Beyond Social Wholes?

Abstract

In Thomas Barfield's Dictionary of Anthropology, the entry for holism is laconically short. It reads, Holism. See Functionalism (1997: 240). Turning to functionalism, one learns that functionalism - apart from being an ethnographic methodology distinctive of school of sociology, and philosophy of the social sciences - is a historical school of anthropology also known as 'British social anthropology' (1997: 209). Holism, functionalism, and British social anthropology, one is led to understand, are synonyms. The reality is more complicated, of course.