Form and cultural complexity: epistemological notes for a semiotic anthropology

Abstract

The epistemological relations between complex and dynamic
systems and the understanding of semiotic/semiolinguistic and
anthropological complexity, properly human, have become an
indisputable necessity. The epistemological relations between
complex and dynamic systems and the understanding of semiotic/
semiolinguistic and anthropological complexity, properly
human, have become an indisputable necessity. The question
of terminological transfer and the transposition of descriptive
resources from the physical and chemical sciences to the study
of social and symbolic behavior raised doubts about the legitimacy
of the transposition itself, but also about the effectiveness
of approaches taken from the natural sciences to describe socialsymbolic
interactions and complex semiotic forms. Recently, the
ecological turning point in the cultural sciences has distanced
itself from this problem and has highlighted the importance of
a pluralist and unifying perspective in relation to the modes of
description and objectivation of the phenomena studied. In fact,
an ecological approach to a given cultural phenomenon seeks
the integration of a plurality of heterogeneous descriptions coming
from different disciplinary strategies; in so doing, such an
approach aspires to recover not so much the internal systematicity
of the phenomenon as its lines of development and change
within increasingly richer systems of organization, spheres of
existence and evolution that are always open to change, variation
and rebalancing. One might even add that ecological approaches
in the cultural sciences have explicitly addressed the idea of a
complexity of human life and its forms, mainly emphasizing the
idea of a constant and non-linear interaction with the environment
and inhabited environments. An important consequence
concerning this study on symbolic behavior is derived from
this: the epistemological questioning of the roles to be assumed
in epistemological and descriptive strategies by many concepts,
such as: form, sociality, incorporation, fluctuation, mediality