notes from a Cultural Anthropology perspective

I will try to present a possible Cultural Anthropology (CA)
perspective with respect to the current fis socio info discussion.

issue: the base of discourse
============================
IMO, when seeking to apply {biological /darwinian} metaphors
for socio information we should be more aware that
all scientific discourse is taking place on the social plane,
(even without invoking Feyerabend), and it is primarily
governed by the social communications processes that
we humans use implicitly and without much reflection
all the time, in order to make ourselves (more or less)
understood by our peers.

issue: Lamarckism / Genes / Memes / Weismann Barrier
=====================================================
IMO, Lamarckism vs. Darwinism is an issue of the Weismann Barrier,
i.e. by current scholarly consensus, ontogenetic information
cannot pass with genes to the next generation.
To speak of Lamarckism in issues other than biological
inheritance runs the danger of overstressing the metaphor.
socio info is about NOTHING ELSE than the transmission
of ontogenetic information. What is transmitted by
phylogenetic means (genes) is conversely an issue of genetics.

We should note, though, that the Weismann Barrier does
not apply to (prokaryote) bacteria, since these can trade and swap
genetic information freely. See Howard Bloom's contribution
with his bacterial "global brain" concept. (also Margulis & Sagan)
Therefore, the info lives of bacteria can possibly
be used much more readily as models for socio info than
the eukaryote model.
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/glob/default.html
(so to say: the www existed already in the pre-cambrium age).
This may also be an insteresting connection to
Tom Stonier's "Global Brain" concept.
Book Literature:
Bloom, H.: The Lucifer Principle. A scientific expedition into the
forces of history, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York (1995)
http://www.bookworld.com/lucifer/
Margulis, L, Sagan, D.: Mystery Dance, Summit,
New York, London, Toronto (1991)
dt: Geheimnis und Ritual (Sexualit�t), Byblos

issue: Social Information, "individual humans" vs. "society"
Tue, 27 Oct 1998 22:42:13 -0100 (GMT-0100)
Bob Artigiani <artigian@novell.nadn.navy.mil>
and other contributions by Bob. (Royal Road...)
===================================================
In the CA perspective, the distinctions introducted
between "individual humans" and "society" seem
artificially abstract and quite impossible in "life out there"
There is no such thing as an isolated "individual human".
(No man is an island). Therefore there is also no possibility that
"the individual humans will return to their initial state",
because there never was one. (I believe that this error was
introduced by Rousseau, or was it Hobbes, with his "short and
brutish life of primitive man")?
One writer (I believe it was Sahlins)
once said that the beginnings of humanity were most like
"a two-million year continuous encounter group", for the
density of social interaction that took place. Current CA
accounts of hunter-gatherer tribes (like the Bushmen and
the Australian Aborigines) corroborate this. (Sahlins)

issue: social vs. natural environment
=====================================
The distinction between the "environment of society" and
the "natural environment" likewise seems
artificially abstract if not downright impossible.
We may, to the contrary, consider most of the effort of
ecology to formulate the "society view" of a natural ecosystem.
A good example for this would be:
Robert Ulanowicz: "Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective"
Columbia Univ. Press 1996. ulan@cbl.cees.edu
Ulanovicz describes an "Information Theory in Ecology"
in Ch. 4. that should be quite appropriate for the present
discussion.

I refer again to the theoretical groundwork given by
Whitehead in "Process and Reality"
and my email: on social complexity
Tue, 27 Oct 1998 10:14:10 -0100 (GMT-0100)
goppold <goppold@faw.uni-ulm.de>
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/poly04.htm
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/inform.htm

issue: VEMs vs. rites & rituals
===============================
The same with VEMs vs. rites & rituals.
For this, a nice CA anecdote will be illustrative:
At one time the Indonesian government finally wanted to
"help" the backwards superstitious Balinese farmers who
were still letting their planting and harvesting cycles
be determined by the Brahmin priests and their ritual
calendar with all their "superfluous" festivities,
and they called in some "real" and "rational" agronomic
specialists. The result was complete catastrophe. The
crops rotted in the fields and the pests ate what
was left of them.

Perhaps the ritual calendar embodied
some vital knowledge of mainly ecological issues
that the agronomists were entirely oblivious of. Animist
conceptions consider all of nature as animate, and therefore
communicable. What else but a society view of the world is this?

issue: REPRODUCING vs. REPLICATING and the cultural memory
==========================================================
> Bob Artigiani Tue, 27 Oct 1998 22:42:13:
> "because every now and a great then some real deviation occurs"
In this matter, the dictum:
"le plus �a change, le plus �a reste le m�me" applies
strictly. Since most of the social development takes more than
one human's life span to come about, we must be aware,
that our facility to notice change or continuity, is
also the same what we experience as change(d) or constant.
This is a matter of the cultural memory.
And it is controlled by certain cultural facilities such as
writing or performative (oral) tradition. On this footing,
there are some slowly changing parameters in society,
like language, VEMs, and "rites & rituals". Others are
changing faster, like fads, styles, attitudes, etc. But
there is no such thing as a clear (or "natural")
(or Weismann) distinction between the things changing,
and those remaining constant. To introduce this distinction
is strictly in the eye of the observer, or a matter
of the social consensus, which brings us back to the beginning.

Conclusion: a more general substrate
====================================
(See also: Stockinger, Wed, 28 Oct 1998)
>"So we have to look, as you say, for new media..."

It would be appropriate to consider, in an ecological manner,
the whole living biosphere as "a kind of" society (see Whitehead).
also Stan Salthe:
(Evolving hierarchical systems, Columbia Univ. Press, New York (1985)
Science as the basis for a new mythological understanding, Uroboros, No.
1, 25-45. (1992)
Development and evolution, MIT Press, Cambridge (1993))

We should therefore look for a more general substrate underlying
VEMs as well as "rites & rituals", the "matter of
INFORMATION and its COMMUNICATION" (Stockinger, Wed, 28 Oct 1998)
that is not subsumable by or commensurable with
Darwinian (genetic) discourse. We would have to take a hard look
into fashioning "new media" from a repertoire of
"close {neuronal/chemical/vibrational/behavioral} coupling"
of organisms that is only on the very highest levels
reflected by the symbolic strata that we humans have evolved,
and of which our western european-derived
alphabetic/mathematical/etc./ symbol repertoire is again a very
narrow sample.

-- 
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