I coined, or rather hijacked, the term deme to have a special purpose in cliology. It is almost the same as demographic in that it refers to a population, but has a few tweaks that make it more specific to cliology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography Demography is often used in government policy making and marketing to slice up the population and put them into boxes. It comes from the word ‘deme’ with ‘graph’ appended. The Ancient Greek term for municipality was ‘demos’ or ‘deme’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deme From this stem, we get words like endemic, epidemic, pandemic – relating to how widespread something, like a disease, is within a population. We also get academic, which was an olive grove where Plato did his teaching. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy
Biology uses the term ‘deme’ to refer to the local population of a species, an example being that of polar bears at different parts of the arctic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deme_(biology)
I chose deme over demographic for the biological analogue, but rather than being geographic communities, the deme is defined by common ideaologies and are communities of interest or practice and so on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_interest and are catagorised by the ideas they share, or beliefs to which they are adherents. Memetically, a deme is a population in which a meme is endemic – here the memes define the demes. For example the Jehovah’s Witnesses are international, but would be of the same deme as, as they would claim, they all believe the same thing.
A deme though is a category rather than a class and the physical populations can overlap as an individual might hold separate ideas that they find compatible. For example, political and religious beliefs can, but don’t necessarily covary. Two christians may be in communion, but might object to being called comrades. Hence, at once, an individual may be of a deme religiously, a different deme politically, support a soccer team, have a mac rather than a PC and so on.
A deme is a corpus, where individuals are corpuscles. It could be true that an individual might adhere to an ideology all their life, but the deme principle is not premised on individual members. Individuals can change their ideas and move from one deme to another, as by religious conversion: one deme would shrink, while the other would grow. Compartmental epidemeological models become useful in such an analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology
I have thought about demes in this way for a long time, but it seemed that the idea needed firming up, but no so much as to become restrictive. It seemed also, as the cliome idea was developing, that demes were more related to that framework – a cliome is tantamount to a memeplex and a deme are those who adhere to that cliome. It seemed also that a symbol would be required as the notation progressed, and as with that layer of thinking, a Phoenician character presented itself. The latin D, via the Greek delta comes from the Phoenician ‘daleth’ .
I have tried to use symbols that are not quite as arbitrary as those in maths, but have some intrinsic structural value. The triangular shape is convenient as it has three points, like the noam (Phoenician nun), but is inverted, so something of a kludge is required. A cliome consists of re-transmissible noams, and a noam has three points: sigma – the totality of salient awareness, nu the cluster of values, and rho – the potential responses. My current thinking is that, as adherence to noams defines demes, and a noam is of three points, then a deme, denoted by the daleth triangle should also be of those three points. In other words, a deme might well be identified according to sigma (bottom-left point), nu (apex) and rho (bottom-right point). The idea is a work in progress, and it remains to be seen whether it forms part of a more coherent system, including properties like pi and tau etc.
Leave a Reply