Experiments in Holism E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 838

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

1 Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism

Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto

Why Bother With Holism?

Holism in Anthropological Self-Representation

The Abject Heart of Anthropology

A Brief History of Holism

The Scope of the Book

The Structure of the Book: Four Kinds of Experiments in Holism

Notes

References

Part 1

2 Beyond the Whole in Ethnographic Practice? Introduction to Part 1

Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt

Holism and Culture Critique

Holism and Ethnographic Representation

The Chapters

Notes

References

3 Holism and the Expectations of Critique in Post-1980s Anthropology Notes and Queries in Three Acts and an Epilogue

George E. Marcus

Orientation

Act 1: How Holism Has Mattered in Modern Anthropology

Act 2: Holism as a Problem of the Limits of Conventional Representation

Act 3: Holism as a Different Problem in the Refunctioning of Ethnographic Research as an Enterprise of Critique

Three Exhibits: Strathern, Rabinow, and Bunzl

Epilogue

Notes

References

4 Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora Or, Can Actor-Network Theory Experiment With Holism?

Anna Tsing

Studying Science With the Ants

From Scallops to Mushrooms

Marginal Worldings

Implicit Worlding

Worlding at the Encounters

The Uses of Disorientation

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

5 The Whole Beyond Holism Gambling, Divination, and Ethnography in Cuba

Martin Holbraad

Wholes Reduced, or Holism

Wholes Produced: Gambling in Havana

Anthropology’s Gambles

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Part 2

6 Beyond Cultural Wholes?

Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt

Franz Boas’ Heritage

Different Conceptions of Culture and Holism

Clifford Geertz and Hermeneutical Holism

Marshall Sahlins and Symbolic Holism

Practice Theory

The Chapters

References

7 The Whole is a Part

Marshall Sahlins

“Human Societies are Never Alone”

“National Cultures, Where are You?”

Actually Existing Cultures

The Cultural Politics of Alterity: Depending on the Kingness of Strangers

Elementary Forms of the Political Life

Galactic Dynamics of Culture in East Asia

Intercultural Dynamics of Order and Change: The Real-Politics of the Marvelous

8 Lingual and Cultural Wholes and Fields

Alan Rumsey

Introduction

Language Differentiation in Aboriginal Australia

Language Differentiation in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Unitary Language as Analytical Construct

Language Difference and Group Identity in Australia, New Guinea, and Northwest Amazonia

Language Differentiation and National Identity in France and Germany

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

References

9 Deep Wholes

Mark Mosko

Yam (Taitu) Base, Body, Tip, and Fruit

Yam Gardens

Yam Parents and Children

Pruning and Heaping Yams

Yam Houses

Yams Exchanged for Valuables

Opening, Intermediate, and Closing Kula Gifts

Yams Exchanged for Banana Leaf Bundles

Cooking and Alimentation

Childhood, Adulthood, Elderhood, and Baloma

Bodies and Souls

Agency and Fame

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

Part 3

10 Beyond Structural Wholes?

Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto

Critique of Modernity

Poststructural Critique

Louis Dumont and the Chapters

11 Louis Dumont and a Holist Anthropology

Bruce Kapferer

Dumont’s Holism: Beyond Marcel Mauss

Dumont’s Universalist Orientation

The Hierarchy of Individualism

Ideology, Value, and Comparison

Holism and Potentiality

Dumont the Last Modernist?

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

12 From Wholes to Collectives

Philippe Descola

The Coherence of Experience

A Nostalgia for Ordered Wholes

From Wholes to Collectives

A Typology of Collectives

Conclusion

13 Holism and the Transformation of the Contemporary Global Order

Jonathan Friedman

Introduction

Global Systemic Anthropology

Hegemonic Decline and Cultural Transformation

Concentric Dualism, Hierarchization, and the Remaking of Political Space

Indigenization

Geopolitical Fracture in the Global Order

Conclusion

References

Part 4

14 Beyond Social Wholes? Introduction to Part 4

Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto

The Holisms of Social Anthropology

Critique of Organic Holism

Experiential Holism

Methodological Individualism and Holism

Two Chapters

Holism, Transdisciplinarity, and One Last Chapter

Notes

References

15 Proportional Holism Joking the Cosmos Into the Right Shape in North Asia

Rane Willerslev and Morten Axel Pedersen

From Totalitarian Holism to Proportional Holism

Humor in Darhad Mongolian Shamanic Ritual

Joking as Spiritual Apportioning

Ridiculing the Spirits: The Role of Humor in Yukaghir Hunting Animism

The Impossibility of Sharing

Creating Discrepancy Through Laughter

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

16 One Past and Many Pasts

Eric Hirsch and Daniele Moretti

Papuan “Hero Tales,” Tidibe, and Missionization Among the Fuyuge

An Australian “Hero Tale” and Its PNG Counterpart

“Partial Wholes”

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

17 Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines

Tim Ingold

A Biographical Prelude

Painting and Drawing

Toward a Graphic Anthropology

Follow the Materials

Copy the Gestures

Draw the Lines

Looking Back

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Experiments in holism: theory and practice in contemporary anthropology/Edited by Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3323-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Anthropology-Philosophy.

2. Holism-Philosophy. I. Otto, Ton. II. Bubandt, Nils.

GN33.E94 2010

301.01-dc22

2010006825

Acknowledgments

The idea “to do something about holism” came up during a board meeting of the Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography in autumn 2004. Funded by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation, the Research School has as its main task to support and enhance PhD training in anthropology and is a collaborative enterprise between the Departments of Anthropology at Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen.

The idea arose from a discussion about what constituted the special characteristics of anthropological research in comparison to other styles of inquiry within the overall need to specify how one might best train doctoral students for a future of interdisciplinary collaborative work in a world that increasingly challenges the routines of traditional ethnographic fieldwork.

Ton Otto had just taken over as head of the Research School and organized a series of 1-day workshops on holism in 2005, to which he invited Bruce Kapferer, Veena Das, Tim Ingold, and George Marcus as guest professors. Next, holism was chosen as central theme of the biennial conference of the Research School for 2006 under the title”Reinventing the Whole in a Global World”. These biennial conferences – which with a customary Danish sense of ironic self-aggrandizement are called the Megaseminars – are the main forum for anthropological debate in Denmark and gather staff, doctoral students, and guests from abroad. Keynote speeches in 2006 were delivered by Eric Hirsch, Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer, Emily Martin, and Anna Tsing.

From this grew the idea that the theme of holism could work as a diagnostic device to rethink the state of the art of anthropology. Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt decided to join forces to produce an anthology on this issue and collaborated in organizing a conference, “Beyond the Whole? Anthropology and Holism in a Contemporary World,” in 2008. The conference was generously funded by The Research Priority Area Globalisation at the Faculty of Humanities, Aarhus University, as well as by the Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography. We thank both institutions for supporting this conference. Without the conference this anthology would not have been possible.

All contributors to the present anthology – with the exception of Daniele Moretti, who joined the project later on – as well as Fredrik Barth, Andreas Roepstorff, and 10 doctoral students, participated in this conference. In addition Veena Das, Kirsten

Hastrup, Emily Martin, and Marilyn Strathern were also invited but were unable to attend, and due to various other commitments were also unable to produce a chapter. We regret this of course but are pleased to note that a number of their ideas are still part of this book.

We would like to thank Rosalie Robertson and Julia Kirk from Wiley-Blackwell for their support of this project, and freelance project manager Nik Prowse and copy-editor Cheryl Adam for their excellent cooperation. Finally we would like to thank the doctoral students and staff of the Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography for contributing to a productive and challenging intellectual environment.

The work of editing this anthology and writing the introductions has been shared equally by Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto.

Nils Bubandt, Aarhus

Ton Otto, Cairns

April 2010

List of Contributors

Nils Bubandt

Afdeling for Antropologi og

   Etnografi

Aarhus Universitet

Moesgaard

8270 Hojbjerg, Denmark

Philippe Descola

Collège de France

Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale

52, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine

F-75005 Paris, France

Jonathan Friedman

Lilla Fiskaregatan 8A

222 22 Lund, Sweden

Eric Hirsch

Department of Anthropology

Brunel University

Uxbridge

Middlesex UB8 3PH

United Kingdom

Martin Holbraad

Department of Anthropology

University College London

14 Taviton Street

London WC1H 0BW

United Kingdom

Tim Ingold

Department of Anthropology

University of Aberdeen

Aberdeen AB24 3QY

Scotland, United Kingdom

Bruce Kapferer

Institutt for sosialantropologi

Universitetet i Bergen

Post Box 7802

5020 Bergen, Norway

George E. Marcus

Department of Anthropology

3151 Social Science Plaza

University of California, Irvine

Irvine, CA 92697

United States

Daniele Moretti

Department of Social

   Anthropology

University of Cambridge

Free School Lane

Cambridge CB2 3RF

United Kingdom

Mark Mosko

Department of Anthropology

College of Asia and the Pacific

Australian National University

Canberra ACT 0200

Australia

Ton Otto

The Cairns Institute

James Cook University

PO Box 6811

Cairns Qld 4870

Australia

Morten Axel Pedersen

Institut for Antropologi

Københavns Universitet

Øster Farimagsgade 5, opgang I

1353 København K

Denmark

Alan Rumsey

Department of Anthropology

College of Asia and the Pacific

Australian National University

Canberra ACT 0200

Australia

Marshall Sahlins

5629 S. University Ave.

Chicago, IL 60637

United States

Anna Tsing

Department of Anthropology

University of California

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

United States

Rane Willerslev

Moesgaard Museum

Moesgaard Allé

8270 Hojbjerg

Denmark

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.