Cultural anthropology of involution

The involution comes from the Latin word "involution", which means "turning or rolling". The German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished the difference between involution and evolution.

Alexander Goodenweitzer, an American anthropologist, defined the concept of involution on the basis of Kant: he used "involution" to describe that after a certain cultural model reached a certain final form, it could not be self-stable, nor could it be transformed into a new form, but only made itself more complicated.

Gilds put forward the concept of "the involution of agriculture" in his book "The involution of agriculture: the process of Indonesian ecological change" to explain why there was no agricultural revolution to promote the industrial revolution in Java.

Geerds makes this concept widely known in anthropology and sociology and becomes a special concept to describe the slow development of social culture.

Prasenjit duara cited this concept in his analysis of rural social development in China in "Culture, Power and State: Rural Areas in North China 1900- 1942", and put forward that "state power participates in it.

Due to the small-scale peasant economy in Huang Zongzhi and the social changes in North China, the concept of "involution" has also attracted the attention of rural research in China.

In addition, the relevant analysis has been extended to the analysis of state-owned enterprises, urban research, academic research, educational development, legal proceedings, democratic development, institutional innovation and other different fields.

In recent years, this word has continued to be popular in the context of network and daily life, and its semantics have deviated. Used to refer to vicious internal competition, excessive competition or race to the bottom. Anthropologists describe it as "the endless loop of gyro" and "the competition that does not allow failure and withdrawal"