Systems theory in anthropology is an interdisciplinary,
non-representative, non-referential, and non-Cartesian
approach that brings together natural and
social sciences to understand society in its
complexity. The basic idea of a system theory
in social science is to solve the classical
problem of duality; mind-body, subject-object,
form-content, signifier-signified, and structure-agency.
System theory suggests that instead of creating
closed categories into binaries (subject-object);
the system should stay open so as to allow
free flow of process and interactions. In
this way the binaries are dissolved.
Complex systems in nature—for example, ecosystems—involve
a dynamic interaction of many variables (e.g.
animals, plants, insects and bacteria; predators
and prey; climate, the seasons and the weather,
etc.) These interactions can adapt to changing
conditions but maintain a balance both between
the various parts and as a whole; this balance
is maintained through homeostasis. Human societies
are complex systems, as it were, human ecosystems.
Early humans, as hunter-gatherers, recognized
and worked within the parameters of the complex
systems in nature and their lives were circumscribed
by the realities of nature. But they couldn't
explain complex systems. Only in recent centuries
did the need arise to define complex systems
scientifically. Complex systems theories first
developed in math in the late 19th century,
then in biology in the 1920s to explain ecosystems,
then to deal with artificial intelligence
(cybernetics), etc.Anthropologist Gregory
Bateson is the most influential and earliest
founder of system theory in social sciences.
In the 1940s, as a result of the Macy conferences,
he immediately recognized its application
to human societies with their many variables
and the flexible but sustainable balance that
they maintain. Bateson describes system as
"any unit containing feedback structure and
therefore competent to process information."
Thus an open system allows interaction between
concepts and materiality or subject and the
environment or abstract and real. In natural
science, systems theory has been a widely
used approach. Austrian biologist, Karl Ludwig
von Bertalanffy, developed the idea of the
general systems theory (GST). The GST is a
multidisciplinary approach of system analysis.
== Main concepts in systems theory ==
=== 
Non-representational and non-referential ===
One of the central elements of the systems
theory is to move away from the representational
system to the non-representation of things.
What it means is that instead of imposing
mental concepts, which reduce complexity of
a materiality by limiting the variations or
malleability onto the objects, one should
trace the network of things. According to
Gregory Bateson, "ethos, eidos, sociology,
economics, cultural structure, social structure,
and all the rest of these words refer only
to scientists' ways of putting the jigsaw
puzzle." The tracing rather than projecting
mental images bring in sight material reality
that has been obscured under the universalizing
concepts.
=== Non-Cartesian ===
Since the European Enlightenment, the Western
philosophy has placed the individual, as an
indispensable category, at the center of the
universe. René Descartes' famous aphorism,
'I think therefore I am' proves that a person
is a rational subject whose feature of thinking
brings the human into existence. The Cartesian
subject, therefore, is a scientific individual
who imposes mental concepts on things in order
to control the nature or simply what exists
outside his mind. This subject-centered view
of the universe has reduced the complex nature
of the universe. One of the biggest challenges
for system theory is thus to displace or de-center
the Cartesian subject as a center of a universe
and as a rational being. The idea is to make
human beings not a supreme entity but rather
to situate them as any other being in the
universe. The humans are not thinking Cartesian
subject but they dwell alongside nature. This
brings back the human to its original place
and introduces nature in the equation. The
systems theory, therefore, encourages a non-unitary
subject in opposition to a Cartesian subject.
=== Complexity ===
Once the Cartesian individual is dissolved,
the social sciences will move away from a
subject-centered view of the world. The challenge
is then how to non-represent empirical reality
without reducing the complexity of a system.
To put it simply, instead of representing
things by us let the things speak through
us. These questions led materialists philosophers
such as Deleuze and Guattari to develop a
"science" for understanding reality without
imposing our mental projections. The way they
encourage is instead of throwing conceptual
ideas we should do tracing. Tracing requires
one to connect disparate assemblages or appendages
not into a unified center but rather into
a rhizome or an open system.
=== Open system and closed system ===
Ludwig Bertalanffy describes two types of
systems: open system and closed system. The
open systems are systems that allow interactions
between its internal elements and the environment.
An open system is defined as a "system in
exchange of matter with its environment, presenting
import and export, building-up and breaking-down
of its material components." For example,
living organism. Closed systems, on the other
hand, are considered to be isolated from their
environment. For instance, thermodynamics
that applies to closed systems.
== Tracing "systems theory" in anthropology
==
=== Marx–Weber debates ===
Although the term 'system theory' is never
mentioned in the work of Karl Marx and Max
Weber, the fundamental idea behind systems
theory does penetrate deeply in to their understanding
of social reality. One can easily see the
challenges that both Marx and Weber faced
in their work. Breaking away from Hegelian
speculative philosophy, Marx developed a social
theory based on historical materialism, arguing
that it is not consciousness that determines
being, but in fact, it is social being that
determines consciousness. More specifically,
it is human beings' social activity, labor,
that causes, shapes, and informs human thinking.
Based on labor, Marx develops his entire social
theory that specifically questions reified,
bourgeois capitalism. Labor, class conflict,
commodity, value, surplus-value, bourgeoisie,
and proletariat are thus central concepts
in Marxian social theory. In contrast to the
Cartesian "pure and rational subjectivity,"
Marx introduced social activity as the force
that produces rationality. He was interested
in finding sophisticated, scientific universal
laws of society, though contrary to positivist
mechanistic approaches which take facts as
given, and then develop causal relationship
out of them.
Max Weber found Marxist ideas useful, however,
limited in explaining complex societal practices
and activities. Drawing on hermeneutic tradition,
Weber introduced multiple rationalities in
the modern schema of thinking and used interpretive
approach in understanding the meaning of a
phenomenon placed in the webs of significance.
Contrary to Marx, who was searching for the
universal laws of the society, Weber attempts
an interpretive understanding of social action
in order to arrive at a "causal explanation
of its course and effects." Here the word
course signifies Weber's non-deterministic
approach to a phenomenon. The social actions
have subjective meanings that should be understood
in its given context. Weber's interpretive
approach in understanding the meaning of an
action in relation to its environment delineated
a contextualized social framework for cultural
relativism.
Since we exist in webs of significance and
the objective analysis would detach us from
a concrete reality which we are all part of
it, Weber suggested ideal-types; an analytical
and conceptual construct "formed by the accentuation
of one or more points of view and by the synthesis
of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or
less present, and occasionally absent concrete
individual phenomena, which are arranged according
to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints
into a unified analytical construct." Although
they are analytical concepts, they serve as
reference points in interpreting the meaning
of society's heterogeneous and polymorphous
activities. In other words, ideal-types are
simplified and typified empirical reality,
but they are not reality in themselves. Bureaucracy,
authority, religion, etc. are all ideal-types,
according to Weber, and do not exist in the
real world. They assist social scientists
in selecting culturally significant elements
of a larger whole which can be contrasted
with each other to demonstrate their interrelationship,
patterns of formation, and similar societal
functions. Weber's selected ideal-types – bureaucracy,
religion, and capitalism – are culturally
significant variables through which he demonstrated
show multiple functionalities of social behavior.
Similarly, Weber emphasizes that Marxist laws
are also ideal-types. The concept of class,
economy, capitalism, proletariat and bourgeoisie,
revolution and state, along with other Marxian
models are heuristic tools for understanding
a society in its context. Thus, according
to Weber, Marxist ideal-types could prove
fruitful only if used to access a given society.
However, Weber warns of dangerousness or perniciousness
in relation to Marxist ideal-types when seen
as empirical reality. The reason is that Marxist
practitioners have imposed analytical concepts
as ahistorical and universal categories to
reduce concrete-process and activities from
the polymorphous actions into a simplified
phenomenon. This renders social phenomena
not only ahistorical but also devoid of spatio-temporal
rigour, decontextualized, and categorizes
chaos and ruptures under the general label
of bourgeoisie exploitation. In fact, history
emerged as a metanarrative of a class struggle,
moving in a chronological order, and future
anticipated as a revolutionary overthrow of
state apparatuses by the workers. For instance,
the state as an ideal-type imported to the
physical world has deceived and diverted political
activism away from the real sites of power
such as corporations and discourses.
Similarly class as an ideal-type, projected
to a society, which is an ensemble of population,
becomes dangerous because it marginalizes
and undermines organic linkages of kinship,
language, race, and ethnicity. This is a significant
point because society is not composed of two
conflicting classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat,
and does not just have vicissitudes along
economic lines. It does not exist in binaries,
as Marxist ideal-types would suppose. In fact,
it is a reality in which people of various
denominations – class backgrounds, religious
affiliations, kinship and family ties, gender,
and ethnic and linguistic differences – do
not only experience conflict, but also practice
cooperation in everyday life. Thus when one
inserts ideal-types into this concrete dynamic
process one does categorical violence to multifariousness
of the population and similarly reduces feeling,
emotions, non-economic social standing such
as honor, and status, as Weber describes,
to economism. Moreover, the ideal-types should
also be treated relevant to a context that
defines and delimits the former's parameters.
Weber's intervention came at the right moment
when Marxism – particularly vulgar Marxism
– reduced "non-economic" practices and beliefs,
the superstructure, to a determined base,
the mode of production. Similarly, speculative
philosophy imposed its own metaphysical categories
on diverse concrete realities thus making
a particular instance ahistorical. Weber approaches
both the methods, materialist and purely idealist,
as "equally possible, but each, of it does
not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion
of an investigation." To prove this point,
Weber demonstrated how ethics and morality
played a significant role in the rise of modern
capitalism. The Protestant work ethic, for
instance, functioned as sophisticated mechanism
that encouraged population to "care for the
self", which served as an underpinning social
activity for bourgeois capitalism. Of course,
work ethics was not the only element, utilitarian
philosophy equally contributed in forming
a bureaucratic work culture whose side-effects
are all too well known to the modern world.
In response to the reductive approach of economism
or vulgar Marxism, as it is also known, Louis
Althusser and Raymond Williams introduced
new understanding to Marxist thought. Althusser
and Williams introduced politics and culture
as new entry points alongside the mode of
production in Marxist methodology. However,
there is a sharp contrast between the scholars'
arguments. Taking Williams as our point of
discussion, he criticizes the mechanistic
approach to Marxism that encourages a close
reading of Marxian concepts. Concepts such
as being, consciousness, class, capital, labor,
labor power, commodity, economy, politics,
etc. are not closed categories but rather
interactive, engaging, and open practices
or praxis. Althusser, on the other hand, proposes
‘overdetermination' as multiple forces rather
than isolated single force or modes of production.
However, he argues that the economy is "determinant
in the last instance."
== 
Closed systems ==
In anthropology, the term 'system' is used
widely for describing socio-cultural phenomena
of a given society in a holistic way. For
instance, kinship system, marriage system,
cultural system, religious system, totemic
system, etc. This systemic approach to a society
shows the anxieties of the earliest anthropologists
to capture the reality without reducing the
complexity of a given community. In their
quest of searching the underline pattern of
a reality, they "discovered" the kinship system
as a fundamental structure of the natives.
However, their systems are closed systems
because they reduce the complexity and fluidity
by imposing anthropological concepts such
as genealogy, kinship, heredity, marriage.
=== Cultural relativism ===
Franz Boas was the first anthropologist to
problematize the notion of culture. Challenging
the modern hegemony of culture, Boas introduced
the idea of cultural relativism (understanding
culture in its context). Drawing on his extensive
fieldwork in the northwestern United States
and British Columbia, Boas discusses culture
separate from physical environment, biology,
and most importantly discarded evolutionary
models that represent civilization as a progressive
entity following chronological development.
Moreover, cultural boundaries, according to
Boas, are not barriers to intermixing and
should not be seen as obstacle to multiculturalism.
In fact, boundaries must be seen as "porous
and permeable," and "pluralized." His critique
on the concept of modern race and culture
had political implications in the racial politics
of the United States in the 1920s. In his
chapter, "The Race Problem in Modern Society,"
one can feel Boas' intellectual effort toward
separating the natural from the social sciences
and setting up the space for genuine political
solutions for race relations.
=== Structural-functionalism ===
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown developed a structural
functionalism approach in anthropology. He
believed that concrete reality is "not any
sort of entity but a process, the process
of social life." Radcliffe-Brown emphasized
on learning the social form especially a kinship
system of primitive societies. The way in
which one can study the pattern of life is
by conceptually delineating a relation determined
by a kinship or marriage, "and that we can
give a general analytical description of them
as constituting a system." The systems consist
of structure which is referred to "some sort
of ordered arrangement of parts or components."
The intervening variable between the processes
and structure is a function. The three concepts
of process, structure, and function are thus
"components of a single theory as a scheme
of interpretation of human social systems."
Most importantly, function "is the part it
plays in, the contribution it makes to, the
life of the organism as a whole." Thus the
functionality of each part in the system works
together to maintain a harmony or internal
consistency.
British anthropologist, E. R. Leach, went
beyond the instrumentalist argument of Radcliffe-Brown's
structural-functionalism, which approached
social norms, kinship, etc. in functionalist
terms rather than as social fields, or arenas
of contestation. According to Leach, "the
nicely ordered ranking of lineage seniority
conceals a vicious element of competition."
In fact, Leach was sensitive to "the essential
difference between the ritual description
of structural relations and the anthropologist's
scientific description." For instance, in
his book, Leach argues, "the question that
whether a particular community is gumlao,
or gumsa, or Shan is not necessarily ascertainable
in the realm of empirical facts; it is a question,
in part at any rate, of the attitudes and
ideas of particular individuals at a particular
time." Thus, Leach separated conceptual categories
from empirical realities.
=== Structural anthropology ===
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in search
of discovering universal laws of language,
formulated a general science of linguistic
by bifurcating language into langue, abstract
system of language, and parole, utterance
or speech. The phonemes, fundamental unit
of sound, are the basic structure of a language.
The linguistic community gives a social dimension
to a language. Moreover, linguistic signs
are arbitrary and change only comes with time
and not by individual will. Drawing on structural
linguistics, Claude Lévi-Strauss transforms
the world into a text and thus subjected social
phenomena to linguistic laws as formulated
by Saussure. For instance, the "primitive
systems" such as kinship, magic, mythologies,
and rituals are scrutinized under the similar
linguistic dichotomies of abstract normative
system (objective) and utterance (subjective).
The division did not only split social actions,
but it also conditioned them to the categories
of abstract systems that are made up of deep
structures. For example, Lévi-Strauss suggests,
"Kinship phenomena are of the same type as
linguistic phenomena." As Saussure discovered
phonemes as the basic structures of language,
Lévi-Strauss identified (1) consanguinity,
(2) affinity, and (3) descent as the deep
structures of kinship. These "microsociological"
levels serve "to discover the most general
structural laws." The deep structures acquire
meanings only with respect to the system they
constitute. "Like phonemes, kinship terms
are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they
acquire meaning only if they are integrated
into systems." Like the langue and parole
distinctions of language, kinship system consists
of (1) system of terminology (vocabulary),
through which relationships are expressed
and (2) system of attitudes (psychological
or social) functions for social cohesion.
To elaborate the dynamic interdependence between
systems of terminology and attitudes, Lévi-Strauss
rejected Radcliffe-Brown's idea that a system
of attitudes is merely the manifestation of
a system of terminology on the affective level.
He turned to the concept of the avunculate
as a part of a whole, which consists of three
types of relationship consanguinity, affinity,
and descent. Thus, Lévi-Strauss identified
complex avuncular relationships, contrary
to atomism and simplified labels of avunculate
associated with matrilineal descent. Furthermore,
he suggested that kinship systems "exist only
in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary
system of representations, not the spontaneous
development of a real situation." The meaning
of an element (avunculate) exists only in
relation to a kinship structure.
Lévi-Strauss elaborates the meaning and structure
point further in his essay titled "The Sorcerer
and His Magic." The sorcerer, patient, and
group, according to Lévi-Strauss, comprise
a shaman complex, which makes social consensus
an underlying pattern for understanding. The
work of a sorcerer is to reintegrate divergent
expressions or feelings of patients into "patterns
present in the group's culture. The assimilation
of such patterns is the only means of objectivizing
subjective states, of formulating inexpressible
feelings, and of integrating inarticulated
experiences into a system." The three examples
that Lévi-Strauss mentions relate to magic,
a practice reached as a social consensus,
by a group of people including sorcerer and
patient. It seems that people make sense of
certain activities through beliefs, created
by social consensus, and not by the effectiveness
of magical practices. The community's belief
in social consensus thus determines social
roles and sets rules and categories for attitudes.
Perhaps, in this essay, magic is system of
terminology, a langue, whereas, individual
behavior is a system of attitude, parole.
Attitudes make sense or acquire meaning through
magic. Here, magic is a language.
=== Interpretive anthropology ===
Influenced by Hermeneutic tradition, Clifford
Geertz developed an interpretive anthropology
of understanding the meaning of the society.
The hermeneutic approach allows Geertz to
close the distance between an ethnographer
and a given culture similar to reader and
text relationship. The reader reads a text
and generates his/her own meaning. Instead
of imposing concepts to represent reality,
ethnographers should read the culture and
interpret the multiplicities of meaning expressed
or hidden in the society. In his influential
essay, Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive
Theory of Culture, Geertz argues that "man
is an animal suspended in webs of significance
he himself has spun."
=== 
Practice theory ===
French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu challenges
the same duality of phenomenology (subjective)
and structuralism (objective) through his
Theory of Practice. This idea precisely challenges
the reductive approach of economism that places
symbolic interest in opposition to economic
interests. Similarly, it also rejects subjected-centered
view of the world. Bourdieu attempts to close
this gap by developing the concept of symbolic
capital, for instance, a prestige, as readily
convertible back into economic capital and
hence, is ‘the most valuable form of accumulation.'
Therefore, economic and symbolic both works
together and should be studied as a general
science of the economy of practices.
== System theory: Gregory Bateson ==
British anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, is
the most influential and one of the earliest
founders of System Theory in anthropology.
He developed an interdisciplinary approach
that included communication theory, cybernetics,
and mathematical logic. In his collection
of essays, The Sacred Unity, Bateson argues
that there are "ecological systems, social
systems, and the individual organism plus
the environment with which it interacts is
itself a system in this technical sense."
By adding environment with systems, Bateson
closes the gap between the dualities such
as subject and object. "Playing upon the differences
between formalization and process, or crystallization
and randomness, Bateson sought to transcend
other dualisms–mind versus nature, organism
versus environment, concept versus context,
and subject versus object." Bateson set out
the general rule of systems theory. He says:
The basic rule of systems theory is that,
if you want to understand some phenomenon
or appearance, you must consider that phenomenon
within the context of all completed circuits
which are relevant to it. The emphasis is
on the concept of the completed communicational
circuit and implicit in the theory is the
expectation that all units containing completed
circuits will show mental characteristics.
The mind, in other words, is immanent in the
circuitry. We are accustomed to thinking of
the mind as somehow contained within the skin
of an organism, but the circuitry is not contained
within the skin.
=== Influences on poststructuralism ===
Bateson's work influenced major poststructuralist
scholars especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari. In fact, the very word 'plateau'
in Deleuze and Guattari's magnum opus, A Thousand
Plateaus, came from Bateson's work on Balinese
culture. They wrote: "Gregory Bateson uses
the word plateau to designate something very
special: a continuous, self-vibrating region
of intensities whose development avoids any
orientation toward a culmination point or
external end." Bateson pioneered an interdisciplinary
approach in anthropology. He coined the term
"ecology of mind" to demonstrate that what
"goes on in one's head and in one's behavior"
is interlocked and constitutes a network.
Guattari wrote:
Gregory Bateson has clearly shown that what
he calls the "ecology of ideas" cannot be
contained within the domain of the psychology
of the individual, but organizes itself into
systems or "minds", the boundaries of which
no longer coincide with the participant individuals.
=== Posthumanist turn and ethnographic writing
===
In anthropology, the task of representing
a native point of view has been a challenging
one. The idea behind the ethnographic writing
is to understand a complexity of an everyday
life of the people without undermining or
reducing the native account. Historically,
as mentioned above, ethnographers insert raw
data, collected in the fieldwork, into the
writing "machine". The output is usually the
neat categories of ethnicity, identity, classes,
kinship, genealogy, religion, culture, violence,
and numerous other. With the posthumanist
turn, however, the art of ethnographic writing
has suffered serious challenges. Anthropologists
are now thinking of experimenting with new
style of writing. For instance, writing with
natives or multiple authorship.
== See also ==
Complex systems
Open and closed system in social science
Social systems
Systems science
Systems theory
