Framing Holism: Sinker, Line and Hook

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Acknowledgements

This essay was adapted from a presentation for the session “Theorizing the General in General Anthropology during Unsettling Times,” delivered at the 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. I thank Rebekah Cupitt, our intrepid session organizer; Lisa Gezon, our deft and generous discussant; and my brilliant co-presenters Beth Reddy, Kathryn Kozaitis, Jennifer Carlson and Conrad Kottak. They have all served on the GAD board and each has a salient take on general anthropology that I hope they will share in coming issues.

Notes

1 Gram Parsons (1973). GP. Wally Heider Studio 4, Hollywood, California.

2 Marilyn Strathern, “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 3 (1987), pp. 251–281.

3 Susan Squires, “Customer Research in the Product Development and Design Industry,” in Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry, eds. S. Squires and B. Byrne, (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002), 103–124.

4 Ann Jordan, Business Anthropology (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2013), 91.

5 Jordan, Business Anthropology, 98.

6 Jordan, Business Anthropology, 126.

7 Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto, editors, Experiments in Holism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 1.

8 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 407.

9 Anna Tsing, “Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora: Or, Can Actor-Network Theory Experiment with Holism?,” in Experiments in Holism, eds. Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 47.

10 Tsing, “Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora,” 50.

11 Tsing, “Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora,” 64.

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Notes on contributors

Jennifer Cool

Jennifer Cool is associate teaching professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is president emerita of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) of the American Anthropological Association and has served on the GAD Board since 2009: as co-chair of CASTAC (Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing), as communications officer and as president.