ABSTRACT
Trying to grasp the ways cultures change, we search for illuminating metaphors. Ernest Gellner, in Nations and Nationalism, contrasts two ethnographic maps; but the maps change quickly into other kinds of pictures. One of them, he says,
resembles a painting by Kokoschka. The riot of diverse points of colour is such that no clear pattern can be discerned in any detail, though the picture as a whole does have one. A great diversity and plurality and complexity characterizes all distinct parts of the whole: the minute social groups, which are the atoms of which the picture is composed, have complex and ambiguous and multiple relations to many cultures; some through speech, others through their dominant faith, another still through a variant faith or set of practices, a fourth through administrative loyalty, and so forth.
