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On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. Mark S. Mosko and Frederick H. Damon, eds. New York: Berghahn, 2005. 276 pp.
There are too many good ideas in this volume. Chief among them is the call to give the new advances in complexity and chaos a larger role in our discipline. To do so, the contributors offer, as a solution to the "crisis of representation," a description of how those fields might positively influence explanations couched in the old familiar languages of discourse, the serial and linear arrangements of words. This has value, although it neglects the fact that complexity and chaos owe their development to the new (if 1950 still qualifies as new) languages of computation, the parallel and nonlinear execution of procedures. The authors' contributions are a good beginning, but the world of the "new sciences of complexity" is vastly larger than they envision and its relevance to anthropology much greater. It is on this omission that I will focus.
Editors Mark Mosko and Frederick Damon assert in their preface:
Anthropological arguments put forward by both defenders and critics of science have presupposed definitions of "science" that have been demonstrably obsolete for at least a quarter of a century; that is, since the development of "chaos theory" - the analysis of complex dynamical systems. [As long as we] fail to take stock of the[se] revolutionary implications ... for comprehending human social life . . . judgments over the "scientific" merits of the discipline . . . must be regarded as tentative, if not irrelevant, [p. x]
Irrelevant would be my editorial choice. Marilyn Strathem begins her prologue, saying, "words exist in complex relations with one another." She continues, "A discipline is no more and no less than the effort to...