Beyond the Whole in Ethnographic Practice?

Abstract

Holism first truly became a hallmark of anthropological inquiry at beginning of twentieth century. At this time various conceptions of informed the emerging theoretical traditions of modern anthropology: culture as a whole, symbolic structure as a whole, and society as a (sec Chapters 6,10, and 14, respectively). Interestingly, this embrace of holistic concepts - which also happened in a variety of other academic disciplines (see Chapter 1) - coincided in anthropology with a major methodological shift from broad ethnographic comparison to focused and intensive ethnographic fieldwork. Within two of major traditions of anthropology - American and British traditions - holism thus became closely associated with ethnographic fieldwork as a way of understanding a way of life. This link was, as Stocking has observed, to a large extent mythopoetic (1983). It established a heroic image of fieldwork, pretending it was new when in fact it was not, and creating a utopian ideal about independent and neutral fieldworker who was able to capture the whole through a form of participant observation that leaned heavily toward natural science ideas of truth, comprehensiveness, and objectivity. This mythopoetic link was strongest amongst British and American anthropologists, epitomized by Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas, respectively. French anthropology was different in this regard, since it was characterized by a much more ambivalent relationship to fieldwork. Claude Levi-Strauss, founder of French structuralism, famously declared that he hated travelling (Levi-Strauss 1992), and while other French anthropologists - like Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris - spearheaded a tradition for fieldwork (Stocking 1983; Clifford 1988), this aspect of French tradition never entered, as Archetti has pointed out, annals of international anthropology(2006). As a result, fieldwork and holism were never mythopoetically linked in French anthropology, neither in its self-image nor in its outside disciplinary reception, to extent that they increasingly were within British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. The French contribution to anthropological holism (deservedly or not) therefore came to be associated with a particular theoretical heritage rather than with ethnographic fieldwork (see Chapter 10). The implicit link between holism and fieldwork within two of dominant traditions of anthropology was probably one of main reasons why holism became firmly established as an anthropological doxa. Holism was not only clearly implied in discipline's central theoretical perspectives and models, but also deeply grounded in new practice of doing and writing ethnography, typically leading to its classical products: monograph and ethnographic film. It is with regard to this modality of its existence - embedded in practices and standards of ethnographic research and representation - that holism came to center of critical attention in 1980s as part of postmodern critique of anthropological representation.