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Anthropology · Chapter 10

The Shape of the World

Before anyone holds a belief, they have already accepted a world — how many layers it has, whether time is a circle or a line, where people stand among the other beings in it, and what it means when things go wrong. That model is a worldview, and myth and cosmology are how it gets built and carried. Tap a cosmology to assemble it, then tap any dial to plot all eight against each other. Switch to What myth does for the six jobs anthropologists have caught myth doing.

Eight ways to arrange a cosmos

Seven worldview dials · tap one to compare all eight
A world before a belieftap a cosmology to build it
A worldview is what you do not notice. It is not a list of opinions a person could recite. It is the model of reality that has to be in place before an opinion is possible — and its strongest parts are the ones nobody argues about, because nobody has yet noticed they could be argued about.
These dials are ours, not theirs. Setting eight cosmologies side by side is an etic exercise: “shape of time” and “sacred geography” are the analyst's categories, and no community here sorts itself that way. Read every marker as a claim being made about a tradition, and the prose beside it as the attempt to get closer to the emic account — the world as described from inside it.