I have been thinking a lot about fractals lately. I first discovered fractals 10 years ago when Kenyatta Cheese introduced me to godel, Escher, Bach (the book I dream of finishing and comprehending). Well just recently on some Friday night at 2am I was watching Nova’s special on fractal love, Hunting the Hidden Dimension. As I was falling asleep to Mendelbrot’s soothing voice, I started thinking about fractals and culture - how we could use fractals to think about cultural practices, communities and groups.
The organizing principle of fractals is similarity in forms. When something appears dissimilar, many of times the recursive logic of fractals reveals that the more you look, the more similarities you will see in the form. So the lines in a leaf may look disorganized, but really they are organized in form, hence recursive.
Using fractal logic to look at cultures around the world can reveal that there are more similarities in practices than we think!
Since a lot of my research is multi-sited and in totally different parts of the world, I find that I look for commonalities in what I observe between the various sites. I try to look beyond the physical and obvious differences. For example, I try to look at how new users are engaging or reacting to technology in similar ways even when people live in totally different countries or even geographies. But at the same time I try to not devalue the specificities that make each community unique. I find this to be something I have to be aware of when I think about commonalities across different regions.
So what would a fractal mindset to ethnography look like? How would recursiveness be used in ethnographic analysis? How can we think of culture as an iterative process?
1.) can’t be culturally reductive - It becomes more difficult to make culturally reductive statements about a group of people if we think in terms of cultural fractals. The most common one I hear about China is that Chinese culture is all about guanxi, therefore everything that happens in China, from success to failure, is attributed to the resilience of traditional guanxi culture. I often read that the culture of guanxi encourages networking, therefore this explains why Chinese people are so good at networking when starting new businesses. In terms of cellphone usage guanxi is used to explain why the Chinese have adopted texting so quickly. But what groups or society not have social networks? If we go with the “Chinese love texting because they have guanxi,” argument, then how do you then explain why regions in Nigeria or Mexico with horrible cellphone signal still have taken up texting so readily? My point is that Nigerians and Mexicans also have a culture based on strong social ties. Not that the way Chinese guanxi is practiced is not a unique and complex tradition in it of itself, but attributing guanxi to mobile phone usage also dumbs down actual practices of guanxi. Perhaps the answer isn’t a simple culturally reductive explanation, rather one that is tied to existing cultural practices, policy efforts and geographical context. So a fractal logic would encourage us to see the similarities between the ways the Chinese or the Mexicans text - and to come up with an explanation that do not rest on simplorifitized cultural statements.
2.) fractal logic encourages a more relativistic way of thinking about cultures. Instead of thinking in linear models with clear independent and dependent variables, fractals gives us a mental break to look at practices more cyclically and over greater amounts of time. In terms of cross-cultural comparisons - instead of thinking about two different regions as two distinct places, how about thinking of as two separate nodes on one large multi-dimensional net? “Christena Turner refers to cross-cultural comparisons as working with two nodes on the same piece of woven cloth - each node of thread with different colors coming together with different layerings so that it appears to be two separate knots, but actually two parts of the same quilt. Cross-cultural comparisons i think are most beautiful when they honor this “net” metaphor as reality - this reminds me of Richard Feynman’s quote about science and life,
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
Feynman’s quote entangles with the fractal notion - that you can look at one part of society/object and abstract out properties of other parts of the world/universe. absolutely beautiful.
3.) expanded temporalities - since fractals have this sense of infinite-less levels of fractalness, there is sense that we are working in a different temporality, one that is not bound to the strict temporalities of the project timeline or stated anount of time in the field.
4.) fractal logic is useful for technology designers. For communication technologies to have market reach beyond Europe, USA and middle- to upper-class Chinese, there are aspects of the communication tool that need to be more or less useful in different cultural settings. Fractal logic encourages designers to look for common denominators in usage. For example, the concept of a text message is a common denominator, but how it is used in various contexts is what makes its use setting different from each other.
5.) cultures are non-deterministic - how a nation or group is going to act, believe and value is very hard to determine! but there are certain feature we know all cultures have. A key feature of fractals is that they are usually stochastically self-similar, meaning they are approximately similar to itself. While groups of people may be very self-similar across the board- for example take the nuclear family - it too is also subject to stochasticity because the way each nuclear family develops in each community and across communities is non-deterministic. A family’s current emotional, psychological or financial state is subject to its prior circumstances and also some random element - such as being a nuclear family in rural India or in suburban UK. Applied stochastic processes tend to describe complex systems that are difficult to determine- like warfare, diplomacy. So why not apply this concept to communities? I like the idea of thinking as cultural practices as non-deterministic. I don’t believe that causal models do much else than serve as an analytical exercise for the researcher - real life is stochastic - because how groups of people live are hard to predict because there are always elements that are unpredictable.
6.) ok going totally metaphysical here - stop reading if you feel the twilight</a>- we can think of all groups of people or nations or communities as a reduced-size copy of the whole -the wholeness of humanity! so instead of looking for differences in each reduction, what happens we look for similarities in form? Entropy as organanized chaos - capillaries in orderly run-offs - rivers meandering in systematic carvings - textile hypnosis - where’s waldo find you. Looking for similarities in form doesn’t mean that we still can’t celebrate differences. Alan Watts, a buddhist teacher, has a great quote that totally operates with fractal logic - and I like using it as an approach to ethnography,
Differences, borders, lines, surfaces and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all, they join them together. All boundaries are held in common.
Alan Watt’s quote is an excellent way to prepare one’s mindset for doing fieldwork and post fieldwork analysis. Especially when doing fieldwork in another culture, it is too easy to treat them as “the other.” This quotes speaks to a way thinking that discourages distancing of the researcher from the fieldsite.
In another metaphysical turn, the organization logic of fractals is based on replication of form based on his quote also reminds of Lao Tzu’s quote on Taoism that also operates with fractal love:
“The Tao is in all things, in their divisions and their fullness. What I dislike about divisions is that they multiply, and what i dislike about multiplication is that it makes people want to hold fast to it. So people go out and forget to return, seeing little more than ghosts.”
At the heart of fractals is that with each division is a multiplication into more similar forms! So Lao Tzu is heeding us to find balance between division and fullness. Alan Watt’s and Lao Tzu’s quote make me think of one of my favorite fractal artworks, Implied. Implied is a fractal of “messy human droplets and straight machine cuts dance[ing] together.”
I end this long winded post with a something yummy to eat from my fave food blog , serious eats (run by the fabulous alaina brown) - cuz you gotta tie everything in life back to food! Well all this talk about fractals makes me want to eat a fractal cupcake!
*for a cool discussion that isn’t about fractals per se - more about trees, design, repesentation and a point about stochastic processes - check out Fred’s blog post on tree drawings
