ABSTRACT
Anthropology has thrived on the dramatic within or between cultures. Anthropologists of ‘exotica’ may have unwittingly relied upon taken-for-granted assumptions of difference when confronted with other cultures. This is despite Malinowski’s plea to look at the ‘imponderabilia of everyday life’ (1922) which may in turn be more extraordinary than anything already so framed. For the Western anthropologist of her or his own ‘ethnographic region’, it is recognised as customary rather than exceptional that other often unfamiliar ways of thinking and being coexist in the same territory. While orthodox anthropologists studying geographically distant cultures are prepared to acknowledge variety and differences within places far from their own biographical past, and while an academic industry is made of intraregional comparisons, anthropologists may be indifferent to the heterogeneity of their own cultural spaces.
