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5Mar

Complexity and complicity in social anthropology

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology
In-person and online public event (Old Theatre, Old Building)
Thursday 5 March 2026 6pm - 7pm

Join us for Hans Steinmüller's inaugural lecture.

We often call societies with cities, literacy, and governments, “complex,” and small-scale societies “simple.” But in reality, everyday life in small societies is highly complex—people must constantly negotiate relationships, care, and conflict without many rules or tools to guide them. By contrast, in large societies, social roles, technologies, and hierarchies simplify routine interactions. To understand the challenges of social entanglements in non-state environments, and the uniformity and monotony of capitalist states, Hans proposes two concepts: complicity and commensuration. Creating complicity (implicit understandings shared by few) increases social complexity; whereas commensuration (comparison by unit and scale) enables social simplicity. Both processes are tied into each other, and to appreciate the complexity of doing things together, we must attend to emergent simplicity.

Meet our speaker and chair

Hans Steinmüller is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at LSE. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in China and Myanmar, and writes about sovereignty, legibility, and care.

Michael W Scott is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at LSE. His area of study is Oceania with a primary focus on Melanesia. His chief theoretical interests lie in anthropological approaches to questions of being (ontology).

More about this event

LSE Anthropology (@LSEAnthropology) is world famous and world leading. We combine innovative research in the unfolding contemporary world with maintenance of core anthropological traditions

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