“It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”

“As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.”

“History will be erased in the universal purgatory.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

“History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.”

“The incompatibility here [between some anthropologies] rests with basic attitudes toward cultural others, which in turn rests on fundamentally different understandings of history. The one sees the Other as different and *separate,* a product of its own history and carrying its own hitoricity...The second sees the Other as different but *connected,* a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of "our" history and "their" history is impossible. In this view, there are no cultures-outside-of-history to be reconstructed, no culture without history, no culture or society "with its own structure and history" to which world-historical forces arrive.”