What Was Antiformalism, and What Comes Next? On Coherence, Corrigibility and Collaboration

Abstract For several decades, social and cultural anthropology has been enmeshed in an antiformalist mood—a shared sensibility that valorizes disruption, emergence, and complexity over stability and pattern; celebrates flexible concepts resistant to systematization; and treats theoretical frameworks with suspicion. Initially revolutionary, this antiformalism has long since become mainstream, settling into recognizable conventions. This article traces antiformalism’s manifestations across diverse theoretical moments, from post-structuralism and practice theory through material and ontological turns, showing how form nevertheless persisted—often disavowed but relied upon—within ostensibly antiformalist approaches. We argue that the alternation between formalism and antiformalism constitutes something like the beating theoretical heart of anthropology, operating both at the macro level of half-century disciplinary shifts and at the microlevel of individual arguments where formal and anti-formal moves remain necessarily interwoven. Against this background, we detect an emergent tonal shift: a rising enthusiasm for form manifest in renewed attention to social and cultural regularities as puzzles worthy of explanation, and in a different valuation of conceptual work that emphasizes robustness, sharp edges, and shareability. We map this new formalist sensibility and identify its characteristic epistemic virtues—coherence, corrigibility, and collaboration—which distinguish it from both earlier structuralisms and recent antiformalist approaches, positioning anthropology as a diverse yet collective comparative endeavor.