entropology

English

Etymology

Coined in 1955 by Claude Lévi-Strauss as Blend of entropy +‎ anthropology

Noun

entropology (uncountable)

1. The study of human actions that lead to the disintegration and increasing disorder of highly evolved social systems.
   • 1974, Ino Rossi -, The unconscious in culture:

     Surely under such inclusive circumstances, the erstwhile frightening prospect of a grimly reductive "entropology" (Levi-Strauss, 1955:397) seems far less ominous.

   • 2003, Wes Sharrock, John A Hughes, Peter J. Martin, Understanding Modern Sociology, →ISBN:

     Thus, anthropology is 'entropology', the science of the running down of things.

   • 2009, Terry S. Turner, “The crisis of late structuralism. Perspectivism and animism: rethinking culture, nature, spirit, and bodiliness”, in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, volume 7, number 1, page 10:

     Both of these approaches began by challenging Lévi-Strauss's central conception of the relation of nature and culture, and of its role as the frame of his vision of anthropology as “entropology”, the reduction of culture to the status of an epiphenomenon of nature.

2. (by extension) The tendency of social systems to disintegrate.
   • 2012, Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Alterity and Narrative, →ISBN, page 158:

     The kind of agency I though I had—and the ethnocentric bias that led me to it—is symptomatic of the narrative motif of entropology. Make no mistake—entrolpology is real.

   • 2013, Stephen I. Ternyik, Global Wave Energetics, →ISBN:

     In any case, the economic relationship between entropology and money in the last 250 years has to be studied in more scientific depth, but our methodical intuition points to an enigmatic monetary mechanism, concerning the entropy of our human economy.

   • 2018, Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, →ISBN, page 83:

     The poem thematizes more than it enacts entropology, a contemplation of materials in process over time.