As the result of numerous conversations while flying across the United States, I have come to accept that if anthropologists are recognized at all, it is for collecting old bones, broken pottery, and primitive art of bizarre forms. Very infrequently are they also recognized as collectors of strange tales of exotic human behavior. However, none of this comes close to the heart of the anthropological enterprise, especially the enterprise of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists are students of the ordinary, mundane, everyday experience of being human.
Cultural anthropologists are connoisseurs of the common.
Cultural anthropology represents an epistemological adventure in learning to name the usually unnamed experiences of singular and plural, ordinary and extraordinary, common and special, lateral and hierarchical. In this adventure the boundaries between culturally different persons break down. The other person becomes the anthropologist's instructor, mentor and model to be respected, valued and imitated. The cultural anthropologist experiences the human experience as plural but unified. This is for me the essence of multiculturalism.