on social complexity

goppold <goppold@faw.uni-ulm.de> (by way of marijuan@posta.unizar.es (Pedro
C. Marijuan))

Dear FISers

I believe it is convenient to introduce some uniform schema for
referencing to other people's contributions. I have
done it with the email headers: time/date, email address.
unfortunately this doesn't help very much keeping track of
the discussion since some people send from different
email addresses than their own.

Here are a few separate comments that I consider posting:

=====================================================
referring to:
Tue, 20 Oct 1998 13:02:11
marijuan@posta.unizar.es (Pedro C. Marijuan)

>also the incas had the "quipucamayocs" or knot-keepers, priests in charge
>of the rope-knots where the basic "accounting" of the village or the city
>was kept.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The usage of quipu by the incas may give us some valuable material for
directions to extending our symbolic capabilities (with multimedia???).
>From my research into the matter I have the impression that they have been
undervalued by alphabet-centric western research. It is generally assumed
that
the quipu were mnemonic devices suitable only for (numeric) accounting, and
a poor substitute to "proper" alphabetic writing. (See eg. Scharlau). Boone
has tried to reverse some of that eurocentric bias. My case in this point
is: The quipu mnemotechnology operates on a simultaneous combination of
several sensory/effective modalities of the human being, and derives its
specific power from that combination: First: touch (a powerful {mnemonic
/psychoactive} device, as exemplified by the ubiquitous usage of rosaries
in the Christian,
Islamic, and Buddhist cultures) but it is a sense/effective capability that
is almost completely neglected in the modern western world. Second: The
symbolic and categorial combinatorics of color (Barthel). There are
indications that Aymara and Quechua, the languages of the Andea peoples,
have (or had) an
inherent categorical combinatoric structure (Schramm) which was possibly
{used/enhanced} by the quipu technology. Since most of the evidence has
been destroyed by the Conquistadores, and the quipucamayocs killed
(intellectual decapitation of the populace),their languages and cultural
level were consequently degraded to the lowest standards, and so any such
possibilities are very hard to prove from the remaining traces.

Literature:
- Barthel, T.: Viracochas Prunkgewand, Tribus #20, Linden-Museum,
Stuttgart, p. 63-124 (1971)
- Boone, E. H.: Writing without words: alternative literacies in
Mesoamerica and the Andes, Duke
Univ. Press, Durham (1994)
- Scharlau, B. M�nzel, M.: Qellqay, Campus, Frankfurt, New York (1986)
p. 80-93
- Schramm, Raimund: Symbolische Logik in der m�ndlichen Tradition der
Aymaras, Reimer,
Berlin (1988)
- and various articles in: Visible Language

=====================================================
subject:
is there a correlation of population density and complexity of socio
information ?

referring to:
Thu, 24 Sep 1998 11:09:34
Bob Artigiani <artigian@novell.nadn.navy.mil>
and
Fri, 2 Oct 1998 14:18:00 +0100 (MET)
morris@posta.unizar.es

Although it may seem suggestive that highly populated agricultural
societies have also the most complex socio information, there are opposite
cases to take account of. Let us take for example the Australian Aborigines
whose (by now largely lost) cultural heritage made up a song/verse
description of every (bio-)geographical feature of the whole Australian
continent. This was called
the "songline legagy" by Chatwin and was distributed among the many
tribes (or nations) of the continent. The Aborigines also have an extremely
complicated kinship structure comparable with the complex system of social
roles in agrarian societies. Lastly, their ancestor system provided them
with a possible alternative to VEMs in form of an instance of the "god's
eye view" or "mental models" of the whole observing the parts. (Perhaps the
whole complex of
the defunct Freudian "totem and taboo" could be rolled up in this manner).
This would be an example of a society that eschewed becoming sedantic (or
had no option to do so, for climate reasons) but nevertheless developed a
high level of socio complexity. Another example of highly complex socio
information
in a simple society is given by Reichel-Dolmatoff of the Kogi indians of
Colombia. In-depth discussions of the complexities of oral socio
information are given by H. v. Dechend. The works of Frits Staal may also
offer some interesting fresh perspectives on the matter.

Sources:
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/cunni08.htm
Chatwin, B.: The songlines, Picador, London (1988)
Dechend, H v.: Bemerkungen zum Donnerkeil, Prismata, (Festschrift f�r
Will Hartner), Franz
Steiner, Wiesbaden (1977)
Dechend, H v., Santillana, G.: Hamlet's M�hle, Kammerer & Unverzagt,
Berlin (1993)
engl.: Hamblet's Mill, Gambit, Boston 1969
Dechend, H v.: Archeoastronomy, draft (1997)
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo: The sacred mountain of Colombia's Kogi
Indians, Brill, Leiden
(1990)
Staal, F.: The science of ritual, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Inst.,
Poona (1982)
Staal, F.: The fidelity of oral tradition and the origins of science,
in: Mededelingen der koninklijke
Nederlands Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, Deel 49 - No 8,
North-Holland,
Amsterdam p. 249-288 (1986)
Staal, F.: Rules without meaning, Lang, New York, (1989)
Strehlow, T.: Songs of central Australia, Angus and Robertson, Syndey
(1971)

===============================================
subject:
the "stuff that societies are made of"

referring to:
Thu, 24 Sep 1998 11:09:34
Mon, 28 Sep 1998 10:04:29
Bob Artigiani <artigian@novell.nadn.navy.mil>
and
GOTT@UFBA.BR Gottfried Stockinger

Bob: "it is not easy to see behavior as stuff" and
"we need to bend our minds"
(Mon, 28 Sep 1998 10:04:29)

In my contribution for the Biosystems fis issue (a version is here):
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/inform.htm
and some further work: http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/poly.htm

I have outlined what I think "we need to bend our minds" too. In my view,
Whitehead worded the main tenets in his cosmology of "Process and Reality"
which is (in my view) equivalent to certain fundamental tenets of Buddhism,
and both are basically expressed by Heraklit's 'panta rhei' dictum.
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/poly04.htm#Heading14

The intellectual history of the West has been largely governed by
Parmenides and Plato, whereas in the East, the Buddhist process view has
had a strong influence on Indian, Chinese and Japanese cultures. We as the
heirs of western european civilization "need to bend our minds" to a
fundamentally different ontological perspective of reality as it was
developed in the Eastern cultures. Not that theirs is "truer" than that of
our heritage, but one needs to train to perfom a
Gestalt flip switch of perception.

See:
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/poly05.htm#Heading20
The world in which society "lives" was termed the Semiosphere by
Lotman:
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/poly04.htm

There has been a corresponding back-and-forth motion in the Cultural
Anthropology discourse, only to mention the proponents of the "Anthropology
of performance" (Turner 1986b etc.) and other authors like Clifford Geertz
(Theatre) and Ivo Strecker (1988).

Bee, R.: Patterns and processes, Free Press, New York (1974)
Strecker, I.: The social practice of symbolization, Athlone, London
(1988)
Turner, V. W.: The forest of symbols : Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Cornell
Univ. Pr., Ithaca (1973)
Turner, V. W.: From ritual to theatre: the human seriousness of play.
Performing Arts Journal
Publ., New York (1982)
Turner, V. W. (ed.): The anthropology of experience, Univ. of Illinois
Press, Urbana (1986a)
Turner, V. W.: The anthropology of performance, PAJ Publ., New York
(1986b)
Turner, V. W.: The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Cornell
Univ. Press, Ithaca, New
York (1987)
Turner, V. W. : Dramas, fields, and metaphors: Symbolic action in human
society, Cornell
Univ.Pr., Ithaca, New York (1990)

=====================================================

greetings,

--
Andreas Goppold
URL: http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/
c/o FAW Ulm, Postf. 2060, D-89010 Ulm , Germany
Tel. ++49 +731 501-8757/ -915 , Fax: +731 501-929