Beyond anthropology: society and the other

, mental models and conceptual frameworks, and all these are in the domain of anthropology. It is a curiosity of our own discipline that although we do owe much origins to anthropology, we rarely see it mentioned in systems literature. With this essay I hope to stimulate some renewed interest. Despite its eclecticism, to the Systems Mind all else than system thinking is the “Other”, and so this book may offer some insights into that difference by elucidating how the more general distinction between Self and Other has been perceived over time. This book is a short, but provocative, Foucauldian essay into the history of different conceptions of “difference” from the Renaissance to the present. The “difference” to which the author addresses himself is that with which the European conceptualizations of the world have become distinguished from the “Other”, the non-European, world views, and, even more importantly, how the concept of “difference” has changed. The central claim of the thesis is that the discovery, or creation, of such a distinction actually tells us as much about how the European world thinks about itself. The author’s deconstruction of the history of the period attempts to