'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
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.