I tend to agree with you; a large portion of the public seems to be drawn to complex explanations, to multi-causal models, but it is hard to find compelling integrative accounts of… well, anything, in contemporary anthropology. We seem so acutely, so painfully aware of the limits of our knowledge that we are discouraged from writing anything sweeping or synthetic. I was reminded a bit of some of Eric Wolf’s bold discussion of the New World history at conquest and colonization, the subtlety and ambition of his explanations, which so often combined everything from agricultural botany to colonial political science to economic systems theory to Native American cosmology. But Wolf never tried to draw human biology or psychology into the mix.

This level seems to be the gap, as the reviewer on Amazon writes. The individual winds up being pretty shallow, static, or otherwise impoverished.

But is the answer grand theory, or just ambitious account? In other words, is one lesson from dynamic systems theory (as from anthropological examples like Wolf), that sweeping theory, if it is causally simplifying, is part of the problem rather than the solution? Can we write ambitious, compelling accounts of ‘big issues’ (that is, other than globalization) in ways that a broad public finds persuasive? Increasingly, as I see the books that are breaking through in popular science, I’m convinced that there is a lot of space for good, well written anthropology; I’m just not sure I can write that deftly (but I’m damn sure going to try).