Louis Dumont and a Holist Anthropology

Abstract

discipline in which potentially all branches of human knowledge may be engaged to understanding the specific practices of human beings, (2) the study of human society and communities as wholes in which all practices are interconnected and mutually influential, and (3) holism as a search for the principles whereby assemblages or forms of human social realities take shape. I will chiefly focus on the last sense, although the other usages will be addressed, and mainly with reference to the work of Louis Dumont. His anthropology is distinguished by an attempt to go beyond holism as a mode of description (e.g., the presentation of societies as institutionally integrated wholes) and to make it into a methodology for anthropological analysis. For Dumont, a holist analytical orientation is vital to anthropology as a comparative project through which anthropology is able to develop both general and specific theoretical understanding. Although I will concentrate on Dumont’s holism, my discussion will also place his approach in the context of more recent holistic approaches upon which Dumont’s has some bearing. Here it must be stressed that Dumont is committed to the idea that social and cultural anthropology has a distinct contribution to make among the social sciences. He is what might be called a “social constructionist” in that he focuses on the principles which are engaged in the conception, formation, and practice of social relations. Central to his social constructionism and holism is the understanding that all orientations of human beings toward existence are in some way or another social constructions, formed irreducibly in their social relations. Above all, this is the case concerning the action of human beings and their interrelations with other human beings and with other material objects (animate and inanimate). Dumont’s holism is sociocentric and, as well, grounded in the concern for the values embedded in relations, integral to their conception and practice. There is some similarity in spirit, if not in execution, with other holisms recently achieving attention in anthropology extending from the influence especially of the poststructuralist Deleuze (e.g., see Latour 2005; DeLanda 2006). They 11

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