What does it mean to say that anthropology is holistic?

Question

I also need to know what are some of the goals of anthropological research

Answer 1

that you must scientifically and logically interpret history by the whole story with every relating parts included, not by one small bit of info.

its like judging what a dinosaur looked like by just seeing a leg bone.

anthropological research?? history is everything, we cant learn who we are by the future!

Answer 2

The term "holistic" in the Anthropological sense refers to the idea that all parts of an issue are considered and all possible explanations as well. If an Anthropologist looks at a society without getting to know it "holistically" (or entirely), crucial details may be left out of his/her research, leaving readers of the research with a misinterpretation of the actual society.

The goals of Anthropological research are to do just this: provide accurate accounts and depictions of other societies and cultures to help us better understand them. In turn we can not only better understand ourselves, but learn more about our past, present and future life on Earth.

Answer 3

That means that anthropology is not a science. Science uses the method called, " hierarchical reductionism. ", which yields the approximations of the truth in nested hierarchies of information.

Holism is not an approach that one can divest of ideological considerations. One must reduce the phenomenon to its constituent parts to understand the whole.

The general goal of anthropology is to not settle empirical questions politically; by voting on them.

Answer 4

Anthropologists who subscribe to a holistic view believe that breaking human phenomena down to their constituent parts does not tell the whole story.  Instead, the "whole" is greater than the "sum of its parts".  This is often contrasted with a more reductionist view that every event can only be understood by breaking it down into its constituent parts.  

Interestingly, these views do not necessarily contradict one and other.  As many physicists have shown over the past century at least, there is value in breaking phenomena down into constituent parts, but it is also imperative to understand all phenomena as part of a larger system in which cumulative, uniquely systemic features may impact phenomena in ways that the constituent parts alone could not.

In the U.S., "holistic" anthropology is often mistakenly oversimplified as the "4 field approach".  This refers to the tendency for many U.S. institutions to lump the four dominant subfields of anthropology (linguistic anthropology, physical/biological anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, and archaeology) into a single university program with the understanding that these four approaches will offer a more well rounded understanding of human phenomena.  This is where a lot of the controversy over whether or not anthropology is a "holistic" discipline derives from.  Many anthropologists see the lumping together of these increasingly specialized fields as archaic and irrelevant.  Which may be the case.  But that does not mean that a holistic approach is not a valuable approach to the scientific exploration of human phenomena.

There is a long history of resistance to holism within traditional "hard sciences", however, this is changing.