ABSTRACT
One of the first conditions of acceptable Ethnographic work certainly is that it should deal with the totality of all social, cultural, and psychological aspects of the community, for they are so interwoven that not one can be understood without taking into consid eration all the others. (1922:xvi)
Three years later, Mauss analyzed "the gift," or "prestation," as a "total social phenomenon," saying that
in these "early" societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed. (1925; quoted from 1954:1)
But despite these brave words, holism has not had a totally happy career in anthropological research, for i t is not without its disadvantages.
