Holistic Approach To Anthropology

The idea of someone in a lab coat doing experiments in a lab brings about a certain type of thinking towards research. The stereotype makes many people feel as though there is only one way to learn something new, or to conduct research. To many people who took any science classes in high school or even elementary, they’ve been taught that all research must be unbiased and that there must be a control involved. That isn’t always true, not everything has to be black in white. In fact, anthropologic research has better results when the researcher forgets everything they were taught about experiments in other science classes.
Anthropologic research ends like any other type of research, with more information on a set topic. The approach to gathering the information is what sets anthropology apart from other scientific practices, and can be hard to understand for someone who is not practicing or has never been introduced to the anthropological way of conducting an experiment. Although anthropology is a broad subject, the type of research that is done can be broken down into two types of approach: holistic and comparative.
The holistic approach has the most depth because anthropology is such a vast topic. The idea of holism is that it brings together …show more content…
Ethnographers give first-hand accounts and are able to better understand ways of life that might be different from their own. The fieldwork doesn’t have to be rigid with a control or black and white outcomes either. They can learn about life from talking to people, from joining in on celebration or trying new foods. This is much different from the traditional methods because scientists and researchers are thought to need to remain unbiased in their work. With anthropology, there is never a ‘right’ answer. There is always just an answer, a different way to do something because of different reasons or learned beliefs