ABSTRACT
Comparative Education, it has been variously argued, is a field, a synthetic field, not a field at all, a discipline, a quasi-discipline and a way of life.1 Such questions are, literally, academic, and for the purposes of this article, a footnote to other concerns. Regardless of how comparative education is defined, one thing is certainly true: it is an area of human inquiry into human activity and as such it only exists because people consider it worth doing, and do it. There is, therefore, another set of questions of potential interest to the curious and observant: who is doing it, and what do we know about them and their lives as comparativists? If we look at this group of people in its broad cultural configuration, what do we see? Comparative education is a scholarly pursuit of some debatable category and status, but behind this is a group of scholars who have enough in common and spend enough time in each others’ (selective) company to be considered a community of sorts. What if we thought of this community as what anthropologists used to call a tribe?2 And if an ethnographer spent a couple of decades among them as a participant observer, what might she note?
