The most consequential blind spots are never the things we don't know. They are the things we know so well we have stopped noticing them.

Anthropology has a deceptively simple founding principle: the most revealing way to understand any human behaviour is to treat it as strange. Not exotic, not primitive — strange in the specific sense of not yet explained, not yet absorbed into the familiar categories that make thinking feel effortless. The anthropologist's discipline is to resist the comfort of the obvious, to keep looking at the familiar until it becomes puzzling again.

Gillian Tett — an anthropologist by training, a financial journalist by career — has spent two decades applying that discipline to places it is rarely welcomed: trading floors, corporate boardrooms, central banks, technology companies. Anthro-Vision is her account of what that lens reveals, and its central argument is methodological before it is anything else. The question is not simply what anthropology can tell us about business and society. It is what we systematically fail to see when we leave it out.

The clearest answer she offers is the 2008 financial crisis. The instruments at the centre of that collapse — collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles, the elaborate machinery of mortgage-backed securities — were understood in quantitative terms by the people trading them and in almost no other terms at all. What the models did not capture, because models are not built to capture it, was the social and organisational texture of the system: the tribal dynamics of trading desks, the rituals of risk committee meetings that produced consensus without scrutiny, the cultural assumptions about housing markets that were so widely shared they had become invisible. Tett, drawing on Marcel Mauss's work on gift exchange and reciprocity, argues that financial instruments are not abstract objects — they are embedded in human relationships, trust structures, and symbolic systems that shape how they behave in ways the pricing models could not see.

That failure has a pattern, and Tett traces it across contexts that are superficially very different. The early response to Ebola proceeded on epidemiological logic — contact tracing, quarantine, clinical intervention — without adequate understanding of the burial rituals and mourning practices through which the virus was spreading. The medical knowledge was sound; the cultural knowledge was absent; the intervention failed until anthropologists were brought in to reframe the problem. In corporate settings, the pattern repeats in a minor key: the management meetings and onboarding rituals that consume organisational time and appear, from the outside, to serve no functional purpose are, anthropologically, doing essential work — maintaining cohesion, encoding values, performing identity. Dismiss them as inefficiency and you misread the organisation. KitKat's decision to position its chocolate bar in Japan as a good-luck charm for exam students — Kitto Katsu, you will surely win — succeeded because someone took the time to understand the specific cultural anxieties around examination and status that made the association meaningful.

What connects these examples is not just the usefulness of cultural sensitivity but something more structurally important: in each case, the conventional analytical framework was not wrong within its own terms. The financial models were technically sophisticated. The epidemiologists knew their field. The marketers understood their metrics. What they shared was a boundary — a limit to what their tools counted as evidence — and it was precisely at that boundary that the important things were happening.

Tett's concept of lateral vision is a method for working at that boundary. It requires, as she puts it, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar: approaching the organisations and markets we think we understand with the same suspended assumption an anthropologist brings to an unfamiliar culture. This is harder than it sounds. The assumptions most worth questioning are the ones that feel least like assumptions — the ones that have become, as Bourdieu would say, the natural attitude, the taken-for-granted structure of the world as it simply is. Adam Smith's barter myth is one example Tett pursues with some precision: the story that monetary exchange evolved from primitive barter is so deeply embedded in economic thinking that the data contradicting it — including the evidence that digital platforms have created vast invisible barter economies in which people exchange personal data for services without recognising the transaction as exchange — has been slow to register. The framework preceded the evidence and shaped what counted as evidence in the first place.

What Anthro-Vision ultimately asks of its reader — and what makes it directly relevant to any serious methodology — is a willingness to treat the analyst's own frameworks as objects of study. The anthropological move is reflexive as well as observational: it turns the lateral vision back on the person using it, asking what assumptions they brought to the question, what they were trained to count as evidence, what they have stopped noticing because they have been looking at it too long. That is not just about being disciplined. Most methodologies ask you to sharpen your tools. This one asks you to question why you reached for those tools and not others — which is a different kind of work, and a prior one.