For the past 30 years, anthropology's critics have repeatedly questioned the notion of “cultural boundaries,” arguing that concepts of culture inappropriately posit stable and bounded “islands” of cultural distinctiveness in an ever‐changing world of transnational cultural “flows.” This issue remains an Achilles' heel—or at least a recurring inflamed tendon—of anthropology. However, in the conception of boundaries, we still have much to learn from Boasian anthropologists, who conceived of boundaries not as barriers to outside influence or to historical change, but as cultural distinctions that were irreducibly plural, perspectival, and permeable. In this article, I retheorize and extend the Boasians' open concept of cultural boundaries, emphasizing how people's own ideas of “the foreign”—and the “own” versus the “other” distinction—give us a way out of the old conundrum in which the boundedness of culture, as conceived in spatial terms, seems to contradict the open‐ended nature of cultural experience.

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In Sex and Temperament (1935), Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh as a nurturing, peaceloving people. But Mead's second husband and fieldwork partner, Reo Fortune, disagreed with this in a 1939 article, "Arapesh Warfare," which presented evidence that before pacification Arapesh society countenanced warfare.Here we show that "Arapesh Warfare" also contains a submerged argument against Mead's personal integrity and ethnographic authority. Sex and Temperament had its own personal subtext, and Fortune responded to it by mobilizing rhetorical strategies drawn from an Arapesh framework of speaking. Our analysis provides insight into Fortune's position in an anthropological disagreement that has been seen primarily from Mead's perspective-when it has been seen at all. Fortune's peculiar approach also speaks to a limitation on reflexivity in anthropology: the illegitimacy of criticizing personal motives in cases of ethnographic dispute, although we know scholarly works are always suffused with their authors' personal histories and perspectives.