Dr. Alexander Moore is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Southern California. His latest book, "Cultural Anthropology" (Collegiate Press,
1992) regards humanity as an emergent species, from its initial diffusing over
the world, to its tribal societies, to civilized life, and then to modern life.
Dr. Moore addresses how homeokinesis can be used to understand and describe
these various phases of societies. Trained at Columbia University and Harvard
University, Dr. Moore has studied cultures in Guatemala, Spain, China., and
Panama.
https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/anth/faculty_display.cfm?person_id=1003552
"Homeokinetics has implications for the study of economics as seen from
anthropology in the context of the study of the emergence of all self-organizing
systems, as well as of human institutions. As it turns out, the primary
implication is that a truly new order of matter, energy, momentum, and living
systems does not emerge with culture in Homo sapiens sapiens (or her
predecessors), but rather emerges with the institutionalization of exchange
processes between and across human groups in trade and war with the emergence of
tribal society. Only then does the superorganic, properly speaking appear.
That which makes human economics unique in nature---indeed all cosmology---
is that the fluxes of energy, matter, action, and population flow across human
group boundaries according to some measure of value. To realize just how unique
this is, imagine adjacent glaciers tossing boulders back and forth according to
a recognized plan or blueprint. Like glaciers, human groups themselves are in
flux. This sum total of world trade and transport, then, obeys the principles of
homeokinetic physics.
Economics comprises yet another continuum of its own atomisms, in that sense
another level of reality, another continuum above related atomisms below. One
can start at the level one-down, with the discrete human groups, each also with
the flow of energy, matter, actions, and population within it, each with its
boundaries staked out over a portion of the biosphere. That is, there a flatland
physics at this level, of the functioning of any given society. There are,
however, also flows up and down from these (increasingly less) separate
compartments, obeying the principles of up-down physics. Here one must study the
interactions at boundaries, which themselves at every level always form new
potentials. For each complex level and its flow stream there is a
linguistic-catalytic communicational flow stream rather than merely an energy
empowering flow stream, that is what activates the system."
return home