Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
Some of the world's best documented peoples live where no single state matches their homeland. This path moves from the mountains of Kurdistan and the Levant through South Asia and the Sahel to Southeast Asia and...
11 stops
From Levi-Strauss's search for universal structure to the critique that followed it, and from Boas's principle of cultural relativism to the field test Mead's Samoa research put it through: six stops through sociology...
6 stops
Marriage is the hinge every kinship system turns on: who inherits, where a bride's payment goes, and whether a household ends at two generations or reaches further. This trail follows patrilineal descent and dowry...
6 stops
Every culture in this atlas marks a boundary somewhere: between one social status and the next, between what a group may touch and what it may not, between the living and the dead, between ordinary awareness and the...
10 stops
A society is not a single thing but a stack of institutions people build to solve recurring problems: how to raise children and pass on property, how to rank one another, how to trade, and how to govern. This trail...
8 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.