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.