The anthropological concern with difference, often misunderstood as a preference for it and an aversion to theory, is hardly more than the recognition, hard-earned in hundreds upon hundreds of detailed and extended field investigations, that difference is what makes the world go around, especially the political world. Heterogeneity is the norm, conflict the ordering force, and, despite ideological romances, left and right, religious and secular, of consensus, unity, and impending harmony, they seem likely to remain so for a good deal longer than the foreseeable future.