Systems theory in anthropology - Wikipedia

[Dante Monson]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory_in_anthropology

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson is the most influential and earliest propagator of systems theory in social sciences. In the 1940s, as a result of the Macy conferences, he immediately recognized its application to human societies with their many variables and the flexible but sustainable balance that they maintain. Bateson describes system as "any unit containing feedback structure and therefore competent to process information."^[1] Thus an open system allows interaction between concepts and materiality or subject and the environment or abstract and real. In natural science, systems theory has been a widely used approach. Austrian biologist, Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, developed the idea of the general systems theory (GST). The GST is a multidisciplinary approach of system analysis.