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:
“No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)