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.
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.