UNIT 9

COMPARATIVE METHOD

Structure

9.1 Introduction

9.2 Relationship with Common Sense: Interrogating Ideological Location

9.3 The Historical Context

9.4 Elements of the Comparative Approach

9.5 Conclusion

9.6 Further Reading

Objectives

After studying Unit 9 you should be able to:

 Locate the significance of the comparative approach in the context of the core issues of

the objective versus subjective, macro versus micro and value neutrality versus

partisanship; and

 Identify a few lessons for your own research on social issues.

9.1 INTRODUCTION

Navigating with the core issues of the objective versus subjective, macro versus micro and value

neutrality versus partisanship, Unit 9 refers to the relationship of comparative method with

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commonsense and interrogates its ideological location. Next, as comparative method has its own

distinct historical legacy and trajectory, the author has provided discussion of the historical

context within which the method emerged. The trajectory of the method is relevant to the way it

is operationalized during the course of empirical research. Further, there is a systematic

delineation of key features of the method. Throughout the Unit, there has been a focus on the

linkages between the overall theoretical assumptions, research methods and field techniques.

There is also substantial reference to social science research carried out in India on comparative

method and this will provide you with a solid base in applying comparative method in your own

research because, as said earlier, there can be no sociology without comparisons. This Unit will

provide you with some identifiable lessons for your own research on social concerns.

9.2 RELATIONSHIP WITH COMMON SENSE: INTERROGATING

IDEOLOGICAL LOCATION

Students of sociology are well aware about both the distinction between common sense and

sociology as well as the danger of collapsing sociological knowledge to common sense

understanding (Beteille 2002). It is in the context of a discussion on the comparative approach

that this allusion to common sense again becomes important. You are well aware that we use

comparison and contrast in everyday life and it is no wonder that application of „compare and

contrast‟ in the study of human society and culture is also equally common. If you think about

your day-to-day understanding of the social world around you, you would realize that you are

involved in comparing and contrasting processes. In addition, all of us keep evaluating things,

people, foods, cultures etc., in terms of their inherent qualities being superior or inferior. It is

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quite commonplace to hear comments that “our food is tastier than theirs” or that “they have a

more developed culture than ours”. In the latter statement one detects an evolutionary

assumption, meaning that there are stages of development and each successive stage is superior

to the preceding one. For long in sociology it seemed perfectly in order to compare the

“barbaric” to the ”civilized”, or the “primitive” to the “modern”. Sociologists now more self-

consciously use “simple” and “complex” societies to avoid the embedded value judgement that

rests on an evolutionary comparative approach. Interestingly however, there is also awareness

even at the everyday level that comparisons are not nice and we ought to value each person,

object or idea for itself.

You would notice that some themes of the comparative approach also make their presence

feltwithin everyday notions. Indeed the connection and spilling over of the two levels make it

doubly difficult to distinguish the sociological approach to comparison and our own lay

approach. Beteille (2004:112) makes a careful and important distinction between the lay

comparative and sociological comparative approaches.

While the extensive, not to say automatic, use of comparison may be natural to the

process of human thought, the same cannot be said about the conscious search for a

comparative method with definite or at least defined rules of procedure. Here one will

find characteristic differences among the various disciplines that together make up the

social sciences. Some disciplines, such as economics and psychology, have focused

largely on universal structures and processes common to all human beings everywhere,

and paid little attention to characteristic and persistent differences between societies.

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 Others, such as history in particular, have dwelt much more on the specific features of

given societies without venturing too far across their chosen boundaries in space and

time. The comparative method as a tool of investigation, designed consciously to

discover the general features of all societies (or cultures) without losing sight of the

distinctive features of each, has been a particular obsession of sociology and social

anthropology… (Emphasis mine)

In his L.T.Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture, 33, Evans-Pritchard (1963:3) stressed the

necessity of comparison and commented that „in the widest sense there is no other method.

Comparison is, of course, one of the essential procedures of all science and one of the elementary

processes of human thought”. Evans-Pritchard was echoing what Durkheim (1964:139) wrote,

‟Comparative sociology is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as

it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts‟.

Macfarlane (2004:95) wrote that „a number of observers have noted that in order to understand

one phenomenon, one must place it in perspective or comparison to others‟ and quoted

Lowies(1950:9) who put it, thus: „At the same time a phenomenon is understood only in relation

to others: “He little knows of England who only England knows.” Hence it is well to look at

western culture in perspective‟.

Most social scientists are generally aware that they are involved in comparison all the time. As

Macfarlane (2004:94) has put it, “In the case of history, the comparisons are usually in time, in

that of other social sciences, predominantly in space. The most familiar method of the historians

is to take their own societies as the norm and then to see how far the past is similar or different

from them. This is also what an anthropologist, sociologist, or economist tends to do, in the

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dimension of space rather than time.” Further Macfarlane has quoted Pocock (1961:90), who

commented, “Informally, comparison is built into the method of the subject, for even in his first

piece of field-work the anthropologist is comparing the categories of his own society with those

of the society he studies…”.

Macfarlane has further quoted de Tocqueville‟s (1861, i:359) work, which illustrates such a

method of comparison, revealed in his memoirs.

In my work on America…. though I seldom mentioned France, I did not write a page

without thinking of her, and placing her as it were before me. And what I especially tried

to draw out, and to explain in the United States, was not the whole condition of that

foreign society, but the points in which it differs fromour own,or resembles us. It

isalways by noticing likenesses or contrasts that I succeeded in giving an interesting and

accurate description…..

As would be obvious to you by now, sociologists at different times have been aware about the

problem of comparison and value judgements. How did the classical sociological thinkers and

advocates of the comparative approach like Durkheim and Weber negotiate this? How did they

manage to resolve the conflict between their commitment to a value neutral sociology and a

commitment to comparison in terms of an evolutionary progression that tacitly accepted that

western societies had reached the highest stage of evolution? We discuss this in the next section,

which is on the historical context of the comparative method in sociology.

Before turning to the next section, it is good to keep in mind that not only had classical

sociologists succumbed to the appeal of comparative method, but such thinkers as Herodotus,

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Aristotle, Polybius, Plutarch among the ancient scholars and Bodin and Machiavelli from

theRenaissance had also used it. You can also drawa longlist ofscholars who derived inspiration

fromclassicalsociologists‟ application of comparative approach and gained a rich understanding

of different societies andcultures. Macfarlane (2004:108)has included in such a listthenames of

Perry Anderson,FernandBraudel, Louis Dumont, Ernest Gellner, Jack Goody, E.L. Jones, David

Landes and William McNeill. Contemporary sociologists, for example Andre Beteille, would

make a case for continuing the application of the comparative method, though with due care to

avoid the mistakes made by its earlier practitioners. This point of view has a lesson for you – to

look at the method with considerable caution and possibilities of entering into debates about

various ways of using the method.

9.3 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Although ancient and medieval scholars made use of comparisons in their writings, the

comparative method as a designated method of social research was a product of nineteenth-

century sociology and social anthropology. In the nineteenth century, the principal attraction of

the comparative method came from the belief that it could be used for discovering scientific laws

about human society and culture. The strong advocates of the comparative method believed in

the possibility of a natural science of society that would establish regularities of coexistence and

succession among the forms of social life by means of systematic comparisons. It must not be

forgotten that in the nineteenth-century sociology and anthropology the study of social and

cultural phenomena was typically combined with the study of the physical or biological aspects

of human life.

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The early sociologists, namely, Emile Durkheimin France, Herbert Spencer in England and Max

Weber in Germany, considered comparison to be one of the basic processes in the way human

beings think. Both Spencer (see chapter II of the first volume of Principles of Sociology,

published between 1876 and 1896) and Durkheim (see chapters V and VI of the Rules of

Sociological Method, published in 1895) were greatly influenced by the organic analogy.

Durkheim, in particular, developed a methodological use of the organic analogy in formulating a

comparative approach to understanding the social world. Durkheim‟s systematic use of the

comparative method gave an impetus to its wide application in sociology and social

anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century. You can mention the name of

Radcliffe-Brown and all his associates as followers of this valuable method in their researches in

different parts of the world (see Box9.1 for a critical look at comparative method).

Box 9.1 A Critical Lookat ComparativeMethod

Undoubtedly, sociologists and anthropologists were able to reap a rich harvest of scholarly

monographs, comparing and contrasting the relationship between structure and social practices.

Most of such social research had a particular conception of society. This view held that society is

a reality sui generis and one could observe it from outside and describe the same objectively.

Ingold (1990:6) has questioned the utility of this concept of society and held its uncritical use

responsible for the failure of the comparative method to achieve the expectations raised by its

extensive application.

Max Weber‟s approach to the comparative method took a different route because he was not at

all sympathetic to viewing sociological inquiry ending with the explorations of causes and

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functions of social phenomena. Weber was more concerned with their meanings.To quote Weber

(1949:15),”We can accomplish something which as never attainable in the natural

sciences,namely the subjective understanding of the component individuals.” Not only was the

early use of the comparative method tied to the idea of a natural science of society, it was more

specifically, tied to the theory of evolution. A large part of the nineteenth-century anthropology

was concerned with the origins of socialphenomena and the reconstruction of the stages through

which they had evolved from their most simple to their most complex forms.

Beteille (2004:114),commenting on the tension between a value-neutral and objective approach

and the influence of an evolutionary approach on early sociologists such as Herbert Spencer,

Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, remarks,

They believed that society, culture, religion, family, marriage, and so on gave shape to

human life everywhere, and called for serious intellectual attention not only at home but

also abroad. In this sense, comparative method required in its practitioners a certain

detachment from their own society and culture that was not required of the practitioners

of the historical method. Many of the latter had been ardent nationalists. Since the

comparative method does not admit, at least in principle, of privileged exceptions, it

cannot as easily or as openly accommodate the spirit of nationalism. The pioneers of the

comparative method in sociology and social anthropology were all influenced to a greater

or lesser extent by the theory of evolution. Indeed, it was the search of the stages of

evolution that largely shaped the comparative method of Spencer and Morgan. This

imposed certain limits on the extent to which they did in fact assign equal value to all

societies and culture. It was tacitly acceptedthat western societies had reachedthe highest

stage of evolutionand that all other societies stood at graduated distances below them.

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There were hardly any voices outside the West to challenge these settled opinions. A gulf

existed from the very beginning between the aspirations of the comparative method and its

achievements. As you will find in Unit 10 and 11 both the feminist and participatory approaches

in a very fundamental manner unsettle the assumption of value neutrality and argue instead that

the perceptions of the dominant section are passed off as the universal and neutral view. For

instance the perception of the privileged white male scholars of the nineteenth century could

unquestioningly pass off as universal knowledge (see Unit 4). In that sense the genesis of the

comparative approach is very different from the feminist and participatory approaches whose

influences in social science research are more recent and whose position vis-à-vis the idea of

value neutrality are also very different. Not surprisingly the questions that have been raised by

the feminist and participatory approaches have influenced in a much deeper way the disciplines

of sociology and social anthropology, the main practitioners of the comparative method.

To come back to what Beteille (2004:127) remarked about Weber and Durkheim,

They were awarethatviewpoints might vary according to class or political affiliation, but

they did not take much account of variations due to differences of national tradition. They

took ideas and values in nonwestern societies into account, but only as objects of

investigation and not as elements in the construction of method. This has become a

source of some anxiety to scholars from Asian and African countries.

The important question that Beteille (2004:127) then raises is whether this limitation can be

remedied by „recommending different methods for observation, description, and comparison to

persons rooted indifferent geographical locations‟. The answer probably is „no‟. However the

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sociologists, by explicitly stating their locations (national, ethnic, gender, even theoretical

predilections@)at thestartof therespectivestudies, would only promote methodological rigour.For

the reader would be in a position tocritically examine the internal coherence of the sociologists‟

studies as well as the dominant assumptions upon which they rest.

At another level, that is the level of the number and nature of the comparisons, it has been

suggested that we avoid binary@ thinking and do not employ a dyadic mode of analysis.

Comparing a pair, for example England and India or the West and the rest, may inevitably imply

one of the pair to be better/superior/higher than the other. Macfarlane (2004:103) refers to

Burke‟s (1972) comments on feudalism@ as an ideal type that „there is a tendency to see French

feudalism as the „proper‟ form and all other forms of „feudalism‟ as deviations‟. Burke has

questioned this assumption and observed that this is the case because the western scholars had

articulated most concepts in sociology on the basis of reflections of their own societies.

Macfarlane has made a case for a three-way comparison (see Box9.2).

Box 9.2 Macfarlane’s Suggestion of Three-way Comparison

Macfarlane (2004)has recommended„an explicit three-way comparison of actual, concrete,

historicalcases,but they are set against a backcloth of the Weberian idealtypes, which alone make

the comparisons possible. …. By extending the triadic method of two cases and an idealtype to

the more complex one ofat least three casesand an idealtype, we move a long way from those

problems of relativism and essentialism, which have plagued much social science for more than

one hundred and fifty years. Wecan more towards a position where wesimultaneously stress the

similarities of peoples and rejoice in their uniqueness and differences‟.

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Let us, at this stage in our discussions of comparative approach, complete Reflection and Action

9.1 in order to fully grasp the issues involved in understanding the significance and at the same

time the problem of applying the comparative approach to our study of the social world.

Reflection and Action 9.1

Consider the following examples and answer the questions related to them.

Examples

Sir Henry Maine contrasted India and Europe.

Marx made comparisons among the various modes of production.

Max Weber compared Protestants with Catholics within Europe and also contrastedChristianity

with religions like Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism.

Questions

●What is the single element that stands out as foremost in the above contrasts and comparisons?

●Are the above instances primarily of contrast or comparison?

●Are suchcontrasts examples of binary oppositions?

●Inorder to avoid comparing societies with huge gaps, as for exampleEuropeand India, is it

better to compare England and Japan? Identify the points of similarities and differences between

England and Japan.

9.4 ELEMENTS OF THE COMPARATIVE APPROACH

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Notwithstanding thecriticalremarks in the previous section on the problems of negotiating

between comparison and the rule of no value judgment, the comparative method has been used in

sociology as a matter of its natural practice. To state some of the features in a schematic fashion,

we find the following characteristics in the comparative method.

 Belief in the possibility of a natural science of society

 The goal of detachment and an uneasy link with the theory of evolution

 Influence of organic analogy

 The intent to have systematic comparisons

Though sociologists have argued over the first three characteristics, they have remained by and

large faithful to the intent of having systematic comparisons.

For this reason, it is necessary to look at the following elements of the method, namely,

 Methods of comparison

 The units of comparison

 The purpose of the comparative approach

Let us discuss each of the three elements at length so that we are able to derive some useful tips

for the application of the method in our own researches.

i) Methods of comparison

As Macfarlane (2004:99)noted, “Comparison can be undertaken in numerous ways, each

appropriate to its task, and one cannot lay down in advance which will be the best. Allone can do

is to raise some of the alternatives”. You may note the three types of approach distinguished by

Durkheim (1964).

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 We could consider a single society at a given time and analyze the broad variations in

particular modes of action or relationships occurring in that society.

 We could consider several societies of a generally similar nature which differ in certain

modes of action or relationships; more precisely, we could here compare either different and

perhaps contemporaneous societies or the same society at different periods, if these exhibit

some limited cultural change.

 We could compareseveral, perhaps numerous, societies of widely different nature yet sharing

some identicalfeature;or different periods, showing radicalchange, in thelife of the same

society.

ii) The units of comparison

Again, we refer you to Macfarlane(2004:100),who noted,“the success of the comparative

method will, of course, depend on the comparison of things that can be compared. This

consists of several features. One is that the units compared are roughly of the same order of

magnitude; for instance, it would not be particularly fruitful to compare the handshake

inEngland with the family system in China”.

Next, Macfarlane said, “Second, in order for comparison to be effective things must be of the

same class or order in some way. Thus to compare, say marriage in America with tea

drinking in China would probably be fruitless. The selection of the comparisons is all-

important. Yet even by choosing something that looks similar, one can be deceived. Words

like „city‟, „marriage‟, „family‟, „law‟ are notoriously loaded with ethnographic assumptions.

Even such apparently obvious terms as „house‟, „meal‟, „body‟ carry complex sets of

assumptions within each culture‟.

Social scientists consider the comparative method as just one of the many tools in their kit. It is

essential for the user to consider why one is using a particular tool, what is the purpose, and how

best to use it. In this regard, Macfarlane suggests that „it helps to a) distance the over familiar, b)

familiarize the distant, and c) make absences visible. Let us elaborate this point a little more.

 Distance the over familiar

„Distancing the(over) familiar‟, or turning the obvious into the unobvious means tocreatea gap

between oneself andthe familiarthings so that one can seethem in a differentlight.

Mostresearchers facethe problem ofnotseeingwhat is familiaror similar toone‟s own and hence

self-evidently „normal‟.Nottouching the rim ofa glassthat has watermeant for drinking may not

appear strange to us in India. You will notice again theconcertedattempt evenwithin

theoreticalrealms ofsociology toquestion thecommon sense, thetaken for granted aspect of

reality.

 Familiarize the distant

Many of thethings weencounter in ourworkaresounfamiliaranddistantthat we cannotget inside

their logic or „understand‟ them.This is equally problematic. The usualtemptation is either to

avoid the subject altogether or to dismiss it as irrationalnonsense. Now thesolution may be

„known‟ in a sort of way through the studies of others in other societies.Examples would be the

insights which anthropological studies of curious phenomena like the blood feud or witchcraft

gaveto historians studying the same phenomena in the West.

 Making absences visible

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Thecomparativemethodhelps us to revealabsences. Always, you will find that many interesting

things are the absences, and it is not easy to be aware of these. Macfarlane(2004:97) hasgiven

the example ofRobertSmith (1983: 152), who recounts how a Japanese scholar replied when he

was asked why ancestor worship persists in modern Japan: „That is not an interesting question.

The realquestion is why it died out in the West?‟ Ofcourse, both are interesting questions, but the

absence is certainly just as curious.

At the end of this interesting section, let us complete Reflection and Action 9.2.

Reflection andAction 9.2

A)

Dumont (1986:243) said, “A solid and thorough comparison ofvalues is possible only between

two systems as wholes”.Basing yourself on this view of comparative method, give at least five

systems of social relations for carrying out a successful exercise of comparison.

B)

How doesthecomparativeapproach help in familiarizing thedistant? Burgess (1982:217) quoted

themathematician G.Polya, who suggested that we „ransackour memory for any similar problem

of which the solution is known‟ and try to solvethe problem.Give examplesof studies ofcurious

phenomena, which have helped the researchers to understand problems in their own fields. You

may give examples from your everyday experiences of a similar type.

C)

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What is the difference between contrast and comparison? Obviously these are two different

processes. Identify the differences with examples.

9.5 CONCLUSION

Dealing with the complex issues involved in the operations of contrasting and comparing, we

have taken an overview of the history of the application of the comparative method. In addition,

we have also looked at the comparative method as one of the tools that social scientists use to

give body to their explanations of social reality.

9.6 FURTHER READING

Beteille, Andre 2002. Sociology: Essays on Approach and Method. Oxford University Press:

New Delhi (forits essays on the nature of the discipline of sociology and the methods

sociologists use to study the social world)

Beteille, Andre 2004. The Comparative Method and the Standpoint of the Investigator. IN

Vinay Kumar Srivastava(ed.) Methodology andFieldwork, Oxford University Press: New

Delhi.Pp.112-131

Evans-Pritchard,E.E. 1963.The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology. L.T. Hobhouse

MemorialTrust Lecture, 33

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