Entropology

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The study of human actions that lead to the disintegration and increasing disorder of highly evolved social systems. uncountable

    "Surely under such inclusive circumstances, the erstwhile frightening prospect of a grimly reductive "entropology" (Levi-Strauss, 1955:397) seems far less ominous."

  2. 2
    The tendency of social systems to disintegrate. broadly, uncountable

    "The kind of agency I though I had—and the ethnocentric bias that led me to it—is symptomatic of the narrative motif of entropology. Make no mistake—entrolpology is real."

Example

More examples

"Surely under such inclusive circumstances, the erstwhile frightening prospect of a grimly reductive "entropology" (Levi-Strauss, 1955:397) seems far less ominous."

Etymology

Coined in 1955 by Claude Lévi-Strauss as Blend of entropy + anthropology

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.