Writing the history of civilization is beset by a double danger: a first approach makes it a kind of annex that would include art, fashion, funeral rites, cuisine, in a word everything that does not come under the heading of political history, or social and economic history, or the history of ideas; the second approach, in reaction to the first, assumes that all phenomena-religious, artistic, social, economic, and intellectual-that appear at the same time in the same group of people "have among them enough essential links to constitute an entity that is endowed with a particular unity and structure more or less like those of an organism."