Culture as Complex System ...

Apologies for repeating my points here, but I think the case can be made from them (that) - as we learn more and more about "culture" in social settings - the more reason we have for looking at it under the light of CDSR. (Luke R.)

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Culture isn’t ‘ “sprinkled” atop a “material” “structure” ‘ as much as the “sprinkling” effect, in some sense, emanates from the systematic structure of social units.  For structure/culture flow into one another, both are behavioral-“imaginative” frameworks [taken in terms of different analytical respects – one ‘particulate-substantive’, the other operative][one as an end-from-which, the other as an actualization of ends].  And while one is more crystallized through recurrent human activity (material-structural source principle), the other is “energetic” as it were and “radiant” of social processes, personal human actions, and psychologic-sociological outputs.

Braudel’s “civilizations Within civilizations” concept è

Yes, this idea is a good one if we understand “civilizations” in terms of further abstractions from “society” and “culture” (i.e., as super-cultures or complex societies ala the social imagination of people in groups, by way of the “imagined communities” concept).

It wouldn’t be surprising that there were “civilizations within civilizations” if we were to consider the many tiered system-structure of human social psychology. Because if the “superscript” of society [a product of the social imagination of groups] has its own variation of “superscripts” and “subscripts” [that is, “civilizations”] then why shouldn’t these also have their own constitutive attributes and system-characteristics [via other “civilizations”]?   It would seem that chaos/complexity by its injection into the domain social science would demand such iterations to be encoded in the organizational fabric of our kind’s existence. 

CONCLUSION:   From such terms, we must without a doubt deduce that culture is typified by "complexity" principles as it operates in the social sphere

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Luke Rondinaro, Group Facilitator

The Consilience Projects

www.topica.com/lists/consiliencep

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