What characterises anthropological research today more than anything is the recognition of complexity; the world is complex, cultures are complex, co… - Thomas Hylland Eriksen

One reason for the increased interest in studies of identity in anthropology may be the fact that issues to do with the nature of groups have become hugely important in politics worldwide in the last decades.

Anthropological theory may be compared to a large crossroads with busy traffic and a few, temporarily employed traffic policemen who desperately try to force the unruly traffic to follow the rules. (There are, it must be admitted, a number of minor crashes and other accidents almost every day.) Or it could be described, more harmoniously, as a coral reef, where the living corals literally build upon the achievements of their deceased predecessors.

Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins took issue with a view of humans which assumed that they were individualistic, maximising and fundamentally selfish creatures. They associated this view with libertarianism and mainstream economics, but, in other contexts, a similar view of ‘man’ as a fiercely competitive individualist has been associated with that of Darwin’s adherents, who claim that social and cultural phenomena must be understood within the framework of evolutionary theory. The slogans ‘the struggle for survival’ and ‘the survival of the fittest’, and the often uncritical use of the word ‘competition’ used to designate the dynamics of procreation and many other human activities, have been typical of Darwinist interpretations of humanity for decades. Against this background, it is astonishing that a growing number of evolutionary scholars now emphasise that cooperation, mutual trust and long-term reciprocity relations are evolutionarily adaptive.