Ethnographers have consistently found that most people in small hunting or farming societies are basically ignorant of their own people’s religious beliefs, even the ones that are public.

Freudianism might have waned as a mass idiom for the psyche, but its pop-psychological replacement works in precisely this way. For a lot of people, the cure for all potentially destabilising social contradictions is to identify an offending party, and tell them to go to therapy. ‘Therapy,’ in this world, is not a series of techniques for thinking... See more

The modern industrialised world is a frustrating place to live in. The more we extend our technical mastery over nature, the more anxious it makes us. Is this really it? Just minerals and sediments, physical processes, lumps of matter in the void? Is there nothing else? People in large swathes of rural West Africa didn’t have to wonder about this... See more