ABSTRACT
Open up any introductory textbook in socio-cultural anthropology and you will find a lecture on the importance of holism. The author will typically explain that anthropologists are usually more interested in gaining an understanding of the total context of human lives than they are in delineating “variables” or “factors” from those lives in order to arrive at a generalization or “law” regarding human behavior. This is particularly true of ethnographic researchers, who traditionally make use of the participant-observation method in their work. Two key terms for an ethnographer are context and pattern. The goal is to formulate a pattern of analysis that makes reasonable sense of human actions within the context of a given place and time. 1 This task of holism may seem simple enough when a student is reading an introductory textbook, but when the same person turns into a researcher he or she is inevitably confronted with the following two questions: (1) How much context do I have to cover?, and (2) How will I recognize a pattern when I see it? These are other ways of asking how a researcher who follows a qualitative, ethnographic strategy can ever know when a “holistic” understanding has been satisfactorily achieved.
