Reading Paul Richards's excellent paper and, most particularly, the set of international commentaries has been something of a salutary experience and, as I have now discovered, has made my task wholly unenviable. There is, of course, something here for everyone as one might anticipate in any state of the art paper of this scope. The respondents' remarks alone cover a huge intellectual terrain from epistemology to animal traction, from bibliographic style to Shakespearean metaphor, and a good deal more. It is difficult to know what to make of all this let alone to weave these heterogeneous threads into a pleasing, coherent tapestry. Yet, beneath this patina of diversity, lie much more deep seated interpretative and theoretical differences that are intriguing in their own right. For example, Richards's plea for the “honest face” of particularism in relation to what he posits as a congenital drift toward arid and sterile global abstractions and grand universal theory was lent wildly different interpretations by his erstwhile critics. For some this was a glorious new mandate to return to Gluckman and some forms of nineteenth century anthropology; for others it was a disastrous slide into the primal cess-poll of crude empiricism, Boasian salmon recipes, and rampant particularism. For others it represented a healthy appraisal of “the great range of specificities that one should be prepared to confront within a (Marxist) framework” (Henry Bernstein). And all this is wrapped in the almost inevitable empirical provincialism of “my village” or “my region” which provide the basis of individual scepticism and conceptual disproof. Because this is the case, my remarks make no pretense to be either a grand synthesis of highly contradictory contributions or a Herculean effort to locate a "common ground" as some of the comments at the panel discussion opined. In my opinion neither are possible.