ABSTRACT
There are four aspects of a comparative method in anthropology: techniques; goals; items and units; and areal coverage of the material which should go together. But only the technique goes with the areal coverage; the picture becomes fuzzy if the other two factors are added to them. The three comparative methods are: the method of illustrative comparison; the method of complete-universe comparison; and the method of hologeistic (sampled) comparison. The three methods, and their particular combination of the aspects are correlated in the table.
