Meanings
- uncountableThe study of human actions that lead to the disintegration and increasing disorder of highly evolved social systems.
Thus, anthropology is 'entropology', the science of the running down of things.
2003, Wes Sharrock, John A Hughes, Peter J. Martin, Understanding Modern Sociology, →ISBN2 more examples
Surely under such inclusive circumstances, the erstwhile frightening prospect of a grimly reductive "entropology" (Levi-Strauss, 1955:397) seems far less ominous.
1974, Ino Rossi -, The unconscious in cultureBoth of these approaches began by challenging Lévi-Strauss's central conception of the relation of nature and culture, and of its role as the frame of his vision of anthropology as “entropology”, the reduction of culture to the status of an epiphenomenon of nature.
2009, Terry S. Turner, “The crisis of late structuralism. Perspectivism and animism: rethinking culture, nature, spirit, and bodiliness”, in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, volume 7, number 1, page 10 - broadlyuncountableThe tendency of social systems to disintegrate.
The poem thematizes more than it enacts entropology, a contemplation of materials in process over time.
2018, Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, →ISBN, page 832 more examples
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.
2012, Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Alterity and Narrative, →ISBN, page 158In any case, the economic relationship between entropology and money in the last 250 years has to be studied in more scientific depth, but our methodical intuition points to an enigmatic monetary mechanism, concerning the entropy of our human economy.
2013, Stephen I. Ternyik, Global Wave Energetics, →ISBN
Origin
Coined in 1955 by Claude Lévi-Strauss as Blend of entropy + anthropology
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
entropology. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/entropology
“entropology.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/entropology. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “entropology,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/entropology.
Source: entropology on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.