In his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (1979), the anthropologist Michael Thompson, who has died aged 89, took an everyday example to show how people’s sense of value operates. How is it that the beaded curtains that hung in doorways across Britain in the 1970s – unremarkable, slightly naff, destined for the skip – can these days fetch real money in vintage shops?
Nothing about the object has changed. What has changed is the social construction placed upon it. Thompson proposed that goods and services divide into three categories: durable objects, whose value rises over time; transient ones, whose value falls; and rubbish, which has none – but with the proviso that these categories are not fixed properties of things. They are assigned by societies, and they shift: in the case of beaded curtains, from transient to durable.
Thompson spent his career showing that the categories through which societies organise value are not fixed and discoverable, but made and remade – and that this insight changes everything about how public policy should work. The mathematical framework, drawn from René Thom’s catastrophe theory, allowed him to sketch how those shifts occur.
Originally Thompson’s PhD thesis, written under the anthropologist Mary Douglas and the mathematician Christopher Zeeman, Rubbish Theory became a minor classic in art theory, and helped establish the field of waste studies.
But rubbish theory raised a harder question: if value categories are socially constructed, what limits them? Thompson came to see this as the central challenge of social science. Assume a single shared rationality and you are unable to explain the vast differences in how humans interact with one another across time and place. Assume unlimited variation and social science dissolves into “very high-level travel literature”.
The solution was what he and his collaborators called cultural theory, or the theory of plural rationality. It holds that there are a small number of recurring ways in which people live together and make sense of their social world – which he described as hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism and fatalism. Their endlessly varying combinations generate the huge diversity of social life. Working with the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, Thompson refined these ideas through the 80s and published them as Cultural Theory (1990).
The practical stakes were considerable. Each of these ways of living and coordinating with others carries with it a coherent way of perceiving the world – of assessing risk, construing fairness and understanding what nature demands. Different communities looking at the same flood, the same deforested hillside or the same epidemiological data are not seeing the same thing. They are reasoning from different premises.
For example, in responding to climate change, a hierarchical approach looks to regulation and expert management; an individualist one to market incentives and technological innovation; an egalitarian one to limits, voluntary restraint and shared sacrifice; while a fatalist one stresses adapting to whatever may come. These are not just different policies, but different ways of reasoning about the same problem.
This meant that the standard policy instinct – get better data, consult the right experts, find the optimal solution – was insufficient. Sustainable solutions to pressing social problems, Thompson insisted, are always clumsy combinations of competing rationalities, not clean victories of one over the others. In complex political decisions, those whose knowledge and perspective were ignored in advance – not just credentialled experts, but communities, practitioners and dissenting voices of every kind – consistently turned out to matter. The failure was not one of data but of listening.
He once summarised this predicament with characteristic clarity: “Democracy, like lavatory cleaning, is an uphill task: no sooner have we got it all clean and shiny than someone comes in and pisses all over it.”
He spent the later parts of his career testing these ideas across many collaborations. At the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, where he worked from 1980, he found in ecologist Crawford Holling an interlocutor: Holling’s model of ecosystem change shared features with cultural theory, opening up work on how social and natural systems interact.
With hydro engineer Dipak Gyawali, he worked on Himalayan water politics and the persistent failure of international development programmes to engage seriously with the plural rationalities of the communities they claimed to serve.
With Bruce Beck and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, he argued that cities could become forces for environmental good rather than minimise their pollution. With JoAnne Linnerooth-Bayer and Anna Scolobig, he examined flood hazards in Hungary and landslide risks in Italy, demonstrating what genuine inclusion looks like when stakeholders hold on to “contradictory certainties”.
Born in Brackenthwaite, Cumbria, Michael was the son of Michael Thompson, a civil engineer, and Annie (formerly Beale), a teacher of botany. From St Bees school, he went to Sandhurst to train as a second lieutenant of the 1st Queen’s Dragoon Guards, serving in Malaya, now Malaysia. His exit from the army was unusual: needing to free himself to go to university and to pursue the climbing expeditions that had become central to his life, he stood for parliament, hoping that the army’s obligation to remain politically neutral would force it to release him. This he achieved by standing as an independent in the Middlesbrough West byelection in June 1962.
He studied anthropology at University College London, graduating in 1965, then took a BLitt in social anthropology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1968, and returned to UCL for his doctorate, completed in 1976. Along the way he was a lecturer in urban sociology at Portsmouth Polytechnic (1973-74) and at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
As a climber, he joined Chris Bonington in making the first ascent of the south face of Annapurna, in the central Himalayan region of Nepal, in 1970 and the first ascent of the south-west face of Everest in 1975. The understanding of risk forged on those routes – that it is not an objective quantity, but a perception shaped by position and perspective – became one of the load-bearing ideas of his scholarly work.
Between his doctorate and going to Laxenburg, he prepared Rubbish Theory for publication while moving between research posts, including a fellowship at MIT, work with Mary Douglas at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York, and fieldwork in Nepal. He subsequently held positions at the University of Bergen, where he was professor of comparative politics from 1995 to 2003, and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford until 2018.
I knew him for many years, first as reader and then as collaborator. His writing used wit not as ornament but as a way of wrongfooting received ideas and opening space for alternatives.
In 1966 he married Anne Musgrave. She survives him, along with their three children, Will, Ursula and Martha, and five grandchildren.
• Michael Thompson, anthropologist, born 28 January 1937; died 17 March 2026
