Measuring up: an afterword

Abstract Towards the end of their Introduction, the editors of this special issue suggest that a principal challenge in ethnographic description is ‘how to measure the measures of others’. It is their own measure of persons, say, or of transactions, on which anthropologists frequently draw in adjudicating social phenomena, not least when characterizing polities as ‘egalitarian’. Rather than presupposing the properties of egalitarianism, the editors ask instead what kinds of commensuration create the conditions of equality. This sparkling collection offers a series of responses that opens up possibilities for approaching afresh a topic that for many has seemed exhausted by too much discussion – or accompanied by too little, as when the epithet is used as a place‐holder gesturing towards certain presumptions without examining them to their limits. Thus writers – myself included – may connive in shorthand usages, as in referring to ‘egalitarian’ sociality in circumstances where it flourishes among men (or women) in everything but their relations with women (or men). This volume suggests there is something more interesting in such abbreviation, or containment, than first seems apparent. Across these essays, the simplest of questions, what kind of equality is at issue, produces a much needed provocation to description. And a breath of fresh air.