ABSTRACT
In this chapter we analyze ways in which disciplinary training and enculturation into scholarly customs can hinder the ability to perceive empirical phenomena that do not fit well into these mental matrices. This may well be a manifestation of a general problem, which is that training to look for one set of phenomena may hinder perception of other data, a phenomenon found even among radiologists (Drew et al. 2013). However, all of us in this multidisciplinary, international comparative study have gained unexpected insights by viewing phenomena, even some already well known to scholarship, within contexts of uncommon disciplinary, geographical and temporal juxtapositions. We believe that the analytical advantages we have had in our joint work result from each of us remaining grounded in a discipline and an area of studies or historical context, but also developing an awareness of the limitations of the strictures of those literatures as we have worked together on problems that are new to most or even all of us.
