Contemporary issues and challenges for comparativists

Abstract

Sir Edward B. Tyler saw ethnology and ethnography as the twin pillars of cultural anthropology. Yet, ethnology has had a marginal role in anthropology compared to ethnography. The inductive comparative approach developed by George Peter Murdock has never been part of mainstream anthropology. The postmodern concern with rooting out the ethnographer's own enculturated and often subconscious biases has placed ethnology at the periphery of the anthropological field of vision. The political economists' concern with post colonialism and, by extension, the de facto dominant position of the ethnographer relative to his or her informants has also narrowed our collective focus. With Europe and People Without a History, by Eric Wolf (1982), the tide began to turn and ethnology has emerged from the ashes. The main issue now is not whether comparative research has a future, but how are we going to do it? How do we incorporate `the best of postmoderism' with `the best of science'? I examine these questions in this introduction and discuss how the authors of this special issue grapple with and test new approaches to comparative analysis.