While regional comparison’s methodological relevance is diminishing, its significance for historical anthropology may increase if properly assessed and reconfigured. This chapter argues this point by discussing three examples from historical South Arabia. These cases highlight the significance of adequately reflecting and identifying existing notions of the “regional” in any given research context as the basic frame of reference in this version of comparison. As a crucial device from science studies and critical theory, the distinction between contexts of discovery, of justification, and of application may be useful for a reliable yet open and flexible conceptualization that includes self-reflexive as well as indigenous notions of the regional. It is also suggested that regional comparison can be improved by triangulating it with other methodological devices, ranging from network analysis to medium-range insights from general anthropology. In turn, this may advance the operational usefulness of regional comparison in historical anthropology by strengthening its potential for highlighting both regional commonalities and diversities among the phenomena under scrutiny.

This chapter argues that critical-comparative studies of two cases can offer context-sensitive and more valid accounts of social problems that accompany intensified global flows in an era of advanced capitalism. This chapter presents a critical-comparative analysis of well-documented suicide epidemics in Chuuk and Samoa. The analysis proceeds in three steps. The analysis begins with an incommensurate mode of comparison of ethnopsychologies of emotion and the management of anger as these contrast with dominant understandings in Western academic psy-disciplines. Second, the analysis compares the organization of everyday social and material reproduction in each site. This analysis provides insight into the local political-economic and social organizational processes that create social-structural disparities in terms of the vulnerabilities associated with self-harm as a strategy of the management of emotions and social-relational protest. The final step examines how each case is nested within wider political-economic and material processes and flows, creating differential sites of collective vulnerability to epidemic suicide at particular historical junctures.

Comparison in anthropology often entails a hermeneutic confrontation between two systems of thought. Starting from an implicit grounding in a home culture, the anthropologist “encounters” a different culture, tries to understand it in its own terms, and then uses those terms to critique home-style thinking. Rather than compare differences, this chapter compares two things understood to be “the same.” I begin with a comparison of two jazz renditions of the song, “Tangerine.” Comparing an amateurish version to a classic recording taught me more about the song’s structure than either version could have done alone. Using this example of a “better-worse” comparison, I turn to anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who wrote a series of essays contrasting what she saw as a “good” individualism, that of American Indian peoples, to the “bad” individualism of the contemporary United States. In Lee’s work, it was not a nonindividualist social formation that became the comparative touchstone for rethinking US culture as in de Tocqueville’s hierarchical-egalitarian contrast. Instead, Native American ways of living provided a model truer to the spirit of an ideal individualism than that celebrated in the United States.

In this chapter, the authors trace out the “natural history” of an intensely collaborative multisited comparison, which was distinct from many other comparative research projects because research at each site was carried out by a PhD-level anthropologist who was involved in the scientific development of the project rather than only in the implementation of a centrally directed project. It draws on their experiences with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a large, US National Institutes of Health–funded multisite project, to discuss ways in which that comparative research could have been even more powerful, things that future comparative research should strive to avoid, recommended best practices, and what the authors would call “minimum adequate” approaches to comparative ethnography.

This chapter reflects on the methodological problems within a collaborative research project involving anthropology and developmental psychology. The project studied relations between child-rearing goals, emotionally arousing child-rearing practices, and the socialization and ontogenetic development of emotions in three different contexts (Indonesia, Madagascar, and Taiwan). I first discuss which demands were linked with the theoretical perspectives and methodological standards of the two disciplines. I then reflect on the problems encountered when trying to apply the same methods in all three contexts. One of the challenges for this interdisciplinary project was the differing kinds of empirical data gathered because of the need to adapt methods to local conditions. We needed a productive way to work between the methodological priorities of each discipline. Therefore, I designed a methodology that acknowledges the unique methodological advantages of anthropology – long-term field research, participant observation, using an explorative approach – while simultaneously making it possible to achieve theoretical and methodological equivalence in controlled cross-cultural comparisons.

While ethnography produces highly contextualized understandings of fields of practice, it is hard to assess whether the phenomena revealed through ethnographic study are typical on a regional level. To overcome this shortcoming, I introduce a research design, ethnographic upscaling, that combines in-depth ethnography with larger-N regional comparisons. While the in-depth ethnography provides valid hypotheses, comparison allows the testing of whether an observed phenomenon can be generalized. To illustrate ethnographic upscaling, I present research on the social engineering of water governance in Namibia. In the course of political “decentralization,” and inspired by community-based natural resource management policies, pastoralists have developed new rules stipulating how to share water and distribute the costs of providing it. While all communities were exposed to similar blueprints, local social practices concerning water governance differ. I show that these variations can be explained if we combine an ethnographic understanding of the dynamics within communities with an understanding of both networks that impinge on the individual cases and influences of external authorities.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of comparative ethnographic research in anthropology as an explicit methodological strategy and organizing framework for the different chapters of this book. The chapter opens with a discussion of the enduring promise of comparative ethnographic research as well as its main challenges given late-twentieth-century disciplinary criticisms. It then provides a summary of the process and kinds of comparative ethnographic research. We argue that ethnographic comparisons in recent decades increasingly bridge the divide between particularistic approaches and more generalizing strategies used in the past. These configurational comparisons focus on understanding and explaining the diversity of social configurations across cases and scales and interpreting their cultural and historical significance. This introduction then discusses the contributions each chapter makes to the development of this comparative paradigm by providing examples of successful comparative ethnographic research in the contemporary milieu.

The notion that comparison is not the search for similarities but the systematization of differences leads to the question of which shared set of concepts and assumptions might be employed to explore this notion. Comparative analysis should at once reduce the complexity of data in the service of comparison and yet still reference the uniqueness and specificity of local values and ideas. Three types of comparison potentially fulfill these criteria. Claude Lévi-Strauss traces the transformations of oppositions and codes across cultural boundaries without claiming to compare societies as such. Louis Dumont contrasts systems of values that represent societies-as-wholes by analyzing their structuring into hierarchical levels. Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems enables the comparison of relationships between social systems and their environments, without assuming societies as units of comparison – examples being the making of ethnic identities and boundaries. A synthesis of the three approaches provides avenues of comparison in a globalized world, as is exemplified by the author’s own work in upland Southeast Asia.

Comparison figured centrally in the GLOBALSPORT project, which investigated the migration of athletes and aspiring athletes in various sports, along several geographical and aspirational trajectories. In its initial design, the project was framed by broad generalizations. Not surprisingly, field researchers encountered specificities during their fieldwork, which contradicted some of the original insights. The team had to grapple with the tension between comparisons across sites and the unique contexts found in each site. The common thread in all subprojects was the presence of global sport industries in people’s lived experiences. These industries have undergone major reconfigurations through corporatization, mediatization, and commercialization, which have engendered a dramatic increase in athletes’ transnational mobility. This mobility and the industries that create and sustain it have restructured individual lives and cultural expectations as preconditions for success. The comparisons reveal common themes in the transformation of key aspects of experience. But comparison also reveals how different scalar processes configure these themes in the contexts of specific field sites.

How do anthropologists think with comparison? This is the core question addressed in this chapter. I draw on examples from my own research to show how comparison, as an epistemological stance, suggests not only questions to be explored during research but also avenues of interpretation and insight during analysis. I argue that comparison (1) helps to illuminate the significance of context in explanation; (2) makes similarities and differences more visible and hence deepens and extends our understanding of critical social and cultural processes; and (3) addresses the tension between the general and the particular, a tension fundamental to anthropology throughout its history. The chapter focuses on three projects where I used comparison to study migrant populations. These projects highlight the role of comparative thinking in relation to distinct scales or units of analysis: different national contexts (Portugal and Ireland), different regions of immigration settlement (French Canadian immigrants in the eastern and midwestern United States), and between immigrant populations of different national origins (Indians and Vietnamese) who have settled in one US city.