Abstract
Anthropology is usually narrated as the discipline that discovered, documented and theorised human difference. But what, exactly, is said to be “the same” in all humans? Fragments of a history of sameness already exist: histories of psychic unity, studies of human universals, a postcolonial critique of the ethical doctrine of equal cultural worth, and accounts of the problem of recognition. What has not been reconstructed systematically is the changing distribution of sameness within anthropology: which dimensions of human living were treated as common, which remained the privileged sites of difference, and how anthropological asymmetry migrated between them as increasingly extensive forms of parity were recognised. The article reconstructs that distribution from the sixteenth-century problem of recognition through the Enlightenment science of man, the line from Prichard and Waitz to Bastian and the comparative psychology of Wundt, Tylor's evolutionism, Boas, Malinowski, structuralism, interpretive anthropology and the ontological turn. It reads the sequence through three independent axes drawn from Living Value Theory: the five mediations, the three recursive counterpart forms and the five recursivity levels, and it distinguishes in each period what was explicitly attributed to other people from what practical interaction silently presupposed. Sameness is treated throughout as aspectual: never one thing, always sameness in some respect and difference in another. The result is a history of migration and not of progress. Parity became harder to deny at embodiment, articulation and classification, and, as a hypothesis tested against Argyrou's analysis of what the natives do not know, Bourdieu and Viveiros de Castro, asymmetry retreated upward to L5, the privilege of standing recursively toward classifications themselves. The ontological turn is read as an explicit attempt to abolish that privilege, and whether it succeeds remains open.
I. Anthropology's Hidden Distribution
The conventional definition runs: anthropology is the study of human difference. It can be reversed at once. No difference can be recognised without some prior sameness against which it registers as difference. To compare funeral rituals, kinship terminologies, skulls, myths, religions or ontologies, one must already assume that the beings compared belong together sufficiently for the comparison to make sense.
Anthropology therefore has a hidden history running beneath its famous history of difference. It is the history of what other humans were recognised as sharing with the observer. Existing histories of the discipline, understandably, foreground race, alterity, evolutionism, culture, relativism, colonialism and representation. A starting-point archaeology of anthropology shows how the discipline repeatedly built new objects of difference: the custom, the specimen, the stage, the culture, the society, the text, the world. The present article asks what such accounts leave in the background, namely the assumptions about commonality on which every one of those objects rested.
A history of sameness has to be claimed with care, because pieces of it exist. Psychic unity has historiographies, as do human universals, the contest between universalism and relativism, similarity as a paradigm for culture theory, and the problem of recognition in early comparative ethnology. The next section locates the present article among these conversations. The defensible novelty claim is narrower and more precise: what has not been reconstructed systematically is the changing distribution of sameness within anthropology, that is, which dimensions of human living were treated as common, which remained the privileged sites of difference, and how anthropological asymmetry migrated between them as increasingly extensive forms of parity were recognised.
The question it poses is finer than whether other peoples were recognised as human. It asks in what respects they were recognised as the same kind of human. Same soul? Same species? Same bodily needs? Same emotions? Same ability to speak, to classify, to reason? Same symbolic capacity? Same ability to understand one's own social world, to question one's own classifications, or to theorise the classifications of others? The historical answer to each has been different, and the differences matter more than any answer to the coarse question.
The central historical claim is that anthropology repeatedly changed the dimension in which sameness was taken for granted and the dimension in which consequential difference remained available, and it never simply discovered that humans were the same. A sixteenth-century missionary could recognise a soul while denying epistemic equality. An evolutionist could recognise speech while ranking thought. Adolf Bastian could posit a psychic unity of humankind while studying radically different folk ideas. Bronisław Malinowski could treat metabolic need as universal while institutions varied. Claude Lévi-Strauss could insist on universal classificatory capacities while treating cultural systems as transformations of one another. Each extension of sameness placed difference somewhere else.
The most provocative finding is offered as a hypothesis under test. The surviving inequality may no longer be bodily or even cognitive. It may be a matter of recursive altitude. The ethnographic subject can possess culture, concepts, classifications and an ontology, while the anthropologist claims the position from which cultures, concepts, classifications and ontologies are compared. The history of anthropological inequality may therefore culminate in a tacit monopoly over what Living Value Theory (LVT) calls L5, the meta-repositioning of stabilised categories, and no longer in the denial of reason. Section XV states the hypothesis, and Section XVI tests it against the most explicit attempt to abolish it.
The genealogy followed is the principal line of Euro-American university anthropology, which the discipline's own histories have usually treated as its history. Other traditions of describing and comparing peoples, in China, the Islamic world and elsewhere, built their own assumptions about what humans share, and a comparative history of sameness would examine them on their own terms.
II. Five Conversations: Where This Article Sits
The history of sameness has been written in fragments, and the fragments belong to five conversations that rarely speak to one another.
The first concerns psychic unity. George Stocking treated the doctrine that humankind shares a common mental constitution as a foundational premise of comparative ethnology and traced its tension with racial thinking and evolutionary ranking (Stocking 1968, 1987). Klaus-Peter Köpping devoted a book to Adolf Bastian (Köpping 1983). Bradd Shore called psychic unity one of anthropology's oldest and most vexing commitments, in tension with its commitment to cultural diversity (Shore 1996). Gustav Jahoda reconstructed Theodor Waitz's project and showed how deeply ethnology and psychology were entangled from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth (Jahoda 2014a, 2014b). These works supply the article's historical backbone.
The second concerns universals and relativism. Donald Brown argued in 1991 that anthropology's attention to difference had obscured human universals, and he catalogued those he found (Brown 1991). Regna Darnell has described the discipline's history as an alternation between cultural specificity and human universals (Darnell 2009).
The third concerns sameness and similarity as such. The volume edited by Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich proposes similarity as an alternative to the dominant paradigm of difference in culture theory, and Thomas Kirsch's contribution observes that anthropology's enthusiasm for alterity eclipsed questions of similarity (Bhatti and Kimmich 2018; Kirsch 2018). Vassos Argyrou has made Sameness an explicit object of anthropological critique, but he uses the term in a specific normative sense: the anthropological commitment to the equal cultural value and worth of societies, which he distinguishes from cultural universalism. His argument is that this Sameness is ultimately impossible, because the very act of positing it recreates the difference between the ethnographer who constitutes the field of equality and those constituted within it (Argyrou 1999, 2002). The present inquiry asks a different historical question. It reconstructs the changing respects in which anthropologists attributed sameness to human beings, bodily, relational, environmental, material, symbolic and recursive, and it treats sameness as aspectual and never as an all-or-nothing ethical condition. Argyrou returns below as evidence on one point, where his analysis of what the natives do not know bears directly on the L5 hypothesis.
The fourth concerns recognition, race and comparative ethnology. Anthony Pagden's account of the problem of recognition in the sixteenth-century Americas and Stocking's histories of race, culture and evolution establish how sameness and ranking were produced together (Pagden 1982; Stocking 1968).
The fifth concerns epistemic asymmetry and reflexivity: Argyrou's chapter on what anthropology assumes the natives do not know, Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology and its attempt to objectify the objectifier, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's claim that anthropology compares anthropologies (Argyrou 2002; Bourdieu 2003; Viveiros de Castro 2004).
The article cuts across all five. From the first it takes history, from the second the question of what is universal, from the third the recognition that sameness is a problem for anthropology and a resource as well, from the fourth the connection between sameness and rank, and from the fifth the question of who occupies the position from which sameness and difference are determined. What none of them provides is a systematic account of how sameness was distributed across embodiment, relations, place, materiality and symbols, across counterpart status, and across recursive levels.
The dispersal can be seen in the discipline's own reference works. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology introduces anthropology through its exposure to the variety of ways of living and its historic fascination with cataloguing human differences (Barnard and Spencer 2010). The materials for a history of sameness are nonetheless present in it, filed under separate problems. The entry on diffusionism treats the explanation of similarities as fundamental to late nineteenth-century anthropology and invokes Bastian's psychic unity. The entry on cognition frames the dispute between Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl around whether people everywhere think in fundamentally the same way. The entry on German anthropology identifies Bastian's elementary ideas with psychic unity, and the entry on psychological anthropology links Boas's version of the doctrine to Wundt's comparative psychology. A discipline whose reference work scatters the history of sameness across separate entries has had little occasion to ask how sameness was distributed, which is the question taken up here.
III. What Sameness Means Here
Sameness is used here as an analytical umbrella, and the historical actors did not necessarily use the word or distinguish what it covers. At least five things must be separated, and all must be distinguished from the mere empirical similarity of customs.
Categorical sameness is membership in the same human kind: having a soul, being a man, falling under the category that law or theology calls human. Species sameness is membership of one biological species, the claim of the monogenists against the polygenists. Capacity sameness is equal capacity of a particular kind: reason, language, moral sense, symbolic competence, the ability to be educated or to govern oneself. Process sameness is the sharing of processes, bodily needs, emotions or cognitive operations, whatever their contents. Recursive parity is equal capacity at a particular recursivity level: to coordinate absorbedly, to register a catch, to articulate, to stabilise classifications, and to reposition one's own classifications.
Empirical similarity, the observation that two peoples make similar myths or tools, is a different thing again. It is evidence that may be explained by sameness of mind, by diffusion or by similar conditions, and the nineteenth-century quarrel over these explanations is a dispute about which kind of sameness accounts for it. Each of the five kinds can be granted without the others. Categorical sameness coexisted with the denial of equal capacity, species sameness with ranked capacity, capacity sameness with unequal development, process sameness with institutional difference, and parity at L4 with asymmetry at L5. Treating sameness as one thing would compress these distinctions into a single L4 category and erase the differences the article aims to show.
Sameness is therefore always aspectual. Two people can be the same in being mortal and different in language, the same in having language and different in their symbolic classifications, the same in capacity at L4 and different in the particular L4 classifications they stabilise, the same in capacity for L5 and different in whether L5 is occurring in a given situation. There is nothing impossible about saying that two beings are the same in one respect and different in another, and partial samenesses are real and empirically tractable: all humans have bodies, depend on others, dwell somewhere, coordinate through things and symbolise. The history that follows is accordingly a history of which respects were counted, and no history of an ethical claim that must either succeed entirely or collapse. Sameness is never one thing in the first place.
IV. Three Axes and Two Questions
A history of sameness can slide back into conventional intellectual history unless it has an analytical frame. LVT supplies three independent axes, and each question is asked separately of every formation.
The first axis is the five-mediational sameness profile. LVT holds that living coordination runs through five mediations that cannot be reduced to one another. Embodiment: were bodies understood as fundamentally the same, which bodily processes counted as universal and which were racialised? Being-with: were dependency, attachment, mating, care, obligation and cooperation recognised as common, or only their organisation as different? Dwelling: was there any recognition that all humans must coordinate with the conditions of a place, or did environment function mainly as an explanation of difference? Multimateriality: was making and coordinating through things understood as a shared capacity, or did material culture serve as evidence for rank? Multisymbolization: were only the symbols different, or were the symbolic capacities themselves ranked? No historical doctrine simply says same or different. Each produces a sameness profile across these five.
The second axis is recursive counterpart status. LVT distinguishes three kinds of counterpart. A counterpart is nonrecursive when nothing about how it is engaged alters its course, selfrecursive when it responds to its own condition, as a living body does, and interrecursive when it is another being whose responses respond to one's own responses in turn. A distinction becomes crucial historically: practical interrecursivity is not epistemic symmetry. Conquistadors, missionaries, merchants and administrators knew from the beginning that Indigenous people could negotiate, resist, deceive, convert, bargain and fight. They were practically interrecursive. The inequality lay in whose responses defined what the encounter meant.
The third axis is recursivity level, and it is the one that reveals what existing historiography cannot easily say. LVT distinguishes five levels. L1 is absorbed coordination, proceeding without becoming salient. L2 is the felt catch, a change in the texture of coordination before anything is named. L3 is articulation, the point at which something becomes symbolically askable. L4 is the stabilisation of articulations into portable classifications, rules and institutions. L5 is the availability of such stabilisations for recursive repositioning, the capacity to treat one's own classifications as classifications. The levels form no evolutionary ladder and rank neither persons nor peoples, and they distinguish ways in which a coordination becomes recursively available. The historical question is: at which level did anthropologists locate the remaining difference between themselves and the people they studied?
The levels demand a methodological discipline. For every period two questions will be asked separately. The first is what level was explicitly attributed to the people studied, in the theories and doctrines of the time. The second is what level practical interaction silently presupposed, in the negotiation, instruction, trade and conversation without which the encounter could not have proceeded. The two can diverge widely. Speech and exchange made L3 capacity pragmatically difficult to deny, yet theories of primitive language and primitive mentality could still rank its quality. The article treats its allocation of levels as a first approximation to be tested against the evidence, and the answers to the two questions are set out in Table 2.
V. Sixteenth-Century Humanity: A Field of Sameness That Is Not Yet Parity
The genealogy begins with a question European Christianity had not needed to ask: what kind of beings had been found in the Americas? On 2 June 1537 Pope Paul III issued the bull Sublimis Deus, which declared the Indians truly human, capable of understanding the Catholic faith, and not to be deprived of their liberty or their property, whatever their unbelief (Paul III 1537). Pagden's account of what he calls the problem of recognition shows how much the bull settled and how much it left open (Pagden 1982).
A substantial theological-juridical field of sameness was granted. It was categorical sameness, humanity, together with a capacity sameness of a particular kind, the ability to receive the faith, and a juridical consequence in rights to liberty and property. It was not yet equivalent to general psychological, epistemic or reflexive parity. The bull did not grant equal science, equal theoretical competence, equal authority to explain the world or equal authority to explain Europeans. This is the first example of why same human is too coarse a category.
The debate at Valladolid in 1550 and 1551 shows that recognised humanity settled little. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, drawing on Aristotle, argued that many Indians were deficient in the reason that qualifies a people for self-rule and could justly be placed under tutelage. Bartolomé de las Casas answered with an account of Indian polities, religions, arts and customs as evidence of rationality (Hanke 1949; Pagden 1982). Neither disputed that the Indians were human. Humanity could coexist with hierarchy, and the historical mistake is to turn a binary question, human or nonhuman, into the whole story.
Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery, which Sepúlveda invoked, located the difference in a deficiency of the deliberative faculty, a defect that made some people fit to be ruled. Las Casas answered by distinguishing kinds of barbarian and arguing that the Indians were barbarians, if at all, only in the mild sense of lacking the letters and the faith of the Europeans, and that they possessed everything that qualifies a people for self-rule. Both sides argued from a shared Aristotelian vocabulary about reason, which means that the debate was conducted at L4, in classifications that neither party could place under question.
Francisco de Vitoria, lecturing at Salamanca in 1539, drew a subtler conclusion from the same sameness. He held that the Indians were not natural slaves, that they had reason, polities and property, and that they therefore held dominion over their lands. He also held that shared humanity created rights the Spaniards could invoke, to travel, to trade and to preach, whose violation could justify war (Pagden 1982). Sameness could justify intervention as readily as protection. A common human nature gave the colonizers a standard against which to judge the colonised, and the standard travelled with the ships.
In LVT's terms, the recognition was heavily multisymbolic and theological. A common soul did not imply equal recognition across the mediations. Explicitly, the Indians were credited with L3: they could speak, understand instruction and receive doctrine. Practically, the encounter presupposed much more. Indigenous people negotiated, resisted, deceived, bargained and converted, so that interrecursivity was practical from the outset. What remained ungranted was parity in the authority to determine the classifications within which the encounter itself was understood. Sahagún's Florentine Codex, compiled with Nahua scholars who questioned elders and wrote in their own language, is the clearest early case in which the knowledge was substantially theirs and the framing remained his.
Each extension of sameness in the centuries that followed would create a new location for difference.
VI. One Humanity, Ranked Humanity
The eighteenth-century science of man made the next redistribution. Carl Linnaeus placed humans within natural history, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in his dissertation of 1775, sorted them into varieties by bodily form (Blumenbach 1775). Scottish writers including Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith placed all societies on one developmental trajectory of hunting, herding, farming and commerce (Ferguson 1767). Herder objected that nations have centres of their own and cannot be ranked on one scale, a voice that would later matter greatly.
This formation required a powerful assumption of sameness. All human populations could occupy positions on the same scale because they belonged to one comparable process. Universalism and hierarchy depended on each other here, since ranking requires commensurability. One cannot place populations on a developmental sequence unless they have first been made sufficiently alike to occupy the same sequence. Johannes Fabian later named the temporal consequence, the denial of coevalness, in which peoples sharing a present are placed in different stages of a single past (Fabian 1983).
Blumenbach's own position shows the instability of the formation. He insisted that his varieties shaded into one another and made one species, and he defended the intellectual capacity of Africans by collecting the writings of authors of African descent. His scheme nonetheless became a template for later rankings. The doctrine of one humanity could be held in good faith by people who also ranked it, because sameness was located in the species and difference in its degrees.
In LVT's terms, the Enlightenment produced significant species-level commensuration and distributed difference vertically. The same capacities might exist in principle while being treated as unequally developed, so that sameness became the premise of developmental inequality. The embodiment profile was split, with bodily form as the marker of variety and the rest of embodied life largely unexamined. Multimateriality and multisymbolization entered as evidence of stage: tools, dwellings, language and religion were arranged on the scale.
This prepared the decisive nineteenth-century question. Are apparent differences evidence of fundamentally different kinds of minds, or are they variable products of fundamentally similar minds?
VII. From Prichard and Waitz to Bastian: The Architecture of Psychic Unity
The answer, in much of German-language anthropology and in some British thought, was that the minds are the same. The route to Bastian is longer than the usual story allows, and Bastian should be read as a consolidation and not as an inventor appearing from nowhere.
James Cowles Prichard, the English physician and ethnologist, argued from the 1810s that the varieties of humankind belong to one species, and developed the case in The Natural History of Man of 1843 against the emerging biological racialism of his day (Prichard 1843; Jahoda 2014a).
Theodor Waitz, a Marburg philosopher and psychologist, made the case on a far larger comparative scale. His Anthropologie der Naturvölker, begun in 1859, explicitly aimed to demonstrate the psychic unity of humankind, treated humanity as one species, and explained differences between peoples through geography and history in place of different mental constitutions (Waitz 1859–1872, 1863; Jahoda 2014a). The proposition became that different populations do not require different kinds of minds.
Adolf Bastian gave the programme its particularly consequential architecture. Trained as a physician, a long-distance traveller and later director of the Berlin ethnological museum, he distinguished elementary ideas, Elementargedanken, from folk ideas, Völkergedanken. The elementary ideas arise from shared human psychic organisation, and the folk ideas are their historically and geographically differentiated forms (Köpping 1983; Zimmerman 2001). The result is an architecture in which the same generative psychic ground produces different cultural realisations. The doctrine is central, since it makes systematic comparison possible: a common psychic ground is what allows folk ideas from different regions to be set side by side as variants.
Psychic unity is therefore one of anthropology's great hidden starting conditions. Once basic mental architecture is held constant, cultural variation can become the explanatory problem, and anthropology can specialise in difference precisely because a substantial field of sameness has been removed from question.
Armand de Quatrefages made a parallel argument in France. Holding that all human groups belong to one species, he argued in the 1860s and 1870s that humans share a moral and religious sense that sets them apart from the animal kingdom as a whole, and that no human group lacks it (Quatrefages 1877). The common ground here lay in moral and religious capacity, a decidedly L3 and L4 sameness, and the evidence for it was the very variety of customs that anthropologists collected. Bastian's museum served the same logic. He urged the rapid collection of the material products of peoples whose ways of life were disappearing, on the ground that the variants of the elementary ideas were the data from which the science of man would be built, and the Berlin ethnological museum became the repository of that conviction.
The same logic produced the nineteenth century's central quarrel over method. Where similar customs were found far apart, evolutionists inferred that a uniform mind had met similar conditions and arrived at similar solutions, a doctrine of independent invention. Diffusionists such as Friedrich Ratzel argued for borrowing along lines of contact instead. The dispute looks like one about history, and it is also a dispute about the engine of sameness: whether likeness between peoples comes from a common mind or from common descent and contact. Both sides took for granted the comparability on which the question rests.
VIII. Anthropology as Comparative Psychology
The connection between these anthropologists and psychology was formal and institutional, and it went beyond a shared assumption. Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal launched the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft in 1860 with an invitation to a new science of peoples' psychology, an effort to connect individual psychological processes with collective products such as language, myth and custom, which became evidence of human mental organisation (Lazarus and Steinthal 1860). Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the experimental psychology laboratory at Leipzig in 1879, developed the programme on a massive scale. Controlled experiment could study elementary processes, he held, but language, myth and custom are products of collective mental life through which universal psychological laws can be investigated, and they demand historical and comparative methods. The ten volumes of his Völkerpsychologie, appearing between 1900 and 1920 and beginning with language, were therefore a complement to experimental psychology and no unrelated inquiry (Wundt 1900–1920).
Jahoda's reconstruction organises this history. His central conclusion is that ethnological theory and psychology were deeply entangled from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth, to the point that the question of who was doing psychology and who ethnology had no stable answer (Jahoda 2014b). The historiographical punch line follows. A major strand of what became anthropology was initially a comparative psychology that used human difference to discover the common architecture of mind. Anthropology could specialise in difference because a substantial field of sameness had been placed beneath it, and the sameness was psychological.
The pivot shows that the conventional move from racial science to culture hides a different transformation. Human sameness moved inward, from membership of a divinely recognised category, through natural humanity, to shared psychic organisation. In LVT's terms, parity at L1 to L3 was becoming difficult to deny, and Bastian goes further: the shared capacity to generate durable general symbolic formations amounts to considerable L4 parity. Yet the observer retained the comparative meta-position. The seeds of the later L5 asymmetry were present from the start.
IX. Tylor, Morgan and Lévy-Bruhl: Hierarchy That Requires Sameness
Psychic unity did not abolish ranking, because ranking could require it. Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture begins from the proposition that cultural phenomena can be investigated through general laws of human thought and action, and attributes the similarities of custom across the world to "the uniform action of uniform causes" (Tylor 1871). Lewis Henry Morgan wrote of the uniformity of the human mind and used it to explain how peoples could independently pass through the same stages (Morgan 1877). Evolutionists could rank societies along one sequence precisely because they had rendered them commensurable. The same sameness that justified comparison justified the ladder, and the lesson recurs throughout this history: hierarchy can require sameness, and it need not contradict it.
Contesting voices existed, and they are easy to caricature. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl argued in 1910 and 1922 that members of what he called primitive societies think according to a different mentality, one characterised by participation and by indifference to contradiction as logicians understand it (Lévy-Bruhl 1922). His account attributes different habits of thought and not a crude biological incapacity, and he abandoned the thesis of a prelogical mentality in notebooks published after his death in 1949. The dispute between Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl is nonetheless the classic anthropological argument over whether people everywhere think in fundamentally the same way. It shows the question same in what respect already being asked in its modern form: same operations, different habits.
X. Boas: The Relocation of Difference
Franz Boas appears in this history as a further redistribution, in addition to being the founder of cultural relativism. Trained in Germany and familiar with Bastian and Rudolf Virchow, he carried the doctrine of psychic unity across the Atlantic and turned it against scientific racism. The Mind of Primitive Man of 1911 attacked the inference from bodily variation to fixed differences in mental capacity and held that modern anthropology could proceed from "the similarity of mental functions in all races," emotion, intellect and will being alike everywhere, before turning to the differences of historically formed culture (Boas 1911). In 1912 he published measurements showing that the head form of children of immigrants differed from that of their parents, evidence that bodily type itself was plastic (Boas 1912).
Boas's argument had a specific form. The processes of thought, he held, are the same in primitive and civilised peoples, and the apparent differences arise from the traditional material with which the mind works, which is shaped by history and by the conditions of social life. Stocking's classic account shows that this argument helped make culture an acquired, historically transmitted determinant of behaviour (Stocking 1966). The settlement was a powerful egalitarian one: shared human capacity, historically particular cultural form.
Boasian anthropology relocated legitimate difference from inherited racial mentality into acquired cultural form without abolishing difference, which makes it a paradigmatic example of redistribution. The success of the anti-racist move helped stabilise culture as the privileged container of difference. Difference moved from race to culture and from different kinds of people to differently learned ways of life. The culture concept had an egalitarian and a differentiating operation at once. It denied that peoples differ in capacity and it supplied the unit by which peoples would be distinguished. Argyrou's observation fits the pattern: by the turn of the twentieth century psychological sameness had become assumed, and the new problem was equality at the level of cultural value and worth (Argyrou 2002). That is one episode in the migration this article traces, and no organising method of his own. Anthropology could become intensely concerned with cultural difference because psychic equality had been secured beneath it, and culture is accordingly where difference goes after mental capacity can no longer legitimately carry it.
His students extended the logic from reasoning to emotion. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa of 1928 argued that the storm and stress of adolescence, which Americans took for a biological stage, was a product of culture, and her argument was a claim about where sameness stopped (Mead 1928). The later controversy over her Samoan evidence was a quarrel over exactly this boundary between the universal and the learned.
XI. Malinowski and the Migration of Sameness Between Mediations
Functionalism made a new redistribution, and here the five-mediation analysis becomes fully explicit. Malinowski's posthumous A Scientific Theory of Culture of 1944 organised culture through basic needs, the cultural responses that satisfy them, derived needs and integrative imperatives, listing as basic needs nutrition, reproduction, bodily comfort, safety, movement, growth and health (Malinowski 1944). Twentieth-century functionalism thereby concentrated a particularly strong form of universality in embodiment and basic need. The sameness migrated between mediations instead of simply moving into the body, and the history of the discipline can be described as the migration of sameness between mediations, with each migration leaving difference somewhere else.
Embodiment received very strong universal treatment. Everyone must eat, sleep, reproduce and be kept safe, and everyone grows, falls ill and dies. Being-with was universally necessary and socially variable. Nobody survives alone, and reproduction, childcare, cooperation and protection require others, yet anthropological attention went overwhelmingly to the differences in kinship systems, household arrangements, marriage rules and political forms. The universal is dependency, and the object of anthropology became its different stabilisations.
Dwelling was rarely theorised as a common mediation. Every life must coordinate with the conditions of a place, yet anthropological description tended to make places differentiators, island, desert, Arctic, forest, mountain, and even adaptation theory asked why environments produced different arrangements. Multimateriality was universally practised and primarily archived through differences in tools, artefacts and technology. Every population makes, stores, modifies and coordinates through things, but museums turned material production into a machine for differentiating peoples, and arrangements such as the Pitt Rivers Museum's typological series made weapons, pottery, clothing and tools into markers of stage. Multisymbolization was increasingly treated as a common capacity whose contents became anthropology's favourite site of difference. Everyone speaks and symbolises, and anthropology studied the languages, myths, categories, rituals and beliefs that differ.
The most explicit attempt to list the sameness was made in the middle of the century. George Peter Murdock's catalogue of cultural universals, published in 1945, enumerated dozens of items found in every culture known to him, among them cooking, funeral rites, incest taboos, kin groups, language, law, magic, marriage, mourning, music, mythology, property rights, religious ritual and tool making (Murdock 1945). Brown revived the project in 1991 (Brown 1991). The lists are instructive for the sameness profile. Their items sit overwhelmingly in being-with and multisymbolization, in the forms of kinship, ritual and language that anthropologists were already studying, and none names sleeping, the conditions of a place or the handling of things as a universal practice with its own variations. The lists located sameness where the discipline already looked.
By the early twentieth century, then, sameness had become concentrated in embodiment, while most of the discipline's intellectual excitement attached to difference in the remaining mediations. The concentration became a disciplinary division of labour and was more than an accidental bias: biology received universality and anthropology received variation.
XII. Structuralism: Parity at L4
Structuralism should be reread as one of the greatest expansions of recognised human sameness in anthropological history. The striking proposition of Lévi-Strauss is more than that myths and kinship systems have structures. It is that the capacity generating complex classifications is not the privilege of literate Europeans. La pensée sauvage of 1962 argued that what he called savage thought is thought in its untamed state, exhibiting extraordinarily sophisticated ordering, opposition, transformation and classification, a science of the concrete in which the bricoleur works with the signs at hand, and no rudimentary form of the thinking of savages (Lévi-Strauss 1966).
The continuity from Bastian through Boas to Lévi-Strauss is real, and the three projects remain distinct. The Routledge Encyclopedia defines psychic unity as the proposition that humankind shares an essential mentality and notes its strong later association with Lévi-Straussian structuralism (Barnard and Spencer 2010). Bastian's elementary ideas, Boas's similar mental functions and Lévi-Strauss's universal classifying mind locate the common ground in three different places: a psychic organisation, a set of operations and a symbolic ordering capacity. Structuralism extends the recognised parity from the elementary organisation of mind to its most elaborate products.
From Bastian's psychic unity the common ground has moved to a shared capacity for complex symbolic classification. In LVT's terms that is a large increase in the recursive level at which parity is acknowledged. L1 parity had effectively been conceded long before, and L2 parity followed, since others perceive salience and misfit. At L3 nobody seriously doubted that others articulate, ask, narrate and debate. At L4 structuralism made parity unmistakable. Other people construct classifications of nature, kinship, myth, exchange, taboo and cosmos, and the ability to build general symbolic structures is fully human.
The asymmetry is retained at one level higher. The Bororo classify, and the anthropologist classifies the Bororo classification. Myths transform one another, and the structuralist maps the transformations, as in the long analysis in The Raw and the Cooked that begins from a single Bororo myth and follows its variants across the Americas (Lévi-Strauss 1969). Structuralism therefore produced enormous cognitive egalitarianism while preserving a higher-order asymmetry. L4 was equalised without L5 being surrendered.
Sameness also returned to anthropology from outside it, and the returns fit the same pattern. Noam Chomsky's generative grammar made the capacity for language a shared biological endowment (Chomsky 1965). Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's study of colour terms in 1969 argued that the basic colour categories of languages follow a constrained sequence (Berlin and Kay 1969), and Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen's work in 1971 reported that certain facial expressions of emotion were recognised across cultures (Ekman and Friesen 1971). Each claim moved the common ground into a different mediation and level, from L1 and L2 in the face and the eye to L3 and L4 in grammar and classification, and each met resistance from a discipline that had made its identity from variation.
It is hard to see how this distinction could have been formulated without separating the recursive levels. A history that says only that structuralism recognised native intelligence cannot also say what it left unrecognised.
XIII. Interpretive Anthropology: Same Symbolic Capacity, Different Worlds of Meaning
The interpretive turn moved from structure to meaning. Clifford Geertz and his contemporaries granted the people studied extraordinarily rich symbolic competence. The ethnographic subject was no longer the carrier of a primitive mentality. Subjects lived inside sophisticated webs of significance.
This was another redistribution. The shared capacity became meaning-making, and the privileged difference became what things mean. Multisymbolization became anthropology's primary theatre of variation. The asymmetry survived in an explicit form. In his essay on understanding the native's point of view, Geertz distinguished experience-near concepts, those a person uses naturally to describe what he sees and does, from experience-distant concepts, those specialists use to advance their scientific or philosophical aims, and he made the anthropologist's task the movement between them (Geertz 1974). The allocation is a recursive one: the natives have the experience-near, and the interpreter holds both registers.
Geertz's most direct engagement with sameness is the essay on the impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man. He attacked the approach that sought human nature in the greatest common denominator of all cultures, the consensus of peoples, and argued that humans are incomplete animals who are completed by culture, so that there is no human nature independent of culture to be found beneath it (Geertz 1973). The argument relocated sameness once more. What humans share becomes the capacity to be shaped, a dependence on symbolic systems for orientation, and no list of traits or institutions. In LVT's terms it is a sameness at L3 and L4 that treats the zoetic ground, the body, the other and the place, as raw material that culture completes. It makes meaning-making the common condition and drops embodiment and dwelling from the sameness profile.
The further anthropology moved toward meaning, the easier it became to lose sight of sameness in the other mediations. A starting-point archaeology can ask what matters before it means, and the question points to the stakes that the interpretive vocabulary leaves in the background.
The rise of claims of partial incommensurability, different conceptual schemes, different ontologies, perhaps different worlds, is taken up below, because it complicates any simple account of the discipline's treatment of sameness.
XIV. From Practical Interrecursivity to Contested Symmetry
The same history can be reread through the three counterpart forms, with a correction of a simple progress narrative. It would be wrong to say that colonised people were first treated as nonrecursive objects and only later recognised as interrecursive. Europeans who negotiated, converted, traded, coerced and fought other people always knew that they responded. The important distinction is interrecursivity without symmetry, and what varied across the centuries was the symmetry and the epistemic authority.
Four configurations can be separated. The first is extractive nonrecursion, in which selected aspects of persons are deliberately rendered nonresponsive. Aspects of them, and never whole persons, were rendered nonrecursive: the skull, the photograph, the artefact, the census category and the kinship schedule can be handled as nonrecursive objects, and the craniometric collections of the nineteenth century show this demediation starkly. The person's being-with, dwelling and own coordination are stripped away until a remnant stands for a people.
The extractive form was administered at scale. The census categories of colonial states sorted populations into tribes, castes and races and treated the resulting groups as fixed objects, and questionnaires such as the British Association's Notes and Queries on Anthropology instructed travellers to record customs under headings chosen in advance. The people who answered were interrecursive in the full sense. They managed what they said, shaped what was asked, and read what was written. The form nevertheless required that their responsiveness be disregarded at the moment of recording, so that the record could stand as a nonrecursive fact.
The second is asymmetrical interrecursivity. Missionaries, officials and ethnologists elicit responses and retain exclusive authority over what those responses mean. The third is ethnographic interrecursivity. Fieldwork makes sustained responsiveness indispensable, and the native becomes an informant and an interlocutor. Malinowski could not learn without being changed by an extended relation. George Hunt, who wrote down much of the Kwakwaka'wakw material that Boas published, is among the clearest cases of an informant who became an author in the practical sense, whatever the title pages said.
The third is ethnographic interrecursivity. Fieldwork makes sustained responsiveness indispensable, and the native becomes an informant and an interlocutor. Malinowski could not learn without being changed by an extended relation. George Hunt, who wrote down much of the Kwakwaka'wakw material that Boas published, is among the clearest cases of an informant who became an author in the practical sense, whatever the title pages said.
Two further examples show how far the fourth configuration was from the usual practice. Jomo Kenyatta, who studied with Malinowski, published Facing Mount Kenya in 1938 as an account of Gikuyu life by a Gikuyu, and Fei Xiaotong, who also studied with Malinowski, wrote about the Chinese countryside as a Chinese scholar and developed his own concepts of social structure from it (Kenyatta 1938; Fei 1939). Both were received as ethnographers, and their concepts were rarely used as theory. The recognition that they were interlocutors came with the reservation that they were data.
The fourth is potentially symmetrical interrecursivity, in which the interlocutor can challenge more than an interpretation and can question the categories within which the anthropologist is interpreting. Collaborative ethnography and the work of anthropologists from the societies once studied have made this possible and have shown how rarely it is attained (Lassiter 2005; Narayan 1993).
The historical sequence is therefore practical interrecursivity, asymmetric interrecursivity, increasingly explicit epistemic interrecursivity, and contested recursive symmetry. Anthropology progressively recognised that the other answers back. The harder transition is accepting that the other's answer can legitimately reposition the analyst's own categories. That move leads directly into L5.
XV. L5: A Hypothesis Under Test
L5 is meta-repositioning toward one's own stabilised L4 classifications, the availability of the categories through which one has been operating for recursive reconsideration, and it has nothing to do with intelligence, abstraction or theoretical sophistication as such. The hypothesis to be tested is that as anthropology surrendered claims to bodily, linguistic and classificatory superiority, its residual asymmetry increasingly migrated upward toward the meta-position from which classifications themselves were explained.
The hypothesis predicts a recurrent structure that is astonishingly stable. The native has customs, and the anthropologist has a comparative theory. The native has culture, and the anthropologist has a theory of culture. The native has classifications, and the structuralist has a theory of classification. The native has meanings, and the interpretivist interprets the meaning system. The native has an ontology, and the anthropologist compares ontologies. This is more than authorial privilege. It is a recursive-level allocation.
Argyrou's chapter "What the Natives Don't Know" is valuable evidence at this point. He argues that twentieth-century anthropologists repeatedly represent themselves as knowing the social or cultural truth of practices that participants cannot grasp, that ethnographers in effect think the natives' unthought while the natives carry it without recognising it, and that reflexive anthropology can deepen the hierarchy, because the anthropologist now claims to know both what the natives do not know and the conditions of the anthropologist's own knowing (Argyrou 2002). That is close to the L5 hypothesis. The explanatory structures differ. Argyrou explains the asymmetry through Western hegemony, the monopoly of legitimate symbolic production, the sociocultural unconscious, the separation of subject and object, and the impossibility of Sameness. The present account explains it through the failure to distinguish recursive levels: anthropology progressively attributed L1, L2, L3 and eventually L4 capacities to the people it studied while retaining L5 as the position of the analyst. It also reaches a different conclusion. Argyrou's argument leaves equality impossible, whereas the LVT account holds that epistemic parity is possible, because recursive level is situational and no class of persons owns it.
What LVT adds, in short, is the claim that several very different capacities have been hidden beneath the single word reflexivity, and that the surviving privilege is specifically one of L5 recursive repositioning toward L4 stabilisations.
Pierre Bourdieu is the strongest test case, and the claim must be stated as an interpretation. In "Participant Objectivation" Bourdieu contrasts practical immersion in a field with a specifically scientific reflexivity that turns the tools of objectification upon the scientific field, the observer's position and the scholastic bias that projects the scholar's detached relation to the world onto the agents studied (Bourdieu 2000, 2003). It is a profound attempt to break with naive scholarly privilege. Read through LVT, Bourdieu's distinction between practical mastery and scientific reflexive objectivation can reproduce a division in which ordinary actors possess practical and classificatory competence while systematic meta-objectivation is attached to scientific practice. Whether Bourdieu closes the L5 gap or reorganises it is the question. His own analyses leave room for actors who objectify their conditions in crisis, and the architecture, which does not convict him of the division, identifies only where the division would sit if it were there.
The counter-tradition is worth recording because the discipline absorbed it so quietly. Paul Radin, a student of Boas, argued in Primitive Man as Philosopher in 1927 that every society contains individuals who reflect systematically on the world and their own traditions, and that the standard picture of unreflective collective thought was a product of the observer's position (Radin 1927). Marcel Griaule's account of his conversations with Ogotemmêli, published in 1948, presented a blind Dogon elder who expounded a cosmology to him over many days and whom Griaule treated as a philosopher (Griaule 1948). These are attributions of L5 to the people studied, and the discipline received them as portraits of native thinkers and as sources for ethnography and seldom as contributions to its own metalanguage. James Clifford's account of ethnographic authority in 1983 showed how the conventions of the monograph fixed the same allocation: the informant supplies, and the author interprets (Clifford 1983).
The practices that conceptual harm names can be read as exercises of this unexamined privilege. Attributing the researcher's own concepts to participants, imposing binaries on practices that do not organise themselves that way, overwriting local explanations with speculation, publishing over community objection and discrediting those who object all involve an analyst who stands over other people's classifications and is not answerable to them. Even performative reflexivity belongs here, because acknowledging one's positionality can be a way of exercising the L5 move while insulating it from being repositioned by anyone else.
The distinction survived because anthropology never separated L1 to L5 adequately. All these capacities could be collapsed into the vague term reflexivity, and very different propositions slid together: people know what they are doing, people can explain what they are doing, people possess general classifications, people can question those classifications, and people can reposition themselves toward the conditions that produced them. Once separated, it is plain that acknowledging the first four does not guarantee acknowledging the fifth.
Writing Culture exposed the ethnographer's authority and turned a part of the L5 operation on the anthropologist. Several questions remain after it. Who identifies a classification as a classification? Who compares several of them? Who diagnoses anthropology's previous mistake? Who writes the metalanguage in which these transformations are described? Exposing authority can leave its location unchanged.
The LVT alternative avoids reverse romanticism, since it does not conclude that Indigenous people were really at L5 and anthropologists refused to see it. The stronger claim is that no class of persons owns a recursive level. L5 is situational. An anthropologist may spend most of a career reproducing disciplinary L4 assumptions without reopening them. An interlocutor may move to L5 in a sentence by questioning a classification that had organised their own practice. Recursive level belongs to an episode of coordination and to no civilisation, profession, ethnicity or person. That dismantles the hierarchy at its foundation.
XVI. The Ontological Turn as an Attempt to Abolish the Asymmetry
The claim that L5 asymmetry persists has to be tested against the strongest attempt to remove it. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism relocated sameness and difference between body and perspective, holding that for many Amazonian peoples humans and animals share a culture and a perspective and differ in their bodies (Viveiros de Castro 1998). The sameness lies in the recursive and symbolic, and the difference in the embodied. His method of controlled equivocation treats anthropological translation as a comparison of anthropologies, placing the conceptual operations of the anthropologist and those of the people studied on the same plane (Viveiros de Castro 2004). In "The Relative Native" he argues that anthropology compares anthropologies, that the operations anthropologists perform are also performed within the worlds they study, and that native and anthropological discourse should be granted something stronger than passive equality (Viveiros de Castro 2013). The ontological turn built on this foundation insists that the concepts of interlocutors are to be taken as seriously as the analyst's own and may transform them (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017).
This is a serious attempt to reopen the asymmetry diagnosed here, and it cannot be dismissed by remarking that the anthropologist still writes the comparison. The ontological turn should be read not simply as the latest expression of L5 privilege but as one of anthropology's most explicit attempts to abolish it. Whether it succeeds is a separate question, and the L5 thesis becomes falsifiable at this point.
Three tests follow from the architecture. The first asks whether the interlocutor's reply can alter the analyst's categories in the text, as against being recorded as an enrichment of the analyst's stock of concepts. The second asks whether comparison is performed by both parties, so that the interlocutor's comparisons of the anthropologist's concepts enter the analysis as analysis. The third asks who writes the metalanguage in which ontologies are identified as ontologies and compared. A turn that satisfied all three would have achieved recursive symmetry at the level of the text. A turn that satisfied the first two and not the third would have relocated the meta-position one level higher, to the metalanguage in which equivocation is described. The evidence of the literature is mixed. Controlled equivocation is a method the anthropologist applies, and its account of how equivocation operates is written in a theoretical vocabulary the interlocutors did not supply. At the same time, the idea that the interlocutor's concepts can transform the analyst's has been put into practice wherever a native concept reorganises an anthropological one. The thesis predicts that the unresolved cases will cluster at the third test, and the cases can be examined one by one.
The ontological turn also shows what distinguishes LVT's claim from the claim that anthropologists should defer to native concepts. Deference is a response at L4. The point at issue is who holds the position from which classifications are repositioned, and a symmetrical arrangement would let the repositioning move in both directions in the same text.
XVII. The Master Matrix: Migration, Not Progress
Table 1 sets out the distribution of sameness across the five mediations in each formation, together with the dominant location of difference. The cells record what was taken as common and what remained available for difference. They do not code sameness and difference as binary values, because no formation did.
Table 1. The distribution of sameness across the five mediations
| Formation | Embodiment | Being-with | Dwelling | Multimateriality | Multisymbolization | Dominant location of difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sixteenth-century theology | one human kind, body and soul | polity and sociability recognised in degree | rarely theorised; land as property | cities, dress and tools read as evidence of reason | speech and capacity for faith shared; letters and doctrine as markers | rational authority, self-rule, true religion |
| Enlightenment science of man | one species, varieties ranked by bodily form | common sociability, institutions ranked by stage | climate as cause of variety | tools and arts as marks of stage | language and religion as marks of stage | position on a developmental scale |
| Psychic unity and comparative psychology | one species, bodily variety secondary | common social dispositions | geography shapes folk ideas | artefacts collected as variants of elementary ideas | common mental organisation, different folk ideas | folk ideas and their regional forms |
| Evolutionism (Tylor, Morgan) | uniform human nature | kinship and marriage as stages | little | survivals and technology in sequence | uniform mind, unequal development | stage of development |
| Boas | similar mental functions, plastic bodily type | shaped by culture | contact and history over environment | cultural traits collected as history | common capacity, learned content | culture as acquired historical form |
| Malinowski and functionalism | strong universality: basic needs | universal necessity, variable institutions | rarely a common mediation; a differentiator | universally practised, archived as difference of tools | common capacity; magic and myth as charters | institutions |
| Structuralism | largely bracketed | exchange and alliance as universal logic | nature as raw material for classification | foods, animals, objects as terms in a code | shared classificatory capacity | structure of each system |
| Interpretive anthropology | bracketed or symbolised | relations as meaningful | setting as scene | objects as symbols | shared meaning-making | what things mean |
| Ontological turn | body as locus of difference (perspectivism) | relations with nonhumans | environment re-enters | things as agents | concepts granted equal standing | ontologies and worlds, including bodies |
Table 2 asks the two questions of Section IV for each formation. It is a first approximation, and each row can be contested with evidence.
Table 2. Explicit attribution and practical presupposition across the recursivity levels
| Formation | Level explicitly attributed | Level silently presupposed | Where asymmetry sat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sixteenth-century theology | L3: speech, instruction, capacity for faith | L1 to L4 in negotiation, resistance and conversion | authority over the classification of reason |
| Enlightenment science of man | L3, with language and religion ranked | L1 to L3 in travel, trade and informants | the scale of development |
| Psychic unity and comparative psychology | L3 and partly L4: folk ideas | L1 to L3 in sources, translators and informants | the comparative position |
| Evolutionism | L3, rudimentary L4 as survivals | informants answering schedules and reports | the sequence |
| Boas | L3; L4 as learned culture | long field relationships, as with Hunt | the cultural analyst |
| Malinowski and functionalism | L1 and L2 as need; L3 as charter | the participant relation of fieldwork | the functional account |
| Structuralism | L4: classification and myth | informants' myths and genealogies | the structural metalanguage |
| Interpretive anthropology | L4: webs of significance | interlocutors' explanations | the interpreter's register |
| Ontological turn | L4 radicalised; L5 claimed in part | interlocutors' concepts as analysis | contested: the metalanguage |
The tables show what a history of progress would conceal. Embodiment carried the most secure sameness, in the species, the body and the basic needs, and it was largely given to biology. Being-with carried a universal necessity whose forms were studied as variation. Multisymbolization carried a common capacity whose content was studied as variation, and it became the discipline's principal theatre. Multimateriality was universally practised and differentially archived, and dwelling was seldom named as shared at all. The discipline's picture of what humans have in common tracked its picture of which mediations were its own business, and the mediations left to other disciplines were the ones on which sameness was most readily conceded.
The answers shifted: the same soul, the same species, the same basic mind, the same psychic architecture, the same bodily needs, the same capacity for learning, the same ability to classify, the same symbolic sophistication, the same capacity to inhabit complex meaningful worlds. Every extension of sameness displaced difference without abolishing it, which is why no staircase from prejudice to equality is available. The sixteenth-century theologian could recognise humanity while sustaining colonial domination. Evolutionists could posit psychic unity while ranking societies. Boasians could affirm equal capacity while intensifying culture as the location of difference. Structuralists could establish L4 parity while retaining comparative meta-authority. Reflexive anthropology could criticise ethnographic authority while leaving recursive altitude unequally distributed. The key historical dynamic is redistribution.
The same questions must be asked of LVT, which makes its own claim about human sameness. It locates the deepest sameness in the zoetic mediations, embodiment, being-with and dwelling, and in the first two recursivity levels, which every living being shares, and it holds that humans differ from other animals in the sustained coupling of multimateriality and multisymbolization and in the levels that depend on it. The strategy is deliberate. Placing sameness below any contested symbolic content makes it the least vulnerable to the history traced here, in which every symbolic definition of the common ground was eventually shown to be a stabilisation someone had made. It also gives LVT a reason to ask where its own architecture sits. A theory that specifies the space within which wonder profiles are carved is itself an L5 operation, performed by one scholar at one moment, and it inherits the danger the article describes. The safeguard is the principle that levels belong to episodes. The theory's claims must remain open to repositioning by those whose coordination they describe, and its categories answerable to cases in which they fail to fit.
XVIII. Conclusion: Two Claims
The article has made one historiographical claim and one theoretical claim. The historiographical claim is that the history of psychic unity, universals, similarity and the ethical doctrine of equal cultural worth has been written in important fragments, and what has not been reconstructed systematically is their changing distribution across the domains from which anthropology built its objects. The theoretical claim is that once the five mediations and L1 to L5 are distinguished, apparently contradictory anthropological commitments to equality and hierarchy can coexist, because they concern different dimensions and different recursive levels.
The implication is practical as well as historical. If L5 belongs to episodes and to no class of persons, a research practice can be organised to distribute it, and L5 is something humans sometimes do, with anthropologists no exception and no owners. Two tools proposed in recent work on conceptual harm do exactly that. A statement of where a project's concepts come from, whether imported, emergent or borrowed from participants, makes the analyst's repositioning answerable to others. A test of whether the research questions would be askable in the participants' own world makes the interlocutor's capacity to question the analyst's categories a condition of the work. Neither is a promise of equality. Each makes visible a privilege that anthropology has long exercised without naming.
Anthropology, instead of progressively discovering that humans were the same, repeatedly changed the dimension in which sameness was taken for granted and the dimension in which consequential difference remained available. Anthropology is conventionally written as the history of discovering human difference. It can also be written as the history of deciding where humans were allowed to be the same. The last privilege to become visible is not the privilege of having culture, reason or classification, but the privilege of standing recursively toward classifications themselves.
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