Because of its epidemic of firearm violence, the United States monopolizes much of the attention on the subject. However, since gun violence is not unique to that country, nor is American gun violence or its gun culture and gun-centered politics typical, we cannot use America as a lens through which to understand and intervene in such violence everywhere. Accordingly, in this introductory chapter—and in this volume—we will take a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to gun violence. Here, we will first unpack the concepts of “gun” and “violence,” then explore the facts of firearms-related death and injury around the world and its human, economic, and political cost, before considering some explanations for the international plague of gun violence and comparing policies and practices for preventing the pain and suffering caused by people with guns.

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Therefore, it is a fact that cultures are different; that is why anthropologists study them. Cultures are different in how they see, interpret, value, and respond to the world, including other human beings in their world. What is done in one culture may not be done in the same way—or at all—in another. What is important or valuable in one culture may not be in another, and what is good or right in one culture may not be in another. For example, in mainstream American culture, polygamy is deemed to be bad, immoral, and illegal (there are of course segments of America that practice and value polygamy, such as the sect of “fundamentalist” Mormons). However, in many cultures—in fact, in most cultures—polygamy has been not only acceptable but normal or even preferred. Who is right about this?

Actually, that is not the correct question to ask. In fact, it is not even a sensible question to ask. But let us say this for now: different cultures can and do have different notions of what is good, normal, moral, valuable, legal, etc. An anthropologist investigating a headhunting society would find men with human heads in their possession, perhaps displayed on their walls or hung from their ceilings. Our reflex would be to judge them with one’s own values and norms: “Those men are all immoral criminal killers!” An outsider might want to call the authorities and have the “deviants” and “murderers” arrested. The visitor might, then, be surprised when the authorities ask us why we are bothering them; in fact, the owners of heads may be the authorities—the chiefs, the priests, or other leaders. That might be difficult to accept, but imagine this: a man from the same headhunting society comes to your society and sees that you do not have heads on display. What would he think? He might conclude you are weak or inconsequential, a person of no courage, fame, or prominence, or that you are just “deviant” from the norm of headhunting. If the headhunter visited the White House or Ten Downing Street and observed no heads, he might assume that the resident has no political authority, since great men collect heads.

Notice that the headhunter got Western people wrong, just as Western people got him and his culture wrong. What do we learn by thinking this way? Not very much, at least not very much about them. We do learn about ourselves (that we disapprove of headhunting), but we already knew that. Clearly, understanding—let alone judging—others by our standards is not helpful.

If anthropologists want to understand another culture rather than judge it, then we must understand or interpret them in terms of their own notions of good, normal, moral, valuable, meaningful, etc. That is cultural relativism. Cultural relativism asserts that an observer cannot apply the standards of one culture to another culture, at least not in an informative way. Rather, an element of a culture must be understood and evaluated in relation to, relative to, that culture. Why? It is always tempting and easy to conclude that different is bad: they do not do it my way, so they are wrong. Scientific observers must avoid such arrogance and shortsightedness, which is guaranteed to breed misunderstanding. This happens, for instance, in international business. A meeting of Western and non-Western businesspeople might easily end with each side thinking it understands what happened in the meeting. Later, if one side does not respond as the other expected they would, there can be confusion, anger, even real financial loss. What went wrong? Each side interpreted the meeting from its own cultural point of view, not realizing that the other side had a different point of view—until it was too late.

Any judgment about norms, morals, values, meanings, laws, and so on is a cultural judgment, made “in relation to” some cultural standard of norms, morals, values, meanings, and laws. Sticking out one’s tongue is an insult here, a greeting there. If an anthropologist gets mad or offended when members of a society where tongue-sticking is a greeting stick their tongue out at him or her, those members will be quite surprised and confused by our response. This is one example of culture shock—the surprise, confusion, and actual pain that one feels in the presence of the profoundly unfamiliar and unexpected. It is a very common experience, as is the reaction: to judge people from other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture. This is called ethnocentrism (from ethno- for a way of life or culture and center for putting it in the center or pride of place), the attitude or practice of assuming that one’s own cultural point of view is the best, the right, or even the only point of view. Of course, ethnocentrism is possible—it is the easy, even the default, thing—but it is simply not helpful. One can be ethnocentric from one’s own cultural perspective, but others can be just as ethnocentric from theirs. Nothing is gained by this except mutual (and probably negative) judgment.

Every judgment, then, of good/bad, moral/immoral, normal/abnormal, valuable/valueless, etc. is made from some cultural point of view—in relation to some standard of good, moral, normal, valuable. And a culture is precisely a set of standards for such judgments. Cultural relativism says that we need to take this fact into account when we confront and interact with other cultures; it must be part of our perspective on cultural difference. However, there are many misconceptions that people, both relativists and non-relativists, have about cultural relativism.

1. Cultural relativism does not mean that “anything goes” or judgment is impossible. Some critics of relativism insist that it means, or leads to, a position of no standards at all, a “do what you want to do,” “if it feels good, do it” ethic or anti-ethic. That is not at all what cultural relativism advocates. It does not say, “Anything goes” but rather, “Here this goes, and there that goes.” It is descriptive. It does not tell us what moral or value judgments to make, only that diverging moral or value judgments are made. And it certainly does not conclude that value judgments are impossible. Rather, it is a description of exactly how such judgments are made—in relation to some standard of judgment—and investigators should find out what that standard of judgment is. But there is no such thing as a “standardless” judgment, and there does not appear to be a single standard that all cultures share. Instead, there are multiple standards.

2. Cultural relativism does not mean that anything a culture does is good/moral/valuable/normal, etc. Some critics of relativism claim that taking a relativistic stance toward another culture is essentially condoning it. But to condone means to judge favorably, and relativism is not about judging but about understanding. If we encountered a culture that practiced polygamy or infanticide or “honor killing,” cultural relativism would not require us to say, “Those attitudes and behaviors are good or acceptable.” What it would require us to do is determine where those attitudes and behaviors come from and what they mean to the people who practice them. One certainly does not have to approve in order to understand. In fact, not only do anthropologists not have to condone these or any other behaviors, they cannot, as condoning, like condemning, is a value judgment. To say a behavior is bad or good is to judge it, and that means judging by some particular value standard. That would entail abandoning the relativistic perspective and referring to one’s own community of values, one’s own culture. As an anthropologist it is possible to understand a behavior without judging—in fact, it is only possible to understand without judging—while as a member of one’s own culture one can say that s/he does not share or condone that behavior. But you must always remember that your judgment is a product of your culture and may not be shared by all cultures.

3. Cultural relativism does not mean that anything a culture believes is true. Some critics of relativism object that relativism compels us to accept as valid any belief or “knowledge” that a culture asserts. If, for instance, a culture believes that the earth is flat, then it is flat for them, even while it is round for us. This is of course nonsense and has nothing whatsoever to do with cultural relativism. There is a philosophical position known as “epistemological relativism” that does actually hold that all knowledge and truth is relative, but that is not the claim made by cultural relativism and is quite beyond the scope or need of anthropology to address. Let us consider the problem of knowledge by contrasting two different statements:

Polygamy is good. Earth is round.

Both sentences take the superficial form of noun-is-adjective. But the similarity ends there. The latter is a fact-statement, or rather a fact-claim. Is it true or false? More importantly, how do we determine? We make observations and measurements, that is, we check against reality. We find that the earth really is round, not flat, and verify the initial proposition. How about the statement on polygamy? Is it true or false that polygamy is good? The answer is—neither. It is culturally relative. That is, in Warlpiri (Australian Aboriginal) or in fundamentalist Mormon culture, polygamy is good. In mainstream American or European society, polygamy is bad. So “polygamy is good” is not the same kind of utterance as “earth is round.” Again, the latter is a fact-claim (either true or false), but the former is a value-claim. It is neither true nor false.

Value claims are judgments and therefore must be made by reference to, relative to, some value standard. But what standard? Shall we use mainstream Western standards, or Warlpiri standards, or Japanese standards, or Yanomamo standards, ad infinitum? The answer is that any of those standards is equally usable—and equally used by somebody. Therefore, a value statement like “polygamy is good” is not, cannot be, true or false because it is not even a complete statement yet. Before we can evaluate the statement, we need to know more: good for what, good according to whom? If one says, “Polygamy is good among the Warlpiri,” an anthropologist can respond, “That is true.” If one says, “Polygamy is good,” the anthropological response is not “true” or “false” but “please finish your statement.” It is not clear yet which cultural value-standard the speaker is applying, so the sentence is unfinished and meaningless as formulated.

Since there are multiple potential and actual value standards that can be used to evaluate the claim, the final judgment will be relative to whichever standard one ultimately employs. In other words, value statements are culturally relative, whereas fact statements are not. Or, we might say that fact statements are relative to a single standard (reality) that is objective and universally shared. The acceleration of gravity on earth (thirty-two feet/9.8 meters per second per second) is the same for all people in all cultures because they share a single common physical reality. If all people in all cultures shared a single common value standard—a single common cultural reality—for evaluating polygamy, then they would all come to the same evaluation, but then there would not be many different cultures for it to be relative to. (And even if all people shared the same value standard, it would still not be “objective” or “absolute” but only culturally common.)

4. Cultural relativism does not mean that cultures are different in every conceivable way, that there are no cultural universals. Cultural relativism does not rule out the possibility of any commonalities or universals among humans. Relativism does not say that commonalities cannot exist; it merely correctly asserts that we cannot assume that they exist. The question of cultural universals is an empirical question: that is, if we find them, then they exist. If we do not find them, then they do not exist. But the lack of universal meanings or values is not the same thing as the lack of meanings or values. Even if there are not universal ones, there are “local” ones geographically and historically—very many local ones indeed—and if that is all there is, then that has to be enough.

5. Cultural relativism does not mean that “everything is relative,” including cultural relativism itself (cultural relativism is not self-contradictory). Some things are culturally relative, and some things are not. Cultural relativism is simply an awareness and acknowledgment of differences in human judgment about norms, values, meanings, and so on. It amounts to saying, “Different cultures have different notions of good/normal/moral/valuable.” But that statement is not a value statement itself; it is a fact-claim. It is not saying culture is good, or cultural relativism is good, or multiple value standards are good. Perhaps from certain viewpoints, multiple value standards—multiple cultures—are not good at all. They definitely make the human world more complicated and contentious. Still, culture is; multiple value standards exist. That is a fact. How we respond to it, what sense we make of it, is the real question.

6. Cultural relativism does not mean that cultures cannot be compared. Cultural relativism does not mean that comparison is impossible, any more than it means that judgment is impossible. What it means is that when any comparison is being made, the terms or criteria of the comparison must be specified. One cannot say culture X is “better than” culture Y without specifying “better at what?” Some cultures certainly are larger than others, and some cultures certainly are better at hunting or making war than others. As long as the standards of comparison are stated (and perhaps it is also explained why those particular standards were selected) comparisons can of course be made. In fact, recall that the first part of the anthropological perspective was “comparative” study. We can compare two or more cultures on any variable without making value judgments about them.

In short, cultural relativism is three things simultaneously. It is a fact: cultures are different in their standards, values, meanings, and judgments. It is a method: if we want to understand a culture accurately, we must understand it in its own terms. And it is a theory: the explanation of how individuals and groups make their determinations of judgment and action depends on the awareness of the role of cultural meanings and standards. That is, there is no way for humans to behave or evaluate other than relative to some standard of behavior and evaluation.

Political scientists and economists tend to view humans as rational actors; classical economic theory assumes that we will behave dependably to maximize our practical or financial interests. However, behavioral economist Dan Ariely (2008) argues that we are predictably irrational in a book by that very title, driven by logical fallacies, social norms, and other non-rational forces. Mainstream social theorists consistently ignore or undervalue non-rational factors in human behavior, including and especially emotion, identity, and prior belief. Clearly, belief was central to the Millerites, along with hope, and disappointment was a key emotional consequence.

Disappointment, I think, lies at the root of much of contemporary American politics and culture. But this time, the disappointment is in two other articles of American faith — capitalism and democracy. Americans have always been told that capitalism will make each generation wealthier than the one before, that it is the road to realizing the American Dream, and that hard work generally leads to success. This faith has been shattered in chronic and acute ways: chronically, wages have been flat for decades, wealth inequality has grown, and hard work seems unrelated to the rewards of society; acutely, the Great Recession of 2008, followed by the COVID-19 epidemic and spiking inflation in 2024, cast doubt on capitalism as the panacea that it is presumed to be.

Beyond politics and economics, many countries perceived Western social values, including some of our most precious ones, such as human rights, as alien concepts meant to weaken local sovereignty and traditional culture. In lieu of human rights, which ensure equality of all individuals and not just citizens, many countries turn to collective/national rights, to which only “the people” — construed along civilizational, ethnic, or racial lines — are entitled. At the extreme, the fundamentals of capitalism and democracy are altered, in favor of one-party guided capitalism in China or “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, the kind of democracy that is not premised on equality, human rights, freedom of expression, checks and balances, and fair elections (some have dubbed it competitive authoritarianism).

If there is anything that Americans supposedly believe in more intensely than capitalism, it is democracy, and yet many Americans are beginning to despair of it. A 2025 Gallup poll indicates that a mere 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with their democracy (and only 17 percent of Republicans), compared to 61 percent as recently as 1991 (Jones 2025). Elected officials are often perceived as unresponsive, incompetent, or untrustworthy, if not literally corrupt and malicious; the party system seems to offer no real alternative, and special interests are so entrenched that the preferences of the people are ignored. As a result, support for undemocratic politics has increased lately, with nearly 25 percent open to “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections” and almost 20 percent willing to consider military rule (Drutman, Diamond, and Goldman 2018: 3). Most alarmingly, a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll in 2024 indicated that 20 percent of Americans (12 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans) see political violence as the possible solution to the country’s problems (PBS 2024).

Furthermore, the reaction to the cognitive dissonance of disappointment in capitalism and democracy, as with Miller’s end-of-the-world prophecy, is a certain kind of intensification of both, lurching toward more of what is not working. For capitalism, this takes the form of anachronistic images of factory jobs returning to America (despite automation and artificial intelligence likely performing many of these reputed tasks), protectionist tariffs, unilateral trade deals, a general ethos of zero-sum “winning,” and an immanent plutocracy of billionaires. For democracy, it expresses itself as the kind of purified demos-power or “populism” that seeks unmediated representation by — if not embodiment in — a strongman who will disregard if not abolish altogether the traditional and institutional (including legal and constitutional) impediments to “the will of the people” and who is dedicated, in the process, to root out and destroy the “enemies of the people,” be they liberals, immigrants, Muslims, journalists, intellectuals and their universities, or experts of any sort.

These two disappointments and their counter-movements go a long way toward explaining the rise of Donald Trump, for whom the path toward populist authoritarianism has been cleared by decades of capitalist and democratic underperformance. In this sense, Trump and the MAGA movement — idealistically but nebulously evoking an imagined period when America was great — are not an exception but rather a fulfillment, an apotheosis, of American grievances against their own system.

What is still more fascinating and distressing is the commonality of this sentiment around the world. In countries from Russia and China to Hungary, India, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and the UK, populist strongmen (and occasionally women, as in Italy’s Giorgia Meloni or, although not yet in power, France’s Marine Le Pen) are setting aside the rule of law in favor of one-party or one-person autocracy (usually mixed with plutocracy), claiming to understand and advance the interests and the identity of “the people,” defined in exclusionary terms (European Christians in Hungary, Hindus in India’s “Hindutva” or Hindu-ness ideology). Even in the UK, where a right-wing populist government has not so far seized power, the Brexit departure from the European Union was promoted mainly as a “Britain for the British” campaign, rejecting immigration and outside (i.e., Brussels/EU) authority.

Granted, in different places, the disappointment in capitalism and democracy is felt and explained differently and leavened with local concerns about foreigners and wealthy interlopers (like George Soros). Beyond the United States and Europe, the complaint against capitalism is often phrased in terms of frustration with Western-imposed “neoliberalism” (and before it “development” and “structural adjustment”) and “globalization” that undermined their national economies. (Americans are often quick to forget that neoliberalism and globalization were invented and urged by the U.S. and UK, especially conservative leaders Reagan and Thatcher, who expected those systems to enrich their own countries through massive trade bonuses — yet another source of disappointment, as low-wage countries like China and India became sellers to the West instead of buyers from the West.)

Post-socialist countries such as Russia and Hungary resent the shock therapy of capitalization and democratization, which impoverished many of their citizens, ruined their manufacturing sectors, and foisted supposedly universal economic and political practices on them that were actually distinctly Western or specifically American, which were blamed for the impoverishment and ruination. The structures of “liberal internationalism” themselves — the network of institutions against largely constructed by the West after World War II, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, the International Criminal Court, and various UN agencies like UNESCO if not the UN altogether — not to mention the European Union and NATO, were questioned by countries around the world, including the United States which created and long dominated most of them.

Beyond politics and economics, many countries perceived Western social values, including some of our most precious ones, such as human rights, as alien concepts meant to weaken local sovereignty and traditional culture. In lieu of human rights, which ensure equality of all individuals and not just citizens, many countries turn to collective/national rights, to which only “the people” — construed along civilizational, ethnic, or racial lines — are entitled. At the extreme, the fundamentals of capitalism and democracy are altered, in favor of one-party guided capitalism in China or “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, the kind of democracy that is not premised on equality, human rights, freedom of expression, checks and balances, and fair elections (some have dubbed it competitive authoritarianism).

Back in the United States, disappointment is only one of a constellation of negative emotions and experiences that twist our political culture tighter and tighter. Another, closely related, is disillusionment, the discovery that everything we believed in and counted on is eluding us, including American exceptionalism and greatness (it is diagnostic that most of the world’s desperate, disillusioned politics is about recovering lost greatness — in Russia’s case, literally lost empire — and undergoing a rebirth or “palingenesis” that amounts to a return of/to a fantasy golden age). A third is sheer exhaustion, learning that our past efforts have mostly come to naught and that the struggle has no visible end; surely, the fiction of an “end of history” with triumphant capitalist democracy is no longer credible. Worse, we see ourselves fighting the same old fights, with foes like Russia, while the threats to our country, way of life, and planet like climate change seem insuperable. Fourth, underlying and escalating all of these is anger — anger at our leaders, anger at corporations, anger at foreigners, anger at bearers of bad news, and anger at anyone who disagrees with or differs from us.

After all, psychologists long ago determined that frustration causes aggression, and frustration is another kind or symptom of disappointment. Add to these pestilent identity, which divides Americans (and inhabitants of other countries) into clashing and hostile camps or tribes; “identity politics,” formerly the province of minorities and the marginalized, has been usurped by the (white, straight, Christian) majority on the grounds that their identity is now ignored, ridiculed, or endangered (as in the odious conspiracy of “the Great Replacement”). In the U.S., as in Hungary and elsewhere, racism wears the cloak of civilizational identity, in which (racial, ethnic, or religious) others threaten our civilizational privilege and pride.

The first Great Disappointment affected only a few people and left minimal scars on American society. The present Great Disappointment is infinitely more widespread and cuts much deeper. It is also difficult to foresee how we could rise from it: what could people realistically believe in now that has not failed them before, other than some make-believe former glory and greatness pitched by a con/strong man that salves our wounded national ego? Can we create new ideas, institutions, and identities — and will we be allowed to by the powers interested in preserving the status quo as it burns — and will we have the faith and energy to commit to them when, as The Who sang, we are determined that we won’t get fooled again?

References:

Ariely, Dan. 2008. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York: HarperCollins.

Drutman, Lee, Larry Diamond, and Joe Goldman. 2018. “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism.” Washington, DC: Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.

Jones, Jeffrey M. 2025. “Record Low in U.S. Satisfied With Way Democracy Is Working.” news.gallup.com/poll/548120/record-low-satisfied-democracy-working.aspx, accessed August 17, 2025.

PBS. 2024. “1 in 5 Americans Think Violence May Solve U.S. Divisions, Poll Finds.” www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/1-in-5-americans-think-violence-may-solve-u-s-divisions-poll-finds, accessed August 17, 2025.

Of course, blasphemy—as one species of sacrilege, from the Latin sacrilegium for temple robbery (sacer, sacred + legere, to steal)—extends well beyond speech to include actions as well as images that desecrate (de-sacralize or threaten the sacredness of) religious ideas, objects, and persons. So, blasphemy and its synonyms and cognates were never limited to language alone. Nor were they ever restricted to “reviling” the gods but equally if not more to disbelieving in the gods or in any particular point of dogma or to believing in the wrong gods/dogma, causing blasphemy to shade into heresy.

In the present day, blasphemy has morphed into a distinctly postmodern and postdigital form. This is ironic because secularization theory predicted that religion would fade in modern urban society, and therefore, as Rollier, Frøystad and Ruud write in the introduction to their recent volume on religious “outrage” in South Asia specifically, “the belief in blasphemy is often dismissed as a relic of the past or as an anachronistic aberration” (2019: 5). That is, by now people were not supposed to care so much about things like offensive religious speech. Instead, today we see a new wave of blasphemy accusations (and sometimes deliberately and gleefully blasphemous utterances, images, and actions) that we could call Blasphemy 2.0 because they differ from past, especially ancient, forms in two notable ways.

The first new feature of Blasphemy 2.0 is, predictably, its entanglement with digital technologies and social media. Programs like Photoshop and devices like computers and smartphones allow almost anyone to be a visual blasphemer, and AI image generators make creating blasphemous content easier and more ubiquitous. Social media, then, facilitates “the proliferation of potential transgressions and allows a degree of anonymity to its users, which reduces the threshold for sharing transgressive content” (Rollier, Frøystad and Ruud 2019: 32). Consequently, there are potentially more blasphemous words and images now than before with greater, including global, reach. For instance, in Kathinka Frøystad’s chapter in the aforementioned volume, she discusses the production and circulation of provocative images in India that pit Hindus against Muslims. Among these are (necessarily) fictionalized visuals of the Hindu god Shiva hovering over the Qa’aba in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam (see images 1 and 2).

Image 1 Shiva sitting on the Qa’aba. Source: the-militant-atheist.org, reproduced with permission

Image 2 Shiva hovering over the Qa’aba. Produced by the author using DeepAI image generator

More importantly, such pictures portray the fringe but significant political mythology that Hinduism predates Islam in the Middle East and that the latter is a continuation or a corruption of the former. Frøystad reports, accordingly, that many Hindus believe that the Qa’aba was originally a Shiva temple or even that it is still a Shiva temple, with the god literally trapped inside and feebly begging “‘Mujhe dudh pilao, mujhe dudh pilao’ (please give me milk)” (134). Two Brahmin priests whom she interviewed expounded that the captive god could be released if the structure was sprinkled with holy water from the Ganges River, but they appreciated “that such an act could well destroy the entire religion (islam ko tor dena). This was evidently not a desirable option” (134).

Apparently, this idea that Islam is a (bastard) child of Hinduism reaches back at least to the mid-1800s, promoted for instance by Purushottam Nagesh Oak, who taught not only that the Qa’aba was formerly a Hindu temple but that the name of the city of Mecca derived from the Sanskrit word makha for a sacrificial fire and that Arabia was once part of a Hindu kingdom. Depressingly but unsurprisingly, this narrative appeals to contemporary Hindu nationalists: “By 2016 at least 20 assemblages of photos, film clips and accompanying text circulated online, all attempting to illustrate Oak’s main points with authoritative voice-over explanation in English, Hindi and other Indian languages, occasionally with subtitles” (140). Muslims, on the other hand, do not find the idea appealing or amusing, and Frøystad asserts that “such images were almost guaranteed”—if not designed—“to offend Muslims, for whom the imagination of any power supreme to Allah represents heresy” (142). Inevitably, unrest and violence has ensued.

Charges of blasphemy fly back and forth in some societies as one of the most effective methods to censor and censure dissenting opinion and marginalized identity—including non-majority and non-hegemonic positions within one’s own religion.

The second noteworthy feature of Blasphemy 2.0 is its profound subjectivization, psychologization, or personalization. That is, whereas blasphemy in the Hebrew and Greek version was understood to offend God or the gods, in current instances it deeply emotionally offends individual believers. Certainly, this is not entirely new: ancient Hebrew, Greek, and other citizens were often personally outraged by behavior like destroying religious artifacts, refusing to perform sacrifices, or denying the existence of deities. Nevertheless, today we see an epidemic of blasphemy experienced as personal insult and hurt feelings. We wonder, along with Rollier, Frøystad and Ruud, “Why did allegations of hurt religious sentiments become so pronounced” in South Asia and elsewhere in recent years? Already in colonial India in the 1860s, the path was set with the Indian Penal Code, which sought to prevent interreligious hostility by criminalizing words, sounds, and gestures that could “wound” a believer’s “religious feelings” (section 298). Sixty years later, once again to assuage sectarian tempers, authorities introduced a “Religious Insults Bill” with the goal to outlaw “not only spoken offense but also any representation intended to ‘outrage’ religious feelings”; section 295-A proposed fines or imprisonment for anyone who, “with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of His Majesty’s subjects, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class.” Law in independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh has absorbed and extended these provisions, construing blasphemy as anything that upsets people and makes them feel bad or mad. The three authors dub this the “global economy of religious offense.”

What has not changed in Blasphemy 2.0 is, as Rollier, Frøystad and Ruud put it aptly, that “accusations of blasphemy form part of a series of established devices to restrict the freedom of expression” (18)—and not just of expression but of exercise and belonging, therefore let us say to restrict freedom. And since religious freedom or lack thereof is a political matter, we plainly see that affective intensity and “political instrumentalism” are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the question immediately becomes, whose affective responses are politically instrumentalized and hegemonic?

To begin to answer the question, we can paraphrase Marx to the effect that the blasphemy accusations of a society are the blasphemy accusations of the dominant group of a society. Generally but not universally, in practice this means that the majority religion is “more eager to initiate blasphemy cases than others” (25) and usually more successful, since it also dominates the state’s legal apparatus and is more likely to be heard and honored by the state. This is especially so because, paradoxically perhaps, blasphemy—a fundamentally religious crime—is typically, even in devout countries like Pakistan, tried in secular (i.e., governmental) courts. Rather like medieval Christendom where religious officials turned offenders over to secular authorities for punishment, present-day blasphemy charges may originate from religious figures like Brahmin priests or Muslim clerics but are filed and prosecuted in secular spaces. In Pakistan, for instance, members of the ulema (Islamic scholars) are commonly involved in the instigation of so-called First Information Reports, which is how violations come to the attention of law enforcement (Rollier 2019: 54). This does not mean that the religiously-offended necessarily leave the matter in secular hands: in one situation, the extremist group Ahl-e-Hadith (People of Hadith) threatened to torch a police station lest an officer register their First Information Report. Often, religiously-affronted individuals take justice into their own hands, vilifying, attacking, and sometimes killing the alleged culprit.

Consequently, this regime of hurt religious feelings is “democratized” in a way, such that anyone can accuse anyone else of blasphemy on almost any grounds and, to an extent (up to and including death) enforce that accusation. This assures the multiplication and reciprocation of accusations. And, because emotions are subjective, no one can ultimately refute or deny a claim of hurt sentiments; in fact, to attempt to delegitimize such emotional pain is a second assault on the alleged victim. (Perversely, airing the alleged blasphemy in court is often regarded as further blasphemy, making such cases difficult to present.) Thus, charges of blasphemy fly back and forth in some societies as one of the most effective methods to censor and censure dissenting opinion and marginalized identity—including non-majority and non-hegemonic positions within one’s own religion. In Rollier’s chapter, rightly titled “We’re All Blasphemers,” he emphasizes that in Muslim-majority Pakistan, “Charges of blasphemy can indeed originate from, and be directed towards, Muslims of all persuasions” (Rollier 2019: 53), Barelvi Muslims condemning Deobandi or Ahl-e-Hadith Muslims and vice versa in endless rounds of dueling denunciations. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, Muslims who diverge from Sunni/Wahhabi orthodoxy are subject to blasphemy charges. To be sure, minorities in the Muslim world like Alevis and of course Christians are targets of blasphemy allegations, since virtually anything they say or do will offend mainstream Muslims. Certainly too, foreigners who challenge or disparage local beliefs, with for instance rude images of Muhammad or Hindu gods, rile up religious sentiments and inspire calls for retribution. Blasphemy claims are thus effective tools to suppress dissonant voices and simultaneous expressions and methods of cultural and political supremacy.

Granted, in some places like India, religious minorities have also exploited the regime of religious hurt to press their pleas for protections and privileges from the government (although, according to Rollier, Frøystad and Ruud, this courtesy has not yet been extended to atheists and secularists), on the premise that the majority is hurting the feelings of the aggrieved minority. Whatever the source, blasphemy complaints translate into, and sometimes provide legitimation for, demands of “respect” and “recognition”; even better, claims of grievous emotional harm are unimpeachable. In this way, Blasphemy 2.0 functions something like “culture” in popular imagination and political discourse: both carry the certification of authenticity, both presumed genuine. Further, like culture, blasphemy-as-emotional-pain sidesteps the problem of truth: it is irrelevant whether religious belief or culture is factually true as long as it is sincere. Ultimately, the point is that, once weaponized, subjectivized, and democratized, blasphemy charges in the guise of emotional hurt—or emotional hurt in the guise of blasphemy charges—can be utilized by anyone to activate the machinery of law against their antagonists and to gain materially, symbolically, or emotionally against those Others. The contradictory thing is that blasphemy accusers exhibit no empathy for the hurt feelings (and often hurt bodies) of the accused, whose beliefs and identities are every bit as genuine and dear, and emotional (and physical) pain every bit as real and intense, as those of the accusers.

References:

Frøystad, Kathinka. 2019. “Affective Digital Images: Shiva in the Kaaba and the Smartphone Revolution.” In Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud, eds. Outrage: The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia. London: UCL Press, 123-47.

Levy, Leonard W. 1993. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Rollier, Paul. 2019. “‘We’re All Blasphemers’: The Life of Religious Offence in Pakistan.” In Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud, eds. Outrage: The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia. London: UCL Press, 48-76.

Rollier, Paul, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud. 2019. “Introduction: Researching the Rise of Religious Offence in South Asia.” In Paul Rollier, Kathinka Frøystad and Arild Engelsen Ruud, eds. Outrage: The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia. London: UCL Press, 1-47.

Of course, even at the time, these pronouncements of integration were exaggerated. New multinational states arose, but old ones like the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed. Even the UK had fragmented in 1921, most of Ireland breaking free to become the Republic of Ireland (and prophesying a struggle over Northern Ireland). Throughout the recently decolonized world, conflicts flared between peoples, nations, or “ethnic groups” arbitrarily enclosed within a single state, from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, Biafra, Eritrea, Turkey, and eventually Sudan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the immediate post-World War II era seemed like a period of inexorable integration, including supra-national institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union, not to mention a thickening web of non-state and inter-state governmentalities including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and an endless array of NGOs (non-governmental organizations). In fact, painful schisms like the partitions of India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and East/West Germany in the 1940s felt like necessary divorces to allow for happier marriages.

By the 1990s if not earlier, the consensus was that two global processes had largely secured a new integrated world order. The first was “liberal internationalism,” which according to John Ikenberry (2018) rests on several premises: openness of trade, knowledge, and technology; a rules-based set of inter-state relations; a degree of security cooperation; the notion of an “international society” with shared values; and a commitment to democracy. The alternative, he reasons, is “closed systems” of power blocs, spheres of influence, and protectionism. The second was “globalization,” the ambitious and allegedly largely complete “integration between the world’s nations, markets, and social and political systems” (Alkharafi and Alsabah 2025: 1). Even more than liberal internationalism, but intimately related to it, globalization means connection and with it, flow: flow of people, capital, goods, technology, and culture (from popular culture to cultural beliefs and values like “freedom,” ‘human rights,” “democracy,” and “capitalism”). So certain were many Western pundits of the attainment of this goal that some declared the end of history and the triumph of Western capitalist democracy.

However, at the moment of its apotheosis, the flaws and failures of the integrative revolution became apparent; Ikenberry declares the entire system in crisis. The threats and counterforces, which we could and probably should acknowledge as a dis-integrative revolution, come in several mutually reinforcing forms.

Separatism. Geertz himself conceded that the integration of disparate peoples and cultures into unified “nation-states” was not as simple or successful as usually imagined or hoped. Inexpungible “primordial” sentiments and identities survived, demanding recognition if not autonomy. Indeed, he granted that “nation-building” projects often resulted in intensified non-state or pre-state identity and thus identity-based resistance. Walker Connor (1994) went further, hypothesizing that nation-building often if not necessarily entailed nation-destroying, as those previously mentioned primordial ties were suppressed or erased in the campaign for a post-primordial and modern/civil state-society. Consequently, many scholars, fieldworkers, journalists, and diplomats have documented separatist/secessionist movements and violence around the world. Damien Kingsbury (2021), for instance, dedicates chapters to separatist efforts in Europe (Irish, Scots, Basques, Flemish and Walloons, Croats and Bosnians, Czechs and Slovaks, Catalans, etc.), the Caucasus (Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Georgia, Azerbaijan), the Near East (Palestinians, Kurds, Yemenis), Africa (Somaliland, Western Sahara, Katanga, Darfur, Mali, Ethiopia, Senegal), South Asia (Sri Lanka, Nagaland, Jammu-Kashmir), and Southeast Asia and Oceania (Kachins and Rohingya in Myanmar, Muslims in Thailand and Philippines, West Papuans and East Timorese in Indonesia), not to mention the achievement of independence by South Sudan and the subsequent clash between the indigenous Nuer and Dinka.

Deglobalization. At the apex of globalization, a countermovement that can only be called deglobalization has been occurring, which Harold James (2018) characterizes as “disembedded unilateralism” featuring trade protectionism (for instance, tariffs on imports) and promotion of domestic industry (for job creation and manufacturing security). Deglobalization also often entails disengagement if not withdrawal from international institutions like the World Trade Organization as well as the abrogation or renegotiation of multilateral trade treaties like NAFTA. For an increasing number of countries and peoples around the world, globalization (by that name and its earlier moniker, neoliberalism) not only failed to deliver prosperity but actually exacerbated dependence and inequality, destroying local agriculture and industry through imposed trade conditions and an influx of cheap foreign goods. Simultaneously, weaker and non-Western states frequently feel that Western/capitalist economic principles and practices are forced on them to their disadvantage through essentially Western-defined and –managed organizations such as the WTO and the World Bank, and lately Western states themselves have complained of the limitations created by rules-based international economic arrangements. Finally, competition from new economic powers, especially China, has shaken the globalized international order—China even offering its own vision of cross-state cooperation through its Belt and Road Initiative and its pursuit of a rival “Sino-centric global order, in which China replaces the US as the dominant state and reshapes the entire order according to its preferences” (Fravel 2025).

Anti-internationalism Nationalism and Populism. Running through or beneath the other forces is a rise of political nationalism and a rejection of internationalism, which is ironic in view of recent diagnoses of the death of the state. Purportedly, state borders and state governments were obsolete in the liberal internationalist and globalist environment, but lately states have come roaring back. At the heart of the new nationalism or statism are two factors: sovereignty and culture/civilization. Many state leaders and their citizens sense a loss of sovereignty or freedom of action under the sway of internationalist organizations (to which we should add the International Court of Justice) and agreements; this is one contributor to so-called “Euroscepticism” in which European governments and populations feel victimized by the distant bureaucracy of the European Union and its policies, from economic to immigration policies. Euroscepticism was one driver of “Brexit” or the UK’s departure from the EU, a classic gesture of disintegration. The second factor is closely related but distinct, in that transnational integration and the surrender of sovereignty is widely felt to be corrosive to what makes the country or society unique and worthy of respect: its culture or civilization. This culture/civilization may refer to its language, arts, and other customs; it may also refer to its values, which often do not include tolerance of other religions or commitment to liberal democracy, gender diversity, or even human rights. Indeed, religion is commonly at the forefront of the new nationalism, with European countries like Hungary or Poland, for instance, defending their Christian heritage against both modern secularism and immigrant Islam. Sometimes, culture or civilization is a thin disguise for racism. At any rate, as Koen Abts and Sharon Baute (2022) emphasize, this revived and often prickly national exclusivism and chauvinism is typically related to the experience of being “left behind” by international agencies and domestic elites, leading to a populist backlash in which (a) the “true” people or nation strives to regain its control over the government, economy, and culture and (b) this true people/nation attaches itself to a leader who promises to represent them—virtually to embody them—in their campaign of palingenesis or national rebirth, at the expense of international institutions, global economics, and even domestic parties, laws, and legislatures that stand in their way.. This brand of populism (a true people/nation plus a leader/strongman) portends to cut through the dross of modernity and globalism as well the corruption of domestic politics to restore the nation, through the power of the state, to its former political sovereignty, cultural authenticity, and civilizational greatness. It is no wonder that a recurrent slogan is “Make (insert country name) Great Again.”

As this short essay has illustrated, there is something tremendously widespread and important happening in the world today, and scholars in many disciplines—especially anthropology, political science, economics, and international studies—have contributed to the description and analysis of this epochal dis-integrative revolution. Hopefully, it is clear that all social sciences and humanities could and should join the effort to understand, critique, and rethink the trajectories of separatism, deglobalization, and virulent nationalism and populism. One key question is whether the dis-integrative revolution we are undergoing is a temporary reaction and adjustment to integration or a new long-term arc of history. Also, social scientists and humanities scholars must be actively engaged in preventing extreme nationalism and strongman populism from becoming the new normal while also imagining a future that is not a mere return to the admittedly Western-dominated internationalism of the last century.

Dis-integrative Revolution

References

1. 1. Boas, F. Anthropology and Modern Life. W. W. Norton: New York, 1962 [1928].

2. 2. Geertz, C. (1963) “The Integrative Revolution.” In Geertz, C. (ed.). Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. The Free Press: New York, 105-157.

3. 3. Ikenberry, G. J. (2018) “The End of Liberal International Order?” International Affairs 1, 7-23. CrossRef

4. 4. Alkharafi, N., & Alsabah, M. (2025) “Globalization: An Overview of Its Main Characteristics and Types, and an Exploration of Its Impacts on Individuals, Firms, and Nations.” Economies 13 (4), 1-33. https://doi.org/10.3390/economies13040091 CrossRef

5. 5. Connor, W. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. CrossRef

6. 6. Kingsbury, D. Separatism and the State. London and New York: Routledge, 2021.
   CrossRef

7. 7. Fravel, M. T. “02 China: Balancing the US, Increasing Global Influence.” Available at https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/03/competing-visions-international-order/02-china-balancing-us-increasing-global-influence.

8. 8. Abts, K., & Baute, S. (2022) “Social Resentment, Blame Attribution and Euroscepticism: The Role of Status Insecurity, Relative Deprivation and Powerlessness.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 35 (1), 39-64. CrossRef

Two-Spirit rally, Denver 2011. Creator: iagoarchangel, Wikimedia by CC 2.0 license

Out of Many Genders, One People

As the new semester approached in January 2026, administrators at Texas A&M University informed philosophy professor Martin Peterson that he would have to cut Plato’s Symposium from his “Philosophy 111: Contemporary Moral Problems” course because it contains—gasp!—Aristophane’s origin story of humanity in which the gods split initially bisexual proto-humans in half. This was just one of 200 or more courses flagged for daring to discuss gender or race issues (Nietzel 2006), whether the university actually fears that content or merely fears Trump’s and conservatives’ reactions to students learning that content.

Setting aside the hyperbolic reaction by the administration of censoring material that scholars and students have read for more than two millennia without serious psychological or social damage, the first and still most meaningful motto of the United States is e pluribus unum, out of many one. However, people never stop to think: out of many, what, and just how many, are there? Does the pluribus refer to nations, ethnicities, races, religions, or all of and other than these? The one thing most Americans are confident it does not mean is sex or gender, since for them there are not many, but only two, male and female. Is it reasonable then to suggest that ex multis generibus una gens—out of many sexes, one people—and is it possible to achieve? And where could we look for inspiration?

There are, to the surprise and consternation of those who understand gender diversity, two significant shared premises in the contemporary debate about sex/gender in the U.S. and the world. The first is that sex/gender is biological or physical, that is, sex/gender is about the body (primarily the genitals) and that a person’s sex/gender and body should align. The second is that sex/gender is natural, involuntary, and settled or at least settle-able: interestingly, both the binary sex/gender and the diverse sex/gender parties insist that sex/gender is not something you choose but something you are born with.

What is virtually never considered in the mainstream debate about sex/gender is that these two fundamental premises may be wrong, or at least that they may not be shared by all societies. The question of gender diversity is the more easily approached and proven. For instance, many Native American nations understood three genders: ordinary males, ordinary females, and a third category for biological males who adopted some aspects of feminine identity and role behavior.

Of course, sex/gender dualists contend that there are only two sex/genders to be born with and that any tinkering with sex/gender is voluntary if not pathological, while sex/gender pluralists hold that people can be born with more than the two conventional sex/genders, even if their bodies may be wrongly assigned—if which case it is common to modify the body to match the presumably real and permanent sex/gender identity.

What is virtually never considered in the mainstream debate about sex/gender is that these two fundamental premises may be wrong, or at least that they may not be shared by all societies. The question of gender diversity is the more easily approached and proven. For instance, many Native American nations understood three genders: ordinary males, ordinary females, and a third category for biological males who adopted some aspects of feminine identity and role behavior.

Sometimes called (pejoratively) “berdache,” they were known by many local names such as winkte (Lakota), nadle or nádleehí (Navajo), and haxu’xan (Arapaho). They were not necessarily homosexual (the local term did not refer to sexual preference), nor were they considered deviant; often, they were treated as special and were assigned honorable tasks like managing the family’s wealth or educating the young. Finally, there was no inclination or motivation to reshape the body to make body and sex/gender identity “match.”

Other societies also have named categories for a third gender, most often again biological males who exhibit some feminine traits. One of the more famous is the hijra or aravani of India or the khawaja sira/sara of Pakistan. A hijra is regarded as neither man nor woman, a true third gender; commonly, they are viewed as impotent or sexless males who may actually or ideally undergo operations to remove their genitals. More interestingly, they have a formal place in society, dancing at the marriages or births of male babies; their role is also fairly institutionalized, with communities of hijras living together in houses as chelas (disciples) under a guru (teacher), and further organized into regional associations.

Thai culture also recognizes three phet or types of gendered/sexed persons, including the kathoey or male (and sometimes female) individual who displays opposite or mixed sex/gender traits. In Samoa, a fa’afāfine is similarly a male who behaves to an extent like a woman, and in Brazil, a travesti is a male with feminine features, who may actively seek a more womanly figure (through hormones and operations) and engage in sex with men—the latter of whom consider themselves completely heterosexual.

While “third genders” are more common among biological males, there are also sex/gender categories and labels for biological females who take on a more masculine identity or role, essentially representing a fourth gender. In some Native American societies, the female version of berdache may have a distinct name, such as hwame (Mohave), kwe’rhame(Yuma), or hetaneman (Cheyenne). They are usually seen as “manly women.”

The clearest instance is the ninauposkitzipxpe of the North Piegan: a word that literally means “manly-hearted woman,” such a person displays the more masculine qualities of aggressiveness, independence, boldness, and open sexuality. Finally, in traditional rural Albanian culture, the vajze e betuar (literally, sworn virgin) was not only relatively masculine in appearance and behavior but literally a “social male” in the eyes of their peers. Swearing off sexuality, they were accepted by the family and the wider society as men, although they also did not alter their bodies in any way.

Finally, the Bugis of Sulawesi, Indonesia, strain Western sex/gender concepts by recognizing five categories. In addition to normative males and females, their sex/gender repertoire includes calabai, calalai, and bissu. A calabai is a biological male who acts and dresses as a woman, while a calalai is a biological female who takes on male roles and attitudes. Most interesting is the bissu (purportedly derived from the Buddhist term bhikku, ‘priest’), an androgynous person who possesses the energy of both male and female.

This last comment takes us to our second and more challenging (from the Western perspective) point. Americans and Westerners/Christians in general presume that sex/gender is fundamentally and ultimately, if not exclusively, about the body: look at the genitals, and you know a person’s sex/gender. As difficult as this is for some people to fathom, not all cultures think this way. At a minimum, a third or fourth gender may not be sexual at all in the sense either of sexual desire or sexual body parts; it may entail rather behavior and comportment like clothing and gender-specific tasks and roles. Beyond the physical and behavioral, sex/gender may be conceived as spiritual.

The berdache mentioned at the outset of this discussion is more often and accurately described as “two-spirit.” In their own societies, the idea is that every person has a sex/gender spirit (men with a male spirit, women with a female spirit), but a berdache is different—and lucky—to have both and thus to share male and female spirituality. The Bugis bissu also combines masculine and feminine energy or spirit, giving such a person a unique ritual role as an androgynous shaman. In fact, it is relatively regular across cultures for religious specialists to combine sex/gender powers or, in the case of the Mapuche, to move between sexes/genders.

A Mapuche (Chile) shaman or machi may be a biological male or female (originally and predominantly female), but during shamanic rituals the machi alternates between masculine and feminine identities—and also between old and young categories—performing four different personas: young man, old man, young woman, and old woman. The power of the machi is precisely the fluidity of sex/gender.

Indeed, the fluidity and impermanence of sex/gender are noticeable in many cultures, best exemplified by the Navajo concept of Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozho, or the natural order. According to Carolyn Epple, the Navajo natural order “is male and female and organizes everything as male and female; it is a living cycle and organizes everything as a cycle; it interconnects everything; through that interconnectedness it cycles everything into everything; and it is an ongoing cycle, since each male or female has the other (i.e., female or male, respectively) into which it can cycle” (1998: 276).

In other words, nature itself is male-female: “Everything exists in terms of this arrangement: humans, air, and water as well as less tangible things like thought or emotions. All males and females are themselves both male and female” (277). Reality is also a “continuous cycling of male and female into each other,” even at the individual level; the familiar notion that there is such a “thing” as maleness or femaleness—in dress, in work, in sexuality—“is at odds with many Navajos’ understandings” which hold that “masculine and feminine are not as completely separate or mutually exclusive as is usually assumed” (278).

Even more, “Because everything exists as both male and female, gender valuation to many Navajos is largely situational, even when it appears in combination with seemingly fixed attributes such as genitalia. While anatomy is often the basis for female or male social, familial, and kinship roles, from another perspective, each sex’s genitalia also belongs to the opposite sex…. Since what is male or what is female may not be definite, there is no basis for determining whether the individual has the personality aspects, occupations, attire, and other features of only one gender or of both” (278-9).

Anthropologist Walter Williams (1992), one of the leading scholars of Native American sex/gender, once quoted a Native man who said that indigenous societies do not “waste people” like Western societies do; their cultures appreciate that humans are different (and not only in body but in behavior and spirit), that it is okay to be different, and that everyone has a place. Western cultures, especially conservative communities and institutions, would do well to learn this lesson and to stop fighting against and denying sex/gender diversity, realizing that it is alright to be other than normatively male and female. This otherness is no threat to their own identity or to our national unity.

References:

Epple, Carolyn. 1998. “Coming to Terms with Navajo ‘Nádleehí’: A Critique of ‘Berdache,’ ‘Gay,’ ‘Alternate Gender,’ and ‘Two-Spirit.’” American Ethnologist 25 (2): 267-90.

Nietzel, Michael T. 2026. “Texas A&M Forbids A Plato Reading in an Intro Philosophy Course.” www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/01/08/texas-am-forbids-a-plato-reading-in-an-intro-philosophy-course, accessed February 6, 2026.

Williams, Walter L. 1992 [1986]. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Informulacra and Information

The Trickster

Religion is Anti-Me

In the Shadow of the Giant

In this retrospective and prospective on, andIntroductory Chapter: The Many Lives of Anthropology celebration and critique of, the discipline of anthropology, Howell’s and Dieserud’s diagnosis is an interesting provocation and opportunity. Accordingly, this introductory chapter seizes the occasion to survey the territory that anthropology has trod not only during the past century since Malinowski and Boas established it firmly as an ethnographic science but from the earliest stirrings of what we could call the ethnographic impulse, the desire to describe—and more than describe, but to explain and understand—the nature of humanity through its diversity. The history of anthropology has, of course, become something of an industry, embodied best in the works of George Stocking, but there is abundant if not endless—and contentious—material for pondering the origins and evolution of the field, which is an apt undertaking for the book you are about to read. What we will find is many incarnations, in the past and the present alike, of anthropology—that it has lived many lives and displayed as much diversity as the humankind that it aspires to know.

Introductory Chapter: The Many Lives of Anthropology

Agnocracy

Anthropology of Space Colonization