ABSTRACT
Polarities are a convenience. They are useful for sorting out issues. But, like all classificatory devices, they can also become a substitute for thinking: they get essential zed, turned into fact. True, anthropologists may hesitate before publishing findings that might bring minority survival tactics to the authorities attention, for publication can sometimes bring disastrous consequences ranging from petty harassment to genocide. In this sense, exposing the privileged cultural and social intimacies of small or disenfranchised groups may not be a kindly act. The usefulness of the blood metaphor lies largely in the defense of cultural intimacy. If one is not born to the nation, so the argument goes, one cannot possibly understand the national culture, and one may be in danger of attributing to it various traits that are in reality foreign in every sense. Anthropology is well equipped to provide this critique, at the same time as and in part because its practitioners must constantly ponder the dictates of their own consciences.
