Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology

The term "holism" is shorthand for a central predicament in anthropology:  human situations are culturally structured, but individuals, who participate in more than one cultural "whole," can sometimes change the rules.  This volume explores the theoretical space between those two aspects of the human condition. 
Richard Handler, University of Virginia

 

These authors persuasively, even passionately, refocus the analysis of socio-cultural ontology.  In showing how the simplistic rejection of past holisms undermined anthropology's fundamental commitments, they instead devise ingeniously critical new perspectives reflecting today's massively reconfigured and variegated understandings of context.
Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University)

 

In this capacious and brilliantly-edited collection, holism no longer suggests a totalizing project, but rather an indispensable toolkit of world-making strategies.  The innovative essays gathered here map a new, multi-scaled landscape of Anthropological research.
James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Author of The Predicament of Culture.

 

‘Holism' does its magic again. This is an extraordinarily interesting commentary on the present state of anthropology that would never have come together without the editors' pursuit of an apparently unfashionable idea.
Marilyn Strathern