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Can anthropologists misread cultural texts? Currently fashionable relativisms insist that all readings are situated and perspectival. Yet our partial command of fieldwork languages and our theoretical orientations may lead us to misconstrue other people's talk. Our quests for cultural exotica predispose us to read cultural texts selectively and to mistake conventional metaphors for metaphysical accounts. Recent developments in cognitive and linguistic theory are examined to show why language creates traps for unwary exotica seekers. There are no magical pathways to “correct" interpretation (and no reasons to expect that all of what we once deified as “native actors" share the same meanings). Recent advances in the study of language, metaphor, and categorization not only show why interpretive caution and skepticism are needed but provide new ways and means for thinking about and studying other culturally …