"We have met the other and we're all nonlinear

Ethnography as a nonlinear dynamic system" - Mike Agar

"It's not that ordinary social science isn't allowed to look for connections, it's that ordinary social science begins with variables already given by some theory, and then tries to figure out how to locate, decontextualize, and measure those variables. A card carrying holist notices a "variable" in a situation, maybe one that he/she had never thought about before, but then he/she wonders what other things it might be connected with, in that situation and outside of it. The goal is to build patterns of many interacting things that include what was noticed, not to isolate what one was supposed to notice and measure it."

"Understanding how the social world works is poorly served by traditional social research approaches." p.17

Complexity is a comparatively new term for scientists but not for Buddhists.