39 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Keegan's major theoretical work — a comparative cultural history of warfare that challenges Clausewitz's definition of war as politics by other means.
James C. Scott's 2017 revisionist history of early state formation — arguing that the first states emerged not from voluntary settlement but from coercion, that they were fragile and often collapsed, and that the peoples who avoided state incorporation were often doing so deliberately.
French anthropologist who applied structural linguistics to kinship, myth, and culture — founding structural anthropology and becoming one of the dominant intellectual figures of 20th-century France.
American cultural anthropologist who developed interpretive anthropology — arguing that culture should be read as a text and that the goal of anthropology is thick description: rich contextual interpretation.
American linguist who lived among the Pirahã people of the Amazon for decades and argued that Pirahã language lacks recursion — challenging Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis.
American anarchist anthropologist who wrote Debt: The First 5,000 Years — a radical reinterpretation of the history of money and credit — and was an organizer of Occupy Wall Street.
Wundt's account of cultural or folk psychology — his attempt to understand the higher mental processes (language, myth, religion, social customs) that cannot be studied in the laboratory.
French demographer and historian who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in 1976 (La Chute finale) based on infant mortality data — and who developed a theory that family structures (nuclear family, stem family, communal family) determine political ideologies — explaining why communism took hold in Russia and China but not in England.
American cultural anthropologist — author of The Denial of Death (1974) — which won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously two months after Becker died of cancer — who argued that all human culture is a death-denial mechanism.
British-Czech philosopher and social theorist who wrote Nations and Nationalism — a structural account of nationalism as a product of industrialization — and was a leading critic of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
British-American anthropologist and cyberneticist who developed the double bind theory of schizophrenia and one of the most integrative theories of mind, ecology, and communication.
Jared Diamond's geographic-deterministic explanation for the global distribution of power — answering 'Yali's question': why do some peoples have so much cargo and others so little?
Jared Diamond's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning account — arguing that Eurasian civilizations came to dominate the world because of geographic advantages (domesticable crops and animals, east-west axis allowing diffusion, resulting crowd disease immunity) not racial superiority — the foundational text of big history.
American-Israeli Jungian analyst and medical anthropologist at Tel Aviv Medical School who writes on ritual, brothers, and the Jungian dimensions of Jewish culture — contributing to the Jungian analysis of religious and cultural anthropology.
American anthropologist at Macalester College who wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World — arguing that Genghis Khan's empire created the modern world through free trade, meritocracy, religious tolerance, and the first global trade network.
American political scientist who has written the most important critiques of state power and modernist schemes of improvement — from the perspective of the people they affect.
American scientist and author — UCLA — author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (Pulitzer Prize 1998) and Collapse — whose synthesis of evolutionary biology, geography, and history explains why Eurasian civilizations came to dominate — the most influential practitioner of big history.
American anthropologist at Harvard — author of The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World — whose research on cultural evolution and the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) bias in psychology is reshaping social science.
French anthropologist and sociologist who developed the theory of gift exchange — arguing that gifts are never free but operate in a system of reciprocal obligation that is the foundation of social life.
American cultural anthropologist who became the most famous public intellectual in America — popularizing cultural relativism and the idea that personality and gender roles are culturally determined.
American cultural anthropologist who argued that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society — and whose work consistently privileged cultural meaning over economic or biological determinism.
French sociologist who developed the most influential theoretical framework in contemporary sociology — habitus, field, and the forms of capital — and a reflexive sociology that turned its own methods on itself.
American geneticist and blogger — Substack (Unsupervised Learning) and Gene Expression — who writes on population genetics, human prehistory, and the genetics of human variation with unusual depth and accessibility — one of the most widely read independent science writers.
American YouTube historian and podcast host who runs the WhatIfAltHist channel and History 102 podcast — known for sweeping historical syntheses connecting cycles of civilizational rise and fall, demography, and cultural vitality — operating in the tradition of macrohistory.
Yuval Noah Harari's 2011 survey of human history — arguing that Homo sapiens' dominance results from our unique ability to believe in collective fictions (money, nations, religions, corporations) — one of the most widely sold non-fiction books of the 21st century.
American journalist and documentary filmmaker — author of The Perfect Storm, War, and Tribe — whose Tribe argues that modern Western individualism fails to meet the human need for belonging and purpose that tribal community provides.
American conservative writer — Hoover Institution and Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow — author of Radical-in-Chief (on Obama's socialist background) and The Lost History of Western Civilization — who has focused on education policy and culture war issues.
Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning synthesis — arguing that human civilization is fundamentally a response to death anxiety, and that all cultural symbols, heroism, and immortality projects are death-denial mechanisms.
Joseph Henrich's 2020 argument that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people are psychological outliers in the history of humanity — and that the Catholic Church's medieval marriage policies created the nuclear family that produced WEIRD psychology.
Sebastian Junger's 2016 book arguing that humans are wired for tribal belonging — shared purpose, mutual obligation, facing adversity together — and that modern affluent individualistic society fails to provide these conditions, producing depression, PTSD, and purposelessness.
British-American anthropologist who developed the concepts of liminality and communitas — the 'threshold' state in ritual transitions and the anti-structural solidarity it generates.
Scottish social anthropologist whose monumental comparative mythology work The Golden Bough synthesized global data on magic, religion, fertility cults, and dying-and-rising gods, profoundly shaping 20th-century thought on religion and culture.
David Graeber and David Wengrow's revisionist history of human social organization — arguing that prehistory was far more politically diverse than the Rousseau-to-Hobbes spectrum suggests.
American anthropologist and feminist theorist — author of 'Thinking Sex' (1984), a foundational essay in queer theory, and 'The Traffic in Women' (1975), which introduced the sex/gender system concept.
Charles Mann's synthesis of recent research demolishing the image of pre-Columbian Americas as sparsely populated wilderness — revealing sophisticated, populous civilizations that shaped the landscape.
British anthropologist and co-author (with David Graeber) of The Dawn of Everything — a radical re-reading of the archaeological and anthropological record to challenge standard narratives of social evolution.
American archaeologist whose The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) provides the leading theoretical account of why complex societies collapse — through the diminishing returns on complexity.
Heather Heying is an American evolutionary biologist and former professor at Evergreen State College who, along with her husband Bret Weinstein, became a prominent figure in the Intellectual Dark Web after leaving Evergreen during the 2017 campus protests. She co-hosts the DarkHorse Podcast and co-authored A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century (2021) by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying applies evolutionary biology and the concept of the 'Omega principle' (how ancient wisdom coexists with modern innovation) to contemporary challenges in diet, sleep, sex, family, and culture, arguing that humans are often mismatched to modern environments.