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.
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.
Complex systems in nature involve a dynamic interaction of many variables (e.g. animals, plants, insects and bacteria; predators and prey; climate, the seasons and the weather, etc.)
Work to define complex systems scientifically arose first in math in the late 19th century, and was later applied to biology in the 1920s to explain ecosystems, then later to social sciences.
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.
The Cartesian subject, therefore, is a scientific individual who imposes mental concepts on things in order to control the nature or simply what exists outside his mind.
He was interested in finding sophisticated, scientific universal laws of society, though contrary to positivist mechanistic approaches which take facts as given, and then develop causal relationship out of them.
Drawing on hermeneutic tradition, Weber introduced multiple rationalities in the modern schema of thinking and used interpretive approach in understanding the meaning of a phenomenon placed in the webs of significance.
Contrary to Marx, who was searching for the universal laws of the society, Weber attempts an interpretive understanding of social action in order to arrive at a "causal explanation of its course and effects.
Weber's interpretive approach in understanding the meaning of an action in relation to its environment delineated a contextualized social framework for cultural relativism.
Since we exist in webs of significance and the objective analysis would detach us from a concrete reality which we are all part of it, Weber suggested ideal-types; an analytical and conceptual construct "formed by the accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present, and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.
They assist social scientists in selecting culturally significant elements of a larger whole which can be contrasted with each other to demonstrate their interrelationship, patterns of formation, and similar societal functions.
Weber's selected ideal-types – bureaucracy, religion, and capitalism – are culturally significant variables through which he demonstrated show multiple functionalities of social behavior.
The concept of class, economy, capitalism, proletariat and bourgeoisie, revolution and state, along with other Marxian models are heuristic tools for understanding a society in its context.
The reason is that Marxist practitioners have imposed analytical concepts as ahistorical and universal categories to reduce concrete-process and activities from the polymorphous actions into a simplified phenomenon.
This renders social phenomena not only ahistorical but also devoid of spatio-temporal rigour, decontextualized, and categorizes chaos and ruptures under the general label of bourgeoisie exploitation.
In fact, history emerged as a metanarrative of a class struggle, moving in a chronological order, and future anticipated as a revolutionary overthrow of state apparatuses by the workers.
For instance, the state as an ideal-type imported to the physical world has deceived and diverted political activism away from the real sites of power such as corporations and discourses.
Similarly class as an ideal-type, projected to a society, which is an ensemble of population, becomes dangerous because it marginalizes and undermines organic linkages of kinship, language, race, and ethnicity.
In fact, it is a reality in which people of various denominations – class backgrounds, religious affiliations, kinship and family ties, gender, and ethnic and linguistic differences – do not only experience conflict, but also practice cooperation in everyday life.
Thus when one inserts ideal-types into this concrete dynamic process one does categorical violence to multifariousness of the population and similarly reduces feeling, emotions, non-economic social standing such as honor, and status, as Weber describes, to economism.
The Protestant work ethic, for instance, functioned as sophisticated mechanism that encouraged population to "care for the self", which served as an underpinning social activity for bourgeois capitalism.
In response to the reductive approach of economism or vulgar Marxism, as it is also known, Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams introduced new understanding to Marxist thought.
Taking Williams as our point of discussion, he criticizes the mechanistic approach to Marxism that encourages a close reading of Marxian concepts.
Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in the northwestern United States and British Columbia, Boas discusses culture separate from physical environment, biology, and most importantly discarded evolutionary models that represent civilization as a progressive entity following chronological development.
The way in which one can study the pattern of life is by conceptually delineating a relation determined by a kinship or marriage, "and that we can give a general analytical description of them as constituting a system.
The sorcerer, patient, and group, according to Lévi-Strauss, comprise a shaman complex, which makes social consensus an underlying pattern for understanding.
"[24] The three examples that Lévi-Strauss mentions relate to magic, a practice reached as a social consensus, by a group of people including sorcerer and patient.
In his influential essay, Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture, Geertz argues that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.
They wrote: "Gregory Bateson uses the word plateau to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.