Cultural evolutionary theory conceptualises culture as an information-transmission system
whose dynamics take on evolutionary properties. Within this framework, however, innovation …

This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the
status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and …

Take an ethnographer. She has spent more than thirty months in the Bocage in Mayenne
studying witchcraft.'How exciting, how thrilling, how extraordinary…! Tell us all about the …

How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de
Castro? In this article, I pose this challenge to all the major theories of animism, stretching …

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by
striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational …

Establishing whether Big Gods helped drive the cultural evolution of large-scale cooperation
requires the synthesis of multiple lines of evidence. Survey data and labbased studies …

This article stipulates that vagueness is a socially important yet academically largely
overlooked aspect of human interaction with the world. Vagueness and vague experiences …

This book revaluates familiar myths and understandings of the world with insights developed
while doing fieldwork far away from home. It is part of a trilogy derived from my doctoral …

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of
this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore …

The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and
characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very …