Anthropologists in general and ethnographers of Greece in particular have assumed that the construction of cultural differences is the cultural process par excellence. As a result, they have paid little attention to the rhetorical strategies and practices by which people construe similarities between themselves and others, both socially superiors and inferiors. The author presents examples taken from her own field research, from the work of other ethnographers on contemporary Greece as well as from historical studies of nineteenth-century Greece. This corpus tends to prove that the desire for social rise (associated with wealth, reputation, social status or authority) is inherent to human nature. The fact of imitating the ways of the socially superiors and projecting oneself to the socially inferiors emanates from a same desire that is thus both « naturalized » and legitimized. This desire and the mimetic processes it sets in motion highlight the social inequalities and exclusionary practices that they generate and seek to transcend at the same time. Realizing that the boundaries of the social categories in which people place themselves and others are fluid and negotiable leads to revising the notion of social context that rather referred to spatio-temporal categories.