Abstract
Essentialism is a way of conceptualizing categories as if they obtain naturally, intrinsically, or metaphysically in the world, rather than being constructed by human myths and social dynamics. Essentialist thinking is frequently applied to so‐called “natural kinds” and “social kinds,” as well as to putative human qualities and other elaborated cultural concepts. In essentialist discourse, category members are portrayed as deeply similar and naturally bound together, and as intractably, primordially, or absolutely the way they are, sometimes having some kind of essence or “stuff” (usually invisible) that determines their properties or behavior. Contemporary sociocultural anthropologists tend to be antiessentialist in their professional writings, yet many anthropologists recognize essentialism is a recurrent mode of thought and discourse in most of the communities they study and write about and one that begs for ethnographic attention. Social theorists, then, strive to avoid essentialism in themselves, while studying its vibrant existence in others.