[FRIAM] What have the Romans - sorry - complexity done for us?

[Michael Agar]

On Jul 24, 2006, at 6:51 AM, Russell Standish wrote:

>
>
> But more seriously, which university has a department of complex
> systems? Theres the Santa Fe Institute, and possibly NECSI, but where
> else?
>

SFI and NECSI make room for visiting students at different levels,  
but neither are degree-granting. In the social realm,
UCLA has a new Human Complex Systems institute that is going  
gangbusters in its first year, but it is undergrad only right now,  
though the interest there hints that the younger generation is into  
it already. At NECSI the Portland State University computer science  
program drew some student attention, since they can cobble together  
complexity like courses of study. Couple of student emails on the  
NECSI list pointed to other possibillities, like George Mason  
University's Center for Social Complexity. Otherwise it seems like  
academic pockets in various domains. For instance, at NECSI I met a  
student who works with Reuben McDaniels, prof at the University of  
Texas biz school, known on the Plexus list for his work applying  
complexity org development to health care. He works with their  
Prigogine Center, though I'm not sure what they do. I'm sure there  
are many other centers and institutes and academic pockets that folks  
on the list know of as well, and many others in other countries.  
David Lane's group at Reggio-Modena comes to mind. It's an  
interesting "shreds and patches" kind of situation that probably  
reflects the scattered and multi-perspectival nature of the field at  
the moment that motivated Owen's original email.

I've been disappointed that anthro hasn't been more active, though  
there are some good SFI external faculty examples like Steve Lansing  
in ecology and Doug White in networks and George Gummerman and Tim  
Kohler on the ancient Anasazi (a questionable label now, since it is  
a Navajo term and some Pueblo people object). Shortly before  
electricity was invented, when I was in grad school, we learned about  
our "holistic" perspective and the "emergent" nature of our work and  
how our goal was to learn a new perspective "bottom-up," though that  
term we didn't use. Sander van der Leeuw, former SFI faculty, took  
over the department at Arizona State and looks like he's changing  
things in a complex direction, so maybe it's starting to happen. We  
never did anything rigorous and general with the concepts in the old  
days, instead learned them by reading ethnographic case after  
ethnographic case, like lawyers learn legal reasoning. You'd think  
the field would notice the parallels. If anyone's interested, Lansing  
did an overview of complexity for the Annual Review of Anthropology a  
few years back, and I did a piece in Complexity that complexifies  
some ethnographic issues (We Have Met the Other and We're All  
Nonlinear) that's on my web page.

And now, for something completely different, this week's Economist  
has a feature on evolutionary economics:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7189617

Mike