Holistic Anthropology : Emergence and Convergence (Methodology & History in Anthropology)

"This book...presents a powerful case for anthropology that provides a full and whole account of the contemporary world, as well as some dilemmas...Taken together, the different approaches and case studies presented in this volume amount to an important and refreshing perspective...showing how contemporary social anthropology, with [its] 'interdisciplinary turn', offers explanations that can help us understand the interplay of culture, society, biology, genetics, and ecology." * JRAI "...provides some fine examples of ways that anthropology can capture and hold valuable ground in the borderlands between scientific and humanistic inquiry..an excellent volume...remarkable...for its systematic use of examples such as ethnomedicine, landscape studies, and cognitive anthropology to demonstrate the immensely rich ways in which a cultural orientation can meet various kinds of science." * Reviews in 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, f