A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics

ATACD - A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics

Pathfinder Initiative: 2005/2006

Duration: 36 months

Free keywords: Topology, culture, networks, interdisciplinary, modeling movement, co-evolution, form, potentiality, markets, migration, technology, language, transformation, intensity, innovation, connectedness

The mathematical analysis of dynamics has opened up the possibility of innovative approaches to the study of culture, enabling not simply the numerical manipulation of cultural data, but offering tools, models and concepts for the understanding of the intensities of cultural change. The proposed Co-ordinated Action, A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics (ATACD) aims to provide an infrastructure for the sharing and consolidation of topological approaches to the study of cultural dynamics across disciplines. Put simply, topology is the study of structural invariance under deformation. What makes it especially useful in the study of cultural dynamics is that it captures almost everything in our intuition of continuity. And what makes it a distinctive approach to the study of cultural dynamics vis-à-vis other approaches to the study of culture is that it provides tools for the understanding of culture that are neither typological nor topographic. This means that it makes possible the study of:

1. cultural change as normal and immanent rather than exceptional and externally determined;
2. cultures as constituted in relations rather as having some essential properties;
3. cultures as intensive, not extensive, that is, cultures are defined by their possibilities for change rather than their size or location.
   

A topological approach to cultural dynamics thus provides a set of tools and concepts to think about different levels and kinds of change – learning, transmission, and innovation - as normal, relational and intensive. The approach is especially useful at the present time of rapid cultural change as it makes possible the study of values but avoids normative judgments.

It also provides a distinctive perspective on the questions of cultural predictability and innovation. Geometry has been understood as a perception of space that is to be actualized and repeated in the future. What topology offers to the study of cultural dynamics is a set of tools for thinking about the process of actualisation that is to do with possibilities rather than certainty. It offers a framework for the study of culture that is not to do with the measurement of fixed human properties and their extrapolation into the future but instead enables the problematization of events in terms of the potential they offer for change. It thus offers a complex model of predictability. The potential value of such an approach for the public perception and management of cultural change is profound.

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