The ecology of symbols: Information efficiency in
cultural systems
In the course of research investigating the interface
between ideational and material phenomena, Dwight Read and I revisited and
revised his Kinship Algebra Expert System. One of the outcomes of this project
were some conjectures to account for why Kinship terminologies apparently
tend to be describable by algebras, and of the similarities of the resulting
algebras even for apparently quite different kinship terminologies. In this
paper I want to examine two of these conjectures, supported by a multi-agent
simulation framework I have developed to speed development of simulations
which can be linked to existing empirical data. The first is an examination
of the information efficiency of the algebraic and competing proposals; how
much information is required to flow through the system to maintain the kinship
terminological system in each case across a simulated population. This will
employ some reformulations of Information Theory developed to examine stability
in DNA. The second is related to the first, and concerns the relative stability
to information required to maintain diversity and pervasiveness across a
human group relative to structures that have a sound formal basis and structures
which are defined with different degrees of arbitrariness. Both of these
issues are central to Anthropology, Sociology and other social science disciplines
given the increasing prominence of assumptions of non-systematic cultural
formations underlying cultural phenomena.
Michael D. Fischer
University of Kent at Canterbury
Reader in Anthropological Sciences
http://www.fischer.md
M.D.Fischer@ukc.ac.uk