Re: [Pen-l] complexity of society [was: Excellent article on Jared Diamond and the New Yorker

[raghu <mraghu01@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> raghu wrote:
>> .. is it nevertheless
>> not true that industrial societies are orders of magnitude bigger,
>> more interconnected and more complex than tribal cultures? In the same
>> way that a large factory is more complex than a garage workshop.
>
> In reading Raymond Firth's classic (1957) anthropological study, "We
> the Tikopia," I was impressed with how complex their society was in
> terms of kinship relations and the like. I'd guess that the difference
> between "us" and "them" is more a matter of technology than complexity
> _per se_.



This seems similar to Michael's comment about different kinds of
complexity in different societies. Even in the example I gave, the
large factory may be a more complex form of organization, but in a
sense a society with small craftsmen requires more complex exchange
arrangements than a market. So apples and oranges.

Still while acknowledging the basic truth in this, can we not make
certain objective comparisons e.g. in population size, density,
geographical size, material wealth, size of language vocabularies,
energy consumption etc, isn't US society clearly more complex than
Papua New Guinean society?

-raghu.


--
"Never judge a book by its movie." - Anonymous
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