Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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.
Speaker:
Professor Hans Steinmüller
Chair:
Professor Michael W. Scott
#Anthropology #Events #London
Full details/attend: lse.ac.uk/events/social-anthropology
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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.
Speaker:
Professor Hans Steinmüller
Chair:
Professor Michael W. Scott
#Anthropology #Events #London
Full details/attend: lse.ac.uk/events/social-anthropology
To turn on captions, go to the bottom-right of the video player and click the icon. Please note that this feature uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, or machine generated transcription, and is not 100% accurate.
Sign up for news about upcoming LSE Events: lse.ac.uk/Events/signup
