King’s Fellow Alan Macfarlane wins prestigious Chinese Readers' Choice Award

Professor of Social Anthropology Alan Macfarlane has been honoured with the 3rd Dedao Readers' Choice Award for his book Cosmologies and the Modern World.

The award was presented by Dedao, one of China’s most influential knowledge-sharing platforms. Distinct from many literary prizes, the Readers' Choice Award is determined entirely by user engagement data and the preferences of over 1.6 million readers, rather than a traditional panel of experts. This year, Cosmologies was one of only seven titles selected across the fields of history, literature, philosophy, and social science.

Originally based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, Cosmologies and the Modern World examines the evolution of Western worldviews over the last five centuries. Using an anthropological lens, Professor Macfarlane explores how the shifting power dynamics between "the West and the Rest" have fundamentally shaped our modern concepts of time, space, and causation.

Expanding upon the frameworks of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, the book outlines eight major shifts in mental and moral systems - moving from "closed" worlds to our current global, multi-cultural reality.

The book’s translator, Yuchen Qin, was presented with the award and accepted it on Alan’s behalf. During her acceptance speech, she highlighted the book's metaphor for deep-seated cultural assumptions:

"We are like flies trapped inside a glass bottle, bumping against the walls without ever seeing the bottle itself. Each of us lives inside such a bottle: a set of deep assumptions about time, progress, and civilisation... What this book offers is the ability to see the bottle."

On this YouTube video Alan discusses Cosmologies and the Modern World. 

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Alan Macfarlane is Professor Emeritus of Anthropological Science and a Life Fellow of King’s College. He is the author of over 50 books and has spent his career exploring the origins and nature of the modern world through comparative history and anthropology.