8. Wholes and Patterns. The theory of Volksgeist
was an attempt to understand cultures and civilizations
as wholes and to point to empirical data as interrelated
in these wholes. It was an attempt to identify the whole
with a historical people. In this sense it guided empiri-
cal and anthropological research. The direction of
recent anthropological research retains the idea of a
whole but replaces it with an idea of a whole as a
pattern or structure related to civilizations and not to
peoples; wholes are not principles operating in civili-
zations but structures of interrelated elements present
in them. This might be looked at as a turn away from
the mythological understanding of a whole to the sys-
tematic understanding of it. Still, the rejection of
“rationalism” in politics as advocated by Michael
Oakeshott and the acceptance of the “tradition” as the
guiding norm of politics, are echoes of the concept
of Volksgeist in its normative if not in its descriptive
sense.
