Many Faces, One Humanity: Diversity and Comparison in Ethnology

By Eduardo González Santos

A face is the first thing we encounter in another person, and it is where difference often seems most obvious. Skin, eyes, hair, bone structure, scars, wrinkles, and expressions all vary from one person to the next. For as long as people have traveled, traded, and waged wars, they have noticed these differences and tried to explain them. Ethnology, the comparative study of peoples and their cultures, grew out of that curiosity.

In its early days, ethnology was driven by a flawed ambition: to sort humanity into categories and rank them. Nineteenth-century scholars measured skulls, classified “types,” and constructed hierarchies that served empire more than science. Modern ethnology and anthropology have largely rejected that legacy. Human biological variation is real, but it is gradual and overlapping, with no sharp boundaries between one group and another. Genetic studies show that two individuals from the same region can differ more from each other than two individuals from opposite sides of the world. The categories we call “races” are largely social constructs, defined differently across times and places.

Today, ethnology is less concerned with the shape of faces than with the lives lived behind them. Comparison remains its central method, but its purpose has changed. By examining one society alongside another, ethnologists investigate how people organize kinship, raise children, honor the dead, share food, tell stories, and make sense of the world. Comparison reveals that many things we take for granted as natural—such as how to greet a stranger, what counts as beauty, or how to mourn—are, in fact, learned. It also shows that other ways of living can be equally coherent from within their own cultural contexts.

Good comparison requires humility. Researchers must listen before judging and understand a custom within its own context rather than measure it against their own standards. Anthropologists call this approach cultural relativism, which does not mean that anything is acceptable. Rather, it means that understanding comes before evaluation. A mask, a ritual, or a style of dress may seem strange to an outsider while remaining perfectly intelligible to those who use or practice it.

Individuals, too, cannot be reduced to their cultural groups. Within every culture, there are dissenters, innovators, elders, children, and eccentrics, each with a personal history. A people is not a single face but a multitude of faces, and ethnology at its best keeps both levels in view: the patterns that connect a community and the individuals who live within it.

This is why portraits, from ancient masks and Old Master paintings to modern photography, have long served as natural companions to the study of peoples. A portrait captures what a list of traits cannot: the particular gaze of an individual at a given moment. Set many portraits side by side, and their differences become a source of richness rather than a problem to be solved.

Ultimately, the diversity of faces is the visible expression of a deeper truth. Humanity is a single species, extending across every border and expressed in countless ways of life. To compare these forms carefully and respectfully is not to divide people, but to see more clearly both what we share and what makes each of us distinct.

1-14. Eduardo González Santos (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2000s), Akzidens