Mistaken Parity

This pic­ture was taken in the read­ing room of the Human­i­ties and Social Sci­ences branch of the New York Pub­lic Library (yes, the one with the lions). After request­ing a book, your book is given a num­ber. You go either to the north side if your book is odd, or the south side if your book is even, and it is brought up from the bowels.

While I was at the library, I found a great James Lock­hart quote:

Each side was able to oper­ate for cen­turies after the first con­tact on an ulti­mately false but in prac­tice work­able pre­sump­tion that anal­o­gous con­cepts of the other side were essen­tially iden­ti­cal with its own, thus avoid­ing close exam­i­na­tion of the unfa­mil­iar and main­tain­ing its own prin­ci­ples. The truce obtained under this par­tial mis­con­cep­tion allowed for long peri­ods of preser­va­tion of indige­nous struc­tures of all kinds while inter cul­tural fer­ment went on grad­u­ally attain­ing the level of con­scious­ness. I have called the phe­nom­e­non the process of “Dou­ble Mis­taken Identity.”

He is refer­ring to the rela­tion­ship between the Nahua and the Span­ish in con­quest era New Spain (aka Mex­ico), and is quoted by Wyatt Mac­Gaffey in an arti­cle on the rela­tion­ship between Por­tu­gal and the Kongo in the 15th cen­tury, Dia­logues of the Deaf: Euro­peans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa.