Human ecosystems are
complex cybernetic systemsA complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts...
that are increasingly being used by ecological anthropologists and other scholars to examine the ecological aspects of human communities in a way that integrates multiple factors as economics, socio-political organization, psychological factors, and physical factors related to the environment.
Overview
The term
ecosystemAn ecosystem is a system of interdependent organisms which share the same habitat, in an area functioning together with all of the physical factors of the environment. Ecosystems can be permanent or temporary. Ecosystems usually form a number of food webs...
was coined in the 1930s by Roy Clapham, to denote the physical and biological components of an environment considered in relation to each other as a unit. British ecologist
Arthur TansleySir Arthur George Tansley was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed the term ecosystem in 1935 and ecotope in 1939...
later refined the term, describing it as the interactive system established between
biocoenosisA biocoenosis , termed by Karl Möbius in 1877, describes all the interacting organisms living together in a specific habitat . Biotic community , biological community, and ecological community are more common synonyms of biocenosis, all of which represent the same concepts...
(a group of living creatures) and their
biotopeBiotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals. Biotope is almost synonymous with the term habitat, but while the subject of a habitat is a species or a population, the subject of a biotope is a biological...
(the environment in which they live).
Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms are continually engaged in a set of relationships with every other element constituting the environment in which they exist. The human ecosystem concept is then grounded in the deconstruction of the human/nature
dichotomyA dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts.In other words, it is a partition of a whole into two parts that are:* mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and...
, and the emergent premise that all species are ecologically integrated with each other, as well as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope. Ecosystems can be bounded and discussed with tremendous variety of scope, and describe any situation where there is relationship between organisms and their environment.
A
systemSystem is a set of interacting or interdependent entities forming an integrated whole....
as small as a household or university, or as large as a nation state, may then be suitably discussed as a human ecosystem. While they may be bounded and individually discussed, human ecosystems do not exist independently, but interact in a complex web of human and ecological relationships connecting all human ecosystems to make up the biosphere. As virtually no surface of the earth today is free of human contact, all ecosystems can be more accurately considered as human ecosystems.
The human ecosystem concept draws from disciplines such as
ecologyEcology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the interactions between organisms and the interactions of these organisms with their environment....
,
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
,
sociologySociology is the scientific or systematic study of human societies. It is a branch of social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, often with the goal of applying such...
,
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
,
political sciencePolitical science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. It is often described as the pragmatic application of the art and science of politics defined as "who gets what, when and how",...
,
cyberneticsCybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory...
, and
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
, seeking to understand the complex system of relationships in which humans interact. These relationships exist within nested hierarchies of context with which individuals and human aggregates interact with differentially. Most analysis of human ecosystems focuses on particular contexts of relationship, such as biological, individual, socio-cultural, environmental et cetera.
World Systems TheoryThe World-systems approach is a view of world affairs, one of several historical and current applications of Marxism to international relations...
, as proposed by
Immanuel WallersteinImmanuel Maurice Wallerstein is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst...
, is an example of a systemic analysis of the socio-political and economic dimensions of the global network of human ecosystems. The human ecosystem unit of analysis is perhaps most often used by ecological anthropologists, and is apparent in the work of scholars such as
Roy RappaportRoy A. Rappaport was a distinguished anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology....
, who has explored ritual cycles and communication within human ecosystems.
Gregory BatesonGregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature...
, E.N. Anderson,
Mary DouglasDame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism....
, Keith Basso, and Paul Nadasdy are some other anthropologists who have employed the human ecosystem as a unit of analyses.
Cybernetics
Through the emergence and subsequent evolution of cybernetics human ecosystems are increasingly recognized as complex cybernetic systems.
CyberneticsCybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory...
, the study of communication and control in living beings and machines, was established as a cohesive discipline in the 1940s by
Norbert WienerNorbert Wiener was an American pure and applied mathematician.A famous child prodigy, Wiener went on to become a pioneer in the study of stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.Wiener is the founder of...
(who coined the term), Warren McCulloch and others. The discipline is not grounded in any one empirical field, but is concerned with the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense. The emphasis is on the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system, rather than the parts themselves. This is directly applicable to any inquiry involving human ecosystems, which emphasize the relationships between humans and the
bioticBiotic means relating to, produced by, or caused by living organisms.The term biotic may also refer to:*Life, or ecosystem, the condition of living organisms,*Biology, the study of life*Biotic component in ecology,...
and abiotic constituents of the environments they inhabit. Such relationships include the transfer of information, nested hierarchies of context and meaning,
feedbackFeedback describes the situation when output from an event or phenomenon in the past will influence the same event/phenomenon in the present or future....
, emergent phenomena,
self-organizationSelf-organization is a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source...
and
autopoiesisAutopoiesis literally means "auto -creation" , and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.-Meaning:...
. These phenomena are perhaps most holistically identified and interpreted by means of cybernetic analysis.
Information
The transmission and transformation of
informationInformation as a concept has many meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. The concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.The English...
is central to the inquiry of human ecosystems. As scholars such as E.N. Anderson illustrate, humans certainly appear to be specialized information processors. In the context of human ecosystems, information is viewed as a type of input to or output from an organism or designed device. This idea stems from information theory, the foundations of which were laid by Claude Shannon, who published an influential paper titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in 1948. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s cognitive psychology became concerned with information processing, in attempt to understanding human thinking. This approach considers cognition as being essentially computational. During this time cybernetics was emerging, also concerned with the nature and transmission of information.
Information processingInformation processing is the change of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process which describes everything which happens in the universe, from the falling of a rock to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system...
is generally considered as the changing (processing) of information in any manner detectable by the observer. It can be described as either sequential or parallel, both of which can be either centralized or decentralized (distributed). Cyberneticians have argued that it is a process which describes everything that happens (changes) in the universe, from the falling of a rock (a change in position) to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system. In the 1960s and 1970s cybernetic theory began to permeate anthropology, through the work of
Roy RappaportRoy A. Rappaport was a distinguished anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology....
and
Gregory BatesonGregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature...
in particular.
Human ecosystems as complex cybernetic systems
Work by scholars such as
Roy RappaportRoy A. Rappaport was a distinguished anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology....
,
Gregory BatesonGregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature...
, and E.N Anderson has focused of transfer and transformation of information in human ecosystems. Inquiries as such have focused on the ecological and informational aspects of relationships in human ecosystems. In
Steps to an Ecology of Mind Bateson discusses information as pattern and difference within complex cybernetic systems.
In the 1990s
Edwin HutchinsEdwin Hutchins is a professor and former department head of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. Hutchins is one of the main developers of distributed cognition....
developed a school of psychology known as distributed cognition, which draws heavily from anthropology and sociology, emphasizing the social aspects of cognition. Distributed cognition is directly applicable to studies of human ecosystems, considering systems as sets of representations, and modeling the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment. In
Cognition in the Wild Hutchins considers information processing within a bounded human ecosystem in a discussion of distributed cognition on board a naval vessel.
Further reading
- Basso, Keith 1996 “Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
- Douglas, Mary 1999 “Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology.” London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
- Nadasdy, Paul 2003 “Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon.” Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press.