Paper short abstract:

Present day discourses on cultural diversity and identity also generate xenophobia and racism. Teaching anthropologists should reframe diversity within human sameness.

Paper long abstract:

The idea I would like to develop concerns my experience in teaching an undergraduate course entitled "Ethnology et ecology" and the discovery of a surprising persistance of "racial" (not necessary racist...) thinking among European students today. Faced with this, I found it very useful to start this course by (re)affirming very strongly human "sameness" and to list common features of humanity etc. as the prerequisite of any anthropological approach to cultural/social /ethnic diversity. But teaching human sameness today also implies a renewed approach of anthropology's disciplinary divides.