![]() Since the European Enlightenment, the Western philosophy has placed the individual, as an indispensable category, at the center of the universe. 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." The tracing rather than projecting mental images bring in sight material reality that has been obscured under the universalizing concepts. ![]() ![]() What it 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. One of the central elements of the systems theory is to move away from the representational system to the non-representation of things. The GST is a multidisciplinary approach of system analysis.ฤก. Austrian biologist, Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, developed the idea of the general systems theory (GST). In natural science, systems theory has been a widely used approach. Bateson describes system as "any unit containing feedback structure and therefore competent to process information." Thus an open system allows interaction between concepts and materiality or subject and the environment or abstract and real. 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. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson is the most influential and earliest founder of system theory in social sciences. Complex systems theories first developed in math in the late 19th century, then in biology in the 1920s to explain ecosystems, then to deal with artificial intelligence (cybernetics), etc. Only in recent centuries did the need arise to define complex systems scientifically. But they couldn't explain complex systems. Early humans, as hunter-gatherers, recognized and worked within the parameters of the complex systems in nature and their lives were circumscribed by the realities of nature. Human societies are complex systems, as it were, human ecosystems. 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 as a whole this balance is maintained through homeostasis. Complex systems in nature-for example, ecosystems-involve a dynamic interaction of many variables (e.g. System 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. 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 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.
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