Holistic Anthropology

Given the broad reach of anthropology as the science of humankind, there are times when the subject fragments into specialisms and times when there is rapprochement. Rather than just seeing them as reactions to each other, it is perhaps better to say that both tendencies co-exist and that it is very much a matter of perspective as to which is dominant at any moment. The perspective adopted by the contributors to this volume is that some anthropologists have, over the last decade or so, been paying considerable attention to developments in the study of social and biological evolution and of material culture, and that this has brought social, material cultural and biological anthropologists closer to each other and closer to allied disciplines such as archaeology and psychology.


A more eclectic anthropology once characteristic of an earlier age is thus re-emerging. The new holism does not result from the merging of sharply distinguished disciplines but from among anthropologists themselves who see social organization as fundamentally a problem of human ecology, and, from that, of material and mental creativity, human biology, and the co-evolution of society and culture. It is part of a wider interest beyond anthropology in the origins and rationale of human activities, claims and beliefs, and draws on inferential or speculative reasoning as well as 'hard' evidence. The book argues that, while usefully borrowing from other subjects, all such reasoning must be grounded in prolonged, intensive and linguistically-informed fieldwork and comparison.

List of figures and tables
List of contributors
Preface
Introduction: Emergence and convergence
David Parkin
Chapter 1. Bioculturalism
Stanley J. Ulijaszek
Chapter 2. The biological in the social: evolutionary approaches to human behaviour
Robin Dunbar
Chapter 3. Domesticating the landscape, producing crops and reproducing society in Amazonia
Laura Rival
Chapter 4. The biological in the cultural: the fi ve agents and the body ecologic in Chinese medicine
Elisabeth Hsu
Chapter 5. On the social, the biological and the political: revisiting Beatrice Blackwood's research and teaching
Laura Peers
Chapter 6. Anthropological theory and the multiple determinacy of the present
Howard Morphy
Chapter 7. Holism, intelligence and time
Chris Gosden
Chapter 8. Movement, knowledge and description
Tim Ingold
Chapter 9. The evolution and history of religion
Harvey Whitehouse
Chapter 10. The visceral in the social: the crowd as paradigmatic type
David Parkin
Bibliography
Index