Instituttseminaret: Thorgeir Kolshus "Comparison: relatively important?"
Velkommen til seminar og forelesning over temaet "Comparison: relatively important?". Seminaret innledes av Thorgeir Kolshus, post doc ved Sosialantropologisk institutt.
Etter seminaret serveres det kaffe og snacks i vårt lunsjrom. Seminaret er åpent for alle, ingen påmelding påkrevet.
Abstract:
The most frequently invoked shorthand for anthropology remains “the comparative study of societies and cultures.” But our dedication to the comparative perspective seems to share the fate of our concept of culture: in tandem with increased public awareness of its potential benefits, we become ever more wary and inhibited in our employment of them. And when we do apply them they are rarely operationalised or specified, knowing what a Sisyphean task of endless provisions and disclaimers this would entail. Systematic explorations of the comparative method have, with some very few exceptions, been conspicuously absent in recent years, given its continued importance to disciplinary identity. Is attention to the comparative method little more than lip service to a disciplinary trait from the olden days of nomothetic ambitions? What would anthropology stand to lose if we were to let it go? And, if we still define our discipline as the comparative study of societies and cultures, what consequences follow for anthropologists’ engagements in the public domain, where popular cross-cultural comparison seems to thrive?
In this paper, I approach ethnography from my fieldworks on Mota in central Melanesia that relates to religious and political responses to natural disasters from different comparative angles, in order to probe the tipping point between potential gains and losses when gradually moving towards a more unrestricted and holistic comparative exercise.