In 1991 Harding published a powerful essay on this phenomenon. Aren’t anthropologists, she asked, intrinsically interested in cultural structures and practices that are different from their own? Why, then, were so many of them repelled by the idea of studying such difference when the difference lived right next door, and could vote in the same elections the anthropologists voted in? The title of Harding’s essay is “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” and the phrase repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come. In
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