Simplex Society

Front matter

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Simplex Society

Koen Stroeken Simplex Society

Chapter Two: Frameshift

Fig.l Simplex and tensor of UK-US miscommunication 85 Fig.2 Derivation of tensor from simplex 86 Fig.3 Simplex and tensor of science 90 Fig.4 Simplex and tensor of animism 92 Fig.5 The illusion of separate sources producing reality 93 Fig.6 Simplex and tensor of liberal/non-liberal democracy 99

Chapter Ten: Entropology

Fig.l — Lifeways and affect in speciated history Fig.2 Three types of entropy (E) in simplex society Chapter Twelve: Street Cred

Fig.l Tensor of street credibility

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Prologue

After the world globalized and informatized, all dystopias seem to come true in the twenty-first century. Financial implosion. Extreme inequality. Pandemic. State surveillance. AI autonomy. Parliamentary impasse. Ecosystem collapse. War again. And the remarkable thing is: none seem to shake the system at its core. ‘Seem’ I say, because the system is one thing, our idea of it another. We act on the latter. That is the point I am making in this book. Human consciousness has split for us to continue business as usual. The worldwide surge of self-care and the battle for holistic health are among many indications that something needs to be done at the global level. In companies but also schools and universities we were taught that progress can be made without the work of social and cultural translation. Go innovate in the lab, at the office, on the market, in the street, and the rest of the human species will get attuned. For too long have we assumed that society restores itself, and so we inhabit today the global village, a home that turns out an empty shell. Hard. Void. We have come to a point that it has become second nature to say ‘society is this, humans are thar’. To capture the post-truth era, numerous seminal books have been published in the last decade by sociologists, political and communication scientists, economists, historians, psychologists, human geographers and philosophers. The discipline of anthropology has been productive too, but to speak of a recognizable voice in the debate, the jury is still out, so to say. This is surprising because no period in human history has been more in need of a holistic understanding of society than ours, as globalization,

© The Author(s) 2024 1 K. Stroeken, Simplex Society, https: //doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41115-1_1 digital information and cultural difference meet. The upshot of that historical encounter looks very much like the anthropologist’s specter, an atomistic worldview glossing over cultural perspectives, reducing multilayered communication to bits of information and reproducing the way of life that has been ruthlessly disseminated across the globe despite its unsustainability for the planet.’ What the current era of the Anthropocene implies is entropy, a disintegration of living systems, because of one species that stopped being a species and launched a lifeway disconnected from life.

THE SIGNAL

The atom of concern that made it all possible in my view is called a simplex, a one-layered meaning or thing. No context. No frame. An illusion indeed. Yet ubiquitous.

A fixed idea travels fast. It reaches any place without taking local frames into account. Consider the simplex ‘North is better than South’. We annotate it as ‘N > S’. To this tune, the Global North condones the worsening of life conditions in the Global South. To a hopeful ‘N > S’, refugees cross the Mediterranean. To a racist ‘N > S’, the newcomers are typecast. To an enraged ‘N > S’, the poor suburbs burn. A reboot at some point requires reframing, which itself presupposes being in touch with the roots of a thought. How to experience the ‘tensor’ that holds these meanings and events together? Some societies have traditions and rituals that facilitate the experience.

Street art can reframe. ‘Racism is a virus’, the facemask says on a mural, cautioning about speech. A joke too plays with frames. ‘After ten years of solitary confinement in a Russian prison, Putin is released and orders a drink in the bar. Is Moscow ours? Yes says the waiter. And Kyiv? Yes. Even Berlin? Yes, that’ll be 5 euros.’ The frameshift replacing ‘them’ by ‘ours’ prompts a smile because of how intuitively it locks into the mind and reshuffles the deck, the network of social relations. Anthropologists describe frames and how they are culturally related. Structuralism is the method focusing on those contrasts between frames. There was a time, called postmodernity, when scholars could fool themselves that frames had no interrelations and stood each for a perspective in its own right. The present era demands we retrieve the roots of ideas. And so, structuralism deserves a second chance, in a form matured after postmodernity.’

Simplex society refers to a system of one-directional signals, blocking off the contradicting input in parallel that could humanize it. Simplexes carry in their slipstream social phenomena such as polarization, populism, dehumanization, racism, conspiracy hypes, memetic escalation, a-historicism, dogmatic positivism, emo-cracy and identity politics, but also technologies of automation, massification, human resources formatism, algorithmic preprocessing, surveillance and remote-controlled warfare. What simplex phenomena have in common, I will illustrate, is a dissociation of feeling from meaning whereafter emotions can be manipulated or ideas lead their own lives without mediation and verification. The impact on life by wasteful consuming, condoning a racist remark or spreading false rumors is ignored if the feeling of these events is limited to the inner sphere, the likeminded. Not or minimally feeling their meaning unties the sphere from its source of production, from Earth and the species.

Untie society from life, and what do you get? The gap grows between what we say and what we do, between awareness and action, between our thoughts and what eventually happens. This book pleads to take the paradoxes of the era seriously. Democrats in the US tackle poverty but many poor vote Republican.* Massive climate protests in Belgium headline the news for weeks on end but a month later the green party loses the elections.* We decry the monopolies of Google, Facebook and Amazon but when given the opportunity we’d love to work there.

In sum, we are dealing with split consciousness. I utter the last word with caution, given the vast amount of neuropsychological and philosophical debate it has fostered over the past millennium." The above cases seethe with contradiction, at least according to a meaning-oriented definition of consciousness. In the working definition I propose, of consciousness as the feeling of meaning, the discrepancy lies between the meanings we communicate (society) and what we feel (humanity).° Once millennials leave their cocoon, they make this pivotal discovery. Things are not what they were told.” How to humanize society again? Feel the meaning, in its various layers and dimensions. Before we get there, let’s have a look at the past and the present.

The tale repeated by popular movies in this pristine century attests to the discrepancy. Only after society collapses does humanity return." Rephrased, it is the oldest tale. Beware of the monster you create, or you will succumb to it. Remember corona, how it bizarrely raised hopes among many of us for a tabula rasa. The monster made is the (social) system. What else was the main message of dystopia in the twentieth century by among others Orwell, Marcuse, Ellul and Heidegger? Habermas warned about the colonization of the lifeworld (our reference frames) by the system (economy and politics). The works of Weber, Tönnies and Durkheim in the nineteenth century went through the motions too by theorizing the clash between society and community, the latter’s traditions subjected to the former’s modernity. The tension was prefigured by (urban) rationalism and (rural) romanticism before and after Enlightenment. As we go back in time, the accounts of imminent danger further probe into humanity as a collective with a wisdom of its own. Exactly four hundred years ago, Vico wrote in ‘The New Science’ about a providence transmitted through myths and cultural creations that retain ancient wisdom about social equilibria.” Our early ancestors may not have been consciously preoccupied with equilibrium. Paying respect to the forests goes a long way.

The Anthropocene compels the human species to face the breach. A series of lifeways systematically exploited the sources of production. A mechanism we will coin simplication characterizes the lifeways. In its shadow furtively sprawls the medicine. Writer and reader pursue the ancient skill of the healer to detect the tensors bundling the many tensions that otherwise are left unfelt. The diagnosis of Part I (Simplex Frames) comes with a remedy in Part II (Tensors of The Undertow). We have reason for optimism. In a knowledge society, whose currency is language instead of capital, altered vocabulary can end discrimination and injustice. Today it can be an act of actual change to launch a new method of thought with a vocabulary to match.

POST-KNOWLEDGE: FRAGMENTED AND FRAMELESS

‘It is a matter of perspective.” With those words, a conflict can be prevented. Whether in a geopolitical clash, a scientific controversy or a domestic quarrel, this phrase acknowledging frames of experience reassures the parties of the speaker’s openness and ignites a process of mediation. What is the story of this book at the macro-level? The chances for mediation are dwindling in the social network that humans populate today, as this network is toiling to keep the flood of information flowing. The interruption in communication flows can be mitigated by organizing the dialogue between perspectives. A knowledge economy did so via schooling, the social sciences, NGOs, media. A post-knowledge society ‘knows better’ than to mediate. It does not bother anymore. The consensus is claimed. Its reference to perspectives is publicly staged through spin on corporate social responsibility, through greenwashing and emotive hashtags.'°

Cultures are treated as impregnable ‘identities’, as a social category next to race, class and gender, intersecting instead of interacting. The theory of intersectionality conforms to that. ‘Seeing things from the perspective of? an African-American or a woman advances policy but at the same time essentializes the category, one frame for each, whereas cultures unlike the other categories permanently change." By paying lip service to the categories, our government and company policies flaunt the stamp of inclusion. In the background, information is processed for a predefined purpose: never before so much profit, likes, big data.

Whenever the construct threatens to crash, for example because of the spin being exposed or the financial system failing, a post-knowledge system will carve out a niche for the confronting perspective to avoid interruption of the flow of information. The spheres of international high finance, leftist versus rightist media platforms, gendered and age-based channels, racial or sexual identity movements, vegan lifestyle chains, university labs, hybrid intellectual networks, and so forth, grow apart. The cause of ‘humanity’ fragments into specialized NGOs such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch, all campaigning to ensure constant media presence, albeit in stalemate with lobbyists. The bubbles deny the wider network the adjustment and growth that come with confrontation and two-directional exchange. Spheres with the potential of solving problems of the entire society have cut their ties with the whole. As the banking system repeats its mistakes by lack of insight in its own framing of the world, citizens bear the brunt of the next financial crisis.!? Innovations in nutrition are amazing, yet create niches to not interfere with the free market. Sexual, religious and other identities prosper in the margins; tolerance for them in the public eye varies, in turn causing compulsion to refashion or curate the self. Cocoons disconnect from harsh society, interpreting events very differently. Firmed up, the spheres dehumanize each other.'*

The structural impediment would be remediable, were it not internalized as well: ‘to each bubble its truth’. This cynical relativism based on isolated spheres and their frames differs substantially from the acceptance of cultural diversity and multiple perspectives. Post-truth or post-fact means that feelings trump evidence and ‘alternative facts’ are acceptable.'* More fundamentally, facts do not matter because consensus among perspectives selecting the facts would be impossible. What remains is the collision of bubbles, leading to power struggle between identities, or disconnection. The network is populated by streams of (alternative) facts, polarized, meanings uprooted from multilayered extensive feeling, because they can be predictably experienced. In the metaverse, uniquely affective content produced by exchanging actors has made way for experiences occurring to avatars. The dissociation is fun and the metaverse’s game never ends.

Instead of providing a palette of actions in a sphere, the frames splinter an office, a school, a classroom, a team or a household into factions and blame the deviating individual, which is to psychologize a cultural fact, namely the conflict of frames. One striking difference with how things used to be is this denial of experiential frames recombining cultural elements. Bluntly put, a child who cannot stand a way of life demanding to stay for hours in a room without fresh air, cuddling or interspecies communication is potentially a case of ADHD. Psychology booms as anthropology shrinks. An indication of the social network psychologizing human experience is the role of emotions in public speech. The compression of time under digital globalization stresses communication. As a consequence, the nine universal neurobiological categories (from happiness over surprise and disgust to sadness) dominate conversations and overshadow what has been self-evident for millennia: the diversity and natural growth of affects, each a unique sensation that no sensory description, metaphor, let alone word can fully evoke.!® Instead of learning about the specific affect they experience with someone, victims of the stress identify the emotional category and lash out. Or they go for self-care in a stimuluspoor atmosphere, where they can recover their self.1°

Many terms have been launched over the last two centuries to denote the great change or succession of changes that restructured the social network.!” Whether the cause of time-space compression has to be differentiated in terms of globalization or capitalism or industrialization, neoliberalism, (post)modernization, post-Fordism, informatization, massive (de)territorialization or Empire, is quite moot in this book.'* I start from the ruins, the entropy and diminished possibilities at the micro-level, the simplex emotions, ideas, technologies, and afterward—almost in passing—verify which well-studied process at the macro-level parsimoniously explains their upcoming salience. In other words, whenever I use the terms ‘globalization’ and ‘informatization’, it is somewhat ashamedly by lack of clinging concept about the process. What I do tangibly have is a mechanism.

The above amalgam of phenomena, the book attempts to explain by starting from a common mechanism gone awry: simplication. To simplicate is to simplify through a complicated translation. The ‘if? in ‘simplification’ is dropped. The mechanism, which can be cognitive, affective or material, renders an activity simpler by replacing it with an automated sequence. Richly felt meanings simplicate into an idea for instance. When simplications sediment into simplexes, into one-layered entities such as fixed ideas and identities, they undermine intuition, an utterly human capacity. They disconnect from care for the species.!? Society loses contact with the dark matter of past decisions, traditions, the vast unknown and something I will term collective reason. A political effect is populism. Part of human intuition was the sense of not-knowing that kept both ‘the masses’ and ‘the elites’ cautious in elections, yet still oriented on truth.

The mechanism occasions a vicious circle that might explain the process referred to by ‘post-knowledge society’. Simplication drives informatization by reducing intuition and sensory perception to bytes of information amenable to speedy dissemination. Simplication also drives globalization by standardizing economic production and consumption across borders. At the same time, has the reaction against the challenge of complexity due to both globalization and informatization not been to discipline communication into an unhampered flow of fixed ideas and emotions? That is simplication gone into overdrive. The reader may recognize the dystopian tenor of Orwell’s novel 1984 on a state training its citizens into doublethink, newspeak and the self-discipline to dislocate their sense of reality. In my book, the actor, multinational, state or other, does not matter. There is no bad guy out there. The cause of trouble is double: structural and mental. And yet, thanks to the fusion of globalization and informatization into social media, the possibilities for interconnection and cultural understanding have never been bigger.

TRAINING INTUITION: TENSORS VERSUS IDEOLOGIES

If I had to pin down the year of birth for post-truth, it coincidentally would have to be 1984 indeed. A couple of years after Jean Baudrillard published his treatise Simulacra and Simulation on the postmodernity of late capitalism, the saturation of symbolic constructs struck me, being an avid music lover that saw his favorite New Wave and postpunk bands lose their raw energy and shift to commercial music. They simulated styles and originality—1984 was the year that music died The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, Eyeless in Gaza, PIL, The Cult were some of the punk and alternative bands scoring hits in the mid-1980s with polished versions of their signature style. To my adolescent ears, the bands’ transition to blasé irony, not unlike Warhol’s earlier gambit toward commercialization in the art scene, hardly concealed their inability to capture the erstwhile energy. They imitated how they used to do it. Against Baudrillard’s treatise, one could argue that hybridity, mimicry and parody of frames are of all times and did not terminate cultural creativity but simply rekindled it. The sequence of events since the 1980s until the past decade indicates that something else happened, as announced by Reagan—Thatcher neoliberalism and Wall Street yuppiedom. Once spheres merge and globalize, the irony eludes the new members, and positions get firmed up. While the network flourished, the belief in a whole called humanity disintegrated. That too is symptomatic of a consciousness split between meaning and feeling.

Less than ever do thoughts materialize into action. A forager finding a bush of berries in a depleted forest will take action after framing the event as saving her group. In a comparable situation are the top 1% wealthy of the globe able to eradicate poverty. They need not take action. Like in the movie with that name, they take the red pill to enter ‘the matrix’ and learn an unpleasant truth. The matrix is a ‘womb’, not only etymologically. It seals off a perspective, from the outside world. Postmodern scholars go beyond the frameless view of the positivist, who reduces nature to (one-dimensional) vectors, units with only one degree of freedom. Although supplementing a degree of freedom (the perspective underlying the vectors), the scholars stay in the (two-dimensional) matrix, up in their ivory tower where they watch the other paradigms. A tensor is three-dimensional, tapping into intuition, suffused with urgency. A tensor (from the Latin tendere, ‘to stretch’) stretches the simplex back to life.

The media-savvy generations are destined to drag us out of post-truth. They know about tensors. When members of generation Z condemn a certain speech for its political incorrectness and possibly ‘cancel’ the speaker, they appear vectorial to the matrixial mind scolding in disbelief: ‘I was ironic!’ Well, they did recognize the frame, but went a step further by seeing how the irony hurt. Another indication of their tensorial attitude, however minute at first sight, is ‘goblin mode’, the word of the year for 2022 according to Oxford University Press.” This mode or frame of communication and experience, not coincidentally emerging in post-lockdown nostalgia over pajamas-clad online meetings, temporarily permits the user to stop curating the self and disregard esthetical norms. The goblin mode operates at the three dimensions of the tensor. While acknowledging the sphere (e.g., an office) and the expected frame (e.g., dress code), the mode considers the impact the frame has on life and on wellbeing (e.g., isolation, depression) and in this way innovates to humanize the system.

A wide range of complex communications on social media can be explained from this humanizing dynamic, de-simplicating and re-simplicating. Energies in the social network have to be ‘queered’ when they are ‘toxic? and meddling with people’s carefully crafted selves.” Energies of digitized communication, public appearance in the street, choice of dress and tattooed skin, render a society viable. To sense and manage these energies, ‘the vibes’, an important tool is language, not so much semantically but as performance. A lot happens between the lines, more than ever. How did Professa Jay, a Tanzanian hip hop artist, go about writing a song on country-wide corruption and see it become a hit? He implicated himself in the last refrain, see “Chapter Twelve: Street Cred”. He thus crafted a tensor. He did not go for the vector, “The star speaks’. After the first refrain denouncing corruption with a moral matrix, when the artist judged the rest of the country from that comfortable position in the middle, the third refrain pulled him out of the comfort zone to encounter the fault he reproached others for.’ Did his tensorial turn weaken the message for the audience? On the contrary, the shifting point of view safeguards the frame. After the first refrain he felt his position to be moralistic, too comfortable to move the audience anymore. His feeling of their meaning was possible because he stepped out of his cocoon to open up and tune into the world.

The undertow is growing worldwide. Among us ever more are looking with dismay at the narcissistic frame of war the West has so long seemed to reward. An increasing number dare to ask: where is the feeling? What began with communism, anarchism, hippy communities and deep ecology morphed into activism exposing the artificial semantic distinctions in political, economic, religious, educational and other spheres. Activists nurture their close tie with life and the sources of production.** They reject the reductions and naturalism of the global economy and its sideprojects such as transhumanism for augmented cognition (meaning over feeling). They do something else than exclaiming, as Heidegger did a decade after he huddled with the Nazis, that the new technologies (today artificial intelligence) should be mere means and not rule us. Put your smartphone in the wooden box at the door like the Amish do? Segregation rarely works. The undertow is equipped with tensorial apparatus, so as not to fragment life.

Do climate protests support a particular ideology? No, look at the signs the protesters brandish. The texts bear on the planet, the whole. The protests in Iran by generation Z for sexual freedom are not ideological either. They do not seek to promote a Western lifestyle or a particular type of sexuality, as their orthodox rulers contend. The protesters want to retrieve their access to a source of production, in its raw, untamed state. The days of ideology are over, that is, of splitting life into subsystems to serve a political purpose. True, energy is needed to change things: like an atom split for nuclear energy, liberalism and Marxism once unleashed the revolutionary energy tearing individual interests apart from group interests, pitting the economic subsystem against the political and religious. A key observation which Part I sets off with is that the political strategies of prodemocracy movements no longer work because today the stakes of social change concern the whole. Modern ideology took sides; postmodernity fragmented into impregnable identities. The planet will not be helped by dividing the world in sides or identities and by subsequently organizing a revolution of one against the other, oppressed against oppressor. Ideologies separate economic, political, educational, religious, sexual and other spheres to pick elements from them and force them in a simplex frame of experience—a dirty energy to revolutionize the existing order.”° To bundle the tensions into tensors, the undertow retrieves the sources of production that were artificially separated: desire, respect, belonging, peace, planet, water, sound, scent, energy, the species and more, which together derive from life.

What can be an important source for a planetary plan? Part II proposes something termed ‘the collective reason’ of the species. Not purified reason. Not one or the other cultural reason. Sure, anthropologists have been wary of ‘The West’ (the dream held by states with European ancestry that made social, cultural and technological progress and domination their trademark) and heeded ‘the’ Global South from which civil rights activists have since a century awakened large sections of the Global North to distance themselves from the West, and join the Rest. To put the West to rest. However, the attempt is to keep it real; that the woke wake up to everyday life. Not to exclude or to tell a person’s ideas from the place or the color of skin. Collective reason humanizes by letting frames co-exist. Yes, the Global South has technology and government comparable to any other, but equally so, within the things and decisions a tension persists between values promoted and marginalized by a Western frame like efficiency and consensus.” Bundling the many tensions in tensors, I deem an anthropological endeavor.

The revolution will not happen in the standard manner. Millennials and generation Z are not stuck on ideology. They are politically incoherent in one survey, issue-oriented in another, leftists aging into right wingers in yet a third.”? Currently, the populists, the anti-ideologists par excellence, benefit politically. And so do their counterparts, the technocrats. Italy recently exhibited the oscillation between the emotionally decrepit and emotionally overdrawn, as pragmatist premier Draghi was succeeded by ‘post-fascist’? Giorgia Meloni, championing political emotion in the form of patriotism. Her reactionary solution to split consciousness will fail as much as the technocrat’s, because a superdiverse, globalized information society demands an epistemology proper to the post-knowledge era.

I use an old word for this highly needed method in the field of knowledge: intuition, the missing link between spirituality and knowledge. Intuition, to understand instinctively without conscious reasoning, is the capacity to assess a situation without limiting one’s thought or experience, hence without giving up a degree of freedom.* Its feeling of meaning reaches deeper and further as it takes into account frames in spheres (situational analysis in the first five chapters) then cultural systems (ethnography in the next five chapters) and eventually the sensory-spiritual level of life-sensing and the sources of production (existential accounts in the last five chapters). This book uses the notions of post-knowledge and post-truth interchangeably, although has preference for the former because it accentuates the specific situation of post-truth emerging in an information society, in a knowledge economy foregrounding communication technology. Post-truth has the one-sidedly negative connotation of sacrificing meaning for feeling. Post-knowledge announces an epoch innovating what used to be knowledge. ‘After Knowledge’ comes intuition, I will argue. Untrained, intuition is gut-feeling, which only worsens the rule by emotion. Developed, intuition stimulates our feeling of meaning, which grasps the various semantic layers of a situation, linking past and present to the future, intuiting the path to take in a range of possibilities.*! As in the Enlightenment when individual reason was strengthened in response to weakening community and tradition, the very thing responsible for threatening the social order will have to be embraced so as to be perfected.

Adepts of conspiracy theories and alternative facts will not be convinced by ‘the actual facts’.*? Fighting irrationality with rationality, subjectivity with objectivity, will rigidify their position because sustains the simplex frame, a claim of superiority that the fight implies. To get to the root of any problem, communicators must first say how they frame (and simplicate away). What facilitates frame-analysis is trained intuition. Letting go of objectivity as a cognitive capacity can be a blessing too.** Long live post-knowledge. So we better get equipped for it.

A METHOD

The theory pairs two of anthropology’s towering figures. Max Gluckman introduced the simplex relations of industrial society, which revolve around carrying out well-defined tasks. He contrasted them with the multiplex relations of preindustrial communities where parallel roles require ongoing negotiation. Claude Lévi-Strauss reworded anthropology as ‘entropology’, no less tentatively, on how anthropologists by their mere presence spoil the culture they come into contact with.** Neither of the two concepts made a lasting impression at the time, but their combination will turn out timely, if ingested with some of the eeriness I could personally add as a Gen X member. The synthesis provides a method of thought more than anything else. The extended case method of Gluckman is a social analysis recognizing in micro-social situations the processes transforming macro-society. In the situation appear the social relations and power structure of a sphere. The structuralism of Lévi-Strauss exemplifies a cultural analysis deriving from cultural systems the way humans think.* For example, a comparison of kinship terminologies across the planet clarifies the framing of relationships by one culture’s terminology. The third dimension, of life-sensing, enters the equation when we compare the frames’ viability.

The reader should be informed about the philosophical penchant of this essay, which has everything to do with its unusual objective of providing an ethnography of the world. After all, how to experience the world? One way is to study a world and yet another, each a lifeworld and whole of its own, and extend these cases to note parallels and discrepancies.*° My approach is to weld together from the start the many cases as parts into a whole. Recognition comes from the multiplication of micro-situations that converge. Ethnography provides thick description of a discernible group or situation. An ethnography of the world sacrifices specificity for wider grasp. It is ‘comparative’ ethnography for tracing conversations and cultural expressions that make sense precisely because they concern not only a local sphere but the world as such. Having stayed in the trenches of life, whether in a poor neighborhood, a rural outpost, a neglected community, an artistic underground scene or another unstudied part of society commits the ethnographer to an experiential angle. Only on the basis of comparison, in my case mostly from the perspectives of a particular African lifeworld and a European one, can I state that a society ‘is’ so or so. Something is ‘in relation to’. For that purpose I will consider the cultural systems of among others Amerindian hunters, drone operators, lab assistants, healers, preachers, football fans, African farmers and urban artists. Ethnography and structuralist analysis together constitute the unique scientific contribution of anthropology. Combined they perform ‘de-simplication’.