#strathern

Nothing unique here but a local assemblage nonetheless.

As a pre-existing whole, society makes individuals into parts of itself by severing them from other pre-existing domains.

Marlborough Strathern Irwin

Anthropological knowledge offers a transparent example of the process involved in rethinking through concepts and images whose expressible forms already belong to other repertoires and thus to other specific domains of ideas.

Conceptualized as a kind of inverse to lineal holism, the workings of cognatic kinship seemed incapable of yielding a model of a whole.

The field of cognatic kin thus appeared as a set of consanguines naturally undifferentiated -- the raw material of kinship.

Radcliffe-Brown called for the comparison of whole systems because (from the point of view of systems) only systems were whole. The English paradox was that holism was a feature of a part --not the whole-- of social life!