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Remembering to Forget: Memory, Burial, and Self‐Similarity in Sursurunga, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea
Author(s) -
Jackson Stephen A.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 1559-9167
DOI - 10.1525/ahu.1996.21.2.159
Subject(s) - similarity (geometry) , focus (optics) , scale (ratio) , new guinea , variety (cybernetics) , variation (astronomy) , repetition (rhetorical device) , computer science , psychology , cognitive psychology , artificial intelligence , history , geography , cartography , linguistics , image (mathematics) , physics , astrophysics , optics , ethnology , philosophy
In the Sursurunga events of death, small interconnectivities of events are related by pattern to large‐scale patterns in the whole system. Whichever we choose to focus on, the relationship of scale is powerful and persuasive. In this I see the principle of self‐similarity, the idea of recursiveness occurring across a variety of scales, a repetition of shape and detail in smaller and smaller, or larger and larger, scales. Applying self‐similarity to social analysis allows the focus to be on shapes and patterns generated by a whole system, rather than on individual variables, and it shows that patterning, the relationship between variables, remains consistent through different scales of analysis. The variables are then seen to point toward or contain the particular pattern of the whole system.