Comparing Cultures
Innovations in Comparative Ethnography

Shows how comparative ethnographic methods can be successfully used to study important human concerns in anthropology.

Michael Schnegg (Edited by), Edward D. Lowe (Edited by)

9781108720014, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 May 2020

234 pages, 5 b/w illus. 5 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.35 kg

'This book engages with a welcome and timely project: restoring comparative perspectives to anthropology. By exploring the challenges, dimensions, and complexities of comparative methodologies, it illustrates how critical comparisons can inform theory and illuminate underlying political economic and institutional processes.' Nina Glick Schiller, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

A new and important contribution to the re-emergent field of comparative anthropology, this book argues that comparative ethnographic methods are essential for more contextually sophisticated accounts of a number of pressing human concerns today. The book includes expert accounts from an international team of scholars, showing how these methods can be used to illuminate important theoretical and practical projects. Illustrated with examples of successful inter-disciplinary projects, it highlights the challenges, benefits, and innovative strategies involved in working collaboratively across disciplines. Through its focus on practical methodological and logistical accounts, it will be of value to both seasoned researchers who seek practical models for conducting their own cutting-edge comparative research, and to teachers and students who are looking for first-person accounts of comparative ethnographic research.

Introduction. Comparative ethnography: its promise, process, and successful implementations Edward D. Lowe and Michael Schnegg
Part I. Binary Comparisons: 1. Thinking with comparison in the anthropology/historical anthropology of migration Caroline B. Brettell
2. Comparing tangerines: Dorothy Lee and the search for an authentic individualism Richard Handler
3. A comparative ethnographic study of suicide epidemics in two Pacific Island societies Edward D. Lowe
Part II. Regional Comparisons: 4. The comparison of structures and the comparison of systems: Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Luhmann Guido Sprenger
5. Regional comparison in historical anthropology: three case examples from South Arabia Andre Gingrich
6. Scaling ethnography up Michael Schnegg
Part III. Distant and Fluid Comparisons: 7. Best, worst, and good enough: lessons learned from multi-sited comparative ethnography Jennifer S. Hirsch, Holly Wardlow, Daniel Jordan Smith, Harriet Phinney, Shanti Parikh and Constance A. Nathanson
8. Research across cultures and disciplines: methodological challenges in an interdisciplinary and comparative research project on emotion socialization Birgitt Röttger-Rössler
9. Global sport industries, comparison, and economics of scales Niko Besnier and Daniel Guinness.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM], Research methods: general [GPS], Data analysis: general [GPH], Research & information: general [GP]