ABSTRACT
This chapter moves a step further to scrutinize the "comparative" rationale as the reasoning undergirding the developmental comparative paradigm. In so doing, it brings in two strategies to overcome the developmental framework. First is to track "difference at its limit" as an entry point, just as how Michel Foucault envisions his book project of The Order of Things. Second is to turn to a historical-archaeological mode of inquiry to ethnographically historicize a cultural system of knowledge and its conditions of possibility within its own context. The chapter proffers a new way of thinking about the distinctions of difference in comparative studies. It describes a penultimate reflection on method after extensive research, makes possible, and intersects. This archaeological-historical mode of inquiry involves an epistemological shift from viewing time, history, and tradition as being some static, irreversible, and irreducible essences (data) to re-configuring them as happening, events, movement, and moments of arising possibly external to any timeline.
