ABSTRACT
Seeing similarities and differences is a basic activity of the human mind. The perception of relationships and patterns is the way individuals and cultures organize their experience of the world. It is a process without which there would be undifferentiated chaos, or at best only isolated facts. Likewise, specialized knowledge in any field advances by finding or constructing concepts and categories that give order and intelligibility to otherwise unrelated data. Comparison, among other things, is the process by which generalizations and classifications are produced, and is the basis of scientific and interpretive enterprises of every kind. The very concept ‘religion,’ as an academic definition of a certain area of culture, is such a cross-cultural, comparative category.
