Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 32

Another idea that came into anthropology with science was the concept of holism, which is the recognition that all parts of a human culture are more or less interdependent (read that carefully — not independent, but interdependent). It turned out that studying one single aspect of a culture wasn’t working to understand a whole culture. For example, kinship (how people reckon their relations with other members of society) can be influenced by economics, and economics can influence (or be influenced by) religion and politics.

Through time, then, anthropologists had to recognize that the many facets of the human experience were interrelated. This discovery didn’t make humans easier to study, but it was better than laboring under the impression that human societies would be easily understood. And today anthropologists are still trying to figure out how to understand the interrelations of the many facets of human culture — but at least they’re no longer deluded by the idea that every cultural institution, for example, meshes perfectly with some other institution so that both would function in perfect harmony. This idea (one of many functionalist conceptions that focused on how each aspect of culture fulfilled a certain function, like the parts of a complex machine) simply didn’t recognize that people are “messy,” and cultures are hard to draw lines around. For example, even though your culture gives you many instructions for how to behave, how many of us bend the rules on occasion (or often)? Today we borrow all kinds of behaviors from other people and other cultures, and from one generation to the next, a lot can change. This nonuniformity makes cultural anthropology a challenging study. In arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2, but in culture, few things are so clear-cut.

Holism doesn’t necessarily imply that all parts of a society work in perfect harmony; all cultures appear to have some disunity or friction, and over time anthropologists understood this concept as well.