ABSTRACT
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two sites colloquially referred to as “camps” in urban Sierra Leone, in this chapter, I unpack the process of comparison as constitutive of everyday life and explore the way comparable objects of inquiry are produced by the ethnographer. Focusing on fieldcraft, I look reflexively at the play of disruptive difference between my research participants and myself with a focus on performances of positionality and relative privilege and the way these were enacted. Focusing on analytic craft, I juxtapose the two camps across a range of emergent dimensions (the precarity of accommodation; hyperbolic victimhood and everyday struggle; and temporality) and make a case for juxtaposition and mutual illumination as legitimate and necessary forms of analytic comparison. The orientation is not toward comparison as a kind of neutral, procedural, programmable, and controllable endeavor, but to comparison as analytically field-contingent, processual, relational, and intuitive.
