Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Why Gander Social?

A lightening talk showcasing Gander Social. Why we exist and how we interoperate.

Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study

The differences across cultures in the enforcement of conformity may reflect their specific histories. , With data from 33 nations, we illustrate the differences between cultures that are tight (have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior) versus loose (have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior). Tightness-looseness is part of a complex, loosely integrated multilevel system that comprises distal ecological and historical threats (e.g., high population density, resource scarcity, a history of territorial conflict, and disease and environmental threats), broad versus narrow socialization in societal institutions (e.g., autocracy, media regulations), the strength of everyday recurring situations, and micro-level psychological affordances (e.g., prevention self-guides, high regulatory strength, need for structure). This research advances knowledge that can foster cross-cultural understanding in a world of increasing global interdependence and has implications for modeling cultural change.

How to Harness Your Behavioural Wake to Amplify Culture

Every interaction we have, whether in a high-stakes meeting or a casual coffee chat, leaves a wake. Is yours calm, or chaotic?

Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations

“What do Pacific salmon, British falcons, pine trees everywhere, Ifugao pigs and spirits, and Norwegian apples have in common? They perform ‘domestication’ in ways certain to change the narratives and politics of domestication for scholars of whatever discipline and for critter people all over the earth. Read this book for up-to-the-minute, deeply researched, very smart, contentious takes on the shapes of conjoined humans and nonhumans living and dying together in diverse histories of civilization, colonialism, capitalism, times-past, and times-yet-to-come. Perhaps what opens up in this book are real possibilities for caring more materially in urgent times.” - Donna J. Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Culture & truth : the remaking of social analysis

xii, 253 pages ; 22 cm; Argues for a new approach to thinking and writing about culture. Exposing old conceptions, the book argues that new ethnographic writing must come to terms with the dynamic nature of social reality - with history, spontaneity, and human emotions; Originally published: Boston: Beacon, 1989; Includes index; Self-Renewing 2017; Includes index

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.

Sapiens [Tenth Anniversary Edition]: A Brief History of Humankind

New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st CenturyThe tenth anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling phenomenon that cemented Yuval Noah Harari as one of the most prominent historians of our time—featuring a new afterword from the author.One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.

Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups.

Consumer Entrapment

Abstract Why do consumers sometimes remain trapped in the very practices and communities that once helped them? Consumer practice research has largely emphasized the enabling outcomes of sustained practice participation, with less attention given to how those same practices can become entrapping. This article explores how consumer entrapment emerges within interconnected collective practices. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Chama, a community-based savings and support group in Kenya, it integrates practice theory with Hodder’s theory of entanglement. The study identifies three mechanisms (prefiguration, socialization, and entrenchment) through which participation generates commitments, dependencies, and obligations that produce recurring practice misalignments. Consumers continually work to realign these misalignments, yet under specific conditions, these efforts reproduce the contingencies that sustain participation while progressively deepening entrapment. The findings reveal a central tension: efforts to restore practice alignment can sustain what consumers value while simultaneously reproducing the interdependencies through which consumer entrapment emerges.

Chatty Community Gardens

Group chat is fertile soil for low-stakes ideation. With tending, seeds of thought can grow into structured, evergreen knowledge.

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (2026)

DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK: PDFEPUBPURCHASE A PRINT COPY: Buy the book from Better World Books or any online bookstore.Order a copy through your local bookstore!LISTEN TO THE PODCAST (Release dates: July 1 - August 5, 2026): Vanishing Culture Episode #1: What We Stand to Lose with Luca MessarraVanishing Culture Episode #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie LivingstonVanishing Culture Episode #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke PalmieriVanishing Culture Episdoe #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura GibbsVanishing Culture Episode #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter ScholingVanishing Culture Episode #6: What We've Learned with Vida Vojić & Alice BridgwoodABOUT VANISHING CULTURE: In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.  The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.  Web sites like MTV News, Gawker, and others are removed from the live web by their corporate owners, leaving only web archives like those in the Wayback Machine as the last remaining public record of their reporting and cultural impact. Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new form of digital barrier, impeding access to information at community scale.  When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public's ability to access its own history is at risk. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues, featuring essays from: Digital librarian Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive; Humanities scholar Luca Messarra; Book historian and social media star Allie Alvis; Game designer Jordan Mechner; Journalist Philip Bump; Writer and editor Maria Bustillos; Film archivist Rick Prelinger; Digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura; Writer and book artist Eve Scarborough; And many more… The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.

Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence

Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.

Fast Capitalism | Mavs Open Press Open Access Journals | University of Texas at Arlington

Fast Capitalism is an academic journal aimed at describing the current moment of capitalism. We publish peer reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century. Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism. This makes it difficult for people to shield themselves from subordination and surveillance. The working day has expanded; there is little down time anymore. People can 'office' anywhere, using laptops and cells to stay in touch. But these invasive technologies that tether us to capital and control can also help us resist these tendencies. People use the Internet as a public sphere in which they express and enlighten themselves and organize others; information technologies afford connection, mitigate isolation, and even make way for social movements. We are convinced that the best way to study an accelerated media culture and its various political economies and existential meanings is dialectically, with nuance, avoiding sheer condemnation and ebullient celebration. We seek to shape these new technologies and social structures in democratic ways. We look at technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), global flows, political economy, culture and cultural studies, social theory, political theory, intersectionality, and the envionrment.