Comparing Cultures

Michael Schnegg is Professor of Anthropology at Universität Hamburg. Edward D. Lowe is Professor of Anthropology at Soka University of America.

• 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.

'Comparison is almost as fundamental to the human mind as air and water is to the body. It is therefore puzzling and paradoxical that anthropology, which was founded as an explicitly comparative discipline, has often been ambivalent, reluctant and even hostile to comparative research. This extremely timely book reinstates comparison as a key element in anthropological theory and methodology, demonstrating a variety in comparative strategies which reflect the diversity of anthropology itself and, indeed, the human world. Highly recommended.' Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo