Following the Marxist-oriented season of socio-economic history, the cultural turn of the 1970s-1990s has proved to be successful in unveiling the deep symbolic dimensions involved in early modern encounters and the manifold ways in which individuals, social groups and larger institutions made sense of the reality around them. In the past thirty years, the emergence of transcultural theories even pushed scholars to venture out of previous essentialist models into a much more fluid, cross-cultural understanding of early modern identities and interactions. Despite their heuristic benefits, this paper argues that such diverse approaches end to naturalize the concept of culture in itself - a rather "discursive convention" that emerged in the socio-anthropological disciplines only in the 19th century. Given the conjunctural nature of this concept and its recent systematization, we shall question whether the notion of culture, in its various forms, tends to project contemporary sensitivities onto our interpretation of early modern sources. The present study aims at answering this question by tracing a genealogy of proto-anthropological thought in the Jesuit missions to South Asia with special attention to linguistic studies, the composition of Christian texts in local languages, ethnographic accounts, as well as later Jesuit scholarship on the topic of cultural difference. Drawing upon the works of Micheal Baxandall and Carlo Ginzburg on the concept of estrangement, the paper ultimately sketches some alternative methods of analysis in the interpretation of sources aiming at exposing the historical distance that separates our notions of cultural identity from those of the contemporaries.