How do human beings craft enduring social groups and long-lasting relationships? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? How do we live in harmony with groups that may not share that sense of common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so many nations today. This book answers a seemingly simple question, which forms the core of how we constitute ourselves as groups and as individuals: What counts as the same? Note that “counting as” the sam ... More

How do human beings craft enduring social groups and long-lasting relationships? Given the myriad differences that divide one individual from another, why do we recognize anyone as somehow sharing a common fate with us? How do we live in harmony with groups that may not share that sense of common fate? Such relationships lie at the heart of the problems of pluralism that increasingly face so many nations today. This book answers a seemingly simple question, which forms the core of how we constitute ourselves as groups and as individuals: What counts as the same? Note that “counting as” the same differs from “being” the same. Counting as the same is thus not an empirical question about how much or how little one person shares with another or one event shares with a previous event. Nevertheless, as humans we construct sameness all the time. In the process, of course, we also construct difference. Creating sameness and difference, however, leaves us with the perennial problem of how to live with difference instead of seeing it as a threat. In this book we suggest that there are multiple ways in which we can count things as the same and that each of them fosters different kinds of group dynamics and different sets of benefits and risks for the creation of plural societies. While there might be many ways to understand how people construct sameness, three seem especially important and form the focus of our analysis: we call them memory, mimesis, and metaphor.