Comparison in anthropology often entails a hermeneutic confrontation between two systems of thought. Starting from an implicit grounding in a home culture, the anthropologist “encounters” a different culture, tries to understand it in its own terms, and then uses those terms to critique home-style thinking. Rather than compare differences, this chapter compares two things understood to be “the same.” I begin with a comparison of two jazz renditions of the song, “Tangerine.” Comparing an amateurish version to a classic recording taught me more about the song’s structure than either version could have done alone. Using this example of a “better-worse” comparison, I turn to anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who wrote a series of essays contrasting what she saw as a “good” individualism, that of American Indian peoples, to the “bad” individualism of the contemporary United States. In Lee’s work, it was not a nonindividualist social formation that became the comparative touchstone for rethinking US culture as in de Tocqueville’s hierarchical-egalitarian contrast. Instead, Native American ways of living provided a model truer to the spirit of an ideal individualism than that celebrated in the United States.