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Are ethnic units also cultural and sociopolitical units? Barth (1969a) argued that they are not. However, some recent cultural evolutionary studies argue that ethnicity may function to facilitate within-group cooperation and between-group competition, referred to as parochial altruism (Choi and Bowles 2007; García and van den Bergh 2011; Handley and Mathew 2020; Jones 2018). Ethnographers have historically treated ethnicity and culture as equivalent with assertions that X people have particular beliefs, habits, customs, etc. In this paper I explore the ramifications of scale in ethnographic description and generalization, with a focus on my research participants in southwestern Madagascar, whom I usually label with the ethnonyms Mikea, Masikoro, and Vezo, or with the anthropological categories of hunter-gatherers, farmers, and fishermen. These are people who refer to themselves by these same ethnonyms or hyphenated combinations of terms (Masikoro-Mikea, Vezo-Mikea), or as Malagasy, a term referring to all peoples of Madagascar, or by village or clan affiliations. By contrasting evidence from my research (Tucker et al. 2021) with a study by Handley and Mathew (2020) about East African herders, I argue that the appropriate scale for ethnographic description may depend on patterns of similarity and difference in shared cultural traits and social networks, and these may be related to, or independent of, historically constituted ethnonyms. Careful thought is required to avoid scalar errors of over-particularization and exoticism (which I call Type 1 scalar errors) and over-generalization and stereotyping (Type 2 scalar errors). Because “ethnicity” is not just one “thing,” ethnicity is not always the proper scale for ethnographic description.