From Organic Societies to Unnatural Lives

Abstract

This chapter explores a ‘moment’ in which the peoples of the West have been suspended for a hundred years and more. In tracing the story of the study of human sociality in modern anthropology and its critical deconstruction, it demonstrates the enduring legacy of Classical ideas and their insidious effects in shaping anthropological approaches to the human and in supplying the axiom of Western scientific constructions of humanity and the world. The story of anthropology’s growth to full self-awareness, it argues, is also the story of its recognition of the contingency of several key Classical conceptions that presently guide Western thinking about humans, other animals, and the world.