A Wormhole to Kroeber's Whirlpool: Revisiting Cultural Configurations in Light of Complexity and Assemblage Theory

If introductory textbooks are anything to go by, anthropologists teach about the ethnological perspectives of Boas and his students by way of the terms "historical particularism," "diffusionism," and, with special reference to Ruth Benedict, "patterns of culture." Advanced historically oriented writings (Stocking 1974:5–11; Bashkow 2004), however, point out that Boasians are not so easy to label. For one thing, Boasians had a more sophisticated concept of culture than is often assumed. For example, they had a nuanced sense of the internal and external factors involved in generating cultural forms and they were aware of the problem of reification. Another claim, that Boasians were antiscience, is also hard to make stick.

This paper follows a recent trend to "selectively retheorize" Boasian ethnology (Bashkow 2004; Bunzl 2004; Rosenblatt 2004; Orta 2004; Handler 2004; Darnell 2001). The focus will be on aspects of the work of Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber that appear to anticipate nonlinear dynamics (chaos theory). Concerning Boas, the primary evidence of this connection comes from his perspective on historical causality and chance. Although his discussion on these issues has sometimes been understood simply as antiscience, this is a misreading of a more sophisticated analysis of determinism. With respect to Kroeber, evidence of a connection between his work and non-linear dynamics is to be found in his model of cultural configurations. Certain aspects of this model have strong affinities with physical models of phase space and phase transitions. Because of its complexity, as well as its relative neglect, it will receive the most attention here. A more elaborate essay would also discuss the work of Ruth Benedict, but her work is omitted here because a good commentary on what is most relevant—her views about synergistic effects in culture—was published long ago by Maslow and Honigmann (1970).

I recognize that from the point of view of history my reading of the evidence in this paper commits the sin of openly evaluating selective features of the past from a "presentist" perspective, my aim being not only to show how some features of the thought of Boas and Kroeber articulate with nonlinear theory, but also with the related assemblage theory developed recently by Manuel DeLanda (2006). Still, as historiographers know, history is always understood at least to some degree in terms of the present; and sometimes it takes a considerable passage of time to appreciate the subtleties of the arguments of our predecessors. There is at present a need to call attention to prescient Boasian insights into science and causality, especially as two recent ethnological collections, with a cutting-edge focus on holism and chaos theory, fail to draw any connection between the new theorizing and this past work (Mosco and Damon 2005; Parkin and Ulijaszek 2007).

Another key point about the past here is that there were early forms of complexity analysis around, even as the young Boas was developing intellectually in the nineteenth century. In addition to the parallels that one may find when one guides a perceptual wormhole into the past looking for connections, there are also parallels to be found in paths that appear to have been viable options not taken. Anthropological theory has had its own history of bifurcations, and it seems to me that one path that opened before Kroeber in particular could have led to a major reconceptualization of the subfields of anthropology in terms of an analytic worldview defined in terms of synergy and emergent complexity. If this route would have been taken, much of the ink spilt over such issues as units of analysis and the autonomy of culture might not have been wasted. Unfortunately, only in an alternative universe, I suppose, could we have had a Kroeber who went that route rather than down his own rather impersonal and idiosyncratic path stalking the "superorganic."

It would not be right for a paper on culture to eschew the standard practice of providing an ethnological example or two, especially in order to offset dullish abstract theorizing. In keeping with this tradition, in the closing section I will examine...