To ensure more comfort, more security, more spare time and so on, technology progresses by simplicating, that is, by simplifying an action after a complicated translation. The electrical buttons of a machine provide limited selections through extra wiring that replace mechanic sliders and handles, which used to allow endless options. Science teaches how to simplicate, reducing apparent chaos to atomistic principles. Engineers translate events into tangible, predictable and manageable processes. Descartes’s algebra exemplified the technique of replacing a real-life event by a simplified version after complicated approximation. A rolling stone does not follow the perfect curve because terrain is never perfectly even. A slice of life is sacrificed in the simplication, but the approximation works to build bridges and roads.

In another mathematical metaphor, asymptotes replace infinite curves for applications, but they are not real. They conceal infinity, an inconvenient reality. We do the same when singling out facts in discussions, constructing and altering identities, investing time in projects for future gain, or voting for a policy. So much background that holds detail and nuance disappears in the act. Singularity vanishes. At some point, the simplication may be forgotten and users live by simplexes. Languages, frameworks and algorithms are simplication machines that humans built to manage ever larger groups. They keep action predictable. At a price. This book discusses the price.

Sources of Culture

Yesterday I wanted to listen to a post-punk song from 1978 about Camus’s novel The Stranger. I went on the app Spotify but there was no way of finding the song that The Cure unfortunately named ‘Killing an Arab’. A beautiful bit of cultural heritage, the iconic band’s first single, might disappear because of the meaning of its title, irrespective of the song’s frame of experience. Many listeners from Arabian countries will know The Cure’s and Camus’s frame not to be xenophobic. They might not identify either with Arab ethnicity. But that does not matter in a social network backing down to skip the experiential frame on the assumption that everyone is probably so frame-unaware that they will take the meaning at face value. And thus the song is irretrievable, despite the well-known experiential frame. An apparently silent revolution took place that ended trust in human intuition. The price of globalization.

No frame can be judged without the sphere. The song banned for its song title, irrespective of its intention (experiential frame), is grist to the mill of the defenders of freedom of expression. The anti-woke brigade decries ‘woke’ activism for ending that freedom. Yet, does the wide dissemination of anti-woke opinions not point to the contrary? We must picture the blatant cynicism of those orators calling out their being canceled as they announce their sold-out shows in places like Madison Square Garden.Footnote 1 Missing in the story of political correctness as an imprisoning frame is what a situational (social) analysis reveals: the sphere. The sphere the white commentators communicate in is powerful enough to maintain the status quo of the social system, so it is easy for them to focus on speech and its (absence of) freedom while disregarding the network wherein the idea spreads. Consider pillars of the social network such as housing, schooling, employment, access to public services: do whites have reason to complain about discrimination? Blacks have. When little progress has been made in the way of eradicating racism and structural discrimination, how fair is it for the commentators to lament the success of a frame such as anti-racism or BLM activism?

A frame in itself does not guarantee an outcome. Success depends on the sphere, and more broadly on the social network wherein spheres operate. How to stop those abusing their freedom of expression hurting vulnerable groups? A cancel frame, or ‘cancel culture’, exists in a certain sphere. Does it reach further? In contemporary society, the reach of an ethical stance is limited because of both the segregated sphere and the simplex frame. The fragmentation of spheres socially severs the encompassing and interstitial ties of humanity while simplex framing culturally denies the ties through automated decisions, like the app rendering The Cure’s song irretraceable. Fragmentation hampers material influences across the network. Automation obstructs discussions on what is viable or not. A combined social and cultural analysis permits to identify the key weapons of discrimination such as insulting words, and get to their actual underlying tension (and their attraction for some) to actively discourage them via newspaper columns, blogs, school books, sensitivity readers and corporate diversity cells.

The intervention will seem partisan though unless its frame of discussions and its sphere of influences are grounded in life, a third dimension. Culture is never purely a product of arbitrary historical convergence. The species’ care for the sources of production lie at the origin. Once upon a time—to narrate the origin of instituting a food taboo—pork was forbidden in the Middle East for health reasons. Or to accommodate the transition to a nomadic lifestyle.Footnote 2 Alcohol prohibition prevented quarrels in densely populated areas and was adopted by Islam. Women veiling themselves served some purpose too in the new context of nomadic groups seasonally uniting, like limiting jealousy. Democracy and human rights stopped conflict in globalized settings. And wokeness effectively warns about condoning racism. Letting a Black girl star as princess Ariel gives self-confidence to children of color.Footnote 3 Hiring a Black actress to play a Norwegian king from the eleventh century may even plant gender- and colorblindness in a wide audience, who initially perceived anachronism in the film.

Cultural elements do not come out of the blue but have at some point been invented, which was their original frame. Religious extremists stoning a girl for not wearing the veil, are in denial of that. ‘The veil has no origin but God.’ ‘Heresy’ they say refusing to consider the frame behind a practice. The frame is what a certain Jesus named the ‘spirit’ of the law to verify whether an application still was in that spirit. The frame motivating a practice may have shifted from a community’s wellbeing to an obsession with purity and orthodoxy, or to hegemony of a certain group. Commentators rejecting the cultural system of Islam because of this shifted frame of application, similarly forget to consider the frame underlying a belief or practice. They too assume that an individual cannot shift frame. In the same vein, they ban certain people or ideas on the basis of surface traits irrespective of experiential frame. They want immigrants out, to isolate them from autochthones or to reprogram them. They believe in surface traits instead of discussing the different frames, possibly grounded in the same source of production such as peace.

To mainstream the study of tensors, which bundle the prevalent tensions and humanizes them by assessing their impact on the species, I propose an advance in three steps: start with culture, embed it in society, insert life. Here comes the first.

Culture as Nomos and Logos

Institutions are established practices, rules and agreements. They determine ownership and management of the sources of production, in particular the distribution of human and natural energy. Energy is a unit for the spread of production sources, like meaning is for culture and event is for the social network. Policy intervenes in the distribution of energy. So do institutions. They can redistribute or steer behavior away from utility. Therefore, contemporary economists have integrated the role of institutions in the neoclassical model of supply and demand driving production, pricing and consumption.Footnote 4 The economists—one has won a Nobel prize for it—accept that institutions with their particular histories are part of the (eco)nomos.

In the same go, however, the economists opened a Pandora’s box because of the cultural dynamic of nomos and logos, which since Berger and Luckman on the dialectics of socialization and later Bourdieu on the habitus stipulates that no institution is purely a habit or custom, a nomos.Footnote 5 It is easy to see that any institution presumes a logic, broadly defined as principles to perform appropriate actions in different situations.Footnote 6 The cultural system is a set of institutions wherein one logic interrelates with another, which implies again an encompassing logos that people sense in their judgments (of what is right or wrong). Socioeconomic and ecological interventions must be aware whether replacing one of the set’s institutions violates that logic and thus will increase inertia for the nomos to adjust its logic. For instance, the socioeconomic measure of the economist Piketty to redistribute inheritances that are unproductively kept in a family is not possible without a cultural intervention spurring a change of mentality about possessions.Footnote 7 What this cultural intervention by the economist requires is a meta-institutional act: to discern the logos in the nomos. The current tendency in the social sciences is to reduce culture to the arbitrary set, the nomos, which corresponds to an identity. Piketty joins that tendency by concluding from the polarization in politics that progressive thinkers have nothing to gain from the identity debates out of which rightists make hay.Footnote 8 My proposal is to take up the debate on identity and relate it back to culture.

Admittedly, it is not obvious how a cultural logic, a frame of experience, emerges from a historically evolved, arbitrary set of practices. Fans of the series Better Call Saul will know what I mean when referring to Bob Odenkirk’s impersonation of the crooked yet charming lawyer Saul Goodman. The singular combination of traits, loser and worldly-wise in one is a nomos that none of the qualities I propose here could fully capture, yet whose logos the viewer recognizes anyway when applied by Odenkirk in scenes that for that reason—just like situations in a culture—are comprehensible. As I am writing about the actor’s performance, I can do little else than identify a limited number of qualities, like pixels, and put them together, hoping the reader will understand what I mean by the image. Now, the constructed image ‘Saul Goodman’ becomes a pixel in itself as we go on discussing events in the series. This process of an image drawn from a set of pixels and turning into a new pixel I term simplication. Nomos transforms into logos. That is when a thing, an affect or a thought gets a grip on complex reality. Indeed, it exists to us thanks to being framed. The simplication into a frame becomes a simplex, though, when its origins are forgotten. The previous section gave examples of the cultural logics behind institutions and how these might be rooted in sources of production.

A simplex is a frame, but a special one: it obscures the existence of other frames. In the words of Plotinus in the fifth tractate of the Enneads, simplex is ‘that before which there is nothing’.Footnote 9 Could such a thing exist? Everything has an origin, and is related to something else. Plotinus reminds us of the temptation to forget that. The danger is also called reification, as in supposing a dictatorial regime to be a given (thing, res) which thus obscures the origin of its power. Or as in the equation of culture with identity: you should respect an established practice (an institution) irrespective of the damage it causes, because this culture is someone’s identity. No, cultural practices have origins in situations, and as situations change, the practices can be adapted. An institution such as inheritance that previously protected a production source such as income can be diagnosed as jeopardizing that source.

Social and Cultural Analysis: Matrixial Anthropology

Why could employees of the company Amazon not mobilize enough members to set up a union? A social analysis of interviews and participatory observation explains the problem from relations of internal competition in the company. Employees have interiorized values of individualism, which are indicative of unacknowledged social pressure. They obey the employer. Cultural analysis for its part evinces the history instantiated in this one situation, where the American dream as well as the clash of company pride and aversion against socialism converge. To explain the absence of an Amazon union, the methods are intertwined, connecting micro- to macro-levels of society as well as the social to the cultural, structure to agency and the humanities to the social sciences. Otherwise an explanation remains incomplete.

Launched by Gluckman as the extended case method, situational (or social) analysis is a time-honored approach for ethnographers to describe the various interests interlocking in a situation.Footnote 10 Situational analysis extends ethnographic observations at the micro-level, such as a working situation, to make general statements about the meso- or macro-level of, respectively, a sphere or society. Cultural analysis, whose origins are structuralist, basically takes the opposite direction by learning, through fieldwork, initiation and other types of cultural and linguistic training, about the local system of beliefs, traditions and idioms to understand any situation in those terms. Culture is short for cultural system.

The combination of both methods is useful for example in sensitization campaigns to avoid undue association of a group with a stigmatizing practice, for example in the case of albinism-related killings in west Tanzania.Footnote 11 If we adopt Goffman’s take on stigma as ‘discreditable’ social status, the combination means that cultural analysis discerns who is discreditable in principle, following cultural logics (of labeling), and situational analysis reveals the actual social devaluation, the extent (of labeling) in practice.Footnote 12 The social risk of having albinism in an arid rural area could have been mitigated by a protective cultural title, like that of ‘chief’ did for twins to accept their excess fertility.

A class in school organizes cultural analysis by teaching about the history of ideas, various schools of thought and their dialectics of thesis and antithesis. The taught subject fulfills the role of a sphere. The dialectic of frames raises the validity of the pupil’s understanding of the subject. The vertical text box in the scheme below refers to what humans do with meanings of events: feeling them, to a determinable extent. Consciousness is defined as the feeling of meaning (versus the feeling of what happens, Damasio’s neurobiological definition in “Chapter One: Simpl(if)ication”). We feel meaning when we manage to connect the various meanings of an event as terms into a frame and find out how frames relate to each other in a cultural system. Meanings are felt broadly (horizontally across the network) and deeply (vertically toward the meaning system)—the more levels and dimensions the higher their validity. A third dimension will be discussed in the next section when our account reaches down to the sources of production.

Before a frame applies to an event, the actor has defined the sphere to communicate or, more generally, exchange in. A sphere can be almost permanent (a social structure) or transient (a group at an event). In Fig. 1, the dashed ellipse of sphere A encompasses two frames of one cultural system. Examples include the economic sphere where opposite attitudes to trade and the market are possible; the political sphere with diverging approaches to a voting procedure; or intergenerational misunderstandings within a group. Sphere B organizes the encounter of frames from different cultures, like a digital notice board attracting internet surfers of various backgrounds with similar interests. Sphere C describes a moment of context collapse, as in online statements without frame and cultural background.Footnote 13 In ‘superdiverse’ globalized communication, spheres pop up to soon disappear. Others are rigidified.

Fig. 1
An illustration of the vertical dimension of meaning system with a horizontal network of events. It has 3 spheres A, B, and C. A has frame and culture, B has 2 frames one overlapping with that of A, and C has meaning.

Feeling meaning (2D)

Full size image

In gray normal font, meanings linked up in frames, themselves belonging to cultural systems, provide us with the palette of possibilities for making sense. Cultural analysis reconstructs the palette, the semantic field that precedes the actors’ definition of a situation. In black italics, spheres of exchange make up the now, the meaning felt and the choices made at a given moment. Social analysis reconstructs the moment. Whereas the extended case method contextualizes the meaning of, for instance, a wedding (horizontally) in relation to other events, the structuralist method derives the meaning of a marital arrangement (vertically) from the comparison of all marriage and kinship systems of the human species. A ‘meaning system’ encompassing all cultures suggests that a language is possible for such comparison. The social system is the (social) network of (communicative) events.Footnote 14 The meaning system is a hypothetical reality at the macro-level of culture. The first anthropologists who consistently thought from the psychic unity of humanity were structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss studying the unity as a symbolic order of signifiers, human ‘culture’ in the singular, of which cultures in the plural are quite distinct, historically unique combinations.Footnote 15 What else than such a ‘meaning system’, situated on the outskirts of Fig. 1, could even a radically relativistic anthropology assume to be part of when writing and informing future generations about phenomena the world over? The tensorial anthropology introduced in the next sections elicits this third ‘human’ dimension.

Social analysis and cultural analysis. Sphere and frame. Each has its constraints. But without the pair, my analysis would lack the volatile dimension of choice. The duality of cultural system and social structure, treating Marx’s superstructure and base as two halves of a whole, does not sit well with new materialists and post-humanists like Barad who have inspired anthropologists in the past decade.Footnote 16 I contend that, oblivious to the growth of simplex society, these schools of thought could not do justice to the suspense between possibilities from the past and the selection in the present. The suspense has fed much research versed in the critical school that is retrieving relevance, as will be specified in footnotes for the interested reader (e.g., Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Kapferer, Taussig, Virno, Marazzi). Without the palette of possibilities from past and present how could we have a basis to formulate social critique and invent alternatives?Footnote 17 The contrast between simplex and tensor cannot do without.

One generation after anthropology’s experiment in decolonizing knowledge coined ‘cultural critique’ by Marcus and Fischer in 1986, we must again explore the light that cultural comparisons from various corners of the globe shed on current social change.Footnote 18 Euro-American premises of the good life have been anthropologically challenged at three occasions at least: in 1966 by Sahlins’s depiction of hunter-gatherers as the ‘original affluent society’, in 1980 by Taussig’s ethnographic analysis of commodity fetishism, and in 2011 by Graeber’s anthropological history of debt.Footnote 19 During this third period, a second decolonizing experiment took place: to radically adopt the ontologies of other lifeworlds.Footnote 20 From a postcolonial perspective, the radical pluralism suffers from a political deficit. The more radically the otherness of a lifeworld is presented, the less the community can be protected against exoticization and concomitant abuse.Footnote 21 Of course, political pragmatics should not be an argument in determining how things are. This remark in fact also confronts postcolonial studies denouncing unjust situations on the unspoken assumption of universal human rights (a Western ontology to which postcolonial intellectuals subject local spheres). But what lacks in both positions, ontology and postcolonial critique, and might solve the issue as proposed in the next section is to make the assumptions explicit and falsifiable. We can do that by opening a variable in parallel to local spheres. I call this parallel dimension the relation to the species. Anthropos, quite simply the object of our discipline, weirdly forgotten.

Humanity: Life-Sensing

After-knowledge is easy. But can one learn from mistakes if they are the product of a frame rather than of misinformation? As a coordinator of long-term academic exchange in eastern Africa, having defended with limited success the marginalized soft sciences for their peacekeeping impact, I noted in desolation the outbreak of the war in the most northern tip of that region, in Tigray. How could the chimeras of nationalism and ethnicity hold sway in 2020? Twelve years of fruitful cooperation at Ethiopian universities in function of economic and technological progress threatened to be wiped away, in virtually one day. Some of those ready to pull the trigger over ethnic difference included engineers and doctors, economists and policymakers with PhDs. Had their ‘tribal’ sentiments returned? Or had their cultural intuitions about conflict management been stamped out in favor of factual knowledge? Development cooperation in the south has always focused on expertise, the nuts and bolts of machines, the improvement of crops and medical treatment, accountancy and administration, the analysis of objective indicators of poverty—stuff scientists know how to control. In contrast, the humanities cultivate interpretative skills, including self-criticism. Could this capacity of deconstruction be helpful among Ethiopian and Eritrean elites to snap out of the frame of experience that opposes the constructs of an ‘us’ and a ‘they’? Could more ‘humanities’ have prevented the war?

The answer came a year later from Europe as its neighbor Ukraine was invaded by Putin’s forces. Belligerent speech implicated all sciences and ideological backgrounds, despite Europe’s humanities tradition celebrating self-criticism. The postcolonial turn appears mere veneer. The cause of suffering is a way of thinking, which commentators of repute are instrumental in perpetuating. Whether one says ‘Ukraine threatened Russians’ or ‘Russia invaded Ukraine’, both statements make abstraction of a country’s internal diversity. The discourse on ‘Russia’ seeking this and ‘Europe’ or ‘the US’ having to do that, and ‘China’ being thus, each time equates a people with a regime, with self-fulfilling effect say a year later. Russian sons and daughters were led to believe in the equation. They killed and died on the battlefield for that illusion. The regime has fed the belief in an unchanging Russian identity representing a linear history. Western powers were eager to send weapons to the battlefield and fight a war by proxy, which as time goes by inadvertently legitimizes Putin’s posse for Russians seeing their country return on the geopolitical map. Economies north and south of the equator, sanctioning and sabotaging each other, are ailing from the instability. Since there was no objective reason for war, what else caused the escalation save a way of thinking?

The parties could have thought in another way. A Russian man condoning the invasion in Ukraine imagines Russia to stand for a fixed set of beliefs, and Europe or the West for an opposite set, and Ukraine to be moving from the first to the second. The man conflates sphere and frame. He supposes the spheres ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’ to possess one frame each, and only one, moreover opposing each other. Scholars and journalists on both sides of the fence replicate the conflation of sphere and frame. The rigid picture feeds conflict. Anti-American sentiments across the Global South morph into support for Ukraine’s invasion. Conservative forces feel sympathy for the putative fight against ‘Western decadence’. Progressive voices in the Global North think the hard-won ‘universal’ values of ‘democracy and human rights’ are at stake. All these positions assume culture to be the explanation and fixed. The escalation could be avoided had everyone from the onset disentangled sphere and frame, and granted cultures their internal diversity.

A stronger antidote than diversity is to consider the impact of the sphere on the larger network and thus on lives beyond the sphere. An 80-year-old Russian grandmother mourning her grandson denounces the war in Ukraine as an idiocy with the words “unacceptable in the twenty-first century!”Footnote 22 She knows her community is still suffering the consequences of communism and the Second World War which victory in Ukraine might have alleviated. Nevertheless, her words daringly compare the Russian sphere and its dominant frame of experience to what is viable for humanity in the twenty-first century. She could have contented herself with a matrixial view, which is to juxtapose the two frames in a way showing that both have their logic and thus the local one is fine: ‘Europeans have decolonized their imperialism of old’ but ‘Russians have reasons to fear NAVO and thus crave for territorial reconquest’. Your personal upbringing and identity will determine which frame to choose. Such matrixes are what the humanities and social sciences have become experts in after the cultural turn and postcolonial turn in the 1970s that made a clean break with the imperialist past of academia (and of anthropology in the preceding decade).

The matrix contradicts my assumption that the majority of Russian citizens did not agree with Putin’s act of war. Admittedly, I ignored the cultural frame of ‘democracy’ in that region: contrary to Western democracy with its electoral system striving as much as possible to truthfully equate regime and people, the Russian leader represents the people at once and thus knows their will without needing to ask for their opinion. In response to my ignorance, a Russian interlocutor at a conference in Dar es Salaam a week after the invasion magnified the cultural difference into an irreconcilable opposition.Footnote 23 If I may paraphrase between quotation marks: ‘A Westerner will never understand the respect of Russians for traditional values and their conviction that the tsar embodies these, no matter what other governments declare.’ That is reflexivity: how my faulty speech affects the discourse of the interlocutor. But the elderly lady’s gut feeling made her say something else. She went beyond the matrix of frames by assessing their impact on human lives. This third dimension bringing in ‘life’ upgrades the matrix to a tensor, raising the validity of her position. Applied to anthropology, the formula unpacked is that humans think right (reduce society’s entropy) by having frames (cultural analysis) related to the flow of energy (life-sensing) that produces spheres (social analysis).

A tensor adds a degree of freedom, which lends ability to shift frames. Crucial is not the shifting as such, but the openness of mind and senses to the response from the environment as one shifts. A situational analysis, for instance a national survey on school performance, contextualized through cultural analysis which compares countries, periods and educational targets, leads to a policy intervention, for example a pedagogy oriented on self-study. The cogency of the measure will depend on how well the analyses observed the life response. The experiences of teacher and pupil in the classroom and of pupils and parents at home allow the researcher to distinguish the new pedagogy from the old paradigm, and translate the relation between the two frames in experiential terms. Without this life-sensing from the field, the measure will likely not stick.

Eco-transition is wholeheartedly supported by scientists doing the studies in the field and designing the technologies, as well as by entrepreneurs producing and selling the new materials, a generally underestimated willingness also among the bigger companies preparing for transition: these actors keep their finger on the pulse of the field and the market for their survival.Footnote 24 Inertia predominates in the unwieldy middle of the knowledge economy, namely the professional services networks, insurance companies, industry audit and consulting firms, financial advisory, risk management and tax services corporations, lobby groups and political organizations. They do not gain from a completed transition, so their life-sensing wavers around a premeditated social analysis and format.

The outcome of observing a life response is unpredictable. Joining a protest march in the street and hearing the diverse motivations should facilitate frameshift, but repeating slogans might as well indoctrinate. In the matrix there is no way back. One swallows the pill, either blue or red. All room for monitoring one’s frame in terms of changed situations (life-sensing) is gone. One acknowledges the two frames, yet the contrast is invariably made from the perspective of the pill swallowed, like the cultural frame someone grew up in. The matrix does not dig up the relation between the frames, their semantic field of similarities and distinctions. The scholar will not know how to shift from the first to the second frame and back.

Antivaxxers have swallowed the pill convincing them of the delusion of the vaccinated masses. They themselves are the few with ‘pure blood’. So their unfalsifiable claim goes. The antivaxxers’ matrix advocates the antithesis, but precludes the question of viability of either thesis. Decrying ‘collective psychosis’ (a frame in the medical sphere), their matrix does not grant the masses a wisdom on which democracy is based. The majority of the species would not have the collective reason to make choices for the better, conforming to government policy to save more lives in the short term and prevent pan-panic. Readiness to discuss one’s frame is essential, as widely popular online platforms Reddit and Quora show, to expose errors, simplex framing and reductionism. Some antivaxxers have claimed that they represent the undertow against an overbearing state. They believe to be the ones reading the signs of the times and accessing collective reason, an intuition protecting the species, like Vico’s ancient wisdom. They cannot be blamed for framing, because humans need to. But they should tell their frame. Their intuition should explicate the frame to compare it with other frames. The comparison should incorporate life-sensing. Empirical science attempts that. Before thinking to have identified ‘the monster!’ scientists should ask whether they have made the monster. A three-dimensional anthropology studying the making of frames is an advance in validity and in humanizing science.

A simplex, we will see, contains the highly condensed negative energy of unacknowledged layers. If a far-right party wants to forbid immigration because of its threat to the community, to its peace and traditional institutions, why not scientifically check the claim? A moralist rejection of the debate is simplex, with the consequence in a democracy of making the rejected seem cool, a martyr. That is how a fascist can come to look like the underdog, and might attract others disgusted with the muzzling of voices. My frame is that of an intersectionally privileged scholar, a middle-class white male heterosexual, who may gain credibility through an underdog position by having lived a simple life in rural Africa. In my perspective, a democracy rewards speech from the fringes of society. My gay colleague from a poor background, who has been the underdog his whole life, will much more positively frame the acquisition of a power position, the political revolution toward outright dominance of the norms and respect he was deprived of, as well as the legal exclusion of citizens threatening to reduce him again to underdog status. He will cherish signs of the revolution, such as new speech and support of activist authors, which my frame (mis)interprets as new authority deterring votes. Seeing the different frames of experience at work in each other’s statements, how they are related and rooted in existential experience, removes the aggravation and misunderstanding ensuing from our belonging to different spheres. It humanizes the social system, including science.

Anthropological Validity: Toward a Speciated History

For a million years, our ancestors lived off the hunt of animals, when they were not picking berries. For all this time, one may gasp, ‘we’ engaged in the act of slaughter without stunning. Since about twenty years, we prohibit such deed as unethical. ‘Primitive man’ did not care how long the shot or trapped animal suffered until the mercy stroke. We as educated citizens are making up for that lack of awareness. Animal rights, like human rights, are an insight of Western intellectuals thinking freely, liberated of cultural institutions. Religious sacrifices will be adapted accordingly, or they will be considered backward. It would not be fair to apply ethics retroactively and call our former selves immoral, but the general claim is clear enough: humanity makes progress.

What compels me to qualify the claim is ethnographic fieldwork in a community different from my own, south of Lake Victoria in Africa. It has led me to believe that progress can only be made on the condition that we remember what was given up and retain what was good about it. Ethics expands knowledge. Instead of replacing one truth by another, which is simplex (one-layered), a valid knowledge adds a layer. An important layer is the perspective or experiential frame of those involved, not only of the researcher. In the judgment above, the perspectives of hunter and animal are missing. Why should the chemical impulse at a certain moment in a pain center of the brain decide about the ethical status of an activity? Yes, we hear the cry of the trapped animal and see the spastic movement of the limbs. It hurts our European senses. And neuroscience confirms the impulse to be pain. But what about the ensuing stillness of the body? Might it reveal the state the animal ends up in, of spending the last moments in the forest where it belongs? Animists attribute to the animal a state of resignation. They worship the animal’s spirit for the rich nutrition providing the family, which is another story than prey succumbing to the prowess of an animal higher up the food chain. Yet, even if this is not so, and the animal’s panic and pain last until the last minute, why should a life not be judged in its entirety; that the creature feels good by finding its destiny and giving life to others? Why would ‘feeling’ to an animal be the individual body’s sensation that Westerners place in the center of experience? Do we want to be scientists projecting on other creatures our state of consciousness—a culturally and historically specific one at that, which moreover does not question the projection?

The disproportional attention to the impulse, the visible, the moment instead of a lifetime, is telling of a simplex society, focusing on the pixels instead of the figure the pixels form. Concepts of fate have lost their meaning in a society of citizens weaving one gratifying event to another without experiencing the contentment of reaching one’s destiny. Positivism conceives of reality as a sum of moments or atoms without perspective or frame linking the elements. Reality simply is. The vectors of capitalism, industrialization and modernity, respectively money, Fordism, rationalism and empiricism, have proven their efficiency; they are also what brought the world to its knees. My purpose is not to defend slaughter without stunning, but to give a representation of another lifeworld so as to increase the validity of my position. A sign of that validity is that I am reminded now of the intimate relation with animals that animists have, which the neurobiological study of pain ignores. The ethical insight raises the validity of analysis.

The following contemporary neologisms are simplications gone awry at the macro-level. They could fuel ‘entropology’, the study of disintegration or dissipation, in this case a decay of the cultural exchange that connects humans to a common sphere, to a collective good.Footnote 25 McDonaldization refers, in the Weberian tradition of rationalization, to a standardized, homogenizing form of globalization.Footnote 26 Disneyfication transforms an environment to simplify it, for commercial and safety purposes. Googlization is to expand a certain technology of access to all markets, applications and contexts without arousing scrutiny.Footnote 27 Amazonization (after Walmartization) is an expansion disrupting retail by crossing distribution platforms with a one-stop shop.Footnote 28 In all these cases a blueprint (a simplified sequence of actions) is imposed that after testing should work for the largest number of operations (a complicated substitution). Globalization thrives on mechanisms inventing single frames to work in all spheres. The frame is simplex in that information networks transmit unidirectional impulses to make predictable decisions for large groups. The format does not care about sustainability, the relation between part (the activity) and whole (the equilibrium of the wider system).

In the meantime, what are the formats doing to our minds? A simplex draws you into its grip on reality until you cannot get out. Everything you encounter in the image is set in that light. In the piece of art you peer at, say a carnival painted by Breughel, all constituents, dressed figures on the plaza, obscure scenes on a street corner are interpreted through the frame that initially pulled you in. It is a both mentally and emotionally rewarding process. A simplex can be compared to such dazzling light. But it goes further. Picture a black hole, an intense gravity that no matter can escape. Think of your colleague labeled in a certain way. All that person does and says, also his refutations, will seem to confirm the framing. Good intuition and communication with the person could have countered it. But something came in between. The compressed time of globalization and the information society has taken over to let a certain atmosphere invisibly envelop the person. The framer enters a dream to never wake up, like looking at the painting and absorbing the scene without ever returning to see the frame again. Simplexes collide. Country against country. Left versus right. Black and white.

“Why believe in progress?” could have been a subtitle for this book. Ten pieces of good advice, scientifically based, by Harvard’s Arthur BrooksFootnote 29 on being happy each amount to no more than the habits that humans had a few hundred thousand years ago, and that the regular job in contemporary society reserves only for the lucky few with enough spare time: invest in family and friends, become member of a club, be physically and mentally active, think about philosophical or religious matters, do sports, be polite, be also generous, watch your health, go into nature, know your colleagues. Paleolithic societies stimulated all these activities through their initiation networks, egalitarian ethics and way of life. Foragers adapt their paths in function of the environment’s direct responses. They live in bands small enough to have a say in decisions. They have the pleasure of following their instincts. In short, they lead a life contributing to a sense of trust, impact and connection. The three affects are interrelated. Much of the human’s limbic distrust vanishes when cooperating with or talking to someone and feeling how the mutual connection has impact on the surroundings. In contemporary society, the daily chores as well as science and technology, from factories to informatics, develop skills and organize energies in the opposite direction, to eventually have members watch parallel screens in the metaverse. And revealingly, no member even attempts to call that a life.

An essential moment in this book is to agree now on what the old sensations of the species and their ongoing relevance mean for the study of society. What is the significance of the ‘intraspecific’ for students of anthropos, the human? The physiologist Jared Diamond wrote bestsellers to explain cultural differences from biological and ecological factors. His message is that a modern society at odds with those evolutionary factors will fail.Footnote 30 Opponents correctly remark that his materialist take on culture underestimates the plasticity of human nature.Footnote 31 But would they dare contend that humans are malleable to the point of effectively (re)producing any type of society, such as today’s when we as Primates live in networks larger than ant colonies?

The plausible position beyond or between the (modern) materialist and (postmodern) idealist tradition seems the wide spectrum of remaining possibilities, which do not ignore the species’ neurobiological evolution, however without treating these possibilities as fixed structures that moreover directly determine culture. What these possible anthropologies have in common, quite minimally put, is to differentiate ways of life in the species’ history, which materially organize the sources of the planet, and to accept that these lifeways stimulate different palettes of affect.Footnote 32 The palette seems to have gravitated toward (dis)trust in the neolithic, futility in industrialization, and disconnection in post-Fordism. The question is whether the evolution of a species’ lifeways and its affective dimension are covered by the approaches to history advocated by Fernand Braudel, namely event-based chronicles and long-term structures (longue durée).Footnote 33 The first highlights the influences from events and describes the social network of such influences, which fits well in new materialism and Latour’s actor-network theory. Other anthropologies adopt the second approach to study structures of thought, culture and logics reproduced in groups and across periods. Yet, when does any long term begin? Neither of the two (respectively social and cultural) approaches captures the accumulative history, also neurobiologically inscribed, of lifeways interrelated because originating from a common and constant source, the species. This origin-based history (versus event- and period-based) tells an ‘intraspecific’, a ‘speciated’ story. I am not focusing on natural selection but on how the species learns, after members make decisions for or sometimes against the best neural-wired options. The decisions are often rewarded (naturally selected) by arbitrary circumstances while the sources tapped from share the same origin, Earth.Footnote 34

Earth for humans can be specified through the ‘commons’, not the few global resources that are left (high seas, the deep-sea bed, the atmosphere, Antarctica, Outer Space and recently cyberspace) but the original commons before institutional change distinguished public and private ownership (cf. ‘the tragedy of the commons’ associated with the Anthropocene): natural materials held in common such as air, water, habitable land, forests, fisheries, plants as well as intersubjective resources of wellbeing such as desire, care, peace and knowledge.Footnote 35 The commons evolved (e.g., health commons from the forest, digital commons from cyberspace) but their origins are the same, ultimately ‘life’. The central idea remains that of common resources with origins closely tied to the survival of the species that therefore ground a critical view. What happens to these sources of production, how they are thought and differentiate people, is also the story of the human species. That is how intimately connected the three dimensions of the cultural, social and existential are, and why I include all three, via the study of frame, sphere and production source.

Tensorial Anthropology: Society/Culture/Life

An engineer of mixed Angolese and Portuguese descent with an old Dutch name and working for an oil company drives me around Luanda, where he was born and lives. The car is a 4WD, his wife’s. He enjoys narrating the history of his city in French, while driving by the relevant places. I avoid to ask about the details of his job. Climate change might overshadow the conversation. Another topic is the poverty visible on the streets. A man in rags standing at the crossroads attracts attention with his painted face and mouth full of shredded paper. The strips pop out as if in a still, to solicit the drivers’ conscience. At the parking lot where we step out of the car I hesitate to give to the homeless kids begging. A handful of coins would be a cheap way to get rid of the faint guilt. A little further, I am affected by the sight of young people waiting idly on benches in the park at the Cathedral. The great wall-painting across the street throwing a saint into a whirlpool of commodities seems to sum up my unease. ‘We are all part of it.’ The separation of local spheres is no more than a convenient illusion, preventing the money made from oil or science to be redistributed to those born in deplorable circumstances. My host notices my discomfort. Then he says he teaches capoeira to homeless kids so that they can become trainers themselves. They are taught about the African cosmology of the fighting dance that slaves imported to Brazil and now has returned home.

Each of these scenes from a day in Luanda carries a polysemic message. In his gesture to teach, the engineer performs a double transformation, at the level of sphere and frame. By caring for the kids living in the streets he goes against the tendency of fragmenting the sphere of the economy into informal circuits. He acknowledges the kids’ global membership. The capoeira also adds a new frame of experience, one of sportsmanship, to the survivalism dominating the kids’ lifeworld. ‘Generous’ is a correct if perhaps meager label for the tensor, the universally recognizable yet specific combination of traits presented by this highly educated, wealthy, modest and culture-sensitive guy making a difference for some of his much less fortunate compatriots. The wall-painting pins down another tensor, as does the paper-strip beggar. ‘Poverty’ is also an all too simple label to evoke their sets of frames emerging in that public sphere, and the source of production that they guard.

Explanations should be multidimensional. “You believe ‘x’ because it is in your frame (or culture)” is one-dimensional, a vector. That we call cultural essentialism. ‘You believe “x” because of your frame (perspective) in this sphere as opposed to another frame’ is two-dimensional, a matrix. That we call cultural relativism. The reference to the sphere implies that several frames are possible, attesting to a relational concept of culture. “You believe ‘x’ because of how your frame in this sphere relates to life” is three-dimensional, a tensor. The explanation has something spiritual, bringing in the collective reality of the human species. The chapters will account for the third dimension in the form of intersecting diagonals, expressing a dynamic of shifting frames (in a sphere). The following Fig. 2 schematizes the three dimensions of anthropological knowledge. They put together a compass for de-simplication and tensor design.

Fig. 2
An illustration has 3 concentric rings. Energy and meaning at the center, sources of production in between, and social and cultural analyses, and life sensing in the margin, with society and network, frame, culture, and meaning system, and species and life, along the X, Y, and Z axes, in order.

Anthropological validity

Full size image

The inner circle of the figure represents a simplex (‘S’ in Fig. 2). Its meaning, event and energy are disconnected from, respectively, the experiential frame (and its encompassing culture and meaning system), the sphere (and the social network of events it belongs to) and its origins in any natural or other sources of production (from the species and life). The second circle envelops frame, sphere and source of production. I underline these terms because awareness of their (meso-) level is a way out of the simplex. The one-layered meaning then extends into the multi-layered (a multiplex). A tensor (‘T’ in Fig. 2) extends all the way and in the three dimensions. At its widest and deepest, the felt meaning reaches the macro-level of social network, meaning system and life.

To be in the know is the ideal envisaged by the scheme. De-simplicate, and you can diagnose problem and formulate remedy. Yet, is something true necessarily right? Being made aware of what is omitted in a decision, such as cultural possibilities, enables us to take a more informed decision.

But what if the right decision comes from vision, from an unconscious intuition, which is not driven by cognitive logic and empirical data? The dashed arrows pointing toward R at the core of the scheme picture this alternative to de-simplication. Because the omniscient machine, as in the maximally wired, optimal computer, might still not intuit what is right, humans organize moments of ‘the real’. Those are events that carry a strong ‘out of the blue’ factor, reality appearing in its raw state denuded of its symbolic and imaginary features.Footnote 36 For instance, humans organize a democratic vote, even if statistics about individual qualities and personal output could tell them who the best leader is, or the GOAT in some sport or academia. They organize competitions, wherein the condition of the day, even luck plays a role, as if the Greek gods were involved. To end a dilemma, they consult an oracle, which looks like nothing more than a chance event. To feel love, they invest all their energy and spend a lifetime with someone they met by coincidence, as if destiny decided who was right for them. In each case, discussed in the last five chapters, the sense of being stuck in a simplex disappears by doing the opposite of accumulating knowledge. By removing all information they let what remains decide. The real can be nothing, pure chance, or it can be everything, a collective reason that no individual may fathom, a destiny. In the second case, the core transforms into a black hole. Our scheme turns sideways ninety degrees to show what happens behind it: a curved arrow connects the center to the most outward circle, locating the outcome of the real event beyond the widest-reaching tensor.

Brief Overview of Chapters

In the natural sciences, the simplex has a positive connotation, for it solves a complex problem by reducing it to manageable data and thus overcomes noise, the clutter of phenomena. “Chapter One: Simpl(if)ication” describes cases of contemporary technology and communication dominated by a single-part structure or message sending one signal at the time. “Chapter Two: Frameshift” recounts how Bateson’s anthropology and Descola’s study of animist cosmology shift perspective. They combat simplexes by stretching them back into shape along the first dimension drawn in the figure above. We learn to derive tensors from simplexes.

“Chapter Three: Losing the Feel for the Craft” studies witchcraft in a contemporary African setting to illustrate practices that dehumanize. What do albinism magic, drones, double tap, international boycotts and other current simplications have in common? What do they reveal about the direction of the global system? “Chapter Four: The Human Experiment” starts from the notorious Milgram experiment to find the historical and sociocultural origins of dehumanization described in “Chapter Three: Losing the Feel for the Craft”. Delving into the unsteady edifice of simplexes on primitiveness and progress brings us, right at the bottom, to a default frame called ‘normality’ with neolithic origins and discriminating. We explore the morbid energy condensed and transmitted across generations. “Chapter Five: Simplex Communication Society” sketches the impasse of the Anthropocene in terms of the macro context of global information networks. Is a massive shift of lifeway conceivable today, like that of foragers taking the decision to farm?

The five chapters form a first part. They diagnose society as in a state of entropy and dehumanizing. The second part of the book, spanning ten chapters, discusses the remedies developed today, welding cases together into a comparative ethnography (rather than having ethnographic vignettes illustrate a thesis). Part I deconstructed simplexes to derive tensors that are interrelated and form the rationale behind the selection and comparison of case studies in Part II.

Frameshift does not suffice in itself to implement social change. How can new prodemocracy movements break the deadlock? A second way out of the simplex, and effective in combination with frameshift, is to move sphere. This operation concentrates on the second dimension in the figure above, following social analysis. “Chapter Six: Collective Reason” shows how an ecological policy overcomes impasse when it leaves party politics behind to engage with the judicial sphere, where sanctions are imposed on a failing government. Enlightenment and Marxism had clear opponents in their battle for the French Revolution’s values of freedom and equality, respectively. The third value of inclusion, a necessity since globalization, turns out to be the missing link to uphold the other two values. In Luhmann’s smirk, how to include without excluding? Concisely put, a collective reason situated in the future might do the trick.

“Chapter Seven: The Oracle and the Real” and “Chapter Eight: Healer or King” extend our analysis from frame and sphere to cultural systems and the human species. Ethnographic reflections about lifeways come to the fore. As the art of shifting frames and letting in ‘the real’, divination defuses the simplex. So does intuition trained in the initiatory networks of central and eastern Africa. Both practices kept the chief’s rule medicinal and prevented power from corrupting into autocracy, which I come to theorize as a simplex system after split tensor.

With this theory in hand, “Chapter Nine: A Model Leader” turns to the US and Europe. The dwindling mediation between progressives and conservatives testifies to sedimented simplication. Politics has become ritual. Democrats distend their experiential frame toward the globe, so the best leader would be the one mirroring all; Republicans have their sphere contracted, so they elect a model they want to become. The so-called culture wars, science wars, the rise of post-fact, conspiracy and antivax theories, and the anti-conformist distrust of elites point to a divergence between ‘Stick to the facts, no belief’ and ‘Only belief, distrust facts’, caused by generations of simplication that left intuition untrained.

“Chapter Ten: Entropology” prepares for the final, considerably shorter chapters by laying down the pieces of the puzzle in an entropology of human connectedness, impact and trust. The theory substantiates a longue durée explanation of post-knowledge. More exactly, a ‘speciated history’ differentiates between social, cultural and existential validity. Human experience has over a period of 10.000 years been deprived of its connection with sources of production, spheres and frames consecutively. The ways to escape from the simplex through de-simplication are centrifugal. They restore the dependence of meaning, event and energy on respectively culture, network and life. Participants become aware. An alternative technique with the same purpose of pulling the simplex into a dynamic is centripetal. Participants reconnect their inner feelings to meanings out there in the world after the simplex contracts to the real (R in the scheme). Divination exemplifies the technique. An instance of contingency, or (animate) chance, removes all the clutter of symbolics and past speculations so that everyone (and everything) is in tune and the social situation can be rebooted. The reconnection of meaning and feeling strengthens trust and sense of impact.

Democratic elections are unpredictable moments with major impact that announce a collective choice, only reachable via the real. They intensify, through the public duel, the simplex energy of antagonism. The winner for all to see emerges out of that highly contracted, cathartic event, and the feeling is shared about witnessing a collective reason that no sum of educated individual guesses could replace. A similar contraction and witnessing happen in international football competitions, exciting audiences for organizing a moment of the real, away from simplex society (“Chapter Eleven: Soccer as Mirror”). Hip hop performances are a second case where opponents dissing each other attract a crowd for harnessing the energy between attendants (“Chapter Twelve: Street Cred”). The slur appropriated by the artist representing a discriminated group illustrates the principle of using the energy of the simplex instead of evading it: immunity through contagion. Also the redemption of Pentecostalist converts rests on seizing the very evil that their new religion combats (“Chapter Thirteen: Godwork”). Inhabitants of Lubumbashi and Morogoro train their intuition and prepare their children for tensorial lives.

“Chapter Fourteen: Intuition, Destiny, Love” exemplifies the oldest remedy against simplex society. The magic of love, how could dating apps capture it? They are a cure exacerbating the disease, namely the simplex of (inanimate) chance, as opposed to intuition approaching love as a destiny. “Chapter Fifteen: Phantoms of the Future” discusses the Y2K craze, the moral bifurcation in the 9/11 aftermath, and the collective imaginary about aliens, to discuss the ‘ultero-ceptive’ senses as a universal way to humanize a system. Can we leave spirituality out of the picture if validity of claims about the world is our aim? Carl Sagan’s famous dictum that ‘science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality’ evokes an awareness of the formidable whole. The centrifugal arrows in Fig. 2 strive for such feeling of meaning covering the entire scheme. The alternative centripetal arrows aim at the same through the passage of the unknown at the center. The puzzling ‘pre-ception’ in the epilogue is a last attempt at letting the human speak.