Closed Systems
In anthropology, the term 'system' is used widely for describing socio-cultural phenomena of a given society in a holistic way. For instance, kinship system, marriage system, cultural system, religious system, totemic system, etc. This systemic approach to a society shows the anxieties of the earliest anthropologists to capture the reality without reducing the complexity of a given community. In their quest of searching the underline pattern of a reality, they "discovered" the kinship system as a fundamental structure of the natives. However, their systems are closed systems because they reduce the complexity and fluidity by imposing anthropological concepts such as genealogy, kinship, heredity, marriage.
Read more about this topic: Systems Theory In Anthropology
Famous quotes containing the words closed and/or systems:
“My old Father used to have a saying that “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter”; and it occurs to me, that if the bargain you have just closed [marriage] can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for applying that maxim to, which my fancy can, by any effort, picture.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“No civilization ... would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)