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In November 2022, I gave a keynote at the conference Egyptology in Dialogue organised at Emory University by Camilla Di Biase-Dyson, Rune Nyord, Leire Olabarria and Reinert Skumsness. Now I just need to speak to a conference of palaeontologists, and my 9-year-old self will have attained all its goals!

This piece is an afterword to the special issue of Interdisciplinary Egyptology which came out of the conference.Building on the articles in the special issue, the piece examines the place of comparison and defamiliarisation in Egyptology. Noting that the articles in the issue make creative use of a number of theoretical devices from other disciplines, including social anthropology, the piece asks what social anthropology in turn might borrow back from this Egyptological conceptual moment. Rather than follow a traditional import-export model, trading ready-made theories between disciplines, the afterword argues for a different vision of interdisciplinarity, in which the dis