Framing Holism: Sinker, Line and Hook

The “sinker, line and hook” of my title is a lyric from a country song on Gram Parsons’ first solo album, GP.1 it’s an artful variation of “hook, line, and sinker,” an american idiomatic expression meaning completely, without hesitation or reservation. For example, “i bought their story hook, line, and sinker,” meaning that i was completely taken in or deceived. in this particular song, it means to have fallen completely in love. When this title came to mind, i saw it as a way to say completely that would foreground process and connectedness, rather than wholeness or integration. The love song part barely registered. But i now admit that i’ve come to profess my love for holism as a habit of mind and rule of thumb that distinguishes the perspective and practice of anthropology. Holism as i know it is at once sorely needed, often misunderstood and widely challenged. it is a heuristic counter to the order of the day—that is, to bracketing off all but the target or problem, the surgical strike, alongside all the reductive logics of speed, specialism and global economics. no one was talking about holism in my graduate seminars. not in the 1990s before i began fieldwork, nor in the aughts when i returned from the field. i learned holism through two apprenticeships: the first as a teaching assistant, the second as a board member of the General anthropology division (Gad) for more than a decade. it was as a teaching assistant that i learned about holism as distinguishing of the anthropological perspective. my first anthropology class as a college freshman had been “Culture and illness” taught by the medical anthropologist arthur Kleinman. Thus, when i encountered holism later as a teaching assistant, i looked at it as analogous to holistic healing in the sense that, in contrast to biomedicine, which focuses on the physical aspects of health and illness, holistic healing also considers social, psychological, familial and spiritual dimensions. i think this must be at least part of the reason i did not make the connection between holism with an “h” and wholes with a “w.” But, of course, that connection is indisputable. it is a legacy of modern sociology from Comte and durkheim in the model of society as a living organism whose parts—the organs—work together to sustain the whole, the body. Holism is also connected to organic wholes in anthropology’s origin story where malinowski and radcliffe-Brown drove out the darkness of armchair