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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1986. 15:99-119 Quick links to online content
Copyright © 1986 by Annual Reviews 1nc. All rights reserved
Joan Vincent
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INTRODUCTION
This review began with a search of 54 mainstream journals for articles and
books in which the relation of "system" to "process" was explicitly discussed.
The starting point was taken to be 1974 on the assumption that the publication
in that year of Wallerstein's The Modern World-System (128) would be a
triggering or threshold event. It was found that most of the articles appeared
within the domains of ecological, legal, and symbolic anthropology. Several,
but not as many, confrontations with the concepts occurred in the anthropolo
gy of education, urban studies, and the study of the family. It was expected
that gender studies would be prominent, but they were not.
Most of the anthropologists whose work is reviewed use the concepts both
of system and process although frequently favoring one over the other.
Perhaps it should be clearly stated at the outset that "system" is not taken to be
synonymous with "structure." Rather structure is short-term process; process
is long-term structure (102). Their complementarity involves a different mode
of conceptualization from systems thinking. Some systems analysts use
"process" simply to mean "how"; some processualists gain considerable
analytical purchase by perceiving "systems" to be not constructs but con
structed. Following Pepper (88), a systems vocabulary was discerned: stage,
level, environment, variable, evolution, trigger, feedback, integration. The
equivalent processual metaphors were found to be: phase, field, context,
element, history, threshold, movement, duration. I do not suggest that some
anthropologists are processualists and others systematicists: however, it is
possible to distinguish process thinking from systems thinking analytically
and to recognize the pervasiveness of both in anthropology.
IThis article was prepared while the author was at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton,
New Jersey 08543
99
0084-6570/86/1015-0099$02.00
100 VINCENT
process (24, 25) nevertheless continue to use the language of evolution. The
anthropology of law, the longest established specialization, has a pre
dominance of process to the neglect of systems. Here a move toward more
systemic study is underway (9, 16, 126). The study of symbolic systems and
ritual processes apparently falls somewhere in between, but in the journals
and books reviewed (and these did not include linguistics) the legacy of
Turner's processual paradigm (78, 79, 112, 113, 118, 132) moves beyond
both. It is in this domain that (generalizing what is particular in Hunter) "the
discovery of process also leads to the delineation of forms of explanation
other than cause and effect. In addition, interest in process usually results in a
perception . . . of a meaning that transcends events" (50, p. 320). This
trajectory is found in several recent works that do not fall squarely within any
of the three domains, and these are reviewed in the conclusion to this essay.
Themes common to all the domains include: holism in relation to partial
analysis, adaptation to crisis, methodological individualism, pluralism, dis
tinctions between evolutionary and historical systems and processes, and
explorations of varieties of "process." Three models of the relationship
between system and process emerged from the review: a crisis model, a
friction model, and a model that for the present I call a transformation model.
It would appear that crises are giving way to routinization; the friction model
is now most used and has led to more attention being paid to individual and
group relations, heterogeneity, and pluralism; the study of transformation
(production, reproduction, and transformation) is in a somewhat unself
conscious phase (105). Whether the three models actually appeared sequen
tially can only be ascertained after reviewing a more complete literature.
montane Latin America (15, 84, 131); and "the Hutterite case" (24, 119,
121). The domain permits, therefore, consideration of both the part played in
analysis by the historical situation in which the ethnographer found himself,
and the frozen dialectic. "The evaluation of differing theoretical positions is a
process running through generations whose battlefield is the totality of
ethnographic and ethnohistoric information" (24, p. 601). The main com
batants at the moment are the neoevolutionary cultural ecologists and those
whom this establishment designates "the ecological movement in anthropolo
gy" (25). Several labels describe the latter: "functional ecologists," "the
Columbia-Michigan school," and "human ecologists." There are many differ
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ences between and within each camp, but several anthropologists concerned
with system and process belong to neither. The domain seems integrated by
controversies rather than shared concepts and consensual cores. "Contentious
boundaries and concepts encourage the openness-though not the sanguine
peace--of epistemic communities" (59, p. 140).
The difference between human ecology and cultural evolutionary ecology
is said to lie in the concepts of causation, time, and temporal process
employed: "steady-state, externalistic, gradualistic leanings are opposed to
directional, intemalistic, and episodic views" (24, p. 4). The key notion to
which I would draw attention is the intemalistic/extemalistic dichotomy. The
dialectic of system and process is exposed in focusing on change: a theory of
historical change that takes into account only externalistic (the systems term),
exogenous (the process equivalent) causes can only be a theory of variation.
A seminal use of the ecosystem concept appeared in Agricultural Involu
tion: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (39). The subtitle is
significant. General Systems Theory was about to enter anthropology from
the Wenner Gren conference hall at Burgenstein, and a more systematic
ecology than that of Geertz was about to be funded at Columbia (92, 93) and
institutionalized in a new journal, the Annual Review of Ecology and System
atics. In 1984 Geertz published a critical review of the Indonesian research
and commentary his work had evoked.
Geertz attached particular significance to the setting in which he formulated
his ideas: the entry in the early 1950s of specialists from various disciplines
into the newly independent nations and, specifically, the "non-meeting of
minds between development-oriented economists and ethnographically
oriented anthropologists" (43, p. 512). A similar confrontation was taking
place in colonial Africa at the same time, and an ethnographic focus on
"process" similarly emerged (36, 133). There, however, "the judicial pro
cess" (30, 44) and "the ritual process" (112) became the foci of attention. In
postcolonial Indonesia one "massive social fact," as Geertz puts it, the
overwhelming impact of that nation's population density, "made everything
else look rather secondary" (43, p. 513). He thus chose to delineate a crisis in
104 VINCENT
the process of ecological change, the paradigm most frequently found in the
ecological domain (7, 24, 25, 39, 51, 52, 54, 85, 92, 93, 103, 121). Some
systems analysts stress cybernetic feedback to overcome crisis. So desirably
scientific is such an emphasis that Mary Douglas recently suggested (26) that
Evans-Pritchard conceptualized the Nuer political system largely in terms of a
feedback system, foreshadowing the growth of cybernetics and General Sys
tems Theory. One reviewer, it must be said, expressed some reservations with
this interpretation (87).
The main weakness of ecosystem theory is its emphasis on functional
integration and self-regulation so that diachronic processes become problem
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atic. Problems of method arise out of its holistic propensity: boundary defini
tion and crossing, notions of levels, and reification become problematic (80).
Vayda surely puts the last nail into the ecosystemic coffin when he inserts into
anthropological discourse six biological findings: ecosystems are noncyber
netic; ecological successions do not exhibit holistic tendencies; "a balance of
nature" does not exist; evidence of patterning in biological communities is
often dubious; there is no rigorous evidence to justify notions of community
and ecosystem persistence. The ecosystem concept is "a counterheuristic
throwback to essentialist Greek metaphysics" (120, p. 5).
To escape from the teleology of closed, functioning, eqUilibrium systems,
ecological anthropologists have turned to individuals (5, 85, 120) on the one
hand and evolutionary theory on the other (24, 25). Mounting a strong
argument for the former, Vayda (120) provides an overview of problems
relevant to all three domains because it is grounded in theory that has become
an integral part of the social sciences propounded by philosophers Boudon,
Davidson, and Popper; sociologists Dore, Giddens, and Skocpol; economist
Sen; historians Collingwood, Dray, and Fischer; anthropologists Geertz,
Moore, and Silverman. Vayda deals with the ecological fallacy, methodolog
ical individualism, population movement, and short- and long-term change
(120).
In 1981 Robert Netting confessed (his word for it) that he "may have been
guilty of the ecosystemic fallacy" (83, p. 225). Aggregate studies permit us to
see change within systems; individual-level research allows for a processual
understanding of performance and context. Groping with their irreducibility
in the study of migrants' motivations and migratory trends in Central Africa
led to the adoption there of action theory, networks, and social fields analysis
(12, 69, 123). Ecological individualism resembles action theory in its
strengths and weaknesses (99, 100).
But this is not all there is to "processual theory," as Orlove seems to assume
when he describes individual decision making as "processual ecological
anthropology" (85, p. 245), or Cole when he writes of the "social process" or
the "entrepreneurial approach" (14, p. 362). Individual decision making and
SYSTEM AND PROCESS 105
Diener has advocated that social fields analysis replace systems analysis
and greater recognition be given to cultural processes than to ecological
populations. At issue is movement across boundaries, but his proposal is
marred by his attachment to the highly generalized evolutionary concept of
"the capitalist stage of economic integration" (24, p. 615). The mixing of
"open" concepts such as cultural processes and social fields with analytically
"closed" concepts such as modes of production and integrative stages in
dicates transitional thinking. The advantage of the "fields" concept lies
precisely in the fact that it does not require any preconceived notion of
ecosystem, holistic cultural system, or mode of production, as Collier demon
strates (15).
The study of process in ecological anthropology now includes the analysis
of the relation of demographic variables to production systems; the study of
population response to stress; a consideration of the formation and consolida
tion of adaptive strategies; and an awareness of new work in Marxism (85).
Historical naivete is said to be "the major difficulty inherent in ecological
thought at present" and a "new evolutionary" approach is proposed distinct
from but complementary with human ecology (25, p. 2). A more genuinely
historical approach is advocated by Brown and provided not only in her work
(7) but, for example, in the Nuer reevaluations by Kelly (52) and Southall
(03), epitomizing the shift from classical systems thinking to process.
not just regulate behavior, they construe it" (42, p. 2 15). Pospisil, on the
other hand, argues that laws are created through enforcement (90, p. 237).
For Geertz, the comparative study of law should focus not on rules or
disputes, certainly not on individuals, but on "the collective resources of
culture" (42, p. 2 15); for Pospisil, law (ius) is created by legislation and must
be distinguished from rules (lex) and precedent, two fonns in which it may be
contained (90, p. 238). Both take systems approaches.
Paradoxically, processualists, who have dominated the field since Gluck
man's dialogue with Cardozo ( 1 1, 44), have found law to be so intertwined
with political and social processes (71) that they have begun to call for the
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dismantling of the domain (23). They have ipdeed swallowed and thoroughly
digested the red herring which Malinowski's Crime and Custom (58) was said
by a systemicist to be; i.e. "one of the reddest herrings ever dragged into the
workings of orderly jurisprudence" (quoted in 125, p. 2, emphasis added).
Moore, who has explicitly argued the processual case in several arenas
(secular ritual, law, and politics), declares in Law as Process her conviction
that the same social processes that prevent the total regulation of a society
reshape and transfonn its partial regulation (71, p. 83).
The processual analysis of Comaroff & Roberts (23) is contained within a
social system. Explanation is sought not in history but in deeper structure,
"the constitutive order," a deeper logic, a notion that fellow processualist,
Moore, would surely contest (71, p. 12). This is the social anthropological
paradigm that Holy & Stuchlik (49) set out so well in Actions, Norms and
Representations. Greater contextualization (the ecological, economic, and
historical matter that one finds in Comaroff's other work) would have en
hanced the processual in Rules and Processes (74). The book contains two
arguments, one about the relation of nonnative rules to instrumental action
and the other about rule and process perspectives in legal anthropology. They
explode the first dichotomy by documenting ambiguity, flexibility, negotia
tion, and, as always, flux; they are, however, too ready to accept the utility
(let alone the validity) of the second.
The analysis of dispute processing contains elements of both the crisis
model and the friction model with an increased shift toward the latter (16, 75,
76) as analysis moved beyond the bounds of the courtroom to its temporally
and socially contextualizing processes. Individuals other than litigants and
judges entered the extended case as the spotlight focused not only on the
dramatic but on the routine (46, 72, 76). Derivative from action theory in the
work of Gulliver (46), conflict, choice-making, and dispute-processing re
main prominent, but the time of Man-the-Finagler (74) has clearly passed (23,
76).
Collier adds a focus on ideology, and in so doing she moves process
thinking closer again to systems analysis. Different ideologies locate sources
SYSTEM AND PROCESS 107
toward the friction model and the historical analysis of legal change, legal
pluralism becomes more central (42, 74, 77, 126). Moore's tour de force
traverses the landscape' from multicultural arenas and plural legal systems,
legal pluralism, cultural pluralism, and legal transplants to national, religious,
and ethnic legal systems. Against the optimism of lawyers that "modernism"
will lead to universal human understanding (74) she pits Geertz's hope that
they will better appreciate the rich variety of the world's "visions of law"
(42).
Geertz urges a
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shift away from functionalist thinking about law-as a clever device to keep people from
tearing one another limb from limb, advance the interests of the dominant classes, defend
the rights of the weak against the predations of the strong, or render social life a bit more
predictable at its fuzzy edges (all of which it quite clearly is, to varying extents at different
times in different places); and a shift towards hermeneutic thinking about it-as a mode of
giving particular sense to particular things in particular places (things that happen, things
that fail to, things that might), such that these noble, sinister, or merely expedient
appliances take particular form and have particular impact. Meaning, in short, not machin
ery (42, p. 232).
of involution?) and reproduction are also processes. Moore calls her own
approach a hybrid historical/ethnographic perspective (76, p. 11). Politics,
economy, and history provide its background; in the foreground, the field
work moment is conceived in temporal terms. Moore finds that "the tension
between the fieldwork method and the historical questions into which it now
inquires continues to be problematic" (76, p. 321), one aspect surely of the
frozen dialectic.
Nowhere has the relation of system to process been more explicitly addressed
than in the work of Victor Turner (111-114, 116). A large part of the
1974--1985 literature on symbolic systems and ritual process incorporates
crisis and friction models such as he used (13, 33, 34, 37, 78, 79, 95). The
transformation model is not well represented. The beginnings of a nonsystems
hermeneutical approach can also be discerned (31).
Turner, like Geertz, embarked upon fieldwork in a milieu of rapid and
dislocating economic change. He, too, centered attention on what appeared to
be of concern in the locality in which he worked. Geertz, in his small
administrative town, was at the hub of planned "development"; Turner in the
Ndembu forest found "rituals of affliction" paramount. In a series of publica
tions he established an interrelated body of concepts for the analysis of ritual,
chief among them social drama, communitas, and liminality (118, p. 243-
51). Crisis-focused and cybernetic, it resembled Wallace's 1950s delineation
of revitalization movements (127). The Ritual Process (112) reflected the
systemic "correspondence" view of ritual of Robertson Smith and Durk
heim, ritual being seen as symbolically and socially congruent with social
structure (132). Culture expressed in behavior led Turner to an exploration
of the meaning of their environment to ritual actors. His quite different
sense of meaning from that of, for example, Rappaport (92, 93) is reviewed
by Hanson (48).
In his original Morgan lectures Turner dealt with the systemic infrastructure
110 VINCENT
between anthropology and history since they have never been separated. The
historicity of social facts is beyond question: the "fact of historicity is neither
an end nor by itself a means but a condition which must be recognized at
every step" (55, p. 336). On a different trajectory and from different tradi
tions, Arensberg (1) and Comaroff (21) have expressed the same conviction.
Wallerstein's The Modern World-System (128), published in 1974, was not
greatly reflected in the literature reviewed here although anthropologists have
contributed a good deal to global inquiry (82). They appear to cite Wallerstein
for the vocabulary he has provided in much the same way as Walters (130)
says social historians quote Geertz, for legitimacy. But whereas Geertz is
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global system. The root metaphor common to Lesser, Wolf, and Mintz is the
manifold (55, p. 334; 66a; 136, p. 3). Europe and the People without History
opens with: "The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind
constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries
that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify
reality" (136, p. 3). What the world-system paradigm does, in the hands of
both Wallerstein and Wolf, is render endogenous variables that had pre
viously been treated as exogenous in the analysis of change processes.
Anthropology, which since the 1950s had moved from the local to the
national in terms of encapsulated systems and in so doing had discovered that
causal explanations tended to lie in the environments of each (99), thus
arrived logically at its ultimate system.
It would be impossible to review the increasing number of monographs that
contribute not only to the analysis of processes within systems but of histori
cal transformations. Many have found it particularly useful to focus upon the
crises surrounding the transformation from pre- (systems) or non- (process)
colonial society to colonial state, from one phase of capitalism to another
within a cosmopolitical context. Processes of class formation or nonformation
have attracted attention, and their ecological, jural, and symbolic dimensions
have been explored (9,20,22,51,64-66,73,76,77,89,98,101,104,107,
124, 126, 131). There has, however, been no explicit theoretical discussion of
system and process such as would require elaboration in this review. Some
have adopted a more systems-oriented approach; others have been more
concerned with cultural processes. All have been grounded in the particulari
ties of ethnography now derived from both field and archival research.
Mintz's publications between 1974 and 1985 reflect these concerns both
theoretically and methodologically and begin to provide an intellectual
genealogy for those who would study historical systems and processes (61-
68). As one loses sight of specific individuals in the past, participants
observed in action and events, the differences between action theory and
processual theory per se become clearer. Mintz's recourse to the life history
(61) provides a middle ground since the life is "a history within a history, a
human frame within which to see the social and cultural pattern of change in a
SYSTEM AND PROCESS 115
Puerto Rican barrio in this century" (quoted in 68, p. 25). It also provides an
occasion for reflection on current work in henneneutical anthropology.
Whereas the anthropology of Wolf and Mintz arises out of a long es
tablished tradition in historical anthropology, that of Gerald Sider (97, 98)
confronts a new. The writings of social historian Edward Thompson, and
particularly his processual view of class as not a thing but a happening (109,
p. 85), have entered anthropology. Focusing on transfonnations in the colo
nial mercantile and capitalist economy of Newfoundland, Sider provides a
critique of the central concepts of social history and anthropology, class and
culture, and of corollary concepts such as agency and experience. As he puts
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it,
people act in tenns of what they cannot understand, or understand in radically different
ways, and in tenns of relationships they cannot fonn, or sustain, or leave, as well as in
tenns of what "works", what they think they clearly understand and can probably do. From
this perspective we may then better understand how time and history come also to be
embedded in culture and class (98, p. to).
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