Review in the NYT Why we in the West are so Weird.

Henrich is saying that kinship systems are core. I always wondered what it meant that ancients worked these out so early, such complex cognitive maps. This book helps by making strong suggestions that imply that Gardenworld, as a reform agenda for the future, is caught between Greek abstraction supporting empire and technology, and power, and kinship systems that remain local, as cognitive maps of the maps of the world. Are we torn between these two systems? Is a third possible?

Or is the task in life to find a culture which balances both without the current result that one or the other – relationships or power – are marginalized?