In Chapter 2, the human is defined for the purpose of legally advocating for the needs of humanity. Biological considerations are made, including the history of Social Darwinism and the misuse of selective traits to legally discriminate.

The Introduction sets out the central question that this book aims to tackle: when, why, and how did we evolve the peculiar and paradoxical inclination for both war and peace that characterises our species? The book argues that the inclination for both intergroup coalitionary killing and peaceful cooperation have deep roots and that they co-evolved through a gradual, incremental trajectory over millions of years. This co-evolution unfolded in a mosaic-like pattern, with distinct but interacting components emerging at different moments and becoming integrated over evolutionary time.

The Introduction presents the book’s general argument. It describes the main objectives and central themes related to the conceptualization of not-knowing. It argues for an anthropology of that which remains nameless in anthropology, lost in the gaps between culture, structure, and process. Not-knowing refers to the difficulty of accounting for certain intense individual and collective experiences that often arise in ritual, spiritual, and religious contexts and, in many ways, defy any attempt at complete rationalization. It deals with situations in which meaning is broken, forcing anthropologists to think beyond reason. It describes how an otherness of a radical nature unfolds before the anthropologist’s gaze, both in its experiential dimension and ethnographic and argumentative construction, as well as the discipline´s blind spots. The Introduction also describes the book’s structure, the organization of each chapter, and its contribution to anthropology.

What did it mean to be human in the Byzantine church? How was humanity conceived theologically? What were the attributes that comprised the human person? This chapter offers an introduction to anthropological understandings of Byzantine theology. Drawing on major points of consensus across various theologians, genres and liturgical contexts, I show that humanity was understood primarily in light of its divinised potential. Although terminology and understandings of the human body and faculties might differ across various theologians, early and medieval Orthodox thinkers agreed upon the divine origin and end of humanity. From humanity’s creation in the divine image to its potential transcendence in divine communion, humanity in all its diverse expressions was understood as having its fullest expression in God.

As a Black woman and anthropologist, I am positioned as an outsider within the field of American anthropology. Traditionally, Black people and our bodies have been reduced to objects of study within the discipline. Because I am a bioarchaeologist who works directly with the skeletal remains of Black Ancestors, my positionality compels me to think seriously about how anthropologists might address the field’s violent past while moving forward in more ethical ways. But are we effecting change with our work, or reproducing the same inequalities and harmful narratives? I advocate for engagement with Black feminisms to inform the practice of bioarchaeology and shift away from narratives that normalize the objectification and degradation of Black people.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong engagement with anthropology, from his early academic studies at Harvard and Columbia to his immersive depictions of indigenous and subcultural worlds. David Stephen Calonne charts Burroughs’ fascination with shamanism, Mayan hieroglyphics, animal totems, and visionary experience, arguing that his literary project is rooted in an outsider anthropological impulse that spans both ancient cultures and modern subcultures. Burroughs’ friendship with figures like Hal Chase and his involvement with institutions such as the Sahagún Anthropology Club informed works like The Soft Machine, Ah Pook Is Here, and Junky, which often merge ethnographic observation with mystical speculation. The chapter situates Burroughs alongside figures like Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Carlos Castaneda, and highlights the influence of his writings on contemporary anthropologists such as Michael Taussig. Ultimately, Burroughs emerges as an amateur but radical anthropologist, reimagining the potentials of cultural knowledge and visionary consciousness outside the confines of academic orthodoxy.

In war we see xenophobic hate, resentment, and violence-triggering anger, coupled with in-group solidarity, love, and altruistic sacrifice. This combination is mirrored in the opponent society. This structure recurs so often that there is an unfortunate tendency to naturalize it as adaptations produced by an ancestral environment characterized by widespread, intense, and frequent war. From this point of view, we are bellicose because our most successful ancestors were; our emotional structure comes from the fact that we are descendants of victors in battle. I don’t agree with this interpretation, which I will call the bellicose adaptationist story. I will sketch an alternative evolutionary story from ongoing anthropological controversies. I don’t deny that humans are violent, but I will try to show that a coherent story can be told in which war qua anonymous inter-group violence was not universal in human history and so could not serve as the selection pressure for altruism. After clearing the ground in this manner, to account for a non-war-based altruism I describe the hypotheses of collective breeding and collaborative foraging put forth by Sarah Hrdy and by Michael Tomasello.

Possession states are a complex phenomenon that takes a variety of different cultural and religious forms, which may or may not be associated with a psychiatric diagnosis. A case study demonstrates how demonic attributions may be employed as a form of negative religious coping and may lead to spiritual struggles. It illustrates the importance of understanding theological/religious context of belief in spirit possession and the difficulties of reaching a psychiatric diagnosis when the patient belongs to a faith community that understands such experiences as spiritually determined and not symptomatic of illness. Possession states are considered unusual in the UK and yet they are very common worldwide. Exorcism (or disobsession or spirit release) has in some contexts been proposed as an appropriate (if controversial) psychiatric treatment. While, in appropriate religious/cultural contexts, it can be helpful, there is also evidence that it can be harmful when applied in the wrong way to patients with certain diagnoses. This raises important questions about collaboration with faith leaders, safeguarding those who are vulnerable and not pathologising culturally normative practices.

Vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the term ‘belief’ regarding ancient states of mind and cognition has had a profound effect on the field of ancient history (and others, such as anthropology) in recent decades. This chapter considers which of these are still relevant and which are mutual misunderstandings, and which issues have, in effect, been resolved indirectly (such as injunctions to use different words for greater clarity). The opportunities offered by cognitive science of religion (and some limits) are set in a broader context of the study of religion. Behind many of these debates (and misunderstandings), it is argued, secular hegemony intrinsically seeks to ‘contain’ religion (taken pragmatically to be the assertion of the actual existence of divinities). This insoluble tension exerts an unceasing influence on our formulation of questions and answers in history. Recently, we have seen a fruitful greater sympathy for religion and ‘believers’ develop, while an appropriate secular distance from empathy is still maintained, notwithstanding the fact that empathy may contribute to an openness to greater sympathy and understanding: the tension does, and will, persist.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.

Beyond Words has been an introduction to psycholinguistics, the study of language and the mind. This field merges linguistics and psychology, as its name suggests, but it’s much more complicated than that. Psycholinguistics is a multidisciplinary science that also combines insights from philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience, among other areas. To get more granular, there are the branches of study that fall under the umbrella of this field, including first language acquisition, second language acquisition, language comprehension and production, and what happens when this all goes wrong. At first, it is baffling to fathom how so many different branches could possibly belong to a single field. However, as the story unfolded it revealed how these pieces all fit together to help us understand the ways that we learn, use, and lose language.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.