The gist: We live in a world of constant noise. The power of anthropology is that it can help us listen to social silence, and, above all, see what is hidden in plain sight. To listen this way, it helps to embrace tools from ethnography about being an insider-outsider and borrow ideas such as habitus, reciprocity, sense-making, and lateral vision.

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Annie Dillard January 21, 2025

Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, bir... See more

Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific. They considered them to be a barrier to capitalist expansion, and sought desperately to stamp them out. But today science is beginning to catch up. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which

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