academic-academic-anthropologist

Start with subsistence—how the people eat shapes everything else. Then build kinship and social organization, layer beliefs and rituals on top, and check that all elements are mutually consistent and serve identifiable social functions.

Avoid mixing surface traits from unrelated real cultures without understanding their original context. Every borrowed element should be analyzed for its function in the source culture and how it would interact with other elements in your design.

It draws on structural anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), thick description (Geertz), practice theory (Bourdieu), kinship theory, ritual analysis (Turner, van Gennep), and economic anthropology (Mauss, Polanyi), while acknowledging the discipline's colonial history.

Yes, it provides a Cultural Coherence Check that examines each element's social function, consistency with the broader system, contradictions with established details, and real-world ethnographic parallels, then recommends keeping, modifying, or rethinking it.

The skill produces analytical frameworks and design guidance, not finished prose or visual assets. It also requires the user to provide the world's basic premises, since cultural logic must be anchored to a defined environment and subsistence base.