From Linnaeus to Darwin : from cultural grid to "going native"

Sociocultural evolutionary developments are games with no predictable outcomes and can be divided into two types from the viewpoint of cross-cultural, i.e. comparative and historical studies. Across the fields of cultural research, one methodological difference in learning about our understanding and awareness looms as large as a continental divide. On the neo-neo-positivist side, theoretical grids are produced, and when applied to empirical-pre-baked data, they tend to generate comparative analysis of all the world's cultures. Dimensions and rules are supposed to apply universally and one grid implicitly fits all cultures, close and distant, large and small, new and old. Comparative cultural studies are reducible to a library of area files gradually filling the cabinets designed by Linnaeus - for organizational or artistic, national or professional, generational or paradigmatic, religious or spiritual cultural artifacts. Characteristics or dimensions are as predictable as rules of bridge or poker, and dimensions can be gradually reduced to those most relevant for influencing human behavior. On the humanist, qualitative, interpretative side of the methodological divide, often criticized as "soft" or "postmodernist", a search for continually (re)negotiated values, for contingent and emergent ecologies of mind and for a humanist coefficient draws attention to open-ended cultural creativity and to the humanist attempt to "go native". One size of theory does not fit all, a single typology does not hold true everywhere and forever, and the evolution of cultural species includes the evolution of knowledge production and use. What does it mean for the concept of a manageable evolution of complex knowledge democracies navigating our self-understanding and our identity-formation under the looming shadows of power struggles and emergent, aggressive genetic and data technologies?