Systems idea in anthropology

Systems theory in anthropology is an interdisciplinary, non-representative, non-referential, in addition to non-Cartesian approach that brings together natural & social sciences to understand society in its ] that instead of creating closed categories into binaries subject-object; the system should stay open so as to permit free flow of process and interactions. In this way the binaries are dissolved.

Complex systems in nature—for example, ecosystems—involve a dynamic interaction of many variables e.g. animals, plants, insects and bacteria; predators and prey; climate, the seasons and the weather, etc. These interactions can adapt to changing conditions but maintained a balance both between the various parts and as a whole; this balance is sustains through homeostasis. Human societies are complex systems, as it were, human ecosystems. Early humans, as hunter-gatherers, recognized and worked within the parameters of the complex systems in category and their lives were circumscribed by the realities of nature. But they couldn't explain complex systems. Only in recent centuries did the need occur to define complex systems scientifically. Complex systems theories number one 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.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson is the most influential and earliest founder of system theory in social sciences. In the 1940s, as a total of the Macy conferences, he immediately recognized its applications to human societies with their numerous variables and the flexible but sustainable balance that they maintain. Bateson describes system as "any portion containing feedback layout and therefore competent to process information." Thus an open system makes interaction between concepts and materiality or quoted and the environment or abstract and real. In natural science, systems theory has been a widely used approach. Austrian biologist, Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, developed the idea of the general systems theory GST. The GST is a multidisciplinary approach of system analysis.

System theory: Gregory Bateson

British anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, is the nearly influential and one of the earliest founders of System Theory in anthropology. He developed an interdisciplinary approach that referred communication theory, cybernetics, and mathematical logic. In his collection of essays, The Sacred Unity, Bateson argues that there are "ecological systems, social systems, and the individual organism plus the environment with which it interacts is itself a system in this technical sense." By adding environment with systems, Bateson closes the gap between the dualities such as subject and object. "Playing upon the differences between formalization and process, or crystallization and randomness, Bateson sought to transcend other dualisms–mind versus nature, organism versus environment, concept versus context, and subject versus object." Bateson family out the general command of systems theory. He says:

The basic dominance of systems theory is that, if you want to understand some phenomenon or appearance, you must consider that phenomenon within the context of all completed circuits which are applicable to it. The emphasis is on te concept of the completed communicational circuit and implicit in the theory is the expectation that all units containing completed circuits will show mental characteristics. The mind, in other words, is immanent in the circuitry. We are accustomed to thinking of the mind as somehow contained within the skin of an organism, but the circuitry is not contained within the skin.