“… ‘People are everywhere the same except in the ways they differ’, which is not, admittedly, a very profound statement. Yet in an important sense it is what a century of anthropology has taught us, and on closer inspection this is no small thing” (Monaghan & Just 2000, p. 145).
‘People are everywhere the same except in the ways they differ’… this is a mantra I have spoken to myself countless times, the simplicity of it making its truth even more profound. The first time I fully understood this statement was when I was visiting the Embera tribe in Panama with my aunt. I was sixteen and spoke no Spanish. My Aunt was laughing with a group of girls, and when I asked her what they were talking about she said, “I was asking them which boys they like.” I remember the girls continuing to giggle and blush, whispering to each other in a language I couldn’t understand. In that moment – it was a time when my own heart was breaking for a boy – I realized that we were the same. Despite our disparate languages, our disparate dress, the disparate places in which we lived, we were exactly the same. We both laughed and blushed over boys. People are everywhere the same except in the ways they differ.
References:
Monaghan, J. and Just, P. 2000. Social & Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 