Comparing Cultures

With contributions from a global spread of scholars, this book is a timely guide to comparative ethnographic methods and tools, allowing qualitative researchers in a range of social scientific fields, such as anthropology and sociology, to ensure that their work is more contextually sensitive, and theoretically robust.

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.