ABSTRACT
Recent encounters between ANT and anthropology have given rise to a new imagination about difference and diversity. These encounters are mediated by changing ideas about comparison and the multiplicity of technoscience. This chapter first traces the complex journey of comparison from experimental biology to anthropology. It then delineates the rise of social units as preconditions for comparison and their gradual decline and replacement by a new ANT-inspired imagination of diversity, in which networks of intersecting trajectories give rise to a multiplicity of practices. Of particular interest is the idea of lateral comparisons, which work by treating the comparisons of analysts and informants symmetrically. Lateral comparison facilitates the imagination of new topologies of difference that concern not only the worlds that ANT scholars and anthropologists explore but also the heterogeneous and partially connected nature of their own knowledge practices.
