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Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
Social Dynamics and Complexity
University of California, Irvine
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To Contrast and Compare
Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge University

Download the Paper (275 K, PDF file) - August 15, 2006 Tell a colleague about it.
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ABSTRACT:

Necessity, purpose, distancing the over-familiar, familiarizing the distant, making absences visible, and testing answers provide a framework for considering comparison in sociocultural anthropology. The methods reviewed include intrasocietal, dyadic, triadic, controlled, and broad comparison; units of comparison, necessary precautions about what is comparable; the operations of comparison and contrast and their respective productivity; differences, similarities and concomitance; polarity and dimensionality of comparison; comparison of norms, of behaviors, of processes; comparisons in time and issues of comparison in historical time; dynamics and models.

The paper concludes with a short history of methods of contrast and comparison.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted with permission of the author from Methodology and Fieldwork, pp. 94-111, 2004, edited by Vinay Kumar Srivastava. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Alan Macfarlane, "To Contrast and Compare" (August 15, 2006). Social Dynamics and Complexity. Working Papers Series: Paper 20060815.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/wp/20060815

 
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