What was antiformalism, and what comes next? On Coherence, Corrigibility and Collaboration

For several decades, social and cultural anthropology has been enmeshed in an antiformalist mood – a shared sensibility that valorizes disruption, emergence, and complexity over stability and pattern; celebrates flexible concepts resistant to systematization; and treats theoretical frameworks with suspicion. Initially revolutionary, this antiformalism has long since become mainstream, settling into recognizable conventions. This article traces antiformalism’s manifestations across diverse theoretical moments, from post-structuralism and practice theory through material and ontological turns, showing how form nevertheless persisted – often disavowed but relied upon – within ostensibly antiformalist approaches. We argue that the alternation between formalism and antiformalism constitutes something like the beating theoretical heart of anthropology, operating both at the macro-level of half-century disciplinary shifts and at the micro-level of individual arguments where formal and anti-formal moves remain necessarily interwoven. Against this background, we detect an emergent tonal shift: a rising enthusiasm for form manifest in renewed attention to social and cultural regularities as puzzles worthy of explanation, and in a different valuation of conceptual work that emphasizes robustness, sharp edges, and shareability. We map this new formalist sensibility and identify its characteristic epistemic virtues – coherence, corrigibility, and collaboration – which distinguish it from both earlier structuralisms and recent antiformalist approaches, positioning anthropology as a diverse yet collective comparative endeavour.