How Gossip Maintains Social Order
Far from trivial chatter, gossip operates as humanity's decentralized system of surveillance, judgment, and norm enforcement.
Why Hospitality Rules Varied So Dramatically Across Cultures
From sacred guests to ritual enemies to competitive feasting—how societies encode danger, obligation, and belonging in stranger reception
Why Societies Develop Origin Myths
How narratives of cosmic and ethnic origins authorize present power arrangements by grounding them in primordial time
Why Trickster Figures Appear Across All Mythologies
The trickster reveals what societies need to acknowledge but cannot say directly: that every boundary is constructed and every order emerges from prior transgression.
Why Cultures Create 'Wild Men' at Their Margins
Every civilization defines itself through the wild figures it places at its borders—and what it projects onto them reveals its deepest anxieties.
How Divination Systems Encode Cultural Knowledge
Divination practices function as cultural databases—encoding practical wisdom, enabling reflection, and legitimating difficult choices through symbolic frameworks.
The Anthropology of Possession and Trance
How spirit possession provides voice to the voiceless through culturally scripted performance and therapeutic ritual
How Oral Traditions Preserve Cultural Memory
Revealing the sophisticated mnemonic technologies, social validation systems, and distributed knowledge architectures that enable non-literate societies to preserve cultural memory across centuries.
How Material Culture Shapes Social Relations
Objects don't merely reflect social relations—they constitute them through distributed agency, circulating value, and the embodied training of cultural dispositions.
The Cultural Logic Behind Human Sacrifice
Why societies killed their own reveals how cultural systems transform violence into meaning, debt, and social cohesion.
Why Gift Economies Collapse When Markets Arrive
How market exchange systematically dissolves the perpetual debts, social bonds, and redistributive authority that held traditional communities together.
How Pollution Taboos Built the First Social Hierarchies
Before laws and economies created classes, symbolic systems of purity and pollution gave civilizations the conceptual architecture to make hierarchy natural.
The Invention of 'Religion' as a Cultural Category
How a modern Western category distorts our understanding of sacred practices that once constituted agriculture, governance, and healing as integrated lifeways.
How Kinship Terminology Reveals Hidden Social Structures
The words for 'mother' and 'brother' don't just name relatives—they encode entire systems of obligation, property, and power that structure society.