It is perhaps instructive in the wake of the Arday affair, in which both progressive commentators and sociology departments have found themselves in want of “common sense” as most of us instinctively perceive it, to further examine common sense as a concept within anthropology, sociology’s academic daughter and rival. For the influential cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, making explicit a long-implicit concern of the discipline, common sense is a “cultural system” which “can vary dramatically from one people to the next”, and “rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity”. For the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, suggesting the idea first as a “mischievous” provocation and then entirely seriously, “Social and cultural anthropology is simply ‘the study of common sense’” which is itself “the socially acceptable rendition of culture, and is thus as variable as are both cultural forms and social rules”.

As Herzfeld remarks, “common sense — the everyday understanding of how the world works — turns out to be extraordinarily diverse, maddeningly inconsistent, and highly resistant to skepticism of any kind”. It is, indeed, precisely the cultural misunderstandings between the anthropologist conducting his fieldwork and the people who he lives among that reveal “the mutual incommensurability of different notions of common sense — our object of study”. What is anthropologically significant about common sense is not that it is sensible but that it is held in common. It is common sense for the Azande tribesman, stubbing a toe or breaking a pot, to ascribe his misfortunes to witchcraft, where the Western observer would point to what are for us more pertinent causes: the two common senses differ wildly, demarcating two different cultural worldviews.

We may never fully understand what attracts such journalistic and legal luminaries as Carole Cadwalladr and Jolyon Maugham to the cause of the late fabulist and self-promoter Jason Arday. Certainly the many fantastic and self-contradictory claims Arday made over the course of his first stratospheric and then tragic career are an affront to the common sense of the cultural community as a whole. Perhaps, we wonder, trying to make sense of their worldview through our own cultural priors, they have simply gone too far and staked too much of their reputations to accede defeat now, despite the nonsensical nature of the claims they still defend. Could it be pure cynicism, we wonder, defending positions they surely now know not to be true to establish their positions within a political community? But instead, borrowing a way of interpreting the world from anthropology, perhaps it is more fruitful to focus not on the sensibility of their claims but their commonality. For while it is common sense to us that they have settled on an absurd and intellectually indefensible position, it is clearly self-evident common sense to them that they are correct. Beliefs that seem bizarre and outlandish to us provide them with social meaning, reinforcing the boundaries and worldview of their culture and allowing them to make sense of a confusing world.

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The common sense of our own culture would, for example, make even an ambivalent observer of the Arday affair think twice before claiming that the forensic Guardian investigation, by a black journalist, of Arday’s fabulism was an example of racist “lynching” by the “right-wing press”. But to this strange and nascent culture within our midst such truths are self-evident. Perhaps “racism”, or its presumed progenitor “whiteness”, those invisible but omnipresent forces whose malignant presence they discern throughout our society, function for them as witchcraft does for the Azande. As Geertz observes, “It is when ordinary expectations fail to hold, when the Zande man-in-the-field is confronted with anomalies or contradictions, that the cry of witchcraft goes up. It is, in this respect at least, a kind of dummy variable in the system of commonsense thought. Rather than transcending that thought, it reinforces it by adding to it an all-purpose idea which acts to reassure the Zande that their fund of commonplaces is, momentary appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, dependable and adequate.”

Indeed, Geertz continues, “the cry of witchcraft functions for the Azande as the cry of Insha’Allah functions for some Muslims or crossing oneself functions for some Christians, less to lead into more troubling questions– religious, philosophical, scientific, moral– about how the world is put together and what life comes to, than to block such questions from view; to seal up the commonsense view of the world… against the doubts its inevitable insufficiencies inevitably stimulate.” Rather than unsettling their worldview, as our common sense would expect, the effect of the Arday affair upon the progressive tribe has been to reinforce it, allowing them to double down on their beliefs and further elaborating their all-encompassing moral cosmology. Absurd to us, the entire worldview makes sense to them, and clearly serves a social function. One need not agree with their precepts, as Evans-Pritchard did not agree with Zande cosmology, to recognize their importance as social facts, and value as an object of study.

Gently placing the Arday affair to one side, we can apply such methods to the Right as well. It is, after all, a political tribe just as much as the progressives, and one which places greater emphasis on its worldview aligning with the common sense of the wider national community. The recent proposal to ban first-cousin marriage, for instance, aligns with British “common sense” — we know, without needing to be told, that we do not do such things here. Such marriage patterns are anomalous and alien to the cultural community. And yet, as the anthropologist Adam Kuper makes clear in his 2009 work Incest and Influence, first-cousin marriage was the preferential choice of the rising bourgeois class of early 19th-century England, giving rise to such powerful “clans” as the Darwin-Wedgwoods, and the Macaulay-Trevelyans, which would dominate English cultural life, through their descendant spinoffs like the Bloomsbury Group, into the mid-20th century.

Like the Mirpuri clans of Northern England who are the object of the current proposed legislation, such preferential marriage arrangements were undertaken to maximize the economic resources of what became corporate kinship groups, outcompeting rivals and creating mutually reinforcing networks of patronage and influence. This pattern was broken up by economic liberalization, reducing the material necessity for such arrangements, and by the outsized impact of fatalities in the First World War on the upper-middle class, forcing eligible women to widen their pool of marriage partners.

That the first-cousin marriage taboo, like the racism taboo, may be relatively new does not make it less widely held or natural-seeming — even “common sense” — today. Like the progressive appeal to racism as a causative factor operating within our society, the present-day political currency of that anthropological staple of differing “common sense”, the kin marriage taboo serves a social function: to distinguish between “us” and “them”, by demarcating the differing values of two distinct societies. The logical solutions for the Mirpuris addressed by the proposed legislation are thus binary: to jettison first-cousin marriage, and become “like us”, or maintain it and become legally as well as culturally outside the boundaries of the national community.

Britain’s dissident Right is increasingly adopting quasi-anthropological frameworks to make sense of the modern UK. The fact that the values of the liberal, upper-middle-class Victorian “130+ IQ Anglos” they laud did not, historically, differ all too greatly in this instance from the immigrant populations with which they are contrasted does not detract too much from the inner logic of their project, any more than the aberrant relationship between objective fact and their worldview does from the progressive one. Much of the newly-anthropological outlook of the British Right has much to recommend it: what is “the blob” if not a governing caste, a cultural superstructure which uses bureaucratic and legal power, shared social norms, rituals and beliefs to advance its collective interests? These norms are enforced with powerful taboos, and fearsome tests of ritual purity which the Arday fall-out has greatly accelerated, to the discomfort of cautiously skeptical progressives like Novara Media’s commentators, compelled to submit their errant cosmologies to the judgment of the tribe. Rather than gaining new adherents, this caste seems to prioritize thinning its own ranks through ever-stricter enforcement of its social norms. Theirs is a political project, or a culture, which sets itself apart from the interests of the political community or wider culture from which it is sprung, and that sees its purpose as either dismantling or overturning it.

Whether we should view modern progressives as a culture, or as a politically-oriented social structure, reflects older fissures within anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology was historically divided between British Social Anthropology, derived from Durkheimian sociology, and with a politically-minded focus on the notionally empirical social structures of “societies”, and American Cultural Anthropology, derived, via Franz Boas, from contemporary German notions of discrete and holistic “cultures”, which make meaningful sense of the world in their own interpretive ways. What they share, and what sociology now apparently appears to lack, is the emphasis on cultural interpretation through fieldwork, the seeing the world “from the native’s point of view”, as Bronisław Malinowski famously summarized the discipline’s craft, which provides a constant check to the cultural assumptions of the anthropologist himself. An “insider-outsider” in an alien society, the anthropologist is forced, through encounter with its differing notions of common sense, to reflect on the partiality of his own. It is an in-built check to cultural solipsism that sociology, the study of advanced Western societies by members of those same societies, inherently lacks. The practice of autoethnography as practiced by Arday and his Cambridge patron Hilary Cremin shows nominal social scientists conducting a form of anthropological technique briefly fashionable in the first flush of the discipline’s engagement with critical theory, but which was always predicted by serious anthropological theorists, as it has since proved, to become a solipsistic intellectual dead-end.

But this is not merely a matter of abstruse social-scientific debates. When Arday could blame “whiteness” for questions being raised about his credentials and competence by his academic peers as well as his students (as in this paradigmatic work of autoethnographic solipsism), while valorizing, as his posthumous defenders do, his own blackness as a defense of his probity and moral worth, we have moved beyond an anthropological understanding of “culture” into the world of power politics and hierarchy: the meat and drink of social anthropology. Who is subaltern and who is dominant when Arday could set the police on the Times Educational Supplement, summon the legal power of London’s most intimidating law firm on skeptics of his manifold claimed achievements, and weaponize accusations of racism against his academic critics, just as his defenders today invoke this most powerful taboo to muzzle the press in advance of their own political power? These are political matters, relating to the fundamental distribution and exercise of power within our society, and are thus legitimate areas for intellectual inquiry and debate.

As the anthropologist Terence Turner cautioned in 1993, progressive “multiculturalists use the term culture in different ways, and for different purposes, than anthropologists”, as a political tool “of the cultural nationalists and fetishists of difference, for whom culture reduces to a tag for ethnic identity and a license for political and intellectual separatism”. Sniffily disregarding its intellectual output, Turner observes that “to the extent that it has developed a theoretical analysis, it is primarily a conceptual framework for challenging the cultural hegemony of the dominant ethnic group”, so that “Culture, as such, becomes a source of values that can be converted into political assets, both internally as bases of group solidarity and mobilization, and externally as claims on the support of other social groups, governments, and public opinion all over the globe”. For Turner, prefiguring today’s febrile discourse, at its worst all this is merely “an intellectual pseudopolitics that implicitly empowers the theorist while explicitly disempowering real cultural subjects”.

Yet in doing so, he notes, the essentialist claims on identity — on race, gender, religious belief — made by progressive multiculturalists for political ends mirror and thus reify those of the presumed dominant culture. Just as Kuper observes, multiculturalism preserves “insidious assumptions” on the organic wholeness of cultures long jettisoned by anthropology itself, which are put to fundamentally Romantic and reactionary ends, and are “distantly related to certain Counter-Enlightenment discourses about ethnic identity”. As Kuper notes, “how can one know whether a person’s cultural identity is authentic? Only if it is further assumed that identity is fixed by descent.” Arday’s Labour Party defender Dawn Butler, for example, is, by virtue of her apparently self-penned poem on the spiritual, physical and moral superiority afforded to her by her skin color, in common sense terms clearly a racist. Yet her racism is surely an inversion of what she perceives as white racism, similar to the way medieval black magic was merely an oppositional inversion of Christianity rather than a coherent belief system in itself. If whiteness and blackness are parallel constructs of the colonial encounter then why should the modern progressive not deconstruct blackness, and drive it out of the academy?

These are questions, provocations that anthropology can pose but which it is not its role to answer: the mere destabilizing of the culturally-specific assumptions behind them, the grappling with their own partiality and cultural boundedness is enough. Can sociology in its current parlous and solipsistic state pose these questions? One does not imagine that career advancement in today’s Cambridge Department of Education would result. This is where anthropology, with its broader and more quizzical perspective, comes in, for, as Turner claims, “much as St. Paul revealed to the Athenians the identity of the unknown god they had been worshipping, anthropologists might play a useful role in helping multiculturalists realize the revolutionary implications of the course upon which they have embarked”.

For just as academic sociology, taken as a culture, is marked by an aversion to “common sense”, which it broadly views as something to be overturned rather than a spur to deeper analysis (as it is for anthropologists), progressives have seemingly settled on a social system or political project — it is not entirely clear which of the two is preferred — set on the destabilization, dismantling or total destruction of the “common sense” norms of the wider national culture.

As an object of anthropological inquiry, such a development is fascinating and worthy of study. As a political project within democratic conditions, it is obviously disastrous for its adherents, as our last prime minister found. The sheer hatred Keir Starmer inspired among ordinary voters goes beyond rational analysis of his strengths and weaknesses: he ruled according to the common sense of his own social and cultural tribe, and against that of the wider society. Laws, intended to produce positive outcomes, were followed zealously because they were laws, whether their outcomes were positive or not. Such a course of affairs was deemed so unnatural, such an affront to our common sense that Starmer became a folk devil quite out of proportion to his bumbling and incompetent nature.

It is in this literal culture war — a term, as Kulturkampf, incidentally coined by the German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow — that our new prime minister finds himself. Much of Andy Burnham’s recent messaging — on North Sea oil, or the Net Zero push — seems intended to position him as aligned with the common sense of the wider political or cultural community and against that of his progressive caste. The relentless northwestern messaging of the Burnham government is not because he is a provincial bore, though he may be, but because it correlates to widely-held stereotypes within the British cultural zone — commonsensical beliefs — about the no-nonsense pragmatism of Northern English culture. He is invoking, and appealing to, a different type of commonsensical worldview than Farage, who addresses himself primarily to the tradesmen of southeastern England. On some matters, the two groups may hold a shared common sense — and indeed the next election will be decided on this question.

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What Burnham appears to understand is that, however intellectually interesting the cultural worldview British progressives have now settled on may be to observe from without, does not present a viable path towards political success. Insofar as, viewed from outside, their beliefs take a coherent form, it appears to be one of direct opposition to common sense, in which the most outlandish and bizarre claims are made precisely to alienate as many potential adherents as possible, and reinforce the purity of the in-group. When they have lost the Guardian and Private Eye, we can deduce, they have lost even the establishment center-left, still tentative adherents to our society’s common frame of understanding the world. For the progressive part, even the Guardian and Novara are now “polluted”, in the anthropological sense, by their perceived contact with “the Right-wing”, the theodicy against which their moral world is constructed.

When we say that policies or outcomes are wrong or unfair, what we mean is that they violate our understanding of how things ought to be; they simply go against our common sense. The fundamental issue highlighted not so much by Arday’s various fables as by the political furor following his death is that the way in which our society is run in large part goes against the dominant cultural understanding of how our society should be run, to what ends and with what guiding beliefs. The belief systems professed by some within the highest ranks of the British establishment are, to most of us, as self-contained, unfalsifiable, and as alien as if they belong to an entirely different culture, a distant society we can only puzzle at from outside. It is common sense to them, but not to most of us. This creates a cultural disturbance inviting in, though not limited to, extreme political turbulence. The electoral collapse of the Left results not from the fact that progressives do not agree with us, but like du Boulay in her Greek mountain village, that they do not know: they are outside the bounds of the wider society.

But Burnham is not a social scientist: what is of meaningful interest to him is not what hidden patterns the opposing worldviews unlock about their respective cultures, but which sense is more common, and thus commands more votes. His future therefore rests upon whether or not he can re-align the Labour Party with common sense — in both the detached anthropological and our instinctive folk usages of the term.

The audience — from gray-haired professors at the top of their game to undergraduates, there to present a poster  — whooped, cheered, and clapped enthusiastically.

We were five minutes in, and I, an ethnographer with a doctorate in anthropology and 30 years’ experience, already felt not-at-home. The speaker, Jason De León, an academic star who has won every major award the academy can bestow, began his talk by recounting how he’d “remained silent” during an event he attended at which colleagues offered public condolences for the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. He’d been disturbed by the sympathy, he said, because “Charlie Kirk was a peddler of hate speech.” However, his silence had “inhibited” him, and his speech for that prior event was mediocre, he told us, because he had not been “true to himself.” 

Next, he issued a trigger warning before diving into a tale of his traumatic childhood, his identity as a man of color, his emotional numbness, his therapist, his need for danger, and his fieldwork among human traffickers. He showed us childhood photographs. He wept. He said he’d told the traffickers that he was “fucked up, too.” They were “damaged, fearful, angry men,” he said: “so am I.”

De León is not an outlier. He represents a new academic persona of Therapeutic Scholar-Hero, whose ascendancy spells nothing less than the death of the university: not the first time this death has been predicted, to be sure, but the first time it feels earned. This persona claims its authority not from intellectual credibility or scholarly rigor, but the capacity for emoting. The narcissism of the Therapeutic-Scholar Hero isn’t a bug, but a feature. 

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Over the next three days, I witnessed similar behavior at numerous symposia and presentations. At the symposium on “feminist ethics,” organizers handed out a book list that featured exclusively “disabled scholars.” The first presenter announced her pronouns as “she/they,” and told us that her disability had “flared,” ahead of the conference, preventing her from preparing. She’d also been sidetracked by “urgent” campus activism: “I almost didn’t come, but I needed to publicize my book!” The audience loudly cheered. 

This was rank self-promotion, disguised as vulnerability. Her talk, unsurprisingly, was thin, disorganized, and derivative. She ended with a call to resist the “fascist state” because “ICE is coming to this town next.” More rapturous applause. 

Or take the symposium on autoethnography, a subfield of anthropology in which researchers use their own lives — their emotions, relationships, and personal histories — as data. The room was full long before the talk began, with several high-profile scholars in attendance. One after another, the speakers shared personal or familial stories adorned with ethnographic commentary. One presenter suggested that the dust that had settled near a nuclear test site during her grandmother’s youth caused her grandmother’s early death. This was autoethnographic evidence of the American war machine — and an instance of “missing kin” and “intergenerational trauma.” 

In each case, the ethnography merely served to illuminate the personal narrative, rather than to advance a theory. The insights were predictably underwhelming. Although each speaker insisted that story was more accessible than theory, and was more likely to resonate with the “public,” none addressed the central problems of this method: what distinguishes self-expression from scholarship? What are the limits of subjectivity as data? What about distortion, selective seeing, the dangers of solipsism? 

The speakers were apparently unbothered by these elementary concerns, preempting scrutiny or critique by deploying the concept of “positionality.” To acknowledge “positionality” is to explore how one’s own biography shapes the questions one asks, and informs both the things one sees and doesn’t see. To speak from a particular position or identity can yield insights, though it also makes blind spots inevitable. The concept was never intended to confer automatic authority or serve as a replacement for analysis. 

One speaker concluded by asking, “What does it mean when the story truly leads the way, and arguments emerge out of stories, rather than the other way round?” This question was intended rhetorically, but I can answer it: if the story leads, the story sets the terms. An argument that “emerges” from a story is not an argument, but a statement of feeling. And when emotional revelation is framed as expertise, and scholars are rewarded for being rather than knowing, the university mission becomes therapeutic narrative rather than scholarship. Once who you are is treated as epistemic authority in itself, feeling replaces analysis, and identity displaces argument. 

“Being rather than knowing” was on particularly vivid display among the early-career academics at the conference. Young men wore berets, soft floral shirts, and scrunchies on their ponytails. Young women were in army jackets, boots, and elaborate earrings. The clothes were deceptively expensive; the attitude reminded me of 1990s gay clubs, where knowledge of the dress code determined entry. Attendees paired the aesthetic with an aggressively casual decorum: arriving late, eating noisily, putting socked feet on chairs. The message was clear: I reject hierarchy; my comfort is political.

Such conduct provoked in me a sensation I’ve recently grown familiar with: being subtly rebuked — a quick glance, a sidelong smile — by young colleagues. If scholarship is now confessional and moralizing, if identity confers sacred authority, then early-career researchers, even students, can be just as “insightful” as their elders, perhaps more so.

At one panel, a young scholar responded to a methodological question with a short speech about rent and “precarity,” ending with the extraordinary line: “I’ll let you sit with that.” It wasn’t the point that startled me, but the tone: a novice addressing senior scholars in the therapeutic register, as if counseling them. In that small flourish, the collapse of hierarchy revealed itself perfectly. 

These younger colleagues are bold in a way unimaginable in my early years, when I was acutely aware of how little I knew and how much I had to prove. I trained under Godfrey Lienhardt, an exquisitely sensitive ethnographer and master of the discipline, whose magnum opus came much later than his doctorate. He believed in form, structure, and the metaphysical stakes of ethnography. His lineage did cosmology, mapping a community’s entire worldview and belief system. The new cohort does identity. And only identity.

But this inversion is not the fault of the youth; academia no longer allows people to ripen. PhDs are time-limited, rewarding speed, compliance, quick conclusions, and ideologically safe frameworks. The old apprenticeship model, in which seriousness and self-knowledge matured slowly, has vanished. The death of the university is, in part, the death of spaces where maturity matters.

Nor are all senior scholars resisting this shift. At the conference, many older professors were fully aligned in tone, performance, and politicized moralism. There were still serious thinkers doing rigorous work, of course, and I attended some of their sessions. But they no longer set the atmosphere of the discipline — the language, incentives, and epistemic norms. And they no longer shape its future.

Nowhere is the decline of analytic clarity more visible than in the university’s treatment of sex. As a category, it has collapsed entirely into “gender,” sliding from the empirical and material into pure subjectivity. At the conference, this was reflected in the pronoun badges we were encouraged to wear. (After several attempts, I managed to delete mine online and print a badge with only my name and university.) 

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It also appeared in presentations featuring the all-too-familiar patois of gender ideology: “female-identified bodies,” “womxn,” and pregnancy as something that happens to “people.” One paper described “pleasurable violence” within a Central American trans-feminist community as “healing” when consensual, collapsing harm and care into the same category. Another uncritically mapped contemporary Western “nonbinary” gender categories onto non-Western cultures, regardless of the local realities, in the name of decolonization. It was jarring to confront scholars unable to distinguish vastly different cultures and civilizations, and committed to romanticizing pre-colonial systems.

The slide from empirical clarity into therapeutic reassurance wasn’t confined to the panels. Some of the same conceptual moves on display here have already appeared in high-ranking journals: a reminder that these tendencies are not fringe aberrations, but are increasingly institutionalized as “scholarship.” In the book hall, Princeton University Press was prominently displaying Sex Is a Spectrum, the establishment’s polished argument that biological sex can be dissolved into gradations and feelings — a theme reinforced by the book’s author, who was ubiquitous at the conference. Here was another face of the Therapeutic Scholar-Hero: more philosophical than performative, but still committed to dissolving material categories in favor of subjectivity.

I have had a front-row seat at this unraveling, across many disciplines and arenas. The American Anthropological Association conference was hardly unique; but what I saw there was the distillation of the trend into its clearest form. The tragedy is not that universities have become ideological; it is that they have become unserious. A culture that once prized discipline, depth, and rigor now rewards emotional display, political conformity, and autobiographical performance.

The university has forgotten what it was for: to preserve and extend knowledge across generations. That requires hierarchy, apprenticeship, discipline, shared categories, and a recognition of material reality. When these collapse — when reality becomes optional, subject to feeling and “lived experience” — there can be no transmission of knowledge, only performance and self-display.

The old university was often cruel; brilliant older scholars could crush young ones, intentionally or not. I experienced this myself. For this reason, and others, it took me years to find my voice, and more time still to mature into having something worth saying. But the old university also met the world with humility, patience, and an understanding that social science is, at heart, an encounter with the other, not a stage for the self. It was a craft that taught me to pay attention to the world before attending to myself, to question before confessing. That formation shaped my intellectual life, and what I learned then is simply no longer being handed on.

The university once existed to clarify reality. Today, it obscures the real. Everything else follows.

To the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss the fact that so much of intellectual life was dominated by this topsy-turvy procedure seemed very strange. He spent most of his twenties drifting along the Rive Gauche at a time when his young Parisian contemporaries — Sartre among them — were beginning to formulate what would one day be known as existentialism. Abstraction was in the air; Paris was awash with armchair theorists claiming to have derived, a priori and armed only with a fierce intellect and a few translations of Heidegger, the basic condition of humanity. Yet what struck Lévi-Strauss was that most of these confident assertions were just conjecture: if you really wanted to know what human beings are like, then you probably needed to leave the safety of the café and meet some different types of human beings. In 1935, he did just that, abandoning his post as a secondary school teacher and boarding a steamship for Brazil, so that he could have a look at “human nature”, up close, for himself.

The legendary travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955) is an account of that journey. Though its author is perhaps best known in the academy as the inventor of structuralism, the writing is anything but dry and theoretical: from the famous, ironical first line — “I hate traveling and explorers” — Lévi-Strauss styles himself as a reluctant hero, on a quest into the jungle to find mankind in his original condition. “I have often planned to undertake the present work,” he confesses, “but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me making a start.” To proceed, he must give up all pretense of academic discipline and propriety, and indulge his most immoderate Romantic impulses. The result is, in the words of another great anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, “a work which, though it is very far from being a great anthropology book, or even an especially good one, is surely one of the finest books ever written by an anthropologist”.

The bulk of Tristes Tropiques is concerned with Lévi-Strauss’s visits to remote peoples living in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso: the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, whom the author arranges in ascending order of how “untouched” he believes them to be. This mania for the “untouched” and “unspoiled” and “uncontaminated”, borne of Lévi-Strauss’s youthful fondness for Rousseau, initially strikes the modern reader as rather overblown: the innocently naked Caduveo, for instance, cavort around in their own Eden, “protected by the grassy velvetiness of the outside walls and the fringe of palm trees”, their “flesh tones … set off by… the rich, bright glint of the teeth and fangs of wild animals among feathers and flowers”. But soon, Lévi-Strauss’s trained eye can’t help but notice more subtle social structures: the Caduveo’s tattoos, for instance, are a map of their aboriginal forms of social organization, which time and trade with the outside world have long since degraded.

For all Lévi-Strauss’s ridiculous paeans to noble savagery, the fact remains that every single one of his encounters with an indigenous people in Tristes Tropiques contains at least one such fascinating observation — many of which are still respected by first-rate ethnographers. He is sensitive and meticulous: most editions are accompanied by facsimiles of his wonderful drawings of clothing, drinking vessels and tattoos. He also avoids many of the pitfalls into which other anthropologists have fallen, before and since. Of the Bororo, for example, he sees not simply a unified “people” or “tribe” that has been intact since the dawn of time, but a group struggling with disease and resettlement by missionaries, and trying its best to live in accordance with its own traditions.

Even his rather naïve association of Amazonians with “primitiveness” has a certain truth to it, if we read it generously. When visiting the Nambikwara, for instance, he notices that their social structure changes according to the time of year: in the dry season, the fact that most food is gleaned from hunting makes Nambikwara society more centralized and hierarchical; in the rainy season, when agriculture is possible, the Nambikwara disperse into smaller family units. Recent work in archaeology suggests that this kind of social flexibility — alien to modern, bureaucratic states like Lévi-Strauss’s France — was exceedingly common among peoples who lived tens of thousands of years ago. In other words, by identifying primordial “human nature” with a certain openness, a capacity for choice and transformation that industrial societies have somehow lost, Lévi-Strauss might not have been entirely wrong.

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Nevertheless, in the years since Tristes Tropiques was published, its reputation has suffered. Its initial, rapturous reception — Susan Sontag called it “one of the great books of our century” — has since given way to accusations of colonial incomprehension at best, outright racism at worst. Many anthropologists consider Lévi-Strauss’s hymns to the unspoiledness of his “natives” to be a kind of backhanded compliment, a way of denying them the sophisticated, sexy fallenness of the West. Nor was this picture helped by the title of his next book, La Pensée Sauvage — which, although literally meaning something like “untamed thought”, is simply begging for mistranslation as “the mind of the savage”.

But perhaps we have misunderstood the political and intellectual stakes. If we treat Tristes Tropiques as a perfect catalog of the beliefs and customs of the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, we will surely find it lacking, especially in the light of half a century of well-funded ethnographic research. But if we treat it as a riposte to the lofty pretensions of Lévi-Strauss’s fellow Parisian intellectuals (not to mention today’s intellectuals) to know “human nature”, it starts to look like a welcome corrective. Beneath all of Lévi-Strauss’s pontifications about innocence and savagery lies a clear, common-sense conviction that things could be otherwise — that many human societies once were otherwise, and that, at least in a few remote corners of Brazil, they still are.

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By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

It is doubly striking, therefore, that so many of the tetchiest criticisms of Tristes Tropiques have tended to emerge after 1980, from institutions in the US and UK that were in the throes of neoliberalism (a way of thinking whose most famous slogan, “There is no alternative”, is a perfect contradiction of the one intellectual assumption every anthropologist makes). In a sense, I suspect, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation was the victim of a resurgent notion of human nature that took the academy by storm in the final decades of the 20th century: a hard-bitten economistic one which held that the essence of mankind was simply to be “rational” (which, to the economist, means calculating, greedy, concerned above all else with the maximization of personal profit). This was almost as prevalent on the political Left as on the political Right: the only difference was that those leftist thinkers who opposed Lévi-Strauss’s “Romanticism” added that to refuse to ascribe such calculating, greedy “rationality” to indigenous peoples was to label them somehow inhuman, and fall victim to “inverted racism”.

But was this really Lévi-Strauss’s sin? In his final reflections, he strikes a remarkably shy, relativist tone: humanity is vast, perhaps infinite, and even the most skilled anthropologist can only ever offer a few, partial gropings towards its essence, if one even exists. “The paradox is irresoluble,” he writes: “the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but, on the other hand, the less likely it is… that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity.” He tells the legend of an Indian, who journeys to the edge of the earth, asks questions of all the people and things he finds there, only to be disappointed. He cannot quite understand them.

I like to come back to Lévi-Strauss again and again for lessons like these. Like many academics, I spend far too much time chasing around dreamy abstractions, many of which claim to contain the essence of human life or social organization. Books such Tristes Tropiques are a reminder that these efforts are, at best, only part of the story. Indeed, they are a corrective to much else besides: “Human nature” is reified ever more readily these days — not just by intellectuals, but by consultants restructuring economic life, lawyers refashioning society’s rules, HR departments rewriting the mores by which people interact. Everyone has his or her own preconceived assumptions, adopted for self-serving reasons, about what it might mean to be human. Except one. Follow him into the jungle this summer, and discover who you are.

After weeks of growing intimacy, the most bookish of the rebel commanders confided in me that only one westerner, more than a century previously, had ever learned the Uduk language and mastered their ancient belief system, since hidden beneath a light veil of Christianity. That long-dead westerner had written a book on the Uduk, which was now their prize possession, he told me. Retrieving it, wrapped in a cloth like a sacred text from within a thatched tukul hut, he showed me the well-thumbed work, now devoid of covers and binding: it transpired to be an ethnographic text published in 1979 by the very-much-alive Oxford anthropologist Wendy James, whose seminars on Sudan I had eagerly attended just a few years previously.

There is revealed the great ambiguity at the heart of anthropology, a discipline now threatened by the wave of postcolonial fervour crashing on our shores. As Perry Anderson remarked in 1968, Britain’s “brilliant and flourishing” tradition of Social Anthropology” — a discipline until recently distinguished from its American cousin, Cultural Anthropology, by its empirical focus on political and social order — was the nation’s sole significant contribution to 20th century intellectual theory. Yet the foundational texts were written within the context of imperial rule, by academics who either moonlighted as colonial administrators or depended on the pacification of newly-conquered natives to comfortably undertake their research, casting the discipline under a shadow of suspicion from which it has never fully emerged.

In her 1973 essay “The Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist“, Wendy James mounted a cautious defence of the discipline within the imperial context. Struggling, in the first flush of postcolonial enthusiasm, to reject the claim of Third World activists that anthropology was a reactionary handmaiden of colonialism, which functioned to preserve oppressive native hierarchies in aspic at the point of contact, James made the case for anthropologists as liberal critics of colonial administration, defenders of small-scale societies as coherent and sophisticated polities whose customs and social order were worthy of respect by a dismissive imperial centre.

Yet while James struggled to reject accusations of reactionary sentiment in recasting anthropologists as liberal critics of colonialism, from the perspective of today’s all-pervading culture war, an alternative argument could be made: it was precisely the reactionary desire to record and then to preserve pre-modern cultures from the corrosive effects of modernity that motivated the discipline at its height, and which was its greatest moral strength. For the 21st-century reactionary, who rejects the homogenising effects of liberal modernity, each individual human culture is precious and unique, a universe in itself.

For the Uduk, James’ careful work of ethnography preserved an orally-transmitted cosmology they are even now in the process of discarding. Just as British anthropologists in Sudan either moonlighted as colonial administrators or worked within the stable regime colonial order provided, British colonial administrators governed what is today South Sudan almost as a real-world ethnographic museum, banning Arabs from what is now Sudan from entry and preserving a complex constellation of tribal societies from the enforced Arabisation which, following Britain’s departure, they only shook off through a long and bloody conflict. The Uduks’ greatest lament is not that Britain kept South Sudan in tribal stasis, but that their tribe was unfairly disbarred from colonialism’s curatorial care.

Yet this ambiguous record of cultural engagement and preservation is threatened by today’s moralising postcolonial discourse, and it is anthropology’s outward-facing showpiece, the ethnographic museum, that is its fiercest contemporary battleground. Consider the sad case of Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, until recently a museum of museums whose lovingly-preserved Victorian layout functioned as a visual expression of the discipline’s early theoretical worldview. Its great crowd pleaser, the South American shrunken heads that have delighted generations of shrieking children, have now been removed from view, their display case literally shrouded in an expression of the fearful new taboos now governing our society. For curators like the archetypal Twitter don Dan Hicks, the Pitt Rivers is barely distinguishable from a serial killer’s collection of trophies: “brutish museums like the Pitt Rivers where I work have compounded killings, cultural destructions and thefts with the propaganda of race science, with the normalisation of the display of human cultures in material form. An act of dehumanisation in the face of dispossession lies at the heart of the operation of the brutish museums.”

On and on Hicks writes in 2020’s The Brutish Museums, roping in Trump and Brexit in increasingly overwrought prose future historians will surely cherish as a perfect distillation of our contemporary moment. “As the border is to the nation state, so the museum is to empire,” Hicks insists: “two devices for the classification of humans into types.” Well, yes, the reader is compelled to respond: the idea that human societies differ from each other in meaningful ways is not only true, but is the basis of anthropology. All cultures are bounded, by their nature: a borderless world is in practice merely a new form of cultural imperialism, now spread by progressivism’s zealous missionaries, like Hicks.

In his recent book The Museum of Other People, the anthropologist Adam Kuper— an ethnographer of anthropology, whose classic Anthropology and Anthropologists is a set text for British undergraduates — wearily documents how the intrusion of the new American ideology erodes the very foundations of the ethnographic museum. As Kuper notes laconically, with the empirical distance that once marked the discipline, in North America “a romantic conception of identity was revived in the 1960s” in “a development that greatly surprised many social scientists: far from melting away, ethnic identities were reasserted, and they were now viewed positively. Identity had become a political issue again.” This essentialised identity discourse, the sea in which our current progressive museum curators swim, is no more natural or unworthy of objective study than 19th-century nationalism, yet it is now so embedded within our institutions as to pass unremarked. Even to notice it casts the observer in the unwanted role of culture warrior, fighting vainly against the march of progress like 19th-century tribesmen against the approaching gunboats.

The result, the “vapid New Age platitudes” that dominate Washington’s National Museum of the American Indian or the mythicising narratives of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (which “does not mention that those slaves were captured by soldiers of African kingdoms who then marched them to the ports to be sold”) have drifted over from the imperial metropole to us in the periphery, with the consequence that “it was soon widely accepted in the growing field of post­colonial studies that only the native can understand the native. Foreign ‘experts’ (always referenced in scare quotes) are suspect, scholarship discounted.”

Indeed, Kuper notes sadly, “this is apparently now the official view at the Pitt Rivers Museum”, whose director, Laura Van Broeckhoeven, communes with tribal elders in rituals to determine which artefacts she may display and which must be returned. As for the shrunken heads, whose photographic representation Kuper was refused permission to reproduce in an email noting ‘‘the image you suggest is of the display which was removed last summer out of respect for the people involved”, he remarks with disbelief: “The people involved! Who were they, who consulted them, what in fact did ‘they’ believe, and why were they (whoever they were) given the right to determine the policy of a famous and long-­established university museum?” Whether the stakeholders consulted were the tribe who shrank the heads, or the neighbouring tribe whose heads were unwillingly shrunk, remains a mystery.

Though no conservative cultural warrior, Kuper nevertheless sounds like any Telegraph or Spectator columnist in bemoaning the submission to the new ideology that has rapidly overtaken our ethnographic museums. Of the Benin Bronzes held by both the Pitt Rivers and our troubled national institution, the British Museum, Kuper observes that the case for restitution is not as simple as either Hicks or the more temperate writer Barnaby Phillips asserts. Looted by conquering British troops in 1897 as part of the bloody punitive expedition to unseat the recalcitrant Edo oba, or king, the moral case for the return of the bronzes (in fact a collection of brass and ivory sculptures of extraordinary grace and workmanship) is, at least superficially, strong. Yet like Phillips, and unlike Hicks, Kuper observes that Nigeria’s record of custodianship is not impeccable: “three of the bronze plaques sent to Lagos in 1950 by the British Museum had somehow ended up in Ameri­can collections. In 1980, during a brief oil boom, the Nigerian government bought some brass heads at auction. Several soon turned up again on the international market.”

Yet while Kuper makes the incontrovertible point that “given the poor performance of the national museum service in conserving and displaying Nigeria’s own antiquities, there is ample room for scepticism” over the country’s demands for restitution, his argument would be more compelling were the British Museum not itself now embroiled in a scandal deriving from the magpie tendencies of one of its curators, and the inexplicable lack of cataloguing the case has revealed. Though the artefacts apparently sold on Ebay by their errant custodian do not include any of the Museum’s African collections, the Nigerian government has nevertheless used the scandal to revive its claims for the bronzes.

Yet who the bronzes ought to be returned to is not immediately obvious: to today’s Edo oba, whose claim and vision for their custodianship is quite at odds with that of his local rival, the Benin City authorities? To the Nigerian central government, the very existence of which is a product of the same historical story of conquest and imposed political order that brought the bronzes (and latterly, some 200,000 British Nigerians) to Britain? Even some contemporary African-Americans now demand their possession, on the basis that the brass they were forged from was the European payment for their own ancestors’ subjection.

As an undergraduate, I had the privilege to handle the ornate sword and engraved pistol of the last sultan of Darfur, Ali Dinar, whose kingdom was conquered and annexed to Sudan by British troops in 1916, and whose weapons were taken as war booty, ultimately to Durham University’s Sudan Archive. Should they be returned, and if so, to whom? To the Fur people, living in refugee camps far from home? Or to the war-wracked Sudanese state whose militias oppress them? Far from a simple narrative of looting and restitution, these questions become more complex and ambiguous the more they are looked at: it is precisely to unearth these complexities, to ask questions that may not have satisfactory answers, that anthropology is for — or was for, anyway.

Indeed, a single-minded devotion to the British Empire as a unique evil whose blood-guilt is only to be expiated through the dispersal of museum collections is a manner of inverted narcissism, which instead of viewing other societies as objects of fascination and study in themselves, views them solely through the prism of colonial conquest. Hicks’ aim, “to redefine [ethnographic museums] as public spaces, sites of conscience, in which to face up to the ultraviolence of Britain’s colonial past in Africa, and its enduring nature” is, itself, a double form of cultural colonialism. First, by emphasising the Victorian conqueror as the prime agent of history, the prism through which all other societies must be understood as passive victims, and second, in a worldview made explicit by Hicks’ then-modish expressions of fealty to the Black Lives Matter movement, through suborning the complex and ambiguous record of European imperialism to the culturally-specific racial politics of the contemporary United States. Hicks condemns his Victorian antecedents for “the claim — to which archaeologists and anthropologists were called as witness, as judge and as jury… of scientific proof that there could be no civilisation outside of white Euro-America”, quite unaware that he is replicating the process, having only updated their civilising fervour for that of today’s dominant empire.

Even before his resignation last week, the British Museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, struggled to reconcile the institution’s African collections with the mores of contemporary progressivism. Despite his genuflection to Black Lives Matter during the moral fervour of 2020, insisting the British Museum “has done a lot of work – accelerated and enlarged its work on its own history, the history of empire, the history of colonialism, and also of slavery” and is “aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere”, Fischer maintained that “‘the collections have to be preserved as a whole”. Yet at heart, the beliefs encoded within contemporary postcolonial discourse strike at the very essence of cross-cultural understanding at all:  the great age of the ethnographic museum is already past, struck dead by the racialised identity politics of our own imperial master.

Echoing these irreconcilable tensions, Kuper’s book ends on a desperate plea for “a Cosmopolitan Museum, one that tran­scends ethnic and national identities, makes comparisons, draws out connections, tracks exchanges across political frontiers, challenges boundaries: a museum set in the shifting sands of the past and the present but which is informed by rigorous, critical, independent scholarship”. It may be an attractive vision, but that world is already past, lost in the romantic, essentialising tide of ethnic self-regard that Americanised progressivism has bafflingly revived, whose historical course we are only beginning to chart. Kuper’s now-archaic cosmopolitanism, which appears conservative to contemporary mores, only highlights that conservatism is merely yesterday’s liberalism.

For all the British Museum stakes its claim to possession of the Benin Bronzes as artworks of shared humanity, it is the rightfulness of ethnic ownership that now strikes the contemporary observer as natural and just, perhaps correctly. The ethnographic museum is itself an artefact of a lost culture, like the Pitt Rivers’ occluded shrunken heads — an exotic curio of a society and worldview that no longer exists. “Are certain kinds of knowledge encoded in racial memory?” Kuper asks rhetorically, certain that any right-thinking person will disagree. Surveying the discourse of the moment, and the unstable definitions of indigeneity whose full consequences are yet to reveal themselves politically, the answer must be that that is indeed the spirit of the age. Now the chips must fall as they will, even if the results will surely not be those for which progressives dream.

Augé’s best-selling book kicks off by imagining the experience of Pierre Dupont as he drives to Roissy airport, parks, goes through security, boards his flight and reads a magazine. His experience is far smoother than mine was: “He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted … by the certainty that, now he was ‘sorted out’, his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.” Dupont flicks through ads for hotels and reads a book review that contemplates “the homogenization of needs and consumption patterns”. This is supermodernity: a globalised, homogenised, economy in which the same experiences and products are replicated in far-flung geographic locations.

It’s an unusual technique for scholarly writing. But Augé’s willingness to engage in make-believe in this way allows him to draw the general reader into what could have been an alarmingly theoretical essay on the state of anthropology.

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Because French, and philosophically inclined, Augé, who died last month, is often lazily bracketed with the Derrida and Foucault and the like. But he was first and foremost a practitioner. He began his career with field studies of the Alladian cultures of the Ivory Coast, writing books about power, death, symbols — key touchstones of anthropology. And though French scholarship after the student protests of 1968 was marked by radicalism, Augé comes across as a genial thinker: political without being ideological, keen to build bridges in the Francophone academy at a time of upheaval.

Augé was keen to explain how the transformations of the contemporary world had made anthropology more complicated. “We are in an era characterized by changes of scale,” he wrote. “Images of all sorts, relayed by satellites and caught by the aerials that bristle on the roofs of our remotest hamlets, can give us an instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event taking place on the other side of the planet.” So far, so postmodern; what Augé called the “acceleration” of events is an idea that crops up repeatedly in political theory. The specifically supermodern condition that he identifies is the dominance of non-places.

We live in “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions” — from “hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps”. In non-places, exchange between human beings is transactional: you buy a sandwich, or a massage, or a train ticket. Speech is replaced by text; signs direct behaviour, instead of people, giving instructions and advertising products. We are, therefore, isolated, in “a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others”.

Anthropology has traditionally been interested in circumscribed places, the best example being the island, which allows one to consider a culture in its entirety; but non-places offer the opportunity to study a kind of psychic isolation. This “world thus surrendered to solitary individuality … offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object”.

The implications of the rise of these non-places are many and varied. For instance, access to the sort of anonymity they allow is granted only if we provide evidence of our individuality, in the form of identification documents; Augé foresaw that supermodernity would increasingly require us to prove who we are. He also goes so far as to speculate that non-places are terrorist targets not only for practical reasons, but also because they refuse the very idea of the historical territories that nationalist causes wish to restore.

Augé suggests, though, that we shouldn’t simply surrender to their ambiguous charms and to the seductive “feeling of freedom” they offer. Instead of giving in to the temptation to be passive, he suggests we can preserve our humanity through activity — observing, recording, storytelling. In this pursuit, he has influential fellow travellers. Take, for example, the writer Iain Sinclair, whose practice is psychogeography, which both examines and tries to subvert the behaviours produced by urban space; he was interested in precisely the kinds of non-places Augé identified — car parks and industrial estates. London Orbital, a book tracking a motorway, routed him through the Heathrow suburbs. Where Augé is an anthropologist with a poet’s touch, Sinclair is the opposite; he has the eye of an anthropologist but his project is that of an avant-garde poet, imagining afresh these overlooked zones.

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The attention Augé paid to the airport also aligns him with J.G. Ballard, who Sinclair visited in Shepperton on his orbital walk. Ballard’s 1997 essay on airports for Blueprint magazine comes across as a piece of rogue anthropology. “We are no longer citizens with civic obligations,” he writes, “but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open.” The airport is perhaps the ultimate non-place, a “discontinuous city, whose vast populations … are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.” Happy because, as Augé pointed out, anonymity can be a liberation; airports, because so familiar, provide a sense of being at home when far away.

Yet what at one moment can be experienced as liberation and comfort can, in another, become boredom and oppression. The non-place is double-edged. But supermodern life inevitably channels us into these non-places: we have no choice but to enter. We therefore need to learn how to endure them.

Augé, in search of guidance on how to do so, inclines towards the Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau, who in fact first used the term non-place. In his enduringly wonderful The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau draws a distinction between the “strategies” used by institutions to control our behaviour public places — city-planning, for example — and the “tactics” employed by ordinary people to resist that control — such as climbing a high building to enjoy the view. Certeau’s book has become a kind of manual, which guides us towards imagining our own tactics, whether it be walking against the arrows on the floor of Ikea or pulling up our trousers to paddle in a fountain.

Non-places is an analysis rather than a manual, but it is clearly much inspired by de Certeau’s emphasis on the “itinerary”, the individual journey. To chart a path through non-places, we must become supermodern flaneurs. But above all, Augé argues for restoring a social element to places that impose upon us solitariness. Talking to strangers may be the best way to push against the dehumanising effects of supermodernity. Pleading with airport officials using words rather than glares may be the way to reassert agency in a non-place that would rob us of it.

Women, as they see it, are losing in our overly casualised, hook-up-oriented sexual marketplace because it is not how natural selection meant us to be. We were sold a lie that promiscuity was empowering, and we have come up against the constraints of an evolved psychology that tells us to lock down a man and have a baby. As a result, women are single, childless and unhappy. The solution? Variations on abandoning contraception, practising abstinence, embracing marriage and prioritising traditional family structures. The illiberalism of “there are no differences between men and women” is met with the illiberalism of “these differences are insurmountable”.

The evolutionary logic behind human behavioural sex differences, first theorised by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1972, goes like this: because men can hypothetically father as many children as women they could sleep with, whereas women are limited in the maximum number of children they can have, men have evolved to be promiscuous, competing among themselves for a limited number of women. It also led men to become jealous, and in some instances violent, to avoid being cuckolded.

Women, by contrast, who are at risk of being left holding a demanding and vulnerable baby, have evolved to be picky and to prefer monogamy. This package of behaviours is sometimes called “sociosexuality” (high = promiscuous, low = chaste), and is borne out by our experience that men tend to desire more sexual partners and seek out casual sex to a greater degree than women.

But then we get to the question of the size of this difference — and in a debate about the sexual revolution, size matters. Is the disparity really that big? Is it even biological? Or does it vary between cultures?

In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Feminism Against Progress, Louise Perry and Mary Harrington both lean on Trivers’s theory, with Perry citing research that shows large sex differences in sociosexuality across 48 countries. The study, carried out in 2005 by a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois, asked university students how many sexual partners they had had in the last year, how many of these were one-night stands, and whether they thought sex without love was acceptable, among other things. Putting aside that the sex lives of students are wholly unrepresentative of the general population and are unlikely to reflect how older individuals approach sex, and, in the words of the author of the research himself, that to extrapolate from this data to populations as a whole “would be inappropriate”, the research also showed that the sociosexuality gap varied a lot between these same 48 modern states, narrowing considerably in more gender-equal countries. If you keep in mind that men tend to overstate their promiscuity while women tend to understate theirs, then these differences are likely to get significantly smaller. They will still exist, but presenting them as entirely biologically caused, universally large and culturally invariable is a misleading first step in a logic that is defeatist about social change. If we were to look a little wider, outside of our rich and industrialised countries, we would find that the story of male and female sexuality gets a lot more complicated.

Consider the following statement: “I don’t like it when her boyfriend is here in the morning when I come back from being away.” This line might seem plucked from a conversation about sexual jealousy in a polyamorous chatroom, but in fact it comes from a Himba man, a semi-nomadic pastoralist group from Northwest Namibia.

With an estimated population of 50,000, the Himba still “marry”, in the sense that there are socially recognised unions between two or more individuals. There is also widespread acceptance of infidelity for men and women, leading to the highest rate of extra-marital children ever recorded, with 48% of all children fathered by someone other than the husband. It’s no secret when this happens, and parents tend to know with high accuracy whose child is whose. Moreover, Himba men place great value on being good fathers, even when they suspect the child is not biologically theirs. Jealousy still exists, as the above quote demonstrates, as does violence, and there is a degree of informal concealment around these affairs: to reduce the risk of run-ins, husbands are expected not to come home if they are out after dark, while lovers should leave before they hear the roosters crowing.

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The Himba are an extreme example, but stories of relationship fluidity and female promiscuity crop up again and again in the anthropological record. As Paul Riesman has observed, among the Fulani of West Africa, a man knows that a woman has lovers and that “if he is away, whether on a trip… or out looking for women himself, ineluctably his wife will have visitors and that it depends on her wishes alone whether she will go into the bush with them or not”. Meanwhile, many lowland indigenous populations of South America believe in partible paternity, whereby multiple men “contribute” semen to the gestation of a child, leading to most children having several fathers. In the Maqu region of Tibet, trial marriage is practised, where men and women live together before formal marriage, and prior to this cohabitation, may have multiple sexual partners. For the Mosuo and Zhaba farmers of China, husband and wife don’t ever cohabit, instead practising a “walking” marriage in which husbands visit at night, and help raise their sisters’ children during the day. In many traditional hunter-gatherer societies, the environment in which we have spent most of our evolutionary history, there is little stopping lovers from wandering into the forest together.

These examples are not meant to disprove the “naturalness” of long-term monogamous relationships, nor are they “better” ways of being. Many of them are also evidence of the essential existence of “pair bonding” in human relationships, where most individuals do form long-term monogamous relationships. But what they are meant to disprove is a notion of women as inherently chaste and of men as inherently promiscuous. If the elaborate cultural constraints and shame we usually put on women’s sexual behaviour are proof of anything, it is that, without them, women will, and often do, engage in promiscuous behaviour. If the predominance of pair-bonding in humans is proof of anything, it is that men will, and often do, stick around to raise the kids.

But are these examples, interesting as they are, relevant to those of us who departed down a different cultural route a long time ago? Well, is Tibetan “trial marriage” so different from a young couple living together but deciding to part ways? Is a Himba father investing in children he knows are not his, so different from the love and care that many receive from stepparents? Is Donald Trump marrying three times, albeit consecutively, so different from a rich polygamous pastoralist having three wives? We may no longer legally allow polygamous marriage, but the evolutionary nuts and bolts of having a man rich enough that he is able to support multiple wives and children is the same whether it is Trump or a Kipsigi man. We may not require that a man raises a stepchild under his own name like the Himba, but we would still expect him to treat them with kindness and care. There are, of course, still differences, but they are differences of degree, not kind, and much like the gaps in sociosexuality, they are often considered to be larger than they are.

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So, what are the commonalities among the environments in which we find the Himba, the Maqu, the Mosuo, the Fulani, one of the 53 South American societies with partible paternity beliefs, or indeed our own society, where sexual behaviour is more relaxed, where women are freer, and where children are still raised to become happy and healthy adults? Often, women live close to their extended family members, who can help her raise her children and come to her defence if mistreated. Women inherit, and they also control some means of wealth generation. Most crucially, women are less dependent on their husband.

It is in these situations where research has shown that male jealousy is lower, as men are less concerned with becoming a “cuck” whose resources are unwittingly going to non-biological children, since wealth is instead passed through women. As Perry and Harrington note, this does weaken marriage bonds, because both men and women are able to walk away more easily. But compare this with societies where men control all the wealth, or where women make a lesser contribution to the economy, and male jealousy becomes high, the sexual culture less permissive, and strict controls emerge over women’s behaviour as paternity once again becomes an issue. Socially imposed monogamous marriage did not emerge in the West because it was better for society (though it might well be), as Perry states. It emerged to protect the wealth of a man being inherited by a non-biological son. Virginity and chasteness became highly valued, and women traded their promiscuity in exchange for their sons to be the sole heirs of a man’s estate, for they had no estate of their own.

Despite this, many “feminists” today propose solutions that would return women to once again being highly reliant on husbands. “Get married and do your best to stay married” is Perry’s parting advice. Harrington tells us to reject the contraceptive pill. Both propose that women wait to have sex, possibly until after marriage. “There was a wisdom to the traditional model in which the father was primarily responsible for earning money while the mother was primarily responsible for caring for children at home,” Perry states. All of these solutions are aimed at controlling the two male evolutionary strategies that Perry describes — cad and dad — as by being chaste you force men to make themselves marriageable. Yet, she denies women the same multitude of sexual strategies, instead reducing the female evolutionary story to a battlefield of male-on-male competition where our only active role is one of containing male promiscuity.

But can any of this tell us how to live? I’m not convinced. Natural selection doesn’t care much for your long-term happiness and doesn’t provide us with the means to build a moral and sexual ethics. The dissatisfaction individuals express about our contemporary sexual culture is more complicated and individualised than the sweeping conclusions provided by evolutionary theory. We should acknowledge that weakening monogamy leaves some women vulnerable, particularly if they cannot replace support from husbands with family or the state; just as we should also acknowledge that reinstating a forceful emphasis on monogamous marriage with sexual divisions of labour would limit women’s freedom. What we should not do, however, is use evolutionary theory to make superficially convincing narratives of gender stereotypes, which are a distraction, and do a disservice to the multitude of ways that humans can and have evolved to live.

What distinguishes us from other animals is the diversity in how we live. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul. While so much modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it is in fact the variation within our species that defines us as a big-brained species. Rats live rather similar lives, regardless of where they are born, because they are driven by their inborn instincts. But rather than being led by genetically programmed impulses, we use constructed tools, whether literal or figurative, to survive and thrive. And those tools are what comprise a place’s culture.

Your definition of culture might be different from an anthropologist’s. In his book of essays, The Interpretations of Culture, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that a human being is imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but generally ends up “having lived only one”. That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into. “As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This,” writes Geertz, “is what we have in common.” Oddly enough, many of our subjects express this more clearly than we anthropologists. In Java, Geertz points out, the people quite flatly say: “To be human is to be Javanese.”

What anthropologists seek is not that different from what most people say they want to get out of travel: an understanding of a place. But most travellers’ grasp of culture is what Geertz calls a “thin description”. A listing of the foods, faiths, clothes, and customs that make it unique. For tourists, understanding a place is about figuring out what you need to do to “pass for a native”. That is, to know enough of the language, styles of dress and etiquette to be able to spend time in Lima without causing offence out of ignorance.

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How narcissism killed the tourist

By Lucy Lethbridge

While culture, to Geertz, does encompass the surface-level rules that “guide behaviour”, to him they aren’t nearly as interesting or meaningful as what lies beneath. Culture, he writes, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. In other words, culture is about why we think we are here, and why we think it’s worth being here. Where the “thin description” asks “how do you live?”, the “thick description” asks: “Why do you live?”

That different cultures, and different places, have different answers to that question shows the depth of human adaptability. It is those differences that fascinate me as a traveller. For me, to travel is to learn how to be human, by observing the variety of ways you can be human.

Most of what passes as travel these days, though, is “thin travel”. It’s about selling an experience of a place, staging a version of its culture. The travel industry proffers package dinners, where you can drink traditional liquors, eat traditional food, watch traditional dances. If there is any meaning there, it’s buried so far beneath the glitz that it’s dead. Meaning isn’t staged. It is so interwoven into one’s sense of self that it’s often unacknowledged, like the water a fish swims in, or the air you breathe.

Every city has a tourist district, which bundles up a culture and puts it in one, easy-to-find, safe area full of quaint shops. These places are the hallmarks of “thin travel”. Sure, you are in Hanoi. Sure, the people here are Vietnamese. But they are not living their true life. They are performing, mostly as a job. Their intention might well be to educate people about their culture. But thick travel is about getting away from performances, and into neighbourhoods where people are going about their lives. People who aren’t trying to teach or sell you something.

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So, how do you travel in a way that allows you to understand a place’s meaning, as best you can, rather than travelling just to see its surface? Thick travel isn’t about intensity, or danger, or going to extremes; it is about seeking the normal, and often the banal. In ordinary places, people are in their default mode, and it is their default mode that people are most “genuine” to their culture. That is why, when I’m in a new place, I try to become a regular in a few average places. Not to blend in, but to let others blend out, by being themselves.

Taking risks, entering sacred or profane spaces against the wishes of residents, or going to the place with the most X or the least Y, isn’t necessarily thick travel. It’s not about trying to play-act as a native, or putting another check on a list of crazy things you’ve done for clout. It’s not about eating the weirdest dish served in that one restaurant highlighted by that guy on the travel channel, but about eating what’s most commonly eaten. It’s about going to 7-11s in the middle-class neighbourhoods of Taipei for breakfast.

Thick travel might not require hours of YouTube research, but it does require time. On my travel blog, I have a bad habit of posting my first thoughts on a place, after three or four days of walking it. I did that in Taipei, writing: “Taipei in many ways is like Seoul. Both have grown quickly, become relatively wealthy, and in the process jumped headlong into materialism while shedding a lot of their traditional culture.”

While that’s partly true, it’s also a “thin description”, because as I learned, after spending two more weeks in the city, religious traditions are central to Taiwanese culture, to people young and old. My epiphany came in a midtown temple. I was only there grudgingly, because I couldn’t book an earlier flight back home (something I had tried to do based on my first impressions).

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I entered the temple at the same time as a young man, a guy who on the surface seemed pretty secular. He was dressed like a kid from a western MTV video, with baggy clothes and a bucket hat. He had three tattoos on his forearms — a pile of US dollars, brass knuckles, and the Mercedes Benz logo. I watched him, figuring cynically that he was there for something other than the rituals. But no, he quickly took off his hat, then slowly worked his way around the circuit of altars and statues, performing all the ritual steps with the upmost reverence. The only scepticism was mine, and it quickly faded.

Faith plays a different role in Taiwan than in Western cultures. That’s not a value judgement, or even an “othering”. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz. The clearer your picture of another culture, the more rational it seems, while also remaining unique. That is, the teenager in a bucket hat going to the temple to do his daily rituals is, at both at a thick and thin level, very different from a young man in Lima going to the cathedral, but both are being very human. They are both seeking meaning, not through their animal impulses, but through their traditions.

Once you see how a thick description of culture provides people with meaning, you also see how lost we would be without it. “The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacity means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete,” wrote Geertz. It is “a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions”. Or, to quote the philosopher Suzanne Langer: “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.”

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

I spent over 10 years documenting poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the US. Now, I am walking around the world, writing dispatches. But my current project is not that different from my last one. My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

A version of this essay first appeared on Chris Arnade Walks The World.

Critical theory was born in Germany between the two world wars. It was founded by a clique of Marxist academics in Frankfurt who were horrified that the grand march toward the communist utopia predicted by Marx wasn’t happening on schedule. On the one hand, communism in the Soviet Union had devolved into a totalitarian nightmare with a reliable habit of mass murder. On the other, the working people of one of the most educated and cultured nations of Europe, who according to Marxist theory should have been flocking to the banners of proletarian revolution, were instead rallying around a weird little man with a toothbrush moustache and an unhealthy obsession with an archaic, bloodthirsty mysticism of race and soil.

Obviously, something had gone wrong, not just with Marxism but with the entire enterprise of Western rationality summed up in the phrase “the Enlightenment”. Consider what that phrase means for a moment. One of the basic credos of the cultural mainstream in Western countries is the rather odd notion that, at a certain point not that many centuries ago, for the very first time in human history, intellectuals in Western Europe saw the universe as it actually is. Before then, despite fumbling attempts in the right direction by ancient Greek philosophers, humanity was hopelessly mired in superstitious ignorance; afterwards, Western intellectuals led a rapid ascent towards true knowledge of humanity and the universe. People still speak of that period using such far-from-neutral terms as “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment”; in Germany, the term is die Aufklärung, literally “the Clearing-Off”.

It is to the credit of the founders of critical theory — Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — that they didn’t just go on believing in the secular mythology of progress. They grasped that the Enlightenment had failed to accomplish what everyone expected of it, and they set out to understand what had gone wrong. Since they were Marxists, of course, they still framed things in terms of the march toward a utopian society of the future, and critical theory thus set out not just to understand society but to change it. It sought, in Horkheimer’s words, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” — but it tried to do that by understanding the entire panoply of reasons why those circumstances happen to exist at a given place and time.

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This is what makes critical theory useful. Treat a belief as though it’s timeless and context-free and all you can do is accept or reject it; recognise that every belief has a history and a cultural context and you can understand it instead. Critical theory attempts to do this with the core beliefs of Western society. The first major book to come out of the movement, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, sought to make sense of the way that Enlightenment rationalism had led to the twin tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. It’s still worth reading today, even though much of what passes for critical theory now is little more than empty propaganda.

In the opening lines of his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound wrote: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, or a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man, or say ‘founder,’ to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom is it blamed.” Similarly today, in circles unsympathetic to what critical theory has become, it is common to assail Adorno, Benjamin, et al., because of the current antics of their followers. This is unfair. The founders of critical theory did in fact make a massive mistake, but it’s one that pretty much everyone made in those days and too many people still make today.

That mistake? The failure to recognise that the academic circles to which Adorno and Benjamin belonged — and to which their followers by and large belong today — form a privileged class with an interest in furthering its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege. Critical theory by and large avoids talking about this. A genuine critical race theory would interrogate the discourses concerning race used by Left-wing activists in today’s society, and show how those discourses are used as instruments of hegemony by those activists and the people who pay them. A genuine critical theory would also interrogate the implications of “liberating human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and talk about how that rhetoric of liberation is used to replace one set of enslaving circumstances with another. You can read a whole lot of critical theory and never catch the least whisper of this sort of thinking.

This is what makes Jason Josephson-Storm’s work so fascinating. He tiptoes very close to the edge of that forbidden territory, by suggesting that one of the most fundamental assumptions of modern thought — the notion that we modern people are disenchanted, freed from the superstitious burdens of the past and venturing heroically forward into a new world free of myth and magic — is simply another myth. He has applied the tools of critical theory to one of the basic assumptions underlying critical theory, and showed that belief in disenchantment is just another narrative employed to advantage certain people over others. It is an impressive project.

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One of Josephson-Storm’s greatest influences, a scholar he frequently cites, did much the same thing on a bigger scale and to an even more vulnerable set of narratives. This is Bruno Latour, one of the first scholars to study “the social construction of scientific facts”. What does this mean? Well, it’s part of the mythology of science that claims that scientists in their research are simply following where nature leads. In practice, it’s very nearly the other way around.

Consider the steps you’d need to take if you wanted to do some research into any branch of science: reading the relevant literature, crafting a hypothesis, considering the available equipment, designing an experiment, and, of course, finding funding for it. It’s common for such steps to be dismissed as mere details, but in fact they are more significant than that.

For instance, the literature you’ve read is the product of peer review and the evolution of scientific opinion, which has at least as much to do with academic politics as with nature. The hypothesis is a product of your education, and also of current fashions in academia (anyone who thinks that scientists are immune to the blandishments of intellectual fashion has never met a scientist). The equipment available depends on who has invested money into developing certain kinds of experimental gear, and also on what gear is popular and readily available. The experimental design is just as subject to fashion, and it also has to appeal to funding sources. And finally, the decision to grant or withhold funding for an experiment depends entirely on the behaviour of human beings.

On top of this, after conducting an experiment, you’d have to interpret the results, write a paper, get a prestigious co-author or two to sign on, submit it to a journal, wait nervously while it goes through the peer-review process, and revise the paper at least once in response to comments by the anonymous peer reviewers. Then, once the paper is finally published, other researchers will respond to it and potentially adapt their own research projects in light of what you’ve found. All these, again, are social processes.

The end result of such a research project — a half sentence and footnote, say, in some future textbook — is thus almost entirely a product of social interactions among human beings. At the centre of those interactions, the flake of grit at the heart of the pearl, is the fact that you asked nature a specific question and got an equally specific answer. That process of question and answer is the thing that makes science as effective a way of making sense of the world as it is, but it does not erase the effect of social processes on the result — it just means that the result has to have some contact somewhere with nature.

Now take that and multiply it by four centuries or so of scientific effort, and the result is a vast social process built atop a relatively narrow foundation of natural facts. Those facts are carefully selected, curated, and assembled by the social process into a model of the world. Ask different questions, use different equipment, give the results a different theoretical spin, and you can quite easily end up with a completely different model of the world. That’s not something most people want to talk about in the scientific community, because it would weaken their claims to influence, wealth and privilege. That’s why so many scientists were shouting “Believe the science!” at the tops of their lungs not so long ago: maintaining the cultural prestige of science, and thus their own social status and its perks, took precedence over nearly everything else.

If you want another glimpse at just how far the social enterprise of science veers from its imagined ideal, look up the phrase “replication crisis”. One of the essential principles of science is that any scientifically valid finding has to be replicable; it can’t be some kind of fluke. These days, for an astounding number of studies in a very wide range of sciences, that’s no longer true. Very few people in the sciences want to talk about how much of this is caused by experimental and statistical fraud, both of which are pervasive in those branches of science where corporate profits are involved and far from rare even in less lucrative fields of research.

If science were really a matter of following nature wherever it leads, the emergence of the replication crisis would have caused a sudden, frantic search for the causes. We’re talking, after all, about something that challenges the act of faith at the centre of the scientific enterprise. By and large, though, that search hasn’t happened. Instead, scientists have chosen either to ignore the problem or to denounce anyone who dares to draw attention to it — typical behaviour of any elite group faced with a challenge to their legitimacy.

This is the kind of thing Bruno Latour wrote about. In We Have Never Been Modern, he proposed that most people are convinced, or at least act as though they’re convinced, that the modern world is something new and unique in human history because, unlike all others, our sciences really do tell us the objective truth about nature. These people also appear to be convinced that the same thing is true of everything else in our culture.

This is the heart of modernity — the conviction that keeps people today from making use of any of the hard-won lessons of past civilisations, or even learning from our own civilisation’s catastrophic mistakes. It is a fond, false, foolish belief — and Latour and Josephson-Storm have both shown that it can’t be justified except by the most absurd sorts of special pleading and circular logic.

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What does it mean if we give up the myth of modernity, the conviction that we — alone of all the human beings who have ever lived — see the world truly? Surprisingly enough, we don’t have to give up science. That our scientific worldview is not given by nature, but assembled out of data points drawn from nature, does not make science meaningless or false. It simply makes the work of the scientist a product of human society and culture, rather than a revelation handed down from on high.

In a very real sense, science stripped of the myth of modernity takes on the same shape as the study of history. It is absurd to think that history is simply an account of what happened; “what happened” in a month in any small town would fill entire libraries. The historian’s task is to craft a narrative which illuminates some part of the past, using actual incidents as building blocks. A scientist without modernist pretensions, similarly, crafts a narrative that illuminates some part of nature, using replicable experimental results as building blocks. Theories along these lines are useful rather than true; they start by accepting the reality that the human mind is not complex enough to understand the infinite sweep of the cosmos, and then goes on to say, “but as far as we are capable of making sense of things, this story seems to reflect what happens”.

This sort of thinking is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow for those who have founded their own identities on the notion that humanity is or should be the conqueror of nature. Here again, though, the failure of those notions to create a world fit for human habitation is increasingly clear to many of us. And the sooner we accept that the stories told by today’s industrial societies are just another set of mythologies, and that the technologies they’ve created to manipulate the world are just another set of clever gimmicks — why, the sooner we can get to work discarding those aspects of modernity that have failed abjectly, and picking up those older habits and stories and technologies that are better suited to the world we find ourselves facing. Only then, can we begin to do something less inept and foredoomed with our time on Earth.

While such animus is out of step with mainstream opinion, it’s clear that the coronation has lost its romance and even its meaning among much of the wider public. Two-thirds of respondents tell YouGov pollsters that they either don’t care very much or don’t care at all about the ceremony. Only 9% of Britons said they care “a great deal”, and that cohort tends elderly.

Modern Britons may well ask: why do we find ourselves locked into a ritual — a religious ritual, to be precise — inherited from the ancient past? Even if some share the Christian faith that underpins rituals like the coronation, can’t they practise that faith privately, without the need for a solemn, state-sanctioned ceremony involving bishops, priests, crowns, sceptres, and holy oils? Why do we need public ritual at all?

All this is a tragedy, because old rituals like the coronation can play a deeply salutary — and even progressive — role in societies otherwise wracked by modern capitalism’s cruel, arbitrary hierarchies. We human beings do all sorts of things that have no functional value in themselves but that help us communicate symbolically. We shake hands. We exchange rings. We are wired, it seems, for ritual: a pattern of words and actions characterised by formality, rigidity, and repetition. The closest analogous human behaviour, according to many anthropologists, is children’s games.

In the middle of the last century, a husband-and-wife team of British anthropologists travelled to Africa in an attempt to scientifically understand the ritual process. Specifically, they sought the meaning of religious rites among traditional tribes; ultimately, it awakened them to the indispensability of ritual for decent societies.

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Victor Witter Turner was born in 1920 in Glasgow. As a teenager, under the tutelage of an Anglican priest, he was drawn to mystical traditions. But by the time “Vic” entered university and married, he had become a card-carrying Communist. His wife, “Edie”, had also embraced Marxism early on, because it was a worldview “wrung clean of religion”.

In the late Forties, the couple discovered Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in a public library. It inspired Vic to study anthropology: he was thrilled by the thought of living hand-to-mouth in remote places, and drawn, too, to the “neat social systems among indigenous islanders” that seemed to exist “like an organism with its own social structural laws”. He worked under Max Gluckman, the legendary leader of the structural anthropology movement based at the University of Manchester, who dispatched Vic to central Africa to study “chieftainship politics”.

Ritual, of course, was central to defining the individual’s roles within the “neat social systems” in which he was interested. For example, many tribal peoples mark the passage from childhood to adulthood with highly elaborate rites, whereas in the modern West, childhood often merges imperceptibly with adulthood, leaving it to each individual to figure out what it means to “come of age”.

Many anthropologists then dismissed tribal ritual as the unintelligible mumbo-jumbo of a “simpler” people. But in 1951, Gluckman sent Vic a telegram urging him to switch to researching the religious practises of the Ndembu people of south central Africa. Edie came along. The Turners’ time among the Ndembu convinced them that such supercilious attitudes were false. “In matters of ritual as of art,” Vic would write years later in his seminal 1969 text, The Ritual Process, “there are no ‘simpler’ peoples, only peoples with simpler technologies than our own. Man’s imaginative and emotional life is always and everywhere rich and complex.”

Zambia, where the Turners encountered the people, was then a British colony known as Northern Rhodesia. Nevertheless, the Ndembu welcomed the foreign couple’s attempts to understand their rituals, even inviting them to participate. The Turners studied the Isoma, a rite that treated women suffering from infertility. The central action of the ritual involved the afflicted woman and her husband walking in the nude several times between two holes, one identified as “cold” and the other “hot”, representing both the grave and the birth canal. In this way, the ritual reconciled the once-warring communities of the living and the dead.

The Dutch-German anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, whose ideas the Turners borrowed, taught that every rite involves three stages. First, a separation, when the subjects are removed from the social structure. Next, the liminal stage, when the subjects become indeterminate, ambiguous, outcast even: during the core action of the Isoma, the afflicted couple no longer occupy their symbolic roles as husband and wife; their nakedness signifies that they are more like new-borns, or the dead. Finally, there is a reaggregation, when the subjects return to the social structure, either in a new condition — a boy emerges as a man after the extreme trials of the coming-of-age ritual — or merely restored to their prior condition — the afflicted couple now “healed” by Isoma.

The Turners focused their analysis on the middle stage. As Vic explained, liminal beings “are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial”. To become liminal is to assume a transcendent vulnerability; it is the condition of Christ on the Cross. The humiliation of the liminal subject, for the Turners, fostered communitas, a state apart from the structured hierarchies we inhabit most of our lives. Communitas, a primordial state beyond rank and class, reminds us that the high and mighty have their status only in relation to the low, and “he who is high must experience what it is like to be low”.

Before he assumed power, a Ndembu chieftain had to undergo ritual humiliation at the hands of a mythic figure known as the Kafwana; coded female, she was associated with the land and the people who tilled it, those who weren’t politically or militarily strong but who nevertheless possessed a sacral power. Among other things, the chieftain-to-be had to absorb a barrage of insults and criticisms from other villagers; once installed, he didn’t dare hold it against the people. In this way, the religious ritual taught the chieftain that he was first and foremost a servant.

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By humbling himself, and dispensing with his normal privileges, the one undergoing the ritual must recognises what Vic called “humankindness”: “a generic bond between men.” Without it, the hierarchical community has no qualms about excluding and even destroying the weak. Far from locking people into the past, then, ritual allows them to confront present and future challenges. Ritual, in this telling, humanises societies.

On the surface, the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla is about as distant as can be from the chieftainship ritual of the Ndembu people. But the rite’s underlying structures are are shockingly similar. The Anglican ceremonial adds several layers of Christian symbolism, not to mention genteel ornamentation — all of which softens the liminal humiliation of the king-to-be and his bride — but the fundamental process is the same.

First, there is the separation of the ritual subjects — Charles and Camilla — from humdrum British reality. This is marked by their carriage ride to Westminster Abbey. Next comes the liminal stage, where Charles’s face is literally covered by Anglican churchmen, using a canopy of golden cloth, known as the anointing screen. The covering shields the most sacred element of the ritual from prying eyes, but it also means that Charles is erased as an individual.

The core action of the liminal stage is the anointing of king’s hands, breast, and head with oil. In the Bible, such oils are the mark of the self-sacrificing King of Kings: Jesus is anointed before he is to undergo his passion, death, and burial. Once the screen is removed, the anointed king will kneel at the high altar while the archbishop recalls how “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God … was anointed with the Oil of gladness above his fellows.” Thus Charles, as a Christian statesman, is united with the sacrifice of Christ. He is giving up something, trading his personality for that of the sovereign, dutybound to serve the commonweal.

Finally, there is Charles’s reaggregation: he re-enters society with elevated status, symbolised by the crown and sceptre. But again, this occurs only after he has ritually identified himself with society’s victims — indeed, with the anointed Victim. All this marks him out as the servant-ruler of the British people, rather than merely a king.

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Today’s economic hierarchies tell the winners that they owe their status to no one and nothing but their own “meritocratic” efforts. This isn’t, in fact, true: study after study demonstrates that social mobility has stalled, especially in the Anglosphere. But it makes for particularly obnoxious elites: if they owe their status to no one, then they also have no obligations to society’s losers. Against such a backdrop, Britain’s traditional monarchic rituals, not least the coronation, are a very different, and much-needed, account of what the high owes the low.

When we glimpse the communitas lying beyond everyday structures — when we leave behind profane everyday reality to play the solemn, cosmic game of ritual — we are possessed by a vision of what society could or should look like. Here, the mighty chieftain submits to the lowly Kafwana. Here, the omnipotent Son of God consents to be humiliated. And His Majesty the King consents to follow the mortified god-man, even into the tomb.