Current Anthropology Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/40supp-0004$3.00
Sameness and the
Ethnological Will to
Meaning 1
by Vassos Argyrou
This article examines the claim that there is a crisis in ethnologi-
cal representation. It argues that no such crisis exists because
the truth of the most fundamental ethnological representation—
Sameness—is questioned by no one. It suggests that this claim
must be understood as an attempt to uphold Sameness in the
face of representations of difference that contradict it. The article
further argues that it is impossible to demonstrate Sameness and
that every attempt to do so results in the production of differ-
ence and Otherness. It concludes by suggesting why anthropolo-
gists must nonetheless persist in this self-defeating endeavor.
vassos argyrou is Associate Professor of Social Science at In-
tercollege (P.O. Box 4005, 1700 Nicosia, Cyprus). Born in 1955,
he was educated at North East London Polytechnic (B.Sc, 1980),
the London School of Economics (M.Sc., 1989), and Indiana Uni-
versity (Ph.D., 1993). He has been a visiting assistant professor at
Reed College, Holy Cross College, and Colgate University. His re-
search interests are social and cultural theory, symbolic power,
religion and ritual, and Southern Europe. Among his publications
are Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), ‘‘Is ‘Closer and Closer’ Ever
Close Enough? De-reification, Diacritical Power, and the Specter
of Evolutionism’’ (Anthropological Quarterly 69:206–19), and
‘‘‘Keep Cyprus Clean’: Littering, Pollution, and Otherness’’ (Cul-
tural Anthropology 12:159–78). The present paper was submitted
22 xii 97 and accepted 10 iv 98; the final version reached the Edi-
tor’s office 11 v 98.
1. Several friends and colleagues read earlier versions of this paper
and provided generous feedback. I thank Peter Sutton Allen, Trish
Glazebrook, Michael Herzfeld, Yiannis Papadakis, Nancy Ries, and
current anthropology’s anonymous referees.
There was a time in the Western intellectual tradition
when ‘‘man’’—the thinking subject that makes knowl-
edge the condition of its own possibility—did not exist.
At this time, the ‘‘Classical Age’’ as Foucault (1970) la-
bels it, scholars had no epistemological consciousness,
no awareness of being part of the picture they were
painting. They went about their scientific tasks using
the tools of their trade—representations—with the cer-
tainty that the image of the world they constructed was
the exact replica of the world as it existed in itself. In
short, they assumed—or had no reason to think other-
wise—that representations were neutral and innocent,
a transparent medium through which the world mani-
fested itself to the mind undistorted.
Then, an event of enormous complexity, what we
would today call reflexivity, took over scientific minds.
Scholars who represented everything except themselves
in the process of representing discovered that represen-
tations were also things of this world and hence amena-
ble to representation. At this point, the threshold of
Western modernity, there was a fundamental ‘‘displace-
ment, which toppled the whole of Western thought:
representation ha[d] lost the power to provide a founda-
tion [to knowledge]’’ (Foucault 1970:238). If representa-
tion was the product of socially and historically situ-
ated subjects rather than the immaculate conception of
a transcendental being, one could no longer maintain
the implicit assumptions of neutrality and transpar-
ency. Nor, by extension, could one maintain that what
representation represented was the true nature of
things. From now on, it would not be ‘‘their identity
that beings manifest in representation, but the external
relation they establish with the human being’’ (p. 313).
One of the first scholars to have applied this critique
of representation to the discourse that makes Others its
object of study is Edward Said. In his well-known book
Orientalism (1978) he points out that Western knowl-
edge of the Orient, like all knowledge, is political. This
is not, however, because scholars of the Orient inten-
tionally distort their accounts to serve their personal in-
terests or the interests of their societies. Rather, they
are situated and operate within the framework of a geo-
political awareness that informs their decision to study
the Orient to begin with and shapes everything else that
they may have to say about it. Knowledge of the Orient,
then, is inherently political, not as an afterthought. It
is political precisely because it is a social and historical
product—the product of social and historical beings
who are unable to see the world through disinterested
eyes. ‘‘No one has ever devised a method for detaching
the scholar from the circumstances of life,’’ writes Said
(p. 10), ‘‘from the fact of his involvement . . . with a
class, a set of beliefs, a social position.’’ No one has be-
cause no one can. There is simply no such method, no
vantage point outside the world, even for scholars. ‘‘All
academic knowledge [is thus] tinged and impressed
with, violated by, [this] gross political fact’’ (p. 11)—the
fact, that is, of the scholars’ inevitable involvement in
life.
For Said, then, there is a politics of perception of Oth-
S29
S30 c ur r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
erness—of difference, that is, understood as inferiority.
In ethnology itself, the critique of representation shifts
the emphasis from the politics of perception to the poli-
tics of presentation. Heterodox anthropologists 2 are pri-
marily concerned with the circumstances surrounding
the production of discourse, particularly the transfor-
mation of ethnographic experience into a text. The cen-
tral argument is that ethnological discourse is mediated
by the fundamental need to tell an effective story, one
that is both coherent and persuasive. This need in turn
forces anthropologists to adopt two complementary
strategies, one of exclusion and one of inclusion. An-
thropologists typically exclude from their accounts all
those things that undermine the credibility of their
story, among others ‘‘states of serious confusion, vio-
lent feelings or acts, censorships, important failures,
changes of course, and excessive pleasures’’ (Clifford
1986a:13).3 The other side of the coin is the inclusion
of poetic, literary forms that transform ‘‘dry’’ data into
a vivid, lively, and entertaining story 4 and the use of dis-
cursive conventions that stamp the story with aca-
demic authority.
Despite the emphasis on presentation, heterodox dis-
course is unable to ignore completely the politics of per-
ception. Over and above any rhetorical devices that an-
thropologists employ, what makes a story truly
effective is its relevance, the extent to which it ad-
dresses current concerns. Indeed, the decision to study
a particular Other or a certain aspect of Otherness is
motivated, albeit mostly unconsciously, by the social
and political concerns that anthropologists share with
members of their own societies. Thus, in response to
the breakdown of European reciprocity in World War I,
Mauss wrote The Gift; Benedict’s and Mead’s work re-
flects dilemmas in American society during the inter-
and postwar periods, while current studies of Other
women respond to the contemporary concern with gen-
der and the construction of female subjectivity (for
these and other examples of this argument see Clifford
1986b). To say this, of course, is to argue that our per-
ception of Others is shaped by the way we perceive our-
selves, and this indeed is the heterodox argument. How-
ever, the way we perceive ourselves is influenced by our
social and historical circumstances. Thus, in this way,
the heterodox argument returns to the radical kind of
sociology of knowledge put forward by Said.
Whether one emphasizes the politics of perception or
the politics of presentation, the critique of representa-
2. I use the term ‘‘heterodox’’ to refer to what goes by the name
of ‘‘postmodernism.’’ The latter term is far from neutral, but I am
particularly concerned with avoiding the implication that ‘‘post-
modernism’’ objectifies and disenchants ethnology. As I will argue
in this article, the ‘‘postmodern’’ is based on the same fundamental
and enchanted premise as the modern—Sameness, which is a
metaphysical ontology of the social.
3. For Clifford (1988b) the archetypal case of exclusion is to be
found in Malinowski and the contrast between his personal diary
and The Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
4. Note, for instance, the connections that Crapanzano (1986:68–
69) draws between Geertz’s essay ‘‘Deep Play’’ and the porno-
graphic film Deep Throat.
tion leads to the same conclusion: Our knowledge of
Other societies and cultures is constructed not only in
the sense that it is we who produce this knowledge but
also in the more radical sense that we create something
that does not really exist. Others, of course, exist, but
in-themselves, as a reality wrapped up in itself, forever
inaccessible to us. What does not exist as an objective
presence is that particular Otherness that we construct
by means of our ethnographic representations. In this
sense, what we know of Others, that which we claim
to be true, is nothing more than ‘‘fiction’’ (see Clifford
1986a:6).
Such is the heterodox critique, but the argument runs
into an intractable paradox. If indeed it is the case that
we are all caught in the circumstances of life and the
circumstances of discourse—in society and history—
the question arises how heterodox anthropologists can
be aware of this fact. If they too are socially and histori-
cally situated, how can they know anything of society
and history? How can they speak about these bound-
aries from a position within them? To be aware of the
existence of boundaries and of the space they enclose
one must have a view of the whole, and the only way
to have such a view is from a position outside it. To
know that the forest one lives in is a forest and not a
multitude of trees, one must have a view from a sum-
mit over and above it. The same paradox can be put in
another way. If indeed it is humanly impossible to
know how Others are in-themselves, what sense does it
make to say that what we can know is ‘‘fiction’’? One
would have thought that precisely because we can
know only by means of our representations, what we do
know is what is—reality. Is this not, for instance, what
we say about things that exist in space and time, reserv-
ing the term ‘‘fiction’’ for things that lie outside these
cognitive limits? To speak of ‘‘fiction,’’ then, is possible
and makes sense only when one already knows what
nonfiction is, namely, the truth.
It would seem, therefore, that heterodox anthropolo-
gists are able, somehow, to step outside society and his-
tory even though, apparently, they too are caught
within these boundaries. It would seem that they some-
how know the truth about Others, the deficient nature
of ethnological representations notwithstanding. If that
were not the case, they would not be able to argue as
they do, nor would their claims make sense. And yet to
acknowledge this is also to recognize that, in spite of
everything, there is no crisis in ethnological representa-
tion. Indeed, there is no such crisis; the truth of the
most fundamental ethnological representation—Same-
ness—is questioned by no one, heterodox anthropolo-
gists included.
Sameness is the most fundamental representation
precisely because it is the condition of possibility of all
particular representations that ethnology has produced
ever since its inception as an academic discipline, if not
earlier.5 To say this is not to claim that the way in
5. See, for instance, Pagden’s (1982) discussion of the Spanish
churchmen’s ethnological work in the 16th century.

which Sameness has been conceptualized over the years
and across paradigms has remained unchanged. Rather,
it is to argue that whatever its particular historical man-
ifestation, Sameness is an ethnological a priori. It is the
axiomatic proposition that demarcates the epistemolog-
ical space within which it becomes possible to study
Others—as human beings or as human beings whose
culture is of the same value as ours. This distinction
points to the two broad conceptions of Sameness as
they emerge in the history of the discipline.
In the English-speaking world, anthropology became
a recognized academic discipline with the appointment
of E. B. Tylor as reader at Oxford in 1884. Before this
time, the British Association for the Advancement of
Science classified anthropology under natural history
(Kuklick 1991). This should not be surprising. Ethnol-
ogy could not have been born nor could it have emerged
as an independent domain of knowledge as long as Oth-
ers were considered to be less than human. Racism was
what kept anthropology chained to natural history.
Others could certainly be studied as part of nature and
its history but not as social beings. What liberated eth-
nology from nature and allowed it to develop into a so-
cial science was ‘‘the psychic unity of mankind,’’ the
fundamental tenet of a universal mental Sameness (for
discussion see Stocking 1982[1968], 1987). Nor could
modern ethnology have emerged and developed into
what we recognize today as sociocultural anthropology
as long as other societies were considered culturally in-
ferior to European ones. Ethnocentrism set the limits
within which Victorian anthropology could operate
and dictated its agenda as the study of the origins and
evolution of civilization. Others could be studied
as surviving specimens of the European past but not
as contemporary ways of life. What made the latter
possible was the invention of cultural relativism, the
tenet that no matter how different Other societies are,
they embody the same cultural value as Western soci-
eties.
To argue that there is no crisis in representation—for
the truth of Sameness is questioned by no one—is not
to say that there is no crisis at all. Rather, it is to sug-
gest that the problem with ethnology is not epistemo-
logical but ontological. More specifically, the problem
is to be located in the opposition between two different
definitions of social reality or two different kinds of rep-
resentation. The first is the a priori and, as I will argue,
metaphysical representation of Sameness. The second
is empirical and emerges within social and historical
constraints such as those discussed by heterodox dis-
course. It refers, in other words, to all those a posteriori
representations of Otherness—of difference understood
as inferiority—which heterodox anthropologists call
‘‘fiction.’’ The ‘‘crisis,’’ then, or the ‘‘ethnological prob-
lem’’ (cf. Stocking 1987) emerges because the empirical
contradicts the transcendental. Indeed, in a very impor-
tant sense, the entire history of ethnology can be read
as a persistent attempt to demonstrate Sameness in the
face of the a posteriori representations that contradict
it.
a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S31
Strategies of Mediation
In their quest for a solution to the ethnological problem,
anthropologists have employed three analytically dis-
tinct strategies of mediation. The first locates manifes-
tations of the self in other societies, for instance, a cer-
tain ‘‘practical rationality’’6 or a particular institution
which Others are said to lack. In the same vein but in
reverse, anthropologists seek to locate manifestations
of Otherness in Western societies; beliefs and practices
that were once thought to be the (sad) prerogative of
Others are now shown to exist among us as well (see
Argyrou 1996). The third and perhaps most important
strategy of mediation tackles Otherness itself. In effect,
its aim is to demonstrate that although Otherness has
form, it lacks content or, to put it in another way, that
its content is the Same despite its different form.
There are countless examples of these three strategies
in the ethnological literature, but here I will try to lo-
cate them in the work of only two major figures, E. B.
Tylor and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. More specifically, I will
explore what these writers have to say about that which
has served as perhaps the primary trait of Otherness—
magico-religious beliefs and practices. Neither the
choice of writers nor the choice of topic is arbitrary. Ty-
lor is more often than not presented in the literature as
the ethnocentric villain par excellence; he was, in fact,
using the same three strategies of mediation that most
if not all anthropologists have been using ever since. Ev-
ans-Pritchard’s work on magic is critical because it con-
tains the seeds of the paradigm that was to dominate
the field—symbolic interpretation. As for the choice of
magico-religious beliefs and practices, past interpreta-
tions illuminate the heterodox critique in interesting
ways and implicate it in what it seeks to avoid—ethno-
centrism. I shall return to these implications below.
In his address to the Ethnological Society of London
in 1866, the famous British explorer Sir Samuel Baker
(quoted in Morris 1987:91) had this to say about the Ni-
lotic peoples he had visited: ‘‘Without any exception
they are without a belief in a supreme being, neither
have they any form of worship or idolatry; nor is the
darkness of their minds enlightened by even a ray of su-
perstition.’’ In the same vein, the ethnographer J. D.
Lang (quoted in Tylor 1874:418) wrote that the Austra-
lian Aborigines had ‘‘nothing whatever of the character
of religion, or of religious observance, to distinguish
them from the beasts that perish.’’ For Tylor, religion
was a fundamental human institution; if it existed in
European societies it had to exist everywhere else as
well. The problem, according to Tylor (1874:419–20),
was not that Others had no religion but that Europeans
like Baker and Lang had failed to recognize it because
they understood religion in terms ‘‘of the organized and
established theology of the higher races.’’ Tylor made
certain that Other religious conceptions would be
6. For a recent example of this argument see Obeyesekere (1992:
15–22).
S32 c ur r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
readily recognizable. He defined religion in the widest
possible terms—as a belief in spiritual beings.
And yet if Others practiced religion and were in this
sense the same as Tylor’s European contemporaries,
they also practiced magic, which, one could argue, set
them clearly apart. Not so, according to Tylor, for this
manifestation of Otherness was still very much part of
European societies themselves. Magic, Tylor (1874:115)
pointed out, is found as a survival from the past ‘‘among
the ignorant elsewhere in the civilized world.’’ In Ger-
many, for instance, ‘‘Protestants get the aid of Catholic
priests and monks to help them against witchcraft, to
lay ghosts, consecrate herbs, and discover thieves.’’ Nor
was it, in fact, the case that ignorance was confined to
the uneducated of the ‘‘civilized world.’’ Commenting
on the rise of spiritualism during his time, Tylor (1874:
142) had this complaint to make: ‘‘Not only are spiritu-
alists to be counted by tens of thousands in America
and England, but there are among them several men of
distinguished mental power.’’ Whether as a survival or
revival, then, the existence of magic in Western socie-
ties demonstrated that the Other was also within.
Nonetheless, this argument did little to explain Oth-
erness itself. If people everywhere were united by the
same mental abilities, as ‘‘the psychic unity of man-
kind’’ postulated, how was it possible that so many of
them were involved in such apparently irrational prac-
tices as magic? Tylor needed to reinterpret magic and to
show that although it had form—it was indeed false—
it lacked content—it was not the product of different
minds.
Tylor argued that the human mind operates on the
basis of the three principles of association of ideas iden-
tified in the previous century by David Hume (1977
[1711–76])—resemblance, contiguity in time and space,
and cause and effect. Thus, a picture may lead one to
think of the original, the sight of one’s house may give
rise to thoughts of one’s neighbors, and the sight of a
wound may evoke thoughts of the pain that follows.
‘‘Primitive’’ people practiced magic not because their
minds were in any intrinsic way different from Euro-
pean minds but because they confused associations of
resemblance and contiguity—analogies—for associa-
tions of cause and effect. For instance, contiguity in
time and space of two otherwise unrelated events—the
crowing of the cock and sunrise—was misinterpreted as
a causal relationship. Hence the belief that if the cock
was made to crow the sun would rise. There was noth-
ing mysterious about magic, then, nothing unfamiliar
about its Otherness; it was a difference well within the
limits of the Same. Even though analogy is ‘‘distrusted
. . . by severer science for its misleading results, [it] is
still to us a chief means of discovery and illustration’’
(Tylor 1874:297). The trick is to know analogy for what
it is, that is, not to confuse it with reality.
The same three strategies of mediation can be located
in Evans-Pritchard’s work on Zande witchcraft. Much
of this work can be read as an attempt to refute Lévy-
Bruhl’s claim that there was a distinct ‘‘primitive’’
mentality that was mystical and ‘‘prelogical.’’ For Lévy-
Bruhl, it was not the case that ‘‘primitive’’ people mis-
applied logic, in which case one could call their prac-
tices illogical; rather, they knew nothing of logic what-
soever. They neither tried to avoid contradiction—the
most fundamental law of logic—nor sought to bring it
about; they were ‘‘wholly indifferent to it’’ (Lévy-Bruhl
1925:78). The reason for this, according to Lévy-Bruhl,
was that they were unable to distinguish between per-
ception and representation. For example, it was not the
case that they first perceived their shadow and then de-
veloped the notion that it was the soul. Rather, the
shadow was experienced immediately and directly as
the soul. Moreover, given this conflation, representa-
tions caused ‘‘primitive’’ people to perceive things that
did not exist in the empirical world.
Lévy-Bruhl’s thesis was attacked for its presumed rac-
ism, but Evans-Pritchard was well aware that his argu-
ment was not biological but social.7 Nonetheless, the
thesis was blatantly ethnocentric,8 and Evans-Pritchard
responded to it by trying to mediate the radical opposi-
tion that it posited. To begin with, he was quick to lo-
cate in Other societies what was for Lévy-Bruhl the dis-
tinguishing characteristic of ‘‘logical mentality’’—
practical rationality and empirical knowledge. It was
not possible for ‘‘primitive’’ people to lead a life enve-
loped in mysticism, he argued, because, unlike us,
‘‘they live closer to the harsh realities of nature, which
permit survival only to those who are guided in their
pursuits by observation, experiment, and reason’’ (1965:
87–88). He also located in European societies what was
for many of his contemporaries the primary trait of
‘‘primitive mentality’’—irrationalism. ‘‘Theology,
metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, uni-
versal suffrage, republics, progress . . . are quite as irra-
tional as anything primitives believe in.’’ They are irra-
tional, according to Evans-Pritchard, because ‘‘they are
the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experi-
ment and reasoning’’ (1965:97).
The third and most difficult question that Evans-
Pritchard had to confront was that of irrationalism it-
self. If ‘‘primitive’’ people were indeed practical in their
everyday lives, why was it that they also entertained
mystical beliefs and engaged in magical practices? The
problem was to explain how apparently irrational be-
liefs were in reality sensible and necessary. He did this
in his classic discussion of Zande witchcraft, where one
of his major concerns was to demonstrate that there
was no necessary contradiction between empirical and
mystical explanations of the same event. The Zande at-
tribute the collapse of old granaries on their relatives to
witchcraft, but this does not exclude an empirical ex-
planation of the event. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard argues,
the Zande are well aware that granaries collapse be-
cause termites eat away their foundations, but this does
not explain the timing of the event: ‘‘Why should these
7. The thesis was based on Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge; see
Evans-Pritchard (1965:82).
8. It is significant that the original French title of Lévy-Bruhl’s book
was Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures.

particular people have been sitting under this particular
granary at the particular moment when it collapsed? . . .
Why should it fall just when certain people sought its
kindly shelter?’’ (1976[1937]:22).
Once again, then, Otherness is shown to have form
but no real content. There is no confusion of cause and
effect here, nor are the Azande children of mere fancy
given over to mysticism. They are simply trying to ex-
plain something which, in their culture, appears arbi-
trary and makes no sense. Witchcraft is the idiom
which the Zande use to explain the collapse of granaries
on their relatives and other such unfortunate events.
Thus, what initially appears to be irrational is now
shown to be both sensible and necessary.
There is hardly an anthropologist (including this one)
who has not engaged in one or more of these strategies
of mediation. At the same time, there is no one or, bet-
ter, no ethnological paradigm that has succeeded in me-
diating the conflict between Sameness and Otherness
without compromising the former. That this, indeed, is
the case is amply demonstrated by the history of the
discipline itself, since there is no paradigm that has not
been found, to a lesser or greater extent, guilty of the
ultimate ethnological transgression—ethnocentrism.9
It is because of this monumental failure that heterodox
discourse criticizes not particular representations but
representation as such, not specific paradigms but eth-
nology writ large. In this lies its radicalism, but it is
here also that we must locate the heterodox strategy of
mediation itself.
Heterodox discourse employs none of the three strat-
egies of mediation discussed above. Rather, it strives to
uphold Sameness by calling into question the means
that produce Otherness. Hence, the fact that even
though heterodox discourse criticizes representation it
keeps silent about this representation par excellence. If
Otherness, the product of representation, is ‘‘fiction,’’
what remains is Sameness, which must be true. In this
way heterodox discourse attempts to make room for
Sameness, ‘‘to open space for cultural futures,’’ as Clif-
ford (1988a:15) puts it, ‘‘for the recognition of emer-
gence.’’ What remains to be seen is whether heterodox
discourse can succeed where all other ethnological para-
digms have failed.
What the Natives Don’t Know
One of the most fundamental divisions that ethnology
effects is between those who know the truth of the
world and those who are oblivious to it. In all ethnologi-
cal paradigms that take a hermeneutic approach, what
we know and the natives do not is an ontological
truth—the truth of the human condition.10 It is that the
9. Critiques, of course, are numerous, but Fabian (1983) provides
what must be one of the most comprehensive.
10. The division between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ may raise objections.
It could be argued, for instance, that the category ‘‘them’’ includes
increasingly people from one’s own society. This is no doubt true,
a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S33
world is intrinsically arbitrary and absurd and that
whatever meaning, sense, and purpose we find in it ex-
ists only because we have constructed and placed it
there beforehand. The division that this disenchanting
realization effects, then, is between those who forget
the truth of the human condition because they cannot
bear it and turn to the metaphysical to protect them-
selves and those who cannot forget because they would
be deluding themselves.
The story of the Zande and their granaries exempli-
fies how this division is effected in ethnology as well as
any other study of Others. In this story, the Zande
emerge as a people unable to deal with the possibility
that unfortunate events may happen by themselves.
They are well aware that it is termites that cause grana-
ries to collapse and injure their relatives, but termites
do not have intentions. And without intention suffering
is absurd, meaningless, and unbearable (Lévi-Strauss
1963, Douglas 1966, Geertz 1973). Thus, they resort to
witchcraft. For Evans-Pritchard this is understandable,
but it is also something to which he cannot relate as the
Zande do. He knows the truth of the world and is un-
able to delude himself in this way. In fact, this truth
appears to have cost Evans-Pritchard, who was a be-
lieving Catholic, his own faith. As Morris (1987:72)
points out, his studies of the Zande and the Nuer ‘‘had
precisely the effect he viewed with alarm,’’ namely, to
‘‘render theistic beliefs untenable.’’
This division between us and those who, like the
Zande, must forget the truth of the world has been
made even deeper, sharper, and more poignant by het-
erodox discourse itself. Heterodox scholars cannot for-
get, and will not let anyone else forget, that what up to
now was taken for granted and was treated as a self-evi-
dent truth is nothing of the sort. They seek to remind
all those who may have forgotten that representation
and everything that depends on it—science, objectivity,
the truth—are things that we have invented and in-
serted into the world, just like any other social con-
struct, and that it would be sheer delusion to think oth-
erwise. Despite appearances, then, heterodox discourse
is armed and operates with the most fundamental mod-
ernist weapon—the logic that objectifies and disen-
chants the world. It disenchants the social sciences in
exactly the same way in which they disenchanted reli-
gion in the not-so-distant past. When ‘‘science encoun-
ters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is
a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and
ethically oriented, cosmos,’’ writes Max Weber (1946:
350–51), it ‘‘pushes religion from the rational into the
irrational realm.’’ When social science encounters its
claim that representation is the means to the truth of
but there are structural limits to this trend. Ethnology cannot be-
come a study of ‘‘us’’ because it would cease being ethnology; it
would be absorbed by sociology or cultural studies. As for the cate-
gory ‘‘us,’’ I use it to refer to anthropologists, but anthropologists
too are socially and historically situated, and if it is possible to dis-
tinguish them from other people in their own societies on some
grounds it is equally possible to identify them with such people on
other grounds.
S34 c ur r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
the world, one might add, it has no option but to treat
itself in a similar fashion.
This treatment of ethnographic beliefs and practices
does nothing less than to reproduce the very divisions
that the established orthodoxy has already effected,
since what heterodox discourse posits about us is not
only different from everything that ethnology has pos-
ited about Others but also something that distinguishes
us at their expense. Let me illustrate this with a few
examples. To begin with, the heterodox critique sug-
gests that anthropologists are not, or at any rate should
not be, as innocent as Tylor’s ‘‘natives.’’ For Tylor
(1874:305) ‘‘primitive’’ people occupied the childlike or
‘‘poetic stage of [human] thought’’; they thought and
spoke like poets, using metaphors, similes, and other
such rhetorical devices. Unlike the latter, however,
who never confuse the imaginary worlds they construct
with reality, natives, being innocent as children, fell
prey to precisely this misconception (p. 297): ‘‘What we
call poetry [is] to them real life.’’
The heterodox claim that ethnography must be un-
derstood as poetry reproduces and cements Tylor’s dis-
tinction between poets and natives. Here is how Ste-
phen Tyler (1986:125) argues the heterodox point: ‘‘A
post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved
text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to
evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emer-
gent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense real-
ity, and thus to provide an aesthetic integration that
will have a therapeutic effect. It is, in a word, poetry’’
(my emphasis). Unlike Tylor’s natives, then, ‘‘post-
modern’’ ethnographers do not confuse fantasy with re-
ality. They are well aware that it is poetry we write, and
they call on anthropologists who may have mistaken
ethnography for a science to see through this veil of illu-
sion and recognize it for what it really is.
But the heterodox critique also serves to distinguish
us at the expense of Evans-Pritchard’s kind of native—
the symbolic type, so to speak—as well. Anthropolo-
gists often argue that in Other societies there are times,
such as during ritual, when the flow of time is reversed.
To use Lévi-Strauss’s (1966:237) celebrated phrase,
‘‘rites bring the past into the present and . . . the present
into the past.’’ Such practices, we explain, are symbolic.
As Lévi-Strauss himself (p. 236) points out, in the for-
mer case natives re-create ‘‘the sacred and beneficial at-
mosphere of mythical times,’’ thus denying the profan-
ity of the present, and in the latter they deny the
finality of death. In short, in both cases such rites,
rather like witchcraft itself, transform arbitrary and ab-
surd happenings into meaningful events.
This kind of symbolic interpretation, however, we re-
serve for natives only, for when it comes to our own
ethnological practices, which also appear to reverse the
flow of time, symbolism is put aside. We turn instead
to an old-fashioned positivism and appeal to the truth
of the empirical world. It was Fabian (1983) who first
pointed out that our use of such terms as ‘‘precapitalist’’
and ‘‘traditional’’ to describe Others suggests that we
take the present into the past—to do fieldwork—and
bring the past into the present—the capitalist, modern
era—to write about it. But this, according to Fabian (p.
71), is sheer fiction (rather than a symbolic claim). As
all anthropologists know—but apparently forget—
fieldwork ‘‘is possible only when researcher and re-
searched share Time’’ (see also Clifford’s 1988a and Ty-
ler’s 1986 uses of this argument). It is not possible, then,
to allow this delusion of time reversal to persist in our
midst. We must expose it for what it is, even if to do so
it is necessary to state the obvious.
Thus, in ethnological discourse it seems that, unlike
them, we cannot forget the truth of the human condi-
tion, whether in speaking about them or about us, and,
as a result of our persistent remembering, live in a thor-
oughly disenchanted world without metaphysical illu-
sions—whether religion, magic, or ‘‘immaculately con-
ceived’’ representations. In short, the picture that
emerges is one in which Others need myths to protect
themselves from the meaninglessness of the world and
are thus, to use a phrase from Foucault (1984:95),
‘‘happy in their ignorance,’’ while we can exist without
fictions and may not be as happy but neither are we as
ignorant.
And yet if this is how things appear it is only because
we have not carried the process of objectification and
disenchantment far enough. Even heterodox discourse
stops short of what is most fundamental in ethnology,
that which is ethnology, namely, the a priori represen-
tation of Sameness. We must, then, complete the cycle
of objectification by thematizing what we have forgot-
ten and placed beyond questioning. We owe it not only
to ourselves but also to those whose lives we objectify
and disenchant. I shall turn to this unhappy but neces-
sary task of objectifying Sameness in the next section.
For now, I wish to examine briefly a paradox and an im-
possibility.
It may be argued that the divisions I have been dis-
cussing are unintentional, committed as they are in the
course of trying to demonstrate Sameness itself. It was
necessary for Evans-Pritchard to explain witchcraft in
symbolic terms because the alternative would have
been endorsement of Lévy-Bruhl’s thesis. So would it be
for heterodox anthropologists to argue that our dis-
course is ‘‘poetry’’ and time reversal ‘‘fiction,’’ because
the alternative would be endorsement of the divisions
that our discourse effects. All this is no doubt true, but
this is precisely the point—and the paradox: ethnology
divides the world because it strives to unite it. This
brings me to the impossible—Sameness.
To say that Sameness is the impossible is not to say
that it is nothing. It can be and certainly is imagined,
desired, and even experienced. It should be obvious that
without such imagining ethnology would not be able to
exist at all. Rather, Sameness is the impossible because
it cannot be demonstrated. Every time such an attempt
is made, Sameness is disproved; every time it begins to
emerge it is instantly annihilated. The structural move-
ments of this impossibility can be sketched out as fol-
lows: For Sameness to manifest itself, anthropologists
must define difference as that which does not know it-

self, for if difference knew itself it would cease being
different and would become the same. If the Zande were
persuaded to adopt the truth that Evans-Pritchard pos-
ited about witchcraft, they would lose faith in it—in
the same way that Evans-Pritchard lost his own Catho-
lic faith. If difference does not know itself, then, Same-
ness begins to manifest itself—rather than being ‘‘pre-
logical’’ or irrational the Zande now appear rational like
us. But as soon as Sameness emerges it is instantly de-
stroyed because a new difference is born. It is the differ-
ence between us who know the truth of difference—
that it is, in fact, the same—and the Zande who do not
and, as our explanation suggests, cannot know this
truth.
A structurally similar case can be made about hetero-
dox discourse. For Sameness to manifest itself in this
case, ethnology must be constituted as that which
knows itself, because if ethnology does not come to
terms with the limits of representation it will not cease
to create difference. If ethnology knows its truth—that
the Otherness it constitutes is ‘‘fiction’’—Sameness be-
gins to emerge, but before it has time to emerge it is
destroyed. Ethnology has now become different from all
those cultural systems, such as Zande witchcraft, that
do not know their truth. The limit of Sameness, then,
is this: it can manifest itself only on the condition that
it creates difference—on the condition, that is, that it
destroys itself in emergence—which is another way of
saying that it cannot be demonstrated.
This, no doubt, is an unhappy predicament, but not
only for anthropologists. It is also a predicament for
those who are the object of ethnology, those whose pre-
sumed cultural inferiority—their Otherness—ethnol-
ogy strives to refute only to reproduce, time and again,
farther down the road. How should natives—at any rate
those who, like the ‘‘native’’ anthropologist, are con-
cerned with such things—respond to this predicament?
I shall return to this by no means easy question.
The Will to Meaning
If Sameness is impossible yet clearly not nothing, what
is it exactly, and how do we come to know the impossi-
ble? Certainly, we cannot know Sameness from a posi-
tion within society and history, since all such positions
are condemned to produce visions of a divided world.
However, if the vantage point from which we all appear
the same lies outside of these boundaries, how is it pos-
sible for anyone to have access to it? But there is an-
other question we must raise, the most important one:
If, as I have suggested and the history of the discipline
itself demonstrates, it is impossible to demonstrate
Sameness, if every attempt to do so produces the con-
trary, why is it that we persist in this self-defeating en-
deavor? All these are interrelated questions, and I will
begin searching for answers with the help of three eth-
nographic anecdotes from the Greek-speaking world.
The first is a song by the Greek singer and critic of
modern Greek life, Costas Hadjis. The song that was
a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S35
particularly popular in the 1970s is entitled ‘‘The Air-
plane’’:
When you fly, the world looks like a picture from high up
and you took it seriously!
Towers look like matchboxes and people like ants,
the largest palace looks like a child’s football.
My dearest, don’t cry. If you like, come high up as well
to see the Earth from the moon; it too is a moon.
In this song, Hadjis is advising a friend who seems to
have taken life’s problems seriously to fly with him.
From a vantage point high up in the air the mighty and
the wealthy—symbolized in the song by towers and pal-
aces—who can make one cry appear very small and in-
significant. We all appear this way: small, insignificant,
and indistinguishable from one another, just ‘‘like
ants.’’ A perspective outside the world, then, has a lev-
eling effect. It effaces all distinctions, divisions, and dif-
ferences and demonstrates the absurdity of taking them
seriously and thinking of them as real, either by
allowing them to hurt us or by using them to hurt one
another.
The second anecdote is from Nicos Kazantzakis’s
(1973) novel, The Life and Times of Alexis Zorba.11 Ka-
zantzakis is traveling with Zorba to the island of Crete,
and he is standing on deck enjoying the sunshine and
the sea breeze. At the same time, he is deeply disturbed
by his fellow passengers on the boat, ‘‘the sly Greeks
with rapacious eyes, their narrow-mindedness and petty
quarrels.’’ Kazantzakis imagines seizing the boat and
plunging it into the sea to clean it of all the living beings
that have ‘‘polluted’’ it—both people and animals. But
he also cannot help feeling compassion, ‘‘a cold, Bud-
dhist compassion, the outcome of complicated, meta-
physical reflection; a compassion, not only for people,
but also for the entire world that struggles, cries, weeps,
hopes, and does not understand that everything is a
spectacular illusion—Nothingness’’ (pp. 30–31). Once
again we have two conflicting visions of the world: that
of Kazantzakis’s fellow passengers, who are totally im-
mersed in life, who struggle to take advantage of one
another and cannot see beyond their petty personal in-
terests, and that of Kazantzakis himself, which gener-
ates compassion from a vantage point beyond the
world—‘‘the outcome of complicated, metaphysical re-
flection.’’ From this vantage point, the struggle for exis-
tence and all that it entails—competition, calculation,
and division—appear absurd and meaningless. Such
things are for nothing, since in the wider scheme of
things life itself is ‘‘Nothing.’’
The final anecdote comes from the island of Cyprus
and has to do with death—the death of the wealthy, the
distinguished, and the powerful. When such deaths oc-
cur, ordinary people often remark, Plousii tje ftoshi, to
idhion khoman en na mas fai (Rich and poor, we’ll be
eaten by the same soil), or Kanenas en perni tipote
mazin tou; oullous thkio metra ghi miniski mas (No
11. The book is known in English as Zorba the Greek. The transla-
tion that follows is my own.
S36 c ur r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
one takes anything with him; we all end up with two
meters of earth). Such comments are meant to highlight
the absurdity of the struggle for wealth, power, and
fame since none of them survive death. At the same
time, they point to the fundamental equality of all, rich
and poor, important and unimportant. In the face of
death, such divisions are obliterated and what remains
is the same for all, ‘‘two meters of earth’’—the grave.
It is now possible to return to the questions raised at
the beginning of this section and attempt to address
them. To begin with Sameness, it now appears that this
axiomatic, a priori representation is not simply an on-
tology of the social—a definition of what the social
world is really like—but a metaphysical ontology, for it
is made possible by an imaginary position beyond the
world. In the first anecdote, the vantage point from
which we all appear the same is spatial—an airplane,
the moon. In the second and third anecdotes, the spatial
metaphor begins to assume its proper metaphysical sig-
nificance. Although he does not elaborate, Kazantzakis
makes it clear that his compassion for the world of
struggle and division was the outcome of metaphysical
reflection. For their part, Greek Cypriots make death
the ultimate social equalizer. The objection could be
raised, of course, that death is a this-worldly phenome-
non and as empirical as anything else we know. We may
not experience our own death, but we witness the death
of others. This is no doubt true, but it is also the case
that death always intimates something beyond itself.
We conceive it not just as the end but as a passage—a
passage through which, as the Cypriot saying has it, ‘‘no
one takes anything with him.’’ What lies on the other
side of this passage could be anything, but whatever is
posited does not affect the present argument. It could
be, for instance, the believer’s eternal life or, as in the
case of Kazantzakis the atheist, an eternal silence—
‘‘Nothingness.’’ What is important for the purposes of
this discussion is that ‘‘the other side’’ is imaginable
and imagined. Thus, in this sense, even Nothingness is
something and not nothing. It is a metaphysical posi-
tion, a notion that we use to reflect on what is happen-
ing on ‘‘this side.’’
It is not death as such, then, that is the ultimate so-
cial equalizer. It is whatever position beyond death—
and before life, for that matter—one cares to imagine.
Positioning oneself in this way enables one to consti-
tute life—one’s own life as well as life in general—as a
spectacle, to demarcate its boundaries and to visualize
it as a whole. In short, it enables one to become aware
of life as a radical finitude. Life can now be contrasted
with, measured against, and evaluated in relation to the
infinity of the beyond and the before—be it God, Noth-
ingness, or the Unknown. It is this inescapable finitude
that makes us all the same. And it is this finitude also
that makes life appear absurd and meaningless—life in
general perhaps (and Kazantzakis comes close to this
view), and certainly life of a particular kind. As the eth-
nographic anecdotes clearly show, this is the kind of life
characterized by the struggle to gain and maintain ad-
vantage over others—exemplified by the pettiness and
readiness of the ‘‘sly’’ and ‘‘rapacious,’’ the power of
those who own ‘‘palaces’’ and ‘‘towers,’’ of the rich and
famous. In short, it is the kind of life characterized by
distinction, division, and difference.
From a vantage point outside the world, this kind of
life is absurd because it has lost contact with ‘‘reality.’’
Although it unfolds within the boundaries of finitude,
it proceeds as though there were no such boundaries.
Having forgotten its limits, it portrays the fleeting mo-
ment as eternal and elevates the contingent and the ac-
cidental to the status of the immutable and the neces-
sary. This kind of life, in other words, is so immersed
in the game and has invested so much in it as to mis-
take the game for reality. But from a position beyond
the world reality is nothing of the sort. What is true,
permanent, and inescapable is human finitude and by
extension the essential and fundamental Sameness of
all—common humanity. Hence, the more entrenched
the divisions of the world, the more absurd and mean-
ingless life becomes.
This brings me to the last and for the purposes of this
essay most important question: If it is impossible to
demonstrate Sameness, if every such attempt has no
other outcome than to create difference, why is it that
we persist in this futile endeavor? The positivistic
methodological formula that argues for the rejection of
hypotheses that are not corroborated by facts does not
apply and has never applied to ethnology. Sameness is
not a hypothesis, nor does it have anything to do with
epistemology. It is a metaphysical ontology of the order
of magico-religious systems, itself a system that makes
anthropological lives meaningful and hence something
that must be and is placed beyond all empirical ques-
tioning. This becomes quite clear when one considers
two things.
First, ethnology is a discipline without history, or, to
be more precise, it has a history that its practitioners
reject as little more than a grand mistake. As I have al-
ready pointed out, there is no single ethnological para-
digm—be it evolutionism, functionalism, structural-
ism, or culturalism, to name just a few—that has not
been found guilty of ethnocentrism. In practice, this
means that for the past 150 years anthropologists have
sought to place Sameness outside history and beyond
the reach of all those empirical representations of Oth-
erness—what heterodox anthropologists call ‘‘fic-
tion’’—that contradict and undermine it. One does not
need to call this strategy ‘‘cold’’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966) or
label Sameness an ‘‘archetype’’ (Eliade 1959) to see that
it is intimately connected with magico-religious imag-
inings. Second, the incorporation of Sameness into his-
tory would mean nothing less than tolerating the arbi-
trariness and absurdities of the world, chief among
them racism and ethnocentrism. This is not to say rec-
ognizing that such absurdities exist; it is to say, rather,
recognizing that they are intrinsic and inescapable char-
acteristics of the world, and anthropologists clearly do
not. If the three ethnographic anecdotes are anything to
go by, a world of difference and division is absurd and
meaningless—an unbearable world. Thus, we must find

ways to deal with ‘‘the Problem of Meaning’’ (cf. Geertz
1973) ourselves, and apparently we do. We tackle the
meaninglessness of a world of division in the same way
in which the Zande tackle the meaninglessness of a
world in which granaries collapse by themselves: We
forget to objectify Sameness as they forget to objectify
witchcraft. If we did, we would have to recognize that
Sameness is itself a construct and hence that whatever
sense, meaning, and purpose we find in the world exists
only because we placed it there in the first place. And,
as we well know, this is a dangerous thought. To quote
Geertz (1973:102) again, it ‘‘sets ordinary human experi-
ence in a permanent context of metaphysical concern
and raises the dim, back-of-the-mind suspicion that one
may be adrift in an absurd world.’’
Ethnology, then, must persist in its endeavor to up-
hold Sameness in the face of all those representations
that produce difference and division. But if it must per-
sist, it must also reckon with the divisions that it itself
creates. As we have seen, Sameness can manifest itself
only on the condition that it destroys itself—on the
condition, that is, that it creates difference. Thus, the
stage is set for a vicious circle in which attempts to
demonstrate Sameness produce difference that must be
and is reckoned with only to be reproduced farther
down the road—a long road that leads from Victorian
anthropology to heterodox discourse. It is this will to
secure Sameness that has been driving ethnology for the
past century and a half. But this is not simply or even
mainly a will to power or a will to truth. It is above all
a will to meaning—a desire for an ethically meaningful,
that is, socially unified world.
Conclusion: The ‘‘Native’’ Anthropologist
This paper does not tell a story with a happy ending. If
what I have tried to show has any truth to it, the picture
that emerges is rather bleak. Ethnology strives to dem-
onstrate Sameness, but Sameness is one of those be-
ings—and what I have in mind here is the existentialist
philosophers’ Being—that cannot be demonstrated.
What is even worse, every attempt to do so inevitably
results in the production of Otherness—of difference-
as-inferiority. I have also argued that this self-defeating
exercise, which is ethnology, must persist because its
practitioners are motivated by a will to meaning. In-
deed, if such a will exists—and I think it does—then
calls for an end to ethnology, such as those from outside
the discipline (cf. Said 1989), fail to understand the na-
ture of ethnology completely. But if ethnology must ex-
ist, how are those who must deal with its consequences
to respond? This brings me to the ‘‘native’’ anthropolo-
gist.
The ‘‘native’’ anthropologist, who is not merely a
subjectivity but also a historical phenomenon, strives
to do what anthropologists do, namely, demonstrate
Sameness. This has been my aim in this paper. I have
sought to show that ethnology, far from being a dis-
enchanted realm of belief and practice—as heterodox
a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S37
discourse would have us believe—is the same as the
native’s magic and religion. Ethnology is the anthropol-
ogist’s witchcraft, insofar at least as it makes anthropo-
logical lives meaningful. I am well aware that in striv-
ing to demonstrate this Sameness I am setting up a
certain division. In effect, the implication of my argu-
ment is that the ‘‘native’’ anthropologist—an Other of
sorts—knows ‘‘what the natives don’t know’’—the na-
tives, in this case, being one’s Western colleagues. This
division is regrettable, but perhaps it is not without a
certain value. No doubt it provides additional proof that
Sameness cannot be demonstrated, but what is more
important is that it may begin to do what we wish but
are unable to achieve, namely, to undermine whatever
power ethnological discourse exercises over Others. It
would now be possible for Others to respond to our dis-
course with a knowing smile, the sort of smile that rec-
ognizes ethnology as a quest for meaning, one to be
taken no more—and no less—seriously than any Other
such quest.
Comments
k a m a ri m. c l a r k e
Department of Anthropology, University of
California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A.
(kmclarke@uclink4.berkeley.edu). 1 x 98
Argyrou argues that the social scientific attempt to
highlight Sameness results in the opposite—the pro-
duction of difference, but this effect is critical because
the ‘‘ ‘native’ anthropologist . . . knows ‘what the na-
tives don’t know’—the natives, in this case, being one’s
Western colleagues.’’ Essentially, for Argyrou, although
articulations of human difference have been the product
of scientific racism, it is the will to meaning that differ-
entiates one group from another and one individual
from another.
The crisis of representation in anthropology since the
publication of Said’s (1978) Orientalism has made it
critical not only to call into question the idea of ‘‘objec-
tivity’’ but to empower marginality and allow for new
and creative ways of disrupting the discursive powers
that inform identity formation. The relationship be-
tween representations of Sameness and the discursive
powers that naturalize Sameness and/or difference are
central to authorization of certain tropes of difference
as opposed to others. Although Argyrou clearly demon-
strates how representations, ‘‘the tools of the trade,’’
have been used by ‘‘scientific minds’’ to construct dif-
ference, the privileging of textual authority has also
played a major role in determining whether Sameness
is questioned at all. Given the history of human differ-
ence, Argyrou’s dissatisfaction with the inevitable lack
of attention to Sameness and his focus on anthropolo-
gists’ persistence in articulating difference through the
explication of cultural meaning is no surprise.
S38 c ur r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
It seems to me, however, that the empirical strengths
of anthropology have nothing to do with this existential
question of ‘‘sameness’’ or ‘‘difference.’’ Rather, they
are concerned with the larger issue of constructing a
narrative of ‘‘the psychic unity of mankind’’ that helps
us to ask more theoretically interesting questions about
the past in the present. The task of anthropological in-
quiry should become enabling us to understand that
cultural interpretations and meanings not only are sim-
ilar but are constructed and authorized as similar and
legitimate. The broader questions then can be What are
the conditions of reception which facilitate assumed
notions of community? How are similarities and mean-
ings legitimated? And what role do disciplining mecha-
nisms play in the quest for community? I propose that
we replace the problematic of the corroboration of au-
thentic sameness or difference with that of the cultiva-
tion of difference.
The lingering gap between the political economy of
discourse production and the history of power provides
a special space for new frontiers. Tracing the relation-
ship between power and other idioms of division is im-
portant as we rethink how inequalities and representa-
tions develop, grow, and transform communities.
j oh a n n e s f a b i a n
Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of
Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 10 vii 98
Argyrou states his argument boldly and clearly, and CA
is to be commended for circulating his heavily critical
and philosophical piece. It has helped me to further
work on some thoughts I have been pondering. How-
ever, I will limit myself to the central issue he calls
Sameness.
Leaving aside the merits of his appeals to history—
the gap between Foucault’s classical age and Edward
Said’s critique of Orientalism seems rather large, and
Tylor, Evans-Pritchard, and Lévi-Strauss hardly cover
the history of our discipline since the Enlightenment—
Argyrou assumes a position that is as unassailable as it
is gratuitous. ‘‘The problem with ethnology,’’ he says,
‘‘is not epistemological but ontological.’’ In the end ev-
erything is, maybe, but ontology does not get us
through the day. He needs to make his claim because
the only way he seems to be able to locate himself
in the world of anthropology is by taking a position in
what he imagines as a space or place (and by insisting
that taking a position is something of a ‘‘metaphysical’’
nature). Philosophers may worry about the ‘‘being’’ of
anthropology. Anthropologists, since they have lost, as
Argyrou repeatedly and astutely observes, their ontolog-
ical certainties, have been worrying about what they are
doing.
What are we doing? We work to produce knowledge
about people who usually do not share what goes, for
us, without saying. The problem of alterity is not one
of (ontological) difference but one of being able (willing,
and competent) to engage in practices from which such
knowledge can emerge. Knowledge worth laboring for,
I would argue, is knowledge that changes the knower
(and the known; there are no one-way practices). The
key is in the difference between meaning and sense.
Meaning posits and confirms (as do the whimsical in-
sights into the human condition Argyrou derives from
his ‘‘ethnographic examples’’). Anthropology, as I see it,
is about making sense; it is not a quest for meaning. As-
suming we would find it, to whom would we peddle it?
With whose authorization? Sense strikes and illumi-
nates; it comes from, and causes, struggle; it is, to use
an apt Greek term, agonistic. Meaning may be met with
a ‘‘knowing smile.’’ It is not always easy to deal with
sense gently.
In the end, to use an old, somewhat arrogant but use-
ful phrase, the argument affirming that ‘‘ethnology’’ is
always about Sameness is either trivial or wrong. Triv-
ial, because no doing is imaginable that does not give
itself, or cling, to an identity (which, incidentally,
makes ‘‘ethnocentrism’’ also a trivial notion); wrong,
because action, in our case knowledge production,
could not take place unless identities were transformed.
What sounds like a paradox is, however, just a way of
affirming that Sameness and Otherness are neither
qualities nor states but actions and processes. Such ac-
tions are historically situated and politically involved.
To suggest, as Argyrou seems to do, that because we are
always working in, from, against situations we are con-
demned to enacting Sameness may have the attrac-
tiveness of a pathetic gesture admitting defeat; it also
elevates failure to do the damn work that ‘‘ethnology’’
always is to a metaphysical condition.
So there we are: Argyrou says Sameness is an ontolog-
ical—what? A problem? A position? A ‘‘being’’? I say,
it is, inasmuch as it enters our critical thoughts on an-
thropology, a matter concerning the possibility of
knowledge production, hence an epistemological mat-
ter. This is what allows me to continue presenting expe-
riences and documents in ethnographic and historical
accounts that have a chance to ‘‘strike’’ by the sense
they make rather than give meaning that comforts.
What I dread is being read as if all the pleasures and
pains of writing anthropology were about nothing but
taking a position, or about nothing but enacting a posi-
tion, which comes to the same.
r ik p i n x te n
Cultural Sciences, University of Ghent, Blandyberg 2,
9000 Ghent, Belgium (Hendrik.Pinxten@rug.ac.be).
7 vii 98
Argyrou’s paper is remarkable in a variety of ways. He
takes seriously the critique by Fabian on anthropology’s
one-sided perspective on the Other. This was an episte-
mological critique, to be sure. At the same time he
grants Said’s political criticism on Orientalism. He is at
home with the postmodernist attacks, but he claims
there should be a place under the sun (of science) for

the strange business of studying Sameness in the Other.
Indeed, he thinks that our implicit and aprioristic con-
ceptualisation of the Other in terms of Sameness has
ontological rather than epistemological status. It is at
once inescapable, unprovable, and necessary. Thus, old-
fashioned positivists and phenomenologists, on the one
hand, and heterodox critiques, on the other, are both
wrong in their investment in epistemological battles,
since they should address the deeper ontological level,
where opponents unconsciously meet. This is a neat
analysis, but will it do?
I think Argyrou has a point in referring to the ontolog-
ical level. I guess I am just one among many who have
been told by native subjects that as far as they were con-
cerned, they conceived of the world and its peoples ‘‘ac-
cording to their way,’’ different from the Western one.
This can easily be phrased as consciousness of ontologi-
cal differences. The question, then, was how to organize
(avoid, confront, . . . ) the apparently unavoidable meet-
ing of these different ‘‘worlds.’’ For instance, Navajos
would look upon this meeting as risky, potentially
profitable, and contaminating, while the ‘‘worlds’’
would meet and stay clearly separate from each other
(Pinxten 1997). There is, in other words, a variety of
‘‘ways’’ of which the Navajo way is one. That there is
‘‘one way’’ (world) is a Western preconception.
However, ontological arguments in themselves do
not suffice. Contrary to Argyrou I hold that epistemo-
logical stands of necessity complement ontology. In
other words, there is no ontological knowledge (knowl-
edge about the ontic) without . . . knowledge, hence
epistemology. Argyrou himself takes this path by iden-
tifying with the postmodernists an intractable paradox:
one cannot say anthropology ⫽ fiction without an epis-
temology (factuality, truth notions, etc.).
The argument I want to make runs as follows: It may
well be that we Westerners (probably because of Chris-
tian cosmology, as Argyrou vaguely suggests) share an
ontology which ascribes sameness to all human beings,
and it certainly is the case that we have gone all over
and been able to communicate and interact with all
kinds of people in a more or less flawed but real way.
But that part points to epistemology: How do we know
and what do we know (with flaws)? The statement that
whenever we have tried to capture and express Same-
ness we have ended up with difference is not, however,
saying anything about our knowledge of Sameness. It is
only speaking about our fallibility in knowing, an epis-
temological characteristic. It would be problematic
only in the naive epistemological position in which we
stick with an absolute notion of truth based on a strict
correspondence between ontic reality (people are the
same) and the truth of our knowledge that we can de-
scribe them (as absolutely the same). This is, however,
just one and indeed an old-fashioned absolutist view of
the relation between ontology and epistemology. A sec-
ond possible position would be that of ontological rela-
tivism (people are fundamentally different in reality)
combined with epistemological relativism of the post-
modernist kind (for example, all stories about these re-
a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S39
alities are equally valid). To me the latter position is an
absurdity, ‘‘forgetting’’ how to explain that we can com-
municate and interact (though not flawlessly). But yet
other positions are possible. One of the more interesting
ones, I think, is that of ontological realism (presuppos-
ing the ontic Sameness of people) and moderate episte-
mological objectivism (and hence moderate relativism).
The early advocate of such position was Joseph Need-
ham, the China historian. He was intrigued by the way
traditions of learning about the world (the epistemologi-
cal level) differed and indeed induced more or less dif-
ferent views about the world: Chinese science and
European science prove suited to their tasks but incom-
patible. The existence of one world (the Sameness in
Argyrou’s argument) need not be given up, but different
methods, intuitions, and/or criteria for knowledge may
pertain, yielding different ‘‘knowledges’’ or different
‘‘ways with the world.’’ Choosing that position, I have
to allow some room in and around the notion of ‘‘truth’’
(rightness, validity): instead of a direct correspondence
between ontological and epistemological knowledge I
advocate a position of perspectivalness (with D. T.
Campbell). That is to say, one ontological reality can be
approached from different perspectives on and of
knowledge. The weaving together of these perspectives
may result in a more encompassing truth than the
knowledge produced from just one perspective.
Reply
v a s s o s a rg y ro u
Nicosia, Cyprus. 8 x 98
I thank Fabian, Pinxten, and Clarke for responding to
my paper. Their comments give me the opportunity to
clarify certain important aspects of my argument.
Clarke seems to have misunderstood much of what I
am trying to do in my paper. She thinks, for example,
that I am saying there is lack of attention to Sameness
in ethnology and a focus on differences, I am in fact say-
ing the reverse. She argues that the ‘‘empirical
strengths’’ of the discipline have nothing to do with
Sameness but rather with the psychic unity of man-
kind; and yet, as I show in my paper, the latter is a par-
ticular case of the former. Nor can I argue with Clarke
about what she proposes, because it is not at all clear
to me.
Pinxten thinks that I have a point in bringing ontol-
ogy into my analysis, but, as he points out, ontological
arguments are not enough; they must be supported by
epistemology. There can be ‘‘no ontological knowledge
(knowledge about the ontic),’’ he argues, ‘‘without . . .
knowledge, hence epistemology.’’ But ontology is not
knowledge about the ontic, not about beings, that is,
not factual, empirical knowledge. On the contrary, it is
what makes such knowledge possible; it is knowledge
of Being, any definition of reality that opens up space
S40 c ur r e n t an t hr o p o l o g y Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999
for empirical investigation. An example of ontological
knowledge would be the tenet of the ‘‘psychic unity of
mankind.’’ What kind of ontic, factual knowledge does
this tenet make possible? Everything that one can say
about Others as human and hence social beings—
whether about their kinship system, religion, exchange,
or marriage practices. Without this piece of ontological
knowledge, Others would be regarded as less than hu-
man—as they clearly were even during E. B. Tylor’s
time—and investigation of these and other institutions
would make little sense. As far as we know, it is only
human beings who believe in God, trade, or marry. It is
not ontology that needs epistemology, then, but the
other way round. But, more to the point, I brought on-
tology into my analysis for two reasons. First, I wanted
to demonstrate that, contrary to what heterodox dis-
course claims, the divisions of the world that ethnology
effects are not the result of our inability to know the
truth about Others. We know this truth and posit it a
priori—Others are the Same as Us. Second, my aim was
to inquire about the nature of this ontological knowl-
edge—Sameness—an inquiry that has shown it to be a
metaphysical notion.
The foregoing could, of course, be interpreted as an
attack on ethnology, and, indeed, this is how Fabian un-
derstands my paper. It should be apparent, however,
that if my paper is an attack on the discipline, it is a
strange one indeed. What I have tried to do is nothing
different from what ethnology has been striving to
achieve for the past 150 years, namely, to demonstrate
Sameness. My aim has been to show that far from being
a disenchanted realm of belief and practice—so disen-
chanted, in fact, as to know that its own representations
are ‘‘fiction’’—ethnology is as enchanted as the magico-
religious systems that it studies. But my paper is ethno-
logical for another reason as well. It tries to make sense
of the discipline on the basis of ethnological ideas. Un-
like heterodox discourse, which treats ethnology in a
manner reminiscent of E. B. Tylor’s scientistic treat-
ment of magic, I employ the ethnological method par
excellence—symbolic interpretation; and instead of
pronouncing the discipline ‘‘fiction,’’ as heterodox dis-
course does, I argue that it is neither true nor false but
a way of making anthropological lives meaningful.
Fabian strongly objects to this idea. There is a distinc-
tion to be made, he says, between meaning, which ‘‘pos-
its and confirms,’’ and ‘‘making sense,’’ which ‘‘strikes
and illuminates.’’ Ethnology is not a quest for meaning
but a quest for illumination. The distinction that Fa-
bian makes is not new. Geertz posits something of a
similar nature in his distinction between religion and
science—the former strives to maintain the ‘‘giv-
enness’’ of the world, the latter to dissolve it into ‘‘a
swirl of probabilistic hypotheses’’ (1973:112). I discuss
the ethnocentric implications of this argument in my
paper, and there is no need to repeat any of it here. The
question that I want to raise is this: Is Fabian’s distinc-
tion valid? Is ethnology a quest for illumination for illu-
mination’s sake or, as I argue, a quest to illuminate
those dark areas that threaten to undermine a meaning-
ful vision of the world? Take, for example, Fabian’s
best-known work, Time and the Other. Its aim is to il-
luminate ‘‘how anthropology makes its object of
study.’’ But why, one might ask, should anyone—in-
cluding Fabian—be interested in this topic at all? Why
bother to explain how ethnology places the Other in the
Western past? I do not need to answer these questions
myself; Fabian does that for us in the opening pages of
his book. ‘‘[We are] trying to make sense of what hap-
pens,’’ he explains, ‘‘in order to overcome a state of af-
fairs we have long recognized as scandalous.’’ What is
this scandal? It is ‘‘the scandal of domination and ex-
ploitation of one part of mankind by another’’ (1983:x,
my emphasis). Fabian, then, wants to ‘‘make sense’’ of
and to illuminate what ethnology does because what it
does is to divide ‘‘mankind’’ into West and Other. And
this is ‘‘scandalous’’—indeed a profanity of the highest
order—because, as every anthropologist knows, ‘‘man-
kind’’ is indivisible. It is One and the Same. To tolerate
this division would be to tolerate an arbitrary and ab-
surd world.
My argument, Fabian suggests, is that ethnology is
‘‘always’’ about Sameness, and this, he says, is wrong.
It is wrong first because knowledge production would
not be possible and second because there are other
meaningful things about ethnology, such as ‘‘the plea-
sures and pains of writing [it].’’ I could add many other
meaningful things to Fabian’s list, but what does this
prove—that ethnology is a polysemic symbol? All sym-
bols are. Ethnology is always about Sameness, not be-
cause there is nothing else meaningful about it but be-
cause this tenet of common humanity is the discipline’s
condition of possibility. As for the question of knowl-
edge production, far from being an obstacle Sameness
or, at any rate, the will to uphold it—which is a will
to meaning—acts as a catalyst. If we now know ‘‘how
anthropology makes its object of study,’’ it is because
Fabian could not tolerate the divisions of the world that
ethnology effects.
Fabian finds my argument about Sameness ‘‘trivial.’’
In order to do anything, he suggests, one must have an
identity. No doubt. But the point is not that we all have
identities. It is rather that some of these identities are
open to question and doubt—the anthropologist as sci-
entist, for example—while others are not, that some
can be a conscious basis for action and others cannot.
My paper tries to explain why Sameness (if it is an iden-
tity at all) is placed beyond questioning—why, even
though it is the ethnological basis for action par excel-
lence, its true nature must remain unconscious. And
this is hardly a trivial matter. It shows that what we say
about Others applies with equal force to our own beliefs
and practices; and it undermines the division we effect
by claiming—whether indirectly or, as in the case of
heterodox, explicitly—a thoroughly disenchanted uni-
verse for ourselves.
One last point: The argument that everyone must
have an identity leads Fabian to suggest that ‘‘ ‘ethno-
centrism’ [is] also a trivial notion.’’ Fabian does not ap-
pear very confident about this last statement. He makes

the claim ‘‘incidentally’’ and places the statement in pa-
rentheses. The hesitation is understandable. It is one
thing to make this claim in a polemical context and
quite another to uphold it as a general position. It runs
counter to everything that Fabian has done in Time and
the Other and must withstand the enormous weight of
all of 20th-century ethnology.
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