Experiments in Holism

Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology

Ton Otto, Nils Bubandt, Ton Otto, Nils Bubandt

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781444333237
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444351859
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Experiments in Holism

Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology presents a series of essays that critically examine the ongoing relevance of holism and its theoretical and methodological potential in today's world. Contributions from a diverse collection of leading anthropologists reveal how recent critiques of the holistic approach have not led to its wholesale rejection, but rather to a panoply of experiments that critically reassess and reemploy holism. The essays focus on aspects of holism including its utilization in current ethnographic research, holistic considerations in cultural anthropology, the French structuralist tradition, the predominantly English tradition of social anthropology, and many others. Collectively, the essays show how holism is simultaneously central to, and problematically a part of, the theory and practice of anthropology. Experiments in Holism reveals how contemporary attempts to rescale and retool anthropology entail new ways of coming to terms with anthropology's heritage of holism, seeking to obviate its current excesses while recapturing its critical potential to meet the challenges of our contemporary world.

1

Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism

Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto

Why Bother With Holism?

We remember seeing a T-shirt inscription once: “Anthropologists Do It in Context.” It was part of a string of T-shirt inscriptions – perhaps inspired by the 1990s “Just Do It” advertising campaign by Nike – that used double entendres to describe professions: “Photographers Do It in the Dark” and “Landscape Gardeners Do It Horizontally.” For most anthropologists, it is probably obvious what “doing it in context” means. Context is about locating descriptions of particular phenomena within a wider setting that throws light on these phenomena. It is about making sense of observations by connecting them to larger experiential, meaningful, cultural, functional, or social wholes. Context is about grounding data; about methodological, literary, and political circumspection; and about parts and wholes. Context, in short, is about holism, one of the hallmarks – along with ethnographic fieldwork and intercultural comparison – of social and cultural anthropology.

As hallmarks go, however, holism is an odd one. For one thing, it is not given that it means the same thing to all anthropologists – in fact, it is pretty clear that there is no easy consensus. Second, holism is a highly problematic concept, and has been so for several decades. The likely gut reaction of many contemporary anthropologists to a volume on holism is therefore that holism is a fraught term that is best avoided. Nevertheless, we will argue that in spite of its ambivalence and lack of consensus, holism is still at the heart of the anthropological endeavor and that contemporary qualms about the concept are in fact symptomatic of a new emergence and experimental approach to the anthropological tradition of holism. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the variety and critical depth of current attempts to engage and rethink anthropological holism.

For heuristic purposes, we will adopt a broad (and admittedly also somewhat vague) definition of holism. We take holism to mean that a phenomenon has meaning, function, and relevance only within a larger context, field of relations, or “world” (see Chapters 4 and 8). The term “context” derives from a hermeneutical tradition of textual interpretation and is an important part of a holistic perspective (Dilley 1999). This tradition that blossomed under the influence of Geertzian interpretative anthropology sees the act of interpretation as the establishment of a relation between parts and wholes: “Hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole that motivates them, we seek to turn them, by a sort of intellectual perpetual motion, into explications of one another” (Geertz 1983: 134). Context in this sense became part and parcel of a cultural holism. Holism is not, however, synonymous with contextualization, and other anthropological traditions have their own kinds of holisms whose genealogies and internal ambivalences this volume explores: functional, structural, social, methodological, and experiential holisms.

Holism may be said to be foundational for modern anthropology in the early twentieth century. It is associated with the rise of modern anthropology, characterized by the centrality of ethnographic fieldwork; a variety of theoretical traditions, all of which aspired to understand other forms of social life as integrated wholes; and a particular form of realistic representation of these other life forms, typically using media such as the monograph and ethnographic film. At the same time, however, holism is notoriously problematic and vague. As a central anthropological cornerstone, as Marcus and Fischer noted already in 1986, holism “is currently undergoing serious critique and revision” (in Marcus and Fischer 1999: 23). The reason for this is the seemingly close relationship between holism, wholes, and totalization. This relationship has implicated anthropology, as Sahlins notes in Chapter 7 of this volume, in a theoretical “scandal” that has become increasingly apparent in recent decades. Anthropological holism, it seemed, came to be a postulate about rather than a search for wholes, conceived as totalities of culture, society, or ideology. The problem here was both epistemological- ontological (what anthropological theory was set up to capture and express) and methodological-practical (how fieldwork was delimited and conducted). The holism of anthropological theory and ethnographic practice, it became shockingly apparent, seemed geared toward asserting bounded, static, homogeneous wholes.

These problems are compounded by vagueness. Holism, Parkin notes, “seems to refer to any approach that embraces an undivided view of society and humanity, and so has little analytical worth” (2007: 3). Scandalously outdated, theoretically suspect, and conceptually vacuous, holism also appears to smack of New Age naïveté – and political correctness to boot – at a time when it seems that every scientist and their healer are turning “holistic” (Fodor and Lepore 1991; Smuts 1999; Caruana 2000; Diamond 2001; Esfeld 2001; Jackson 2003; Pellegrini et al. 2003).

Does it make sense to speak about anthropological holism under these circumstances? What insights does such a focus bring to an understanding of contemporary theory and practice in anthropology? We argue that it does make sense. In fact, we argue that looking explicitly at holism again – its history, its problems, and its (ab)uses, and the uncomfortable silences that often surround it – is an endeavor that is long overdue. It is also an endeavor that may tell us something about anthropology that we may not have realized as well as something new about where anthropology is currently going. Reflecting explicitly about holism provides, we suggest, a fruitful vantage point from which the state of the art of anthropological theory and practice can be considered in a new light. We take holism to be a heuristic concept, a vague but nevertheless useful label that helps us uncover and make explicit a central but contested concern in the style of inquiry we call anthropology.

Holism in Anthropological Self-Representation

Holism is, in textbooks and in anthropological self-understanding, frequently presented as a central part of “the anthropological perspective” (Eller 2009: 13), and it is often used to characterize the discipline in contrast to others (Nanda and Warms 2005). Nanda and Warms (2009: 6), for instance, put it this way:

Anthropologists bring a holistic approach to understanding and explaining. To say anthropology is holistic means that it combines the study of human biology, history, and the learned and shared patterns of human behaviour and thought we call culture in order to analyze human groups. Holism separates anthropology from other academic disciplines, which generally focus on one factor – biology, psychology, physiology, or society as the explanation for human behaviour.

This understanding of holism as a comprehensive approach to the human condition is widespread and is – in this formulation at least – closely connected to the American view of anthropology as comprising four subfields – cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology – which together allow a comprehensive, holistic view on humanity (see Chapter 6; Harris 1993; Kottak 2006). The four-field approach to holism is, however, only one of many streams of holism within the anthropological tradition. Holism has thus become central to a number of discussions about what anthropology is and where it is going. Two of these discussions concern the particular strength of applied anthropology – again, in relation to more narrowly focused disciplines (see Harris 1993: 428–9; Ferraro 2006: 14; Nanda and Warms 2007: 166–7) and in connection with reflections about the method of participant observation, often presented as the key characteristic of the discipline (Marcus 1998).

The practice of ethnographic fieldwork during which anthropologists live with and partake in the lives of their informants in order to get better observational data hence the term “participant observation” – is seen as an important reason for the development of a holistic perspective (Kloos 1974: 169; Blok 1977: 49; Kottak 2006: 262-3; Nanda and Warms 2007: 60). Holism, as Marcus and Fischer note, is “one of the cornerstones of twentieth-century ethnography” (1999: 22–23). For a long time, the solidity of this “cornerstone” was founded on the legitimacy of exotic fieldwork. Because of the small scale of the societies they originally studied, so the argument went, anthropologists were better able to see the integration between life spheres that are seen as separate in more complex societies (kinship, religion, politics, and the economy). These separate spheres or domains should therefore be seen as parts of a social whole. Once it had been established as a genre, this holistic perspective also proved useful in other, more complex contexts where face-to-face relationships no longer are standard. Whether this assumed connection between ethnographic fieldwork and the development of holism is historically correct or not – we will argue that there are other factors at stake as well – the textbook image of anthropologists employing a holistic perspective is very much part of the anthropological self-image, as that which makes us unique. As Clifford Geertz has put it,

The specialness of “what anthropologists do,” their holistic, humanistic, mostly qualitative, strongly artisanal approach to social research, is (so we have taught ourselves to argue) the heart of the matter. (2000: 93)

This is an image about anthropology that has now been popularized outside of the discipline, in other disciplines, and among the wider public. Indeed, Geertz has noted the curious discrepancy that has come with this tendency to describe anthropology as a particular style of research associated with holism, namely, that it is turning out to be a highly successful way of promoting the discipline elsewhere while producing “a certain nervousness, rising at times to something near panic,” within the discipline (2000: 94). Below we shall seek to explain the history of this nervousness, while also suggesting that it is pointing the way forward to a kind of anthropological holism that is constituted by neither light-headed panic nor smug confidence.

Despite the many references to holism, explicit reflections about holism have not been the rule in anthropology. If holism was a central axis in anthropology, it had more the character of being a totem pole than an elaborated theoretical dimension. Holism was an exclamation mark of the discipline, a watchword cried out, as Geertz has noted, at conferences and in general call to arms (2000: 97). But it was rarely elaborated on at any length in writing. For all its emotional force as a disciplinary totem, holism was rarely given theoretical depth. It is thus surprising how rarely holism was mentioned in what we would now see as its heyday in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Thus, in most classical textbooks, either holism is not mentioned at all or its treatment is extremely cursory.¹ The centrality of holism in anthropological thought and practice cannot therefore be fully traced in the classic writings of the discipline. Of course, there are the loci classici of holism, which we deal with below and detail in Chapters 2, 6, 10, and 14 of this volume, but it is our strong impression that there is another, more hidden life of holism in the practice of teaching the discipline. Especially anthropology teachers who are now in their fifties or older remember that holism was one of the key terms used to characterize the discipline and its methods. But much of this is oral culture.

One of us recently discussed the issue with a well-known visual anthropologist who had been a student of Margaret Mead. For him the criterion of success of a good ethnographic film or book was the holistic representation of indigenous culture, and he emphasized that this has been one of the key themes in Mead’s teaching. Asked where we could find this theme unfolded, he referred us to Mead’s introductory text in Principles of Visual Anthropology (Hockings 1975). To our surprise, however, the word “holism” is not mentioned at all there. Although Mead refers briefly to holism elsewhere in her writings (see, for example, Mead 1953),² it was evidently much more central in Mead’s teaching than in her writing. It was left to others to explicate it. Indeed, in his book on ethnographic film that he dedicated to Gregory Bateson and Mead, Karl Heider, another visual anthropologist, highlights holism as one of three central principles of ethnography along with detailed description based on long-term fieldwork and the ideal of relating observed behavior to general norms – that are central to ethnographic filmmaking. For Heider, holism – understood as the need to understand things and events in their cultural and social contexts (Heider 2006: 6) – is a reminder of the importance of allowing the camera to capture “whole bodies, whole interactions, and whole people in whole acts” (Heider 2006: 114). Heider does not explicitly credit Mead for this importance of holism, but it is clearly part of the credo and tonality of the tradition of Franz Boas and Mead.

Anthropologists write, as Geertz has famously quipped (1973: 19). It would seem, however, that they do not write everything down. We argue that despite being one of the central tenets of our discipline, holism has been the object of talk rather than of writing. Just like anthropologists return from the field with written fieldnotes as well as unwritten “headnotes” (Ottenberg 1990), it would seem that holism for generations of anthropologists was a “headnote,” a part of the common theoretical imaginary and corridor discourse that were central to a sense of métier and professional identity but that only rarely and sporadically made it into theoretical writings. This headnote quality of holism, its existence as a totemic catchword for what anthropologists told their students, each other, and the rest of the world about what they did, rather than a theoretical term they reflected much upon in writing, was not restricted to North America.

In the English tradition, too, holism was around already at an early stage. In conventional accounts of the origins of “modernist” British anthropology, the rise of fieldwork-based (structural-)functionalism was thus associated with a “revolution” in which armchair anthropology and conjectural history were “rejected in favor of the discovery of holism and synchrony” (Strathern 1987: 258). The fragmented comparison of myth and ritual by Tylor and Frazer was replaced, so the story goes, by the insistence of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown that “practices and beliefs were to be analyzed as intrinsic to a specific social context; that societies so identified were seen as organic wholes, later as systems and structures; and that the comparative enterprise which modern anthropologists set themselves thus became the comparison of distinct systems” (Strathern 1987: 254). As Stocking and Strathern have shown, this idea of a fundamental revolution is a particular disciplinary fiction (Stocking 1983), but it allowed the rise of a new form of holism centered on fieldwork. This in turn generated a successful, but also largely fictional, break that rendered the evolutionist tradition, as Strathern suggests, “unreadable,” while it made possible the discipline of modern anthropology (Strathern 1987: 269). If the revolution was a fiction, it was a persuasive one, for it recalibrated anthropological self-understanding as a scientific form of knowledge in all its aspects. Holism was thus related to new theoretical aspirations, to the new methodological imperatives of fieldwork, and to a new genre convention, all constituting novel standards of proper knowledge and valid representation.

Despite the importance of this paradigm shift for the self-understanding of modern anthropology, holism also rarely floated to the surface of written texts in British anthropology as a theoretical concept.³ Hortense Powdermaker, for instance, mentions that she had been trained in a “holistic frame” by Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics; by this she means the new standard Malinowskian idea of holism described above, namely, that she would always put the issue or group studied in the context of its relations to other issues and groups (1971 [1933]: 8). She writes this in a later (1971) introduction to her ethnography on Lesu (from 1933), in which, typically we think, the term is not used at all.

It would seem, in other words, that as a cornerstone of twentieth-century anthropology, holism acquired the quality of an anthropological doxa. It appears to have been for a long time an aspect of anthropological practice and writing that was rarely discussed. It was something that did not need reflection in writing because it came “without saying,” as Pierre Bourdieu has it (1977: 167). In the context of introducing novices to the discipline, it probably had a more prominent role, especially in the classroom. Holism was an anthropological tradition, and like all traditions it was mainly “silent, not least about itself as a tradition” (Bourdieu 1977: 167).

The Abject Heart of Anthropology

The 1980s, however, marked a break. Postmodern critique, a concern with pluralism and multivocality, the attack on totalizing theoretical paradigms, experiments with new forms of representation, and not least a changing world made holism as an unarticulated ideal a problem. The wholes implicated by conventional holism culture, society, ideology, social organization, and symbolic system – began to appear theoretically unsuitable and politically suspect. The 1980s, in other words, provided anthropology with a new language about itself. This included a hitherto novel way of being explicit about, and often highly critical toward, anthropological wholes and anthropological holism. Despite trenchant critique, however, holism lingered. New forms of holism (like globalization) emerged, and old ones (like culture) refused to disappear, perhaps because the anthropological style of inquiry depended on such notions (cf. Marcus, Chapter 3, this volume; Thornton 1988) and perhaps also because the human worlds studied by anthropologists were replete with them (see Tsing [Chapter 4], Holbraad [Chapter 5], Mosko [Chapter 9], Pedersen and Willerslev [Chapter 15], and Hirsch and Moretti [Chapter 16], this volume).

As a result of these changes over the last three decades or so, holism has now acquired an ambivalent, if still central, position in anthropology. Our own disciplinary fictions established holism as enduringly central to anthropological theory, practice, and self-representation, but left it vaguely articulated – part of programmatic selfdefinition rather than concrete analysis, and implicit in anthropological writings rather than explicitly formulated. The critique of recent decades added new complications. Critique lifted holism to the surface of our writings but as a problematic – even dangerous – anthropological idea(l). Bringing the concept into the light of reflexive scrutiny revealed its shadowy side, namely, the totalizing assumptions of the theoretical models and ethnographic representations based on this ideal.

As a consequence, we suggest, holism now has the status of being both central and abject in anthropology. Julia Kristeva calls abjection one of the “dark revolts of being” (2002: 389). It describes the process of throwing away or casting aside a part of self through which the self comes into being. It is by ridding oneself of the abject – a something that fails to be entirely named or captured – that one becomes a self in the first place. The abject is therefore not an object; rather, it is a something that simultaneously creates the borders of the self as an object and makes possible the self as a subject. Identity begins, in other words, with abjection. Using the example of food repulsion, Kristeva argues that it is through disgust, a corporeal vomiting, that identity is established: “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself in the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself” (2002: 390). This claim, however, can be tenuous at best, and abjection cannot fully succeed. Since the abject is both part of myself and intolerable, my attempt to expel it from me is both necessary and impossible (Kristeva 1982). An illustrative pop image of abjection is the creature Sméagol in the Hollywood motion picture based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s opus The Lord of the Rings. In the trilogy, Sméagol constantly has to stop midsentence to try to cough up or vomit out Gollum, his alter ego whose obsessive desire for the ring has consumed Sméagol. The name “Gollum” is derived from the sound of Sméagol’s abjection, so the more he attempts to cough Gollum up, the more Sméagol becomes Gollum. Such is the irony of abjection.

One may disagree with the structural psychology that informs Kristeva’s notion of abjection (Fraser 1990), but the notion of abjection is nevertheless helpful, we suggest, as a device through which to understand anthropology’s ambivalent relationship to holism, and the way critique and disavowal of holism have seemingly not led to its successful expulsion. Instead, it would appear that the critique of the last three decades of the various forms that anthropological holism may take (culture, ideology, system, and society – abject wholes that have been easy to name but extremely difficult to handle theoretica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• 1: Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism
• Part: 1
• Part: 2
• Part: 3
• Part: 4