Chapter XVII

"…THEORY and PRAXIS of ANTHROPOLOGICAL HETERO-/ORTHODOXIES

by Hugh M. Lewis

Whether if of science or of the humanities, anthropology has always been bound within a scholastic tradition of dialectical disputation dating from Plato and Aristotle. Though now mostly lost, this oral method of argumentation survives in textual essence in professional forums of journalistic discourse, in oral defense of doctoral examinations, in symposia, colloquia, and less formally in seminars and corridor conversation. The focal mode of literary representation, information, articulation and publication of anthropology remains embedded in this tradition of dialogical discourse despite its ideological bifurcation into separate camps of scientific demonstration and logic and humanistic rhetoric and ertistic. This pre-Hegelian dialectic informs the structure of anthropological discourse and allows anthropology to transcend the 'two cultures' of conventional academia to become its own 'third culture'.

This dialectical tradition constitutes the foundation of the rationalistic orientation of what has become the predominant, hegemony western world view. The role of anthropology within this tradition has been the collectivizing/relativizing mediation of the boundaries between the western notion of the self as collectivizing representation and the nonwestern sense of 'otherness' as 'relativizing representations'. Similarly, the individual anthropological ego transcends the separation of self and other by means of the same dialectic, whether in fieldwork, second hand research, or in textual construction or criticism. The anthropological ego becomes the personifier and the ethnographic 'other' becomes the personified in the mediation of these contraposed representations. This dialectic pre-structures the relationship of anthropology to the world whether anthropological ego is serving the role of diplomatic representative, hegemonic imperialist, colonial administrator, change agent, authoritative appropriator, culture broker, trans-cultural mediator or translator, cross cultural comparativist, experimental statistician, or as a medium, vehicle or voice of the 'missing other'.

This framework makes it important to regard anthropological discourse as 'hetero-/orthodox' dialectics of the western world view of the self in relation to 'others'. As heterodoxy, anthropology is construed from the point of view of being informed of the 'opinions of the other'. As orthodoxy, anthropology is construed as representing the opinions of the self above the 'heresies' of the other. In the history of the development of anthropology as a 'paradigmatic science', heterodox differences have always been a minor contrapuntal theme to the major message of the orthodoxy of self identity. Heterodox anthropology presupposes multiple competing 'world views' while orthodox anthropology presumes a single homogenous rational world view subsuming or subsumed by the many variations and differences of the phenomenal world.

The debate between post structural anti-anthropological critique, as 'an important approach which can make a contribution to enhancing the anthropological process by…' and the scientific defense of anthropological orthodoxy that such an approach 'undermines the scientific and theoretical premises of anthropology as a social science' will be evaluated within this framework and it will be applied to heter0-/orthodox challenges in sub-fields of medical anthropology, urban anthropology and the anthropology of migration. Finally, theoretical issues in linguistics and 'applied anthropology' will be explored and an alternative 'philosophy of anthropology' suggested.

The importance of anthropology is not found in its engagement in either scientific/anti-scientific or humanistic/anti-humanistic dialectic (engagement in either side is an inherently political act) but in its critical disengagement as a neutral arbiter of the dialectic. When anthropology and anthropologists learn to stand on their own as part of a 'third culture' then its theory and praxis will come into its own without being referred to either the sciences or the humanities.

1. "The possibility of translation is its impossibility." The value of post- structuralist deconstruction of the position and purpose of anthropology in the world has been it systematic excoriation of hidden contradiction embedded within seemingly coherent, consistent, 'sense making' texts, ideas and theory--its 'demystification' of the 'common senseness' and 'con-sensus' of social science by the relevation of its implicit, unstated biases. This critique focuses upon the problem of interpretations or linguistic translation, and the empowerment which uncontested authority or control over translation brings to social relations in the world. The materialist 'etic' view of language based on the mutual translatability of all languages and a scientific meta-language leads to a version of the 'demystification' of 'science' which is the opposite of the 'emic' version of the demystification of science based upon the critical view of the mutual untranslatability of all languages. Though many may exist, a final, perfect translation is impossible. Hence there can be no ultimate, 'totalizing' sense of objectivity that is not embedded within the emics of language.

Like geography, its sister discipline, anthropology is held to be the first step toward the pan-optic control over the other. More than merely the appropriation of anthropological texts for ideological motivations--the 'distanciation of surplus meaning'--the texts themselves, the act of writing the texts and the languages of the text, are inextricably embedded within history and world informed by differences in power. Texts are re-constructions of reality with an inherent political design of controlling that reality. The realities of the other, and 'other' realities, as coterminous and coeval with our own sense of reality, is 'mis-appropriated' in the form and forum of textual 're-presentations' of 'otherness' (which become more valued than the actual realities of the others and which serve our own ends) and serve political purposes in the interest of the self. There is a critical 'absence' of the missing reality of the other and a 'fossilization' of a frozen other for the mythological reconstruction of our own sense of purpose in the past tense. Without the challenge of a continuous, ongoing dialogue with the actual other, the 're-presentations' of the other enter into a 'self' perpetuating, 'self' promoting and 'self' validating ideology.

A 'post-humanist' critique of 'anthropo-logos' as a 'science of disinterested inquiry' construes its neutrality and objectivity as merely the disguise of the functional intellectual instrumentality of anthropology in the promotion and preservation of the 'colonial' status quo in the world, embodying the enlightenment ideology of reformatory education rooted in the Roman Imperial Tradition of 'Veritas'--Versus and Falsus. The 'Ethnographic Present' and "Historiographic Past' is a culture historical mythology of textual 're-construction' based upon realizing the 'principle of presence'--the projection of ideologies of rational purpose and progress rooted in a western tradition of transcendence and rational idealism. All 'structures' (including 'systems') and the superimposition of a sense of 'order' upon the phenomenological and experiential realities of 'others' is a political enactment of prediction and control, of 'centering' the other in relation to a predominant world view--the 'way of life' of the core metropolis by bringing the other under the pan optic purview of the 'western gaze' and by denying the inter-subjective possibility of 'other' realities. This is the first perceptual/conceptual step in the enlightenment 'reformation' of the other for the purpose of rendering a potentially hostile, unpredictable and dangerous other, docile, obedient, predictable, controllable, and exploitable. Anthropology becomes a 'mode of representation and information' within the political economy of a world system of capitalistic imperialism.

While interesting, the critique of anthropology runs into the problem of posing its own paradox, self-destructing in contradiction in the process of destructing the contradictions of the very anthropological structures upon which it critically depends. In making nonsense of seeming sense, it opens the door to the abyss of its own groundlessness, which it then must cover over by superimposing yet another structure upon the nonsense of its own destruction in order to remake 'sense' of the world--restoring the very kind of thing it destructs in the first place. The lesson it teaches us is that though we cannot live well with 'structure' in the world, neither can we live wholly without it. We must make 'sense' of the world, and scientific sense is the best way we have for it.

In making the strange familiar, such critical theory presupposes the paradoxical impossibility that we cannot communicate in the world, that there can be no mutually intelligible translations of reality. Therefore there can be no anthropology or mutual understanding in the world, there is only a solipsistic conundrum in which there can be no knowledge of knowledge and no vision of difference as difference. It is this dilemma which anthropologists of the strictly scientific persuasion find so deeply distrustful and threatening. Science is not just mythology, mystification of reality or ideology in 'objective disguise'. Science does not and should not seek justification beyond itself. A relatively neutral and value free version and vision of science in the world should not be replaced by mere meaningless anarchy and reductionistic nonsense. While 'emics of the observer' undermines any pretension in scientific 'objectivity' this objectivity itself is only a relative, non-absolutistic, more or less condition. Genuine science was born out of a need to overcome just such a mythology, mystification and ideology in the world, to proffer multiple possible versions of the world which are relatively neutral and value free.

Science is based not only upon the simple possibility of communication, of translation but upon the relative 'openness' of such communication--that its values and meanings should be as non-exclusive and equivalently interpretable as possible--and in the probability of obtaining the 'correct' translation--in the sense of being as much as possible without noise, randomness, error or bias, implying a meta-linguistic framework of inter-interpretation of all phenomena in reality. The precondition of relative 'openness' means that science cannot preclude the possibility of multiple interpretations but must embrace all translations in a dialectical 'free-play'. Genuine science is 'disinterested' not to disguise unconscious motivations or deliberate delusions or deceits of ideology but to remain ostensibly 'value free' to escape entrapment in such delusions and deceits. From this point of view 'objective' has a fundamentally different significance than 'etic denial of emic subjectivity' or 'reification and reduction of humanness'--it becomes the relative degree of achieved 'value neutrality' or the index of 'openness' of its communication--its language.

2. Medical anthropology offers an alternative 'bio-cultural' framework which is within an 'ecologistic' orientation and with a sense of evolutionary history, because its theoretical and methodological focus is upon scientifically precise and exact interconnections and boundaries between the mind and the body, and by extension, nature and culture. A culture's adaptation to disease and the adaptation of disease to culture, is part of an ecological history of a larger environment, a 'co-evolution' of disease and culture. Disease becomes an inextricable part of the total ecosystems--a byproduct of complex factors of stress and maladaptation of the host organism and the environment. Disease is always present because humans must continuously respond to environmental fluctuations. "It is inconceivable that human biology, behavior and culture can have evolved without responding either deliberately or inadvertently to such pressures…it is not inconceivable that some central features of the human mind and human emotional life are adaptations to the challenges provided by disease to human understanding…" (Melvin Konner: 78) A theory of human cultural development has been proposed based upon human adaptations to overcome 'micro-parasitism' which always erodes the biological basis of human well being, and the intermittent ravages of 'macro-parasitism'--the political economic exploitation of class inequality and hierarchy which always usurps and appropriates the human host's products. Micro-parasitism and macro-parasitism form first and second order feedback mechanisms which stimulate population increase and cultural development. The ecological determinism of nutritional anthropology which relates 'protein calorie' malnutrition to such population control mechanisms as migration, hoarding, diversification strategies and warfare, are another dimension of this general theoretical orientation.

The political economy of Western Medical Allopathic Imperialism, as part of the Cultural Hegemony of the west over the east, and as a collusion of a medical technical industry, pharmaceutical industry, medical financial industry, professional elitist medical lobbies, and medical bureaucracy in capitalizing on conceptions of health and disease as a profit making enterprise can be construed as a conspiracy of 'macro-parasitism' in relation to human adaptation to 'micro-parasitism' leading to the depersonalization of health and disease and to an overspecialized and exclusive elitism of control over its diagnosis and treatment that discounts and devalues the traditional services of the local shaman, herbalist, non-western medical practitioners, mid-wives and traditional healers, as if so much quackery. There is a cry for the return to 'homeopathic remedies' and 'holistic' practices, to preventive therapies rather than curative treatment, for the need to treat the person rather then the disease of physical symptom, for the application of appropriate technology, for bare-foot doctors and nurse practitioners, to focus upon human nutrition, adaptive stress and the recognition of the power of the mind to somatize disease into physiologically real symptoms without an organic diagnosis.

Vaccination and medical intervention, coupled with mono-crop agriculture, protein calorie malnutrition, poverty, heminthic infection become a vicious cycle of overpopulation and environmental degradation--malnutrition and stress increases incidence of disease, debilitating diseases lower productivity which further increases malnutrition. The principle health problem confronting the human species is that of global overpopulation in the face of global environmental degradation. Increasing incidence of disease, and institution of 'population control mechanism' are very real long term consequences. This has come about in spite of, and in part because of, the efficacy and efficiency of the western medical establishment. The prognosis of human adaptive success to global environments depends upon maintaining cultural diversity of adaptation and avoidance of overspecialization which can lead to failure to respond to environmental changes.

The two most important theoretical dimensions of urban anthropology can be understood in terms of the differences between 'anthropologies of cities' involving process of urbanization, development, modernization and political economy, and the orientation of 'anthropologies in cities' involving 'pathways to practice' and studies in 'urbanism'. The first dimension is a 'city as context' approach which sees cities as part of a larger regional and interregional historical process of development and which views cities as 'wholes' which can be grouped according to several typologies--regal ritual cities, bureaucratic-administrative centers, mercantile 'city states', industrial and post industrial core 'super cities', third world primate 'mosaic' cities. This framework combines aspects of core periphery relations, which are a derivative of the rural-urban continuum (Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, Folk/Great Tradition, Integrative/Anomic, Sacred/Secular, Simple/Sophisticated, etc.) and aspects of a crude 'central place theory' in which there are several interrelated levels of phenomena--micro-systems of kin groups, neighborhoods, associations, cities as parts of larger regional urban systems, and regional systems as parts of national and international systems. The value of this approach is its 'hologeistic' kind of contextual/comparative framework allowing systematic synthesis/analysis at multiple levels of interaction. It is an alternative to the 'local focus' traditionally characterizing ethnographic research and provides a framework for approaching otherwise overwhelming heterogeneity and diversity which 'cities' comprise. Cities are great phenomenal settings for looking at the complex interaction of a wide variety of variables from a multi-dimension, multi-disciplinary approach. Find a nice 'medium sized' city and you have a wonderful 'laboratory' for the processes and influences of becoming 'modern'.

'Anthropology in the city' has led to 'urban pathways' to the theory of practice of a person centered, human action approach which general applicability to other more conventional ethnographic settings. People move continuously through varied situations involving different kinds and degrees of involvement, resources, activities. "…For most urbanites their pathways were both predictable and meaningful, and these qualities, I suggest, are what anthropologists refer to when they speak about social organization and culture." (Sanjek: 176)

"Urban pathways lead persons to situations where economic, political, legal, medical, educational, religious and aesthetic activity may be studied. They connect, the domains of prediction, social reproduction, neighboring and trafficking and leisure. Their meaning to their users is open to cognitive, psychological and symbolic analysis. They may be studied through participant observation…at selected stopping points, through network analysis and through interviews and dialogic recreation and reflection." (Roger Sanjek, Annual Review of Anthropology 1990: 151-86)

Cities can be seen as 'imploding' in both a spatio-temporal continuum and in a 'web of consciousness' perspectives. City as context is amenable to analysis as 'networks overlapping networks within networks as pseudo events". Individuals learn to negotiate different mappings across different networks. New cityscape environments are learned and the daily and weekly circumambulations and cycles of movement of individuals grows. Such patterns are linked to differences in class status roles identity, and combines dyadic interpersonal encounters, social praxis and the study of the articulation of social structure. The development and changing structure of networks over time involves urbanization as adjustment to city pathways and patterns of urbanism as acquired 'city life ways'. History as diachronic and functional social structure as synchronic can be seen to be intermeshed and articulated at this level of everyday, local and regional social relations within networks of interaction. We can see 'history in the making' and the process of social structuration as a ground level, everyday occurrence between real people.

It is a grand paradox that the science of humankind has mostly depicted people as dwelling within the static boundaries of location and social structure and cultural tradition. The models of socio-cultural anthropology have been based upon presuppositions of relative permanence, stability, incidental peripheral movement, and long term, multigenerational settlement and organizational patterns rather than upon principles of migration and resettlement. Contemporary 'problems' of migration bring into clear focus the disparity between anthropological 'theory' and 'anthropological' practice. The problematics of coming to terms with migration challenges anthropology with perhaps its most unsettling reality--people have always moved around much more than they've ever been given credit for. This is so true that it poses an alternative framework for understanding humankind--Homo migrator--that movement is a basic 'need' which must be met. "Most of what we call migration is a natural way of correcting inconsistencies in the availability of resources--it is a means of promoting efficient allocation of resources." (Foster & Kemper: ?) People have been migrating time immemorial and have rarely stopped or slowed down.

Migration involves any movement of people, whether cyclically, seasonally, semi-permanently or permanently. Though a variety of conceptual models have been constructed to account for the complex 'problematics' of migration (spatial flow models, push-pull models, cost benefit models, system models, multi-causal models, decision making models, adjustment models) for the most part the study of migration remains mostly 'a-theoretical' in the sense that it is without major orienting theoretical construction. Many different kinds of migration have been identified, from tourism and pilgrimages to mass migration, to intellectual brain drains, to enforced diasporas, to rural villages escaping the tyranny of poverty, to seasonal laborers and student sojourners, to homelessness and transience.

My own ethnographic experiences with Vietnamese 'boat people' resettled in Little Saigon, California led to me conclude that a clear sharp dividing line between political refugee and economic migrant is mostly mythological and ideological--rarely are motives for movement pure and unmixed. Political and economic are usually two sides of the same coin of migration or opposite extremes of a long continuum of journeying and mobility. Overtly people may claim 'political refugee' status, but there are often signs and statements which reveal that 'force' often meant little more than being cut off from former economic dependency, structurally reinforced poverty, or bureaucratic discrimination, and that 'fear' implied 'economic insecurity' as much as 'political terror or threat'. Most migrants make many choices in the long chain of determinations which lead from a former homeland to a permanent land of exile, and it is rarely a clear cut case of original 'life or death'.

I prefer a broad generic label of 'political economic refugee' to highlight a number of salient points of 'modern migration': 1. A mixed bag of both political and economic motives and 'incentives' is usually involved; 2. It is frequently impossible to clearly separate where political force leaves off and economic coercion or psychological expectation takes over; 3. Such people are usually systematically, socio-structurally excluded or marginalized by a political economic 'bureaucracy' which systematically promotes agendas of development favoring elite groups and excluding others and also promotes policies of discrimination, either overtly or covertly, to reinforce its agenda; 4. These migrants, whether economic escapees of absolute poverty, psycho-somatic sufferers of relative deprivation and rising expectation, or politically persecuted proponents of 'rights, equality and freedom' are all 'refugees' in the key substantive sense that they are sufferers of a pervasive modern existential disease called 'homelessness'. To be a political economic refugee is to without a home to call your own. Refugees on the international scene are the foreign counterparts of the domestic homeless--both are a consequence, an officially invisible spin-off' of the same developmental processes and political economic 'forces' of modernization promoted by similar political economic bureaucracies which now encapsulate the globe in every expanding delegations of negative authority and professional piles of pen pushing paperwork. Telecommunications makes the bureaucratic business easier and even more efficient. Though there are many regional and local variations to the 'problem' of 'articulation' this general historical process has been continuing unabated since the English problem of the 'commons' and is increasing exponentially and super critically despite what anthropological 'experts' on migration have studied and concluded.

With myself, my wife, friends and with the Vietnamese and Overseas Chinese, I have been an ongoing student of 'first hand' migration for more than six years--on virtually a daily basis. The most pertinent theoretical understanding to have come from the cumulative fund of personal experience is the problem of maintaining 'psycho geographic identity of perceptions'. Study of adjustment and adaptive strategies of migrants are a primary focus of much ethnographic research, and involve a number of dimensions of screens of support, upward or downward mobility, opportunities, networks, language and training, family connections but the mot important factor of the adaptive success or failure is the psychological ability of the individual to come to terms with and constructively deal with the problems of a new environment magnified by the problems engendered by 'separation'--not only that immediately derived from the present episode but the reliving of all the major traumas and past separation episodes which the current circumstances triggers, and the potentially crippling and catastrophic effects this has on the individual's psychological ability to adapt during the critical points of the adjustment period. There are also less recognizable, cumulative and potentially more devastating effects of long term separation and unresolved 'needs' which persist over the long run.

This problem of maintaining a psycho-geographic 'identity of perceptions' is inextricably bound up with a related problem of fostering, negotiating, managing and mobilizing social networks which provide 'surrogate family and fictive kin'. Refugee communities are characterized by extensive, overlapping, open ended networks covering practically every facet of life and livelihood. Those who make the uphill struggle in spite of recurrent episodes of psychic 'breakdown', cognitive confusion and emotional turmoil, successful create, negotiate and propagate extensive networks among many and every corner. Those who suffer downward mobility are systematically excluded from even familial networks as 'unreliable'--their unconscious libidinal drives take over and control their responses to new environments and they become engaged in fruitlessly recreating and reliving a lost sense of the past and sundered relationships.

There is a deep seated sense of suffering and grief over what is lost and can never be replaced. There is a need to grief before an individual can psychologically cope with a new host environment in a realistic and effective manner. Chronic failure to cope results in a vicious cycle of self induced alienation, of reading into and projecting upon the present environment social relations the unresolved dilemmas and traumas of the past, sensing a paranoid hostility and pervasive persecutoriness in the present environment which has been carried over by a sense of loss with the past environment. The amount of cognitive distortion is remarkable and the net effect is mutual withdrawal, avoidance and alienation from otherwise potentially promising and rewarding social relations.

This psycho-social perspective on migration is valuable because it clarifies something fundamental about human consciousness and the representations and embodiment of our environment. Regression and dependency in service of the ego is a necessary defense mechanism for maintaining an experiential sense of identity and balance in the face of changing environments, but if carried to extremes or if cognitive dissonance leads to rationalization or if captured up into the psychic energy channels of the symbolic dynamics of social organizations and collectivities then it can lead to a social pathological 'archoses' which seems comforting for those who have needs of extreme insecurity, but which proves regressive and dangerous in the living out of self fulfilling prophecies in ideological blindness, in fanatical boundary policing, and in mythological 'sleeping'.

Migration is not just a political economic adaptation, but an environmental, ecological, and evolutionary response as well. Increasing population and increasing rates of migration spells problems of 'control' and stability for all nations and peoples preoccupied with maintaining territorial sovereignty, political predominance and boundary identity. Migration is not just a problem of geographic mobility but of social mobility as well--it involves 'passing' between thresholds and boundaries which reinforces cultures, world views, societies, histories. No boundary is absolutely unpassable or impervious to penetration. The increasing movements of increasing amounts of people the world over in our collective future will be symptomatic of broader 'problems' and 'boundaries' of maintaining a global ecology.

The most important contribution that an anthropology of migration can contribute is the understanding of 'The Migration Experience' fundamental to all migration episodes, its many permutations and range of variation, as part of a larger understanding of the 'Human Experience'' in general. A part of this 'Migration Experience' is the power and function of ritual process to mediate change in the environment--it becomes important to understand how ritual mediates 'movement' in the environment, either spatially or temporarily, and how its failure or lack has serious ecological consequences for human adaptation in changing environments. It is through such 'Experience' that we can better approach the problematics of history, social relations, group dynamics and human cultural evolution.

The role of authentic anthropology as a neutral arbiter objectively disengaged from the terms of the dialectics which always informs its discursive practice, fundamentally distinguishes it from the demonstrative culture of the 'hard' sciences and the rhetorical culture of the humanities. The 'relational' kind of logic which informs the study of anthropology is fundamentally different from the mathematical and rational logic held to inform scientific discourse. This 'relational logic' is both metalogical and meta-paradigmatic in being both beyond logic and paradigms in the formal sense and about such logic and paradigms, and it provides the alternative criteria of substantiation, operation and validation within the 'third culture' which is irreducibly different from the criteria applicable within the arts or the sciences--its philosophy of inquiry is fundamentally different from either a philosophy of science or philosophy of the arts.

Science has not been so much based upon the 'discovery' of preexisting principles as much as on the invention and creation of a posteriori rules of relationship accounting for previously observed patterns of phenomena. The 'structures' of scientific theory are held to be partially and imperfectly representative or isomorphic with the eidetic, apodictic 'structures' underlying and governing the observable patterning of phenomena in the real experiential world. Logos is both the ordering principle of the cosmos and of human mind--the principle of Logos holds that human rationality is capable of comprehending the Logos of the universe. It is no accident that Logos has come to mean knowledge as expressed by language. The critique of 'pure' science has been that this Logos of language is embedded within, and embodies, the hermeneutic circles of the culture history of Mind. There can be no pure perceptual experience of real phenomena, nor an 'unbiased' account of such experience, which has not been un-preconditioned by the phenomenological 'intentionality structures' which we bring to the ordering of our experience. It follows that the basic difference between the 'rational two value logic' of the 'hard sciences' and the relational logic informing the 'third culture' is that anthropology as a human science, must somehow take into account in its formulations of theory and praxis the influence and phenomenological substrate of the experiencing Mind, as something more than mere super structural epiphenomena or a residue of physical process. Any other account of human reality must necessarily and insufficiently be 'reductionistic' and 'reifying'. The Logos and language of relational understanding cannot be positivistically reducible to a perfect one to one correspondence between the term and the thing. Such mechanical/material theories of language have a much deeper history of ideas than most modern social scientists or linguists would care to elucidate. Relational Logos must somehow account for the connotational indeterminacy of its significations.

Rational systems are typically 'over determined' systems, especially when they are premised upon relationships which are based on unidirectional causality. Systems of functional relations are over determined 'structures' of direct causality based upon the minimization of uncertainty or the maximization of 'information'. Such systems are physically 'perfect' in a mechanical sense of being unaffected by the law of entropy. Relational systems are 'natural' systems rather than purely abstract or mathematical or noumenal structures--natural systems are entropic and 'weakly' chaotic in that they tend to grow predictably from certain order toward uncertain chaos. Such systems manifest 'self organizing criticality' which accounts for a wide range of variation of phenomenal patterning based on the total history of the functioning of a few basic rules of relation.

The elaborated patterning of phenomenal 'structures' are but the long term derivatives of the operation of these basic sets of rules functioning at different scales, orders and magnitude of interaction and relation--they are 'weakly determined' by the transformations of basic relational rules governing the eidetic structure of the systems minimal components. Relational logic attempts to understand and reduce in a systematic way complex phenomena to such a basic set of relational rules among a minimal set of component entities, within a total universal context of possible relations. Such relational logic is also inductive and empirical in the sense of being derived from phenomenological perceptual experience rather than being based upon conceptions of innate, a priori rational ideals or sense of perfect perception. Relational logic is the Logos of natural systems theory, concerned not so much with 'truth', identity or validity in an absolute sense but with accounting for the co-occurrence, sequence and recurrence of patterns of change in phenomenological experience. It seeks identity and difference in a 'relative' sense of relational contextuality.

The purpose of relational logic is the understanding of how complex systems or patterns of phenomena come to be self organizing or self regulating and how such systems naturally tend to evolve towards chaotic states of super criticality. The long term structures and dynamics of complex systems are the consequence of a total history of transformations and interrelations based upon the operation of basic relational 'forces' between individual component entities of the system, in relation to environmental transformations affecting it. Complex structures must be construed as so many possible permutations of a basic set of relational rules which are interacting within complex environments. There exist no isomorphic, eidetic 'structures' which dictates causal necessity to the developmental history of such patterns--they are randomly organized. The complex patterns are epiphenomenal events resulting from the interplay of a variety of interrelated phenomena.

Like galaxies, solar systems, land masses, clouds, human systems of culture, symbols, economics, ecology and history are self organizing and weakly chaotic. Physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology are all founded theoretically upon basic relational paradigms--the formal sense of a set of rules governing the relations between entities--sets of basic relational rules forming limiting constraints upon the behavior of component entities of a system. Intermediate relational rules describe the interactive transformations of relations within the environment. Epiphenomenal relational patterning are those observable 'structures' which constitute the phenomenological order of the 'real world.

Natural systems theory attempts to describe the basic relational rules, account for the intermediate, derivative transformational rules, and the epiphenomenal patterning at several distinctive orders of phenomenal experience--the physical, the biological and the human. These levels are all interrelated such that the explanation of any higher level is constrained by lower order rules, and yet involves more complex sets of intermediate relationships which confer upon such systems greater dynamic variability, indeterminacy and chaos. Higher order systems must remain non-contradictory with respect to lower order rules, but the patterning of their relations are also synergistic and irreducible to lower order rules.

It is possible to explicate and 'discover' a basic relational paradigm governing pan human behavior, social structure, cognition and culture history, but this has not yet been achieved. Incomplete and partial relational sets have been devised governing certain facets of human experience--Marxian theory of 'modes of production' and 'relations of production' are an apropos example. But the problem of integrating the complexities of human reality have not yet been resolved in a sufficient and satisfying manner.

Relational logic is also 'dialogical' in the sense that it functions through question and answer, respondent and opponent dialectic which explores and exhausts the possibilities of the relational 'paradigm'. Such dialectic is neither the strict, precise logic conventionally valued by pure scientists, nor is it just the arbitrary rhetoric espoused by the humanists--it yields relatively approximate rules in terms of reasonably convincing and definite statements which are general and stable in accounting for a broad range of phenomena and which are amenable of further explication and suggestive of other alternative possibilities.

The value of an authentic anthropology will be found in both its engagement in a self reflexive manner in such dialectic and in its 'objective' disengagement form the terms of the dialectic. It will be found to lie in neither the over emphasis of its frequently spurious pseudo-scientism nor in the exaggeration of its often hypocritical humanism, but in the realization of its 'Third Culture'.