It's written in an academic register dripping with "you're too stupid to follow along, take my word for it." Nonetheless, some of the writers that have made the most sense to me (Graeber, Ferguson, and Harari among others) look not at tribal, cultural or regional interactions but at the underpinnings of those interactions. I've learned that most everyone's "system" as used to explain the world (particularly economics, psychology and politics) only work because they externalize everything they can't explain such that it is no longer a part of the system being discussed.

I'm reading it entirely because of this (long) thread: