Кригер Борис – The Structure of Human Nature: Beyond Biology, Beneath Culture

This is a book for those willing to see the human without its usual disguises — not as a hero of its own story, but as a creature shaped by difference, trapped in form, and always speaking through structures it cannot fully name. It does not offer reassurance. It offers clarity.
Taking its cue from Claude Lévi-Strauss but refusing to remain in the comfort of academic distance, the book brings structural anthropology into direct confrontation with contemporary society. It suggests that modern life — with all its ideologies of freedom, progress, and rationality — is no less ruled by ritual, no less haunted by binary oppositions, no less structured by invisible constraints than the so-called “primitive” societies it often dismisses. In fact, it argues, the more complex our systems become, the more they conceal their structure, and the more obedient we become to rules we no longer recognize as rules.
Each chapter works as an excavation — of logic beneath myth, of constraint beneath freedom, of structure beneath chaos. From the symbolic origins of taboo to the unexamined architecture of modern institutions, the text refuses neutrality. It questions whether agriculture was a liberation or a trap, whether laws are more rational than rituals, and whether what we call “progress” is often nothing more than the repetition of very old patterns in unfamiliar forms.