Review: The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas
A novel about people untethered by tradition, it asks existential questions that touch on how rituals and routines give life shape and meaning
The question is not merely how we live but how we are seen living. Ayşegül Savaş has built a career on scrutinizing the complexities of belonging and displacement. Born in Istanbul and raised across cities like Adana, Ankara, London, and Copenhagen before landing in the US for college, Savaş’s life has been fairly nomadic.

The Anthropologists, her third novel, which recently earned a place in The New Yorker’s list of the best books of 2024, opens with Asya and Manu, a young expatriate couple, adrift in an unnamed city. They seem to be inventing a shared world, a “tribe of two.” It’s a world cobbled together from inside jokes, improvised rituals, and what Asya calls their “native union,” which is a language unique to them. They use words that dictionaries could never and their intimacy seems to be the most exquisite iteration of foreignness and not merely a refuge from it.

How do two people, untethered by tradition, invent a life worth inhabiting? This is anthropology in reverse. Instead of a scholar dissecting the customs of a distant tribe, Asya, herself a documentarian, turns the anthropological gaze inward. Asya and Manu are regular 30 somethings who moved out of their cities and continually bank upon other people’s lives to build their own. They have now mastered the art of finding joy in small things and share a passionate hate for those who seek therapy. Birthdays for them feel like a lonely affair now and they regularly come up with routines in a burst of panic.
Asya is a documentary filmmaker who spends her days observing the small, messy rituals of strangers in a city park. She wants to film ‘the slow and leisurely rot of the day.’ The novel opens with her recalling her university professor, who encouraged students to imagine an anthropologist observing their lives. She then admits that she would summon the ‘tiny Martian’ in a safari outfit to examine her life with Manu. She says,
“Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our make-shift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane? Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.”
Savaş then takes a narrative risk. She writes a novel about happy people who stay happy. In a literary landscape where happiness is often fleeting or suspect, The Anthropologist asks if happiness can sustain a narrative. But Asya and Manu’s contentment isn’t without depth, their uprooting is a grim affair, and their happiness tinged with nostalgia for the life they’re still living.
Savaş resists the temptation to manufacture drama. Instead, the novel’s tension arises from existential questions: How should one live? How do rituals and routines give life its shape?
There are no grand betrayals or shattering revelations in The Anthropologists . Asya and Manu are simply happy. Savas takes what might be dismissed as the mundane and gives it the gravitas of myth. There is a sly irony in the author’s nods to mythology: Manu, evocative of the first man in Hindu cosmology; Asya, named for a continent. Savaş resists the temptation to manufacture drama. Instead, the novel’s tension arises from existential questions: How should one live? How do rituals and routines give life its shape? What does it mean to live without roots? Not the tragic narrative of exile, but the quotidian strangeness of constructing a life from scratch.
The unnamed city is also a co-conspirator. When Asya and Manu search for an apartment to anchor their existence, it becomes a philosophical expedition. Every viewing of a prospective flat makes them wonder if that space can confer belonging or will merely amplify their otherness? Then, there’s Ravi, the third node in the triangular dynamic. He is a counterpoint to the couple’s spiraling anxieties. His anarchic energy resists the gravitational pull of mortgages and societal expectations. But, as Savas shows us, this resistance has its own expiration date.
Savas delights in gossip as a social glue and her characters dissect one another with the affectionate cruelty of close friends. Even the couple’s elderly upstairs neighbour, Tereza, becomes a surrogate family member — a grandmotherly figure who inspires them with her poetic spirit. In an essay for The Paris Review, Savaş wrote about her own poet-neighbour Anne, who clearly served as an inspiration for Tereza. Tereza’s presence gestures toward the limits of choice. We don’t just choose homes; they, too, choose us.

The novel also continually asks: what rituals have you created, knowingly or not? And if a tiny Martian were to observe you, what would they see? Asya’s obsession with tradition (not inherited but invented) is endearing. Her lists of imagined customs, her fixation on creating a rhythm of life, are attempts to stave off the abyss of rootlessness. To commit to a home, as Savas so incisively dramatizes, is to commit to a future life, one that may not align with the selves we hope to become.
And finally, it leaves the reader to wonder: what does it mean to belong to a place, to others, to oneself? And, more provocatively, what if the answer is always provisional?
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
