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SUPERORGANIC
Another name for culture or society
Training Handout
Compare with inorganic and organic
The idea of “The
superorganic” is associated with Alfred Kroeber, an American anthropologist
writing in the first half of the twentieth century.
The superorganic is another way of
describing ––
and understanding ––
culture or the socio-cultural system.
If we start with the inorganic, it
is the physical universe, all the atoms of elements without life.
We can
call this the lowest level of complexity.
The second level of
complexity is composed of living things.
All living things, plants and animals,
are built up of inorganic elements, mainly hydrogen, oxygen and carbon,
plus some trace elements.
Here we use an interesting
phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
The collection of inorganic
elements which we call, for example, a tree, or a dog, is living.
If you analyse all
those parts, in themselves, or even as a collection, they are not
living.
The arrangement makes
them alive.
If you separate the
dog or tree into its separate elements, it dies.
Knowing the dynamics of how carbon
atoms operate, or that combining hydrogen and oxygen can result in a rapid
combustion if not an explosion, does not explain how the tree works, with
its leaves converting sunlight into energy to change water and carbon dioxide
into oxygen and carbon, channels to transfer sap from leaves to
root, and so on.
Similarly, the dog, if seen as a
biological system, operates at a higher complexity than the inorganic elements
which comprise it.
A living entity transcends
its inorganic parts.
Looking at the relationship between
living things and their inorganic components in this way helps us to understand
the relationship between culture and persons.
Culture and society
comprise the third level.
Human beings are animals,
and as such are organic systems.
They have developed communications
between themselves to an elaborate degree, much more sophisticated than
other animals.
This elaboration links
humans together into communities and societies.
The links are symbolic,
not genetic as in biological systems.
The socio-cultural level, culture
or society, therefore is carried by humans and transcends humans.
A
culture has a “life of its own” which is symbolic rather than genetic.
In this way it is a “living” thing.
It operates at a higher
level of complexity than the organic. It is superorganic.
There is a parallel, therefore, in
the relations between the inorganic and the organic, as between the organic
and the superorganic.
The concept developed
by Durkheim, a
“social fact,” is expressed in this understanding.
Humans have thoughts
and behaviour.
Those are carried by
individuals.
They behave, however, in concert
with each other, as a system external to individuals ––
society.
Do not think of a dog
as a carbon atom or a hydrocarbon molecule.
Similarly, do not think
of a community, an institution, a society as a human being.
Do not anthropomorphise
culture.
It may have a life
of its own, but its life more resembles an amoeba than a human.
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