary framework one finds useful and interesting information within. I believe, in hindsight, that the larger Southeast Asian context of which Vietnam was a part, played a role in enhancing this belief in the cross-disciplinary nature of the studies I was undertaking. To limit oneself to only one or a few fields exclusively is to deny oneself of a substantial portion of knowledge and breadth of understanding of reality.

In regard to this, it is important to understand that the pattern and structure of knowledge is more or less institutionalized and stratified such that it changes more slowly than that of the people who may partake of this knowledge. Such knowledge is therefore also spread out over a much larger landscape and terrain than is to be found in any one library. It soon entailed a lot of interlibrary loaning to obtain materials that were locally unavailable or relatively hard to get. The structural (if not social) openness of most of the library systems in the US tends to facilitate more than it frustrates this development in research and scholarship.

Soon, and ultimately, my research goal from the standpoint of developing a sense of background by which to frame the ethnographic study I had been seek to understand, led me to the believe that only a comprehensive command of the knowledge pertinent to the area would be sufficient, though such knowledge would tend always to become incomplete as well. I do not believe that this goal can ever be totally met, and it remains open-ended to the degree that new works relating to the topic are being periodically and continually produced. I have noticed in hindsight that much updating and keeping current with the most recent publications is vital to sustaining ethnocultural studies over the long term. With the snap shot of a couple of years over which most of my studies were carried out, it was possible to achieve temporarily a relative sense of completeness over the subject matter.

Thus, it appears, that subjects in general occupy a complex noetic stratigraphic position in the landscape of knowledge, and subjects once current or popular can become buried with the process of time by more recent works. Library systems that regularly clean off their shelves and update their collections with newer titles experience this and frequently recycle old works regardless of their forgotten value to some prior period of research and scholarship. General subjects can occupy positions within this landscape that are quite stable, and gaining expertise upon these subjects is largely getting to know the lay of the noetic landscape that they are found within, to the point of becoming familiar with every nook and cranny, every feature and blemish. The addition of new material every month and every year tends to the accumulation and dynamic evolution of this landscape, such that the prominent features of a subject area in one phase may not be the same in successive periods.

The conduct of ethnocultural studies therefore soon came to be constituted by a fine kind of survey and excavation work in relation to the texts and understanding relating to the topic of the Vietnamese in general and the Vietnamese refugees in particular. Within this approach, one must recognize that there is no such thing as an uninteresting piece or bit of information. All sources, no matter how trivial seeming, are important bits of evidence, both within their external provenience in relation to other pieces, and in their internal information. I came to read as much Vietnamese poetry, for instance, as I could, and some of the literature as well, such as the class Kim Van Kieu. This aspect of Vietnamese civilization acquainted me with the romantic heart of theVietnamese people, as well as with their sensitivity to the world. It is not an unrelated point that Ho Chi Minh wrote his own poetry while in captivity by the French. Closer to home, it is also not unrelated that Vietnamese, when within a relaxed and pleasant or even a melancholy mood, will frequently swing, quite smoothly, from talking to a melodic kind of folk singing, and that much of the folk poetry of Vietnamese reflects the tonality of the language as well as the romantic heart of the Vietnamese. Therefore, a study of Vietnamese literature was no less important to me than an economic analysis of a Vietnamese peasant village or the ethnographic description of the same small village, or a history of the French or even of the Chinese in Vietnam, or some analysis of the American involvement there.

The ethnocultural understanding that emerges from this kind of scholarship itself become stratified upon multiple levels. At some point I began to realize that there was a systematic order to this stratification, as well as a sense of integration that could be achieved upon each of its levels.