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Ethnographic research conducted in Europe could exercise a significantly increased influence on the renewal of anthropological theory. Recalling the problems involved in the invention of a “Mediterranean cultural area”, the author discusses the taxonomic dangers that the creation of a European “geo-body” (to use Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul’s expression) generates. He therefore calls on anthropologists to resist the reductive effect of bureaucratic categories with a view to rethinking theory and comparison in the context of revised ideas about the meaning of “Europe”.