Editor's Introduction

Abstract

It is certainly true that anthropology is, more than any other field of inquiry, a science of the emergent. As Andrew A. White suggests, we can stack the sciences up with physics, the most fundamental, at the bottom, then chemistry, biology, and so forth until we reach anthropology. Just as chemistry relies on and encompasses physics, so, by the time we get to anthropology, it encompasses all scientific knowledge, as it is all, in some fashion, relevant to human culture. An archaeologist cannot study a pyramid, for example, without taking into account physics, geology, economics, and so forth. Anthropologists deal not only with emergent phenomena, but with emergent systems such as economics, kinship, information flow, or cultural ecology. These are remarkably complex systems that often defy traditional ethnographic description. In many such cases, White argues, complexity and chaos theory may provide ways of understanding and modeling these systems. At one point he mentions schools of fish. This brought to my mind a memory from a visit to Hanoi a few years ago. Traffic on the boulevards was constant, consisting entirely of motorbikes. Few crosswalks or signals existed. I had no idea how to cross the street until a young man came up to me and demonstrated that as long as I walked predictably, the bikes would part to make room, much like a school of fish avoiding a moving obstacle. White’s complaint with this sort of example, which seems valid, is that up to this point anthropologists have only flirted with these theories, using them as a metaphor for the social processes in which they are interested. I confess myself to having been such a flirter, attempting to understand Kwakwakawakw and Heiltsuk ecological relation to salmon as expressed in myth, using concepts from complexity theory (Harkin 2007). I agree that moving forward the use of formal modeling of these complex or chaotic systems offers great promise; and one side benefit is the ability to revitalize the four-field approach. I have some differences with the author on this approach, as I believe that the configuration of our field is historically contingent and that no one, including Franz Boas, was truly a four-field practitioner. Nonetheless, I think there are many opportunities for valuable exchange at the margins of the subfields, both with other subfields of anthropology, and other fields of science.