Sociology & Anthropology

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49 primes originate from Sociology & Anthropology and 73 more draw from it as a secondary origin — sort the Origin column to separate them. They span 27 subdomains; sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Prime	Origin	Subdomain	Description
Activation Energy	Also draws from	—	The minimum input that must be supplied to push a thermodynamically favorable but stalled process past a barrier before momentum carries it to completion.
Adaptation	Also draws from	—	Systems adjust to conditions.
Aggregation	Also draws from	Experimental Design	Deliberately collapsing many items into a single summary, choosing which information to discard to gain tractability.
Alienation	Also draws from	—	Disconnection from system.
Arbitrage (Generalized)	Also draws from	—	Exploiting a discrepancy in price, value, or perception across a boundary that friction keeps from equilibrating, extracting the spread until it closes.
Archetype	Also draws from	—	Recurring pattern.
Assortative Mixing	Also draws from	Mixing Patterns	Detect and quantify whether network edges join nodes whose declared attributes are more similar—or more dissimilar—than an edge-end baseline predicts.
Authority	Primary	—	The recognized, legitimate right to issue binding decisions within a defined scope, distinct from raw coercive force or mere persuasive influence.
Autopoiesis	Also draws from	—	Self-producing systems.
Boundary Critique	Also draws from	—	Examines inclusion/exclusion assumptions.
Bricolage	Primary	Structural Anthropology	Producing a working solution by recombining the heterogeneous resources at hand under a fixed inventory.
Co-location	Primary	Spatial Relations	Distinct entities or functions occupy the same bounded place during an overlapping interval, reducing separation while leaving their interaction and purpose unspecified.
Co-Presence	Primary	Interaction Order	Co-presence exists when two or more agents are mutually available for reciprocal awareness and response within the same effective interactional here-and-now, whether that shared situation is physical or mediated.
Coherence Breakdown Under External Interaction	Also draws from	—	The loss of a system's internal phase alignment or coordination when it couples to an uncontrolled, noisy environment that drains coherence into inaccessible correlations.
Collaboration	Also draws from	Collective ActionTeamwork	Collaboration is a joint-work relation in which partly autonomous participants make differentiated contributions toward a shared object or outcome and expose those contributions to reciprocal coordination, use, or revision.
Collective Effervescence	Primary	—	Shared emotional energy.
Collective Efficacy	Primary	—	Shared belief in capability.
Collective Memory	Primary	—	Shared narratives.
Comparative Method	Also draws from	—	Systematically juxtaposing selected cases so that their similarities and differences do the causal-inference work that controlled experiments cannot.
Conformity	Also draws from	—	Aligning one's behaviour or beliefs to a group standard.
Contagion	Also draws from	Epidemiology	Spread of a state from element to element through contact.
Cooperation	Also draws from	—	Agents bear individual costs to produce a shared benefit.
Coordination Problem and Equilibrium Selection	Also draws from	Game Theory	Multiple stable equilibria require alignment on single outcome.
Creative Destruction	Also draws from	—	Replacement through innovation.
Critical Mass	Also draws from	—	The minimum quantity needed to sustain a self-perpetuating process.
Criticality	Also draws from	Network Science	Regime poised at a phase boundary where response becomes scale-free and correlations diverge.
Cultural Diffusion	Primary	—	Spread of ideas.
Cultural Friction	Primary	—	Incompatibilities arise when external artifacts meet cultural norms.
Cultural Hegemony	Primary	—	Dominant ideology control.
Culture Lag	Primary	—	Mismatch in cultural change rates.
Diversity	Also draws from	—	Maintaining functionally distinct types within a system so that variation provides resilience and coverage that uniformity cannot.
Division of Labor	Also draws from	—	Partition a joint activity into specialized sub-tasks assigned to distinct performers whose outputs are then re-integrated.
Downward Causation	Also draws from	—	Higher-level influence.
Emic And Etic	Primary	Ethnographic Method	A paired dual-description regime in which a phenomenon is captured under an insider scheme closed by participants' competence and an outsider scheme closed by analytic framework, with their divergence treated as a finding.
Emotional Contagion	Also draws from	—	Automatic spread of affect from person to person through a group.
Encounter Surface	Primary	Civic Infrastructure	A durable, accessible, mutually observable, normed layer where strangers can come into contact.
Enculturation	Primary	—	Learning cultural norms.
Epistemic Justice	Also draws from	—	Fair knowledge production.
Essentialism	Also draws from	—	Inherent defining properties.
Ethnocentrism	Primary	—	Cultural bias.
Exchange	Also draws from	—	Reciprocal transfer between parties under mutual commitment, with each side's movement keyed to the other's.
Formal vs. Informal Structures	Also draws from	—	Official vs actual systems.
Free Riding	Also draws from	—	The systematic under-provision that results when individuals can enjoy a non-excludable shared good without contributing proportionately to producing it.
Grand Narrative (Metanarrative)	Also draws from	—	Overarching explanations.
Group Cohesion	Also draws from	—	The forces that bind members into a unified group.
Habitus	Primary	—	Internalized dispositions.
Herding Behavior	Also draws from	—	Mimicking others.
Hierarchy	Also draws from	—	Organizes elements into levels or ranks.
Historical Empathy	Also draws from	—	Interpret in context.
Historicism	Also draws from	—	Context-bound understanding.
In-Group / Out-Group	Also draws from	—	Partition of a social field into an identified 'us' and a contrasted 'them'.
Inertia	Also draws from	—	Resistance to change.
Informal Enforcement	Primary	—	Norm compliance sustained by decentralized social sanction rather than formal authority.
Information Cascade	Also draws from	—	The sequential dynamic in which actors copy earlier actors' visible choices and suppress their own private signals, driving collective convergence that can be confidently wrong.
Institution	Primary	—	A durable, self-reproducing complex of rules, roles, and shared expectations.
Institutional Lag	Primary	—	Formal institutions change slower than underlying conditions.
Internalization	Primary	—	Adopting external norms as one's own internal standards.
Layered Accumulation	Also draws from	—	Sequential time-ordered deposition in which each new layer rests atop the prior ones, so the position of a layer encodes when it formed and the stack becomes a readable record of history.
Legitimacy	Also draws from	—	Accepted authority.
Liminality	Primary	—	Transitional states.
Linguistic Universals	Also draws from	—	Shared language features.
Micro Macro Linkage	Primary	Social Theory	A two-way bridge by which micro units produce macro regularities and macro conditions reshape the micro situation.
Microhistory vs. Macrohistory	Also draws from	—	Scale of analysis.
Mobilization	Primary	Collective Behavior	Latent capacity is activated, channeled into directed action, and then sustained or returned to rest.
Moral Panic	Primary	—	Amplified societal fear.
Moral Relativism	Also draws from	—	Morality depends on context.
Native-Category Flattening	Primary	Research Methods and Classification	A source system's own partition of the world is silently collapsed when an external observer recodes it into a foreign taxonomy without first preserving the source partition, destroying distinctions the downstream analysis would have needed and that recoded labels cannot recover.
Natural Selection	Also draws from	Evolutionary BiologyImmunology	A population of varying, heritable variants is filtered by a selection pressure so that the better-performing variants differentially reproduce or persist, shifting the population's composition over rounds — variation, selection, and retention as a substrate-neutral engine.
Network	Also draws from	—	Models interactions between components.
Network Broker Role	Primary	Network Position and Role	A network position combining upstream access, downstream tie capacity, and interpretive authority that makes its holder a productive required intermediary.
Network Effect	Also draws from	—	Value increases with users.
Niche Construction	Also draws from	Evolutionary Ecology	An agent modifies its environment, and the modified environment changes the selection pressures acting back on the modifier — the environment is endogenous.
No True Scotsman	Also draws from	Informal Logic	When a counterexample to a universal claim appears, membership in the subject category is redefined to exclude it, preserving the claim by emptying it of content.
Non-Zero-Sum Game	Also draws from	Game Theory	A strategic interaction whose joint payoff is not fixed: cooperative play can create value and destructive play can destroy it, so the size of the pie is endogenous to the strategy profile.
Normativity	Also draws from	—	What ought to be.
Observational Learning (Social Learning)	Also draws from	—	Learn by observing.
Organizational Culture	Also draws from	—	Shared norms and values.
Overshoot and Collapse	Also draws from	Resource DynamicsPhysiology	An enabling input that is beneficial at low levels crosses an assimilation ceiling and inverts into a self-amplifying degrading load, depleting a secondary resource and locking in a hysteretic worse regime that does not reverse when the input is removed.
Path Dependence	Also draws from	—	Outcomes are shaped by the specific historical sequence of past choices, which lock in consequences and foreclose alternatives that persist despite present incentives to change.
Performativity	Also draws from	Philosophy of Language	Utterances and acts that constitute the very reality they name.
Pragmatic Politeness Strategies	Also draws from	—	Maintain harmony.
Propagation	Also draws from	—	The systematic spreading of a signal, effect, or state from a source through a medium or network, where the medium's structure governs how fast it moves, how it attenuates, and which paths it follows.
Property Rights	Also draws from	—	An enforceable bundle of exclusive entitlements over a resource.
Purity and Pollution	Primary	—	Classifying things as clean or contaminating, with contagion and ritual cleansing.
Reciprocity	Primary	—	Mutual exchange.
Recognition Justice	Also draws from	Theories of Justice	Judge whether people, identities, experiences, and categories of harm are represented as intelligible and worthy of equal standing before an allocation or procedure is evaluated.
Reflexivity (Self-Reference)	Also draws from	—	Self-referential systems.
Reputation	Primary	—	An aggregated signal of past behaviour that shapes how others treat an agent.
Risk Pooling	Also draws from	—	Aggregating many independent or weakly correlated exposures so that the variance of the pooled outcome shrinks below the sum of individual variances, letting participants share a more predictable collective risk.
Ritual	Primary	—	Symbolic repeated acts.
Role	Primary	—	A bundle of expected behaviours attached to a social position.
Role Conflict	Primary	—	Conflicting roles.
Role Fluidity	Primary	Role Theory	Role fluidity allows the same occupant to move among positions that a rigid system assigns to separate actors, so producer/consumer, leader/follower, or requester/provider functions can alternate without changing occupant identity.
Sacred	Primary	—	Things set apart as inviolable and demanding reverence.
Scapegoating	Primary	—	Channeling collective blame onto a substitute target.
Schismogenesis	Primary	—	A cumulative interaction pattern in which each side's response intensifies the relation—through matching escalation or mutually amplifying opposites—driving progressive differentiation unless balancing processes intervene.
Second-Order Cybernetics (Second-Order Observation)	Also draws from	—	Observer within system.
Self-Defeating Prediction	Primary	Reflexive Dynamics	Belief in a forecast moves conditions against it.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy	Primary	—	Expectations shape outcomes.
Sensemaking	Also draws from	—	Interpret ambiguous situations.
Signaling	Also draws from	—	Revealing hidden information.
Social Capital	Primary	—	Value of relationships.
Social Construction of Reality	Primary	—	Reality shaped socially.
Social Identity Theory	Also draws from	—	Identity via groups.
Social Norms	Primary	—	Shared expectations about how members of a reference group should behave, maintained through internalization and anticipated decentralized approval, correction, or sanction.
Solidarity	Primary	—	Shared commitment and mutual support within a group.
Speculative Bubble	Also draws from	—	Self-reinforcing price rise detached from fundamental value.
Stratification	Also draws from	—	Layered separation of a system.
Structural Filtering	Primary	Institutional Analysis	A content-producing system passes its output through several parallel institutional filters, so the surviving output is the filter set's intersection — predictable even when producers are sincere and unaware.
Structural Violence	Primary	—	Systemic harm.
Symbiosis	Also draws from	—	Mutual interdependence.
Symbolic Boundaries	Primary	—	Group distinctions.
Synchronic vs. Diachronic Analysis	Also draws from	—	Static vs temporal study.
Taboo	Primary	—	Forbidden elements.
Teleconnection	Also draws from	—	Distant relationships via shared dynamics.
Tipping Points (or Phase Transitions)	Also draws from	—	Abrupt state change.
Tragedy of the Commons	Also draws from	—	Resource depletion from self-interest.
Trust	Primary	—	Willingly accepting vulnerability to another party's future behavior under incomplete monitoring, based on positive expectations about their competence and intentions.
Turnover	Also draws from	—	Continuous replacement of components while the system's structure persists.
Unintended consequences	Primary	—	Outcomes caused by a purposeful action that were neither among the actor’s aims nor fully represented in the action’s decision model.
Variation and Sociolect	Also draws from	—	Group-based language variation.
Weak Ties	Primary	—	Distant acquaintances that bridge otherwise separate social clusters.