Returning to academe proper, however, we observe that disciplinary boundaries are now being renegotiated in ways conducive to cross-cultural, comparative analysis. Disciplinary genres are blurring. From its text alone, a reader may not be able to judge whether any given article was written by a historian or an anthropologist (or some other academic type), and practitioners of different disciplines have appropriated each other’s theories and methods. Anthropology itself is becoming more international, although there are certainly distinct cleavages; British anthropologists who object to their colleagues’ increasingly closer intellectual ties to Americans (formed not least because there are now many Americans employed in British departments) have looked for like-minded associates in continental Europe.^[48] And over the past decades there have been widespread intellectual trends. Anthropologists — and others — have encouraged attention to the peculiarities of the local, while historians have been especially concerned to establish patterns of everyday lives among the ordinary folk of the past. Nowadays, it seems that the focus of past decades on accumulating knowledge about the peculiarities of the local has provoked a reaction; various types of scholars are now producing sweeping surveys of times and places. They are asking genuinely comparative questions about differences and similarities. But genuinely cross-cultural, comparative research poses technical difficulties. It requires not only a wealth of accumulated knowledge about a range of places but also particular skills, such as the command of a number of languages and the ability to decipher old styles of handwriting. The most promising way to do cross-cultural research may be to form collaborating teams. Thus, we may revive another structural feature of nineteenth-century scholarship, albeit one in which the social stratification in the division of academic labour will be based on the professional standards of the modern university, rather than on the general class structure.