Genesis of social refers to those complex and intractable issues, among which we find problems of the origin of consciousness, culture, language. The book sets out the original concept of the origin of society, summarizing the results of research conducted in the last two decades at the Center for Historical Anthropology of the Free University of Berlin: the mimetic foundations of cultural learning and the theory of performative practices, fundamentally related to bodily representations, as well as the role of language, image and imagination in the genesis of social. Social - a product of the interaction of mimetic, performative and ritual processes; without realizing the importance of their interaction, it, according to the author, cannot be fully understood in the past, nor formed in the present. The historical and local cultural conditioning of bodily processes creates all the diversity of social actions. C. Wolf not only develops the theory, but also applies it in practice, wittily interpreting the inauguration of the American president as an archaic ritual, during which the winner of the election "adopts the imaginary political body of the president of the United States of America."