“There was no place where we could feel at ease, no language that, after so many years, we could sink into like a deep sleep. And we hadn’t even begun to consider the greater issues of being rootless yet, such as where we might be buried, what words of which language we might begin to lose when old age chipped at the reserves of our minds.”
The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas is a quiet, deeply observant, and erudite novel exploring themes of everyday urban life, ordinary rituals, modern work, contemporary marriage, identity, and belonging through the lens of a young immigrant couple: Asya and Manu.
The novel consists of short, fragmentary chapters with anthropological-style headings that reflect Asya’s worldview and her interest in studying people. Each chapter functions as a small vignette of life’s ordinary moments.
The narrative focuses on finding meaning in the texture of everyday life, in daily rituals, in their repetition, the slow accumulation of shared habits, and the small lived moments that quietly shape existence: quiet breakfasts, sharing a pot of aromatic coffee, apartment searches, conversations with an elderly neighbour, strolling through a local cemetery and befriending the dead who are no longer with us, attending Sunday cinema screenings, or watching two episodes of the favourite detective show in a row.
The story follows Asya, a documentary filmmaker trained in anthropology, for whom filmmaking is a process of empathy, and her husband Manu, a nonprofit worker. They live in an unnamed foreign city that reflects their aspirations and preferred rhythm of life, building a shared existence far from their families and native languages.
The city reflected “the cadences and proportions we wanted from life. Its hours ticked alongside our own; we admired its colours and edges and embellishments, the organisation of its neighbourhoods.”
They explore what it means to create a life and a sense of home in a place where they are not “native,” and whether rituals and daily habits can give shape and meaning to their existence. Asya, in particular, is interested in places that receive outsiders without judgment.
This attention to the extraordinary within the ordinary texture of daily life is also central to Asya’s and Manu’s emotional world. They recognise something deeply familiar in each other despite having grown up on opposite ends of the world. Their bond lies in similar upbringings, shared anxieties, and a mutual understanding of what it means to live between cultures. They create their own universe based on personal rituals rather than inherited traditions, forming a shared mythology untethered from nation, religion, or family history.
“We accepted (…) that we would remain foreigners for the rest of our lives, wherever we lived.”
The novel repeatedly returns to the tension between insider and outsider, not only in relation to the city’s native residents, but also within immigrant communities themselves. Most of the people Asya and Manu know are foreigners, yet even these relationships rarely deepen. They remain defined by superficial markers:
“For most of the people we were acquainted with, Manu and I were nothing much more than our countries of origin, our accents, our work.”
Asya and Manu are perceived by other immigrants primarily through the prism of nationality, even though they feel little connection to the cultures they were born into, having spent their entire adult lives abroad.
Their only close native friend, Lena, embodies another dimension of alienation: she feels suffocated by the very city Asya idealises. This contrast complicates the immigrant narrative by showing that belonging is not simply a matter of origin; it is also psychological, existential, and deeply personal.
Language plays an equally significant role in shaping identity. One of the novel’s most moving threads concerns the private linguistic world Asya and Manu create together. They teach each other untranslatable words from their mother tongues, terms that capture subtle emotional and cultural meanings:
“These words became part of our shared language, growing in meaning once they were plucked out of their habitats.”
Over time, their relationship develops its own vocabulary of inside jokes, mispronunciations, and phrases that exist nowhere else. Language becomes a shared territory where belonging can exist even when geography fails. They speak differently to each other when alone, sharing words with no meaning in any dictionary. Eventually, even their mother tongues cease to provide the comfort of familiarity.
“Manu and I taught each other words and phrases from our own languages… These words became part of our shared language, growing in meaning once they were plucked out of their habitats.”
The novel also explores the quiet grief of distance from family and “the sorrows of life for which outsiders were not expected to pause their routines.” Asya and Manu fear becoming strangers to their families as their lives grow increasingly different. Visits feel touristy and phone calls lose their comforting familiarity. They are startled by signs of ageing in their parents, and when relatives die, they confront the disorienting reality that their routines abroad continue uninterrupted.
This emotional distance reshapes how they see their parents. As adults, they begin to recognise them as individuals rather than purely parental figures – people who once had their own desires, fears, and dreams. These reflections deepen the novel’s meditation on time, generational change, and the subtle erosion of shared worlds.
Savas also situates the couple within a distinctly millennial sensibility. Their careers, life abroad, and social networks reflect a generation shaped by globalisation, precarity, limited choices, and the absence of stable anchors.
“It was often the case for people our age that an interesting job was tantamount to being an interesting person.”
“As if everyone ended up living the same sort of life, describing it with the same words…”
This awareness creates an undercurrent of existential unease throughout the novel.
The novel maintains a melancholic tone sustained by quiet contemplation of the extraordinary within ordinary daily rituals. Asya’s anthropological perspective reveals a comforting insight: beneath cultural differences and varied life paths lies a universal human experience.
“I’d begun to understand that there was also only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms…”
In the novel, belonging does not lie in geography, tradition, or identity labels, but in the fragile daily acts through which people build lives together.
Savas’s work is ultimately a subtle and profound meditation on modern adulthood, suggesting that meaning emerges from attention to everyday life and from the accumulation of shared routines that shape existence.
The Anthropologists poses thoughtful questions about how people construct a life when traditional anchors like family, language, and history are distant or absent. The search for home becomes symbolic of a broader existential pursuit.
