SOCI 2001 week 4 Essay Assignment
Cultural Complexity
Cultural identity is a difficult topic to investigate in the modern epoch. With the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, many countries began to envision themselves within a nationalist discourse as opposed to one that focused on religious differences. However, this becomes much more difficult to define within multicultural modern nation states such as Australia. Formally defined by its British colonial past, Australia has emerged as a cross-cultural state. While it still strongly identifies with tropes of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, Australia has become a cultural mosaic that has incorporated people and their cultures from all over the world into their own.SOCI 2001 week 4 Essay Assignment
According to most students and scholars of nationalism, chief cultural identifiers include gender, race, location, nationality, history, sexuality, language, ethnicity, religious beliefs, aesthetics, and even cuisine. Therefore, when approaching cultural identity in largely immigrant-based countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, one has to take into account a number of complex factors. Who is an Australian? What does it mean to be an Australian? What are the national values of Australia?
Due to Britain’s relative late colonization of Australia, the original settlers of the nineteenth century had to develop a set of values to survive in the wilderness. As such, egalitarianism, an irreverent sense of humor, and informality became touchstones of the Australian personality in juxtaposition to the formal social behaviors of the British aristocracy and gentry. As a result of such informality, Australians are known for being very open and welcoming to foreigners. Over 43% of Australians were either born abroad or have at least one parent who immigrated to Australia. Moreover, Australia was one of the first modern states to grant women’s suffrage in the 1890s. Because of such openness, Australia has successfully built a cultural identity based on equality and justice.
Cultural Complexity
The study of the emergence of civilizations examines the development of complex societies from previous simpler ones. But the question of how to define complexity is a tricky one that has affected archaeology from it’s beginning. How complexity is defined changes the framework of how societies are studied and viewed, often with problematic results. This is illustrated more dramatically with nineteenth century academics but still applies to archaeological study today.
Looking back to the nineteenth century provides a good example of how the definition of complexity can change how research is conducted. Most nineteenth century archaeologists and academics had a very Western-eccentric definition of complexity, focusing on things such as technology and capitalism as signs of advancement. During this time period, a great deal of importance was placed on “progress,” the idea of moving forward linearly to better things. This concept was fed by new scientific theories regarding evolution and geology. Complex societies were seen as the natural progression from simpler societies, with Western societies representing the pinnacle of complexity. Using this framework, many cultural beliefs and systems were discounted as primitive or barbaric. The legacy of nineteenth century research is rife with racism, sexism and an over-focus on the elites of society. Defining societies in a biased manner led to biased conclusions. The cultural focus that is present in archaeology makes it especially susceptible to these sorts of problems.SOCI 2001 week 4 Essay Assignment
While the field of archaeology has come a long way from its less culturally sensitive roots, many of the same issues still apply today. Complexity is still defined in a very ethnocentric fashion, favoring Western culture. Harris’ model of complexity uses social organization as its primary classifier, with states as the most complex. This favors Western societal organization. If characteristics such as kinship or piety were used, Western societies would be viewed as simple. Harris’ model is used to organize societies for research purposes, but the problem comes when this cultural complexity is conflated with cultural worth. This is a longstanding issue that persists today. In Patterns in Prehistory, Wenke cites an example of an Iraq city-state citizen in 2500 BC who disparage his nomadic neighbors for their simple, “barbaric” culture (203). The danger of this sort of ethnocentrism is still imminent, even with the prevalence of cultural relativism in anthropology today. While biased definitions of complexity are still used for research’s sake, archaeologist must take care to refrain from making judgements on cultural worth based on these definitions.
Cultural anthropologists have long noted and described differences in the level of cultural complexity of different human groups. The first discussions about cultural systems and complexity were centered on a notion of linear progress from simple to more complex cultural systems considering modern Western cultures as the furthest advanced (see e.g. Tylor 1920). Although modern anthropologists have realized nowadays that this simplistic notion of cultural complexity discredits the adaptation al value of some of the most long-lived cultural systems of human history, it is still the prevailing one in much of the research on human cultural evolution today. To gain a less ideologically motivated and more analytically useful view of these concepts, we first have to define what we mean by “culture” and by “complexity”.
In the Encyclopedia of Evolution, Mitchell and Newman define a complex system as “a group or organization which is made up of many interacting parts”. If we then accept the definition of culture as socially transmitted information (Boyd & Richer son 2005), this means that the complexity of a cultural system lies somehow in the number of items of information that it contains and the number of interactions among these items. Depending on our interests, we may stress different typologies of information and different sets of interactions: cultural complexity becomes a “multidimensional variable”. SOCI 2001 week 4 Essay Assignment
Without taking the analogy too far, a cultural system can be compared with the code base of a computer game. The code base of a game holds its rule set or informational content. A more complex game has a bigger code base, because more information needs to be stored for each possible decision-making point, game assets and interactions among subsystems and objects within the game. The more different agents or players there are in a game, the more different variables each agent owns, and the higher the number of possible interactions between them is, the more complex the code base will become. Equally, a more complex game-environment will increase the code base, because there are more possible interactions between the players and their environment. Similarly, human agents in cultural systems hold information about tool-use, knowledge about their bio tic and a biotic environment and also about social interaction rules. All these items of information together constitute a cultural system and its complexity.
Obviously, the game code itself will be hidden from the human player (= observer), and only its effects will become apparent during the game. The same relationship applies to individual cultural traits, which we can define as individual pieces of cultural information, and the properties of cultural systems that we can observe. We may consider observable cultural properties and artifacts as the product of modular recipes of cultural traits (Mesoudi & O’Brien 2008). Therefore, when asking questions about cultural complexity, it is important to operational the concept, even if this means that we will lose some aspects of cultural complexity for the purpose of our analysis.SOCI 2001 week 4 Essay Assignment
For example, we can look at the technological complexity of different cultural groups. Technology, as a prominent part of material culture, is relatively easy to observe. Measures of technological complexity vary, but mostly they take into account the number of different tool types and/or the number of distinct sub units of each type (the latter are also referred to as techno units, after Oswalt 1976). Thus, we can assess the number of different parts at different scales of a technological system and the number of functional interactions among these parts (in the case of techno units). Culture, however, is not restricted to technology or even material culture. The number of levels of social stratification and the degree of social heterogeneity both represent different aspects of cultural complexity (McGuire 1983). It may also be reflected in the number of different cultural roles which an individual can adopt within a community.
Once we have clarified what we mean by cultural complexity and what aspects of cultural complexity we are investigating, we can start asking more interesting questions, such as the following:
Why are some human cultures more complex than others? In what aspects are some human cultures more complex than others? How is complexity at the individual level (e.g. the number of cultural traits, rules and relationships held by individuals) related to the complexity at a higher collective level (e.g. the total set of cultural traits or rules in a population, the levels of social hierarchy, or the number or different relationships between individuals)? In how far is cultural complexity affected by chance effects, such as fluctuations in population size? And in how far is the amount of complexity found in a specific cultural community an adaptive response to social and environmental circumstances? SOCI 2001 week 4 Essay Assignment