ABSTRACT
After the Second World War, new maps and alliances were drawn across Europe and around the world. The period of war had ended, but a period of reconfiguration of new trade and political associations continued. The era heralded a new time of respect for social and cultural differences, but new problems too. In anthropology a new theory emerged that supported the commitment to the commensurability of differences that would be necessary to modern times. The new theory, the structuralist theory of human variation, aimed to explain social variation without falling into habits of relying on evolutionary differences and drawing on old paradigms of race.
