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. Systems 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 binaries are dissolved.
Complex systems in nature 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 the system as a whole; this balance is maintained through homeostasis. Human societies are also complex systems. Work to define complex systems scientifically arose first in mathematics in the late 19th century, and was later applied to biology in the 1920s to explain ecosystems, then later to social sciences.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson is the most influential and earliest propagator of systems 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 a system as "any unit containing feedback structure and therefore competent to process information."Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 260. 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 representational systems to the non-representation of things. What this 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."G. Bateson and R. E. Donaldson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book, 1991), 50. Tracing rather than projecting mental images brings into sight a material reality that has been obscured under universalising concepts.
Non-Cartesian Since the European Enlightenment, 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' asserts that a person is a rational subject whose process 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 nature or simply what exists outside his mind. This subject-centered view of the universe reduces 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 the center of the universe and as a rational being.
The objective is to displace human beings from a position of supreme entity and situate them instead as beings within a contextual universe. Humans are not independent Cartesian subjects but dwell within nature. This brings back the human back to its original place and introduces nature in the equation. Systems theory, therefore, encourages a non-unitary subject in opposition to a Cartesian subject.
Complexity Once the Cartesian individual is dissolved, social sciences are able to move away from a subject-centered view of the world. The challenge is then how to represent empirical reality without reducing the complexity of the system. To put it simply, instead of representing things by us let the things speak through us. These questions led materialist philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari to develop a "science" for understanding reality without imposing 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.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
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."L. Bertalanffy, General system theory (G. Braziller New York, 1988). 141. 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.Karl Marx. (1970). The German Ideology. Ed. C. J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers Co. 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."Max Weber, Sociological Writing, 228. 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."The methodology of the social sciences (Edward A. Shils & Henry A. Finch, Trans. & Eds.; foreword by Shils). New York: Free Press, 1997 (1903-1917). p.88. 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.