ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors offer an "accounting scheme" that should be helpful both for locating and assessing the comparative analysis used or advocated in any publication, and for making clear distinctions between it and their general mode of analysis. In 1955, in a survey of "Comparisons in Cultural Anthropology," Oscar Lewis noted the "ever-increasing concern of anthropologists with problems of theory and method, and the accumulation of great masses of data which cry out for systematic comparative analysis." Comparative analysis, in other words, thrives on the need to theorize. Some comparative analyses are made in the service of theories that are accepted as so correct and so useful that researchers wish merely to contribute to them in minor ways. The authors explore several research publications in which verification is much more prominent than the development or generation of theory.
