Our work is easier to know by its fruits than by its roots, and readers may wish to skip forward to later chapters to see our methods in action. Here we outline an approach which is not quite a methodological procedure nor an abstract theory but a mode of recognizing the present in the past: archaic anthropology. Herein, ‘archaic’ is not antiquated and superannuated, nor do we adopt the Greek sense of ‘arché’ as an origin or a source, but the ‘archae’ of archaeological. The ‘archaic’ is always another sedimented layer of times past which forms the site we investigate today. We are formed by the cascade of history – our society, our thoughts, our approach, our idea of ourselves has come to us from the past. We are digging less to find the origin – because there are always further layers – than to understand why the world has the shape it does today. While etymologically arché means ‘beginnings’, today it denotes ancient, and this collision of meanings expresses our sense that the present is alive with the past.

Our approach is interdisciplinary, combining ideas from anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy and beyond in an attempt to reconsider the present as decisively shaped by theological ideas from the past, often unrecognized, yet pervasive and significant, animating our world. Our focus is not the religious beliefs of modern people, whether policymakers or jobseekers, but how their ideas about the economy, choice, work and so forth are at least partially and unknowingly drawn from Judeo-Christian ideas. Of course, there are other historical influences – Greek philosophy and Roman law and beyond – but for various reasons religion is most neglected, despite being the most influential inheritance, for good or for ill.

Recognizing the past in the present is an approach which combines at least three elements: an anthropological immersion in our topic, through interviews with the unemployed, analysis of policy documents, media and politics, and ethnographies of the physical and digital spaces of welfare; a historical awareness of key religious ideas, from popular beliefs and practices like purgatory and pilgrimage to theological ideas of providence, sin, salvation and redemption; and the final element, reflexivity, which cannot be supplied simply by extensive research or intensive reading – it is the practice of examining our own ways of thinking, and recognizing them as part of a wider culture, a tangled inheritance.