ABSTRACT
Human diversity originates in our cultural knowledge. Because cultural knowledge can only be shared by a group of people, and cultural knowledge can accumulate increasingly complex cultural objects almost indefinitely, the cultural objects of different culture-sharing groups can become mutually unintelligible. The difference between anthropologists and ordinary historians was merely methodological. It had to do with the particular way anthropologists reconstructed history: instead of using written records or archaeological remains, they would view current 'primitive' societies as living fossils. Cultures are different not because they fulfil different functions or the same function in different environments, but fundamentally because they are the contingent product of human history, equivalent, in this sense, to the random mutations of DNA sequences in biological reproduction. Ethnography is the method anthropologists use to learn a different culture and translate it into the terms of another.
