ABSTRACT
In his 2013 Lewis Henry Morgan lecture “The Value of Comparison,” anthropologist Peter van der Veer addressed the thorny question of how best to wrest analytical purchase from comparison. He criticized the tendency to oversimplify cases, as well as the habit of ignoring how similar historical or contemporary social factors influence cases. He was particularly critical of Euro-American social science and the constant, facile juxtapositions of ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ He wrote:
The pervasiveness of ethnocentrism in the social sciences is astonishing …. One of the greatest flaws in the development of a comparative perspective seems to be the almost universal comparison of any existing society with an ideal-typical and totally self-sufficient Euro-American modernity. Comparison should not be conceived primarily in terms of comparing societies or events, or institutional arrangements across societies, although this is important, but as a reflection on our conceptual framework as well as on the history of interactions that have constituted our object of study. Comparison is thus not a relatively simple juxtaposition and comparison of two or more different societies, but a complex reflection on the network of concepts that underlie our study of society as well as the formation of those societies themselves. It is always a double act of reflection.
