Moving Comparison out of the Scholar's Laboratory

Abstract

This essay attempts a brief ethnography of our field impelled by the aftermath of September 11, 2001. My purpose is to ask if the current state of the debate over comparison addresses a growing reality on the ground. Whether or not we engage in comparison, the public does. Whether or not we are willing to place one religion in the context of another, globalization and a network of migration does. On a street corner in Chapel Hill, I overheard an antiwar demonstrator, dressed in a good imitation of the 1960s style, provide his audience with a crash course in Islam, explaining that killing these people is pointless because they really do not value life in quite the same way, because, after all, they believe in a heaven. Such public discourse on comparison is not new, but we seem to pay little attention to it as we shake our heads and go on with our own internal debate over the nature of comparison within Religious Studies. This debate was begun in many ways in the early 1980s by Jonathan Z. Smith, but is now impelled by a series of real and perceived critiques of more threatening outsiders labeled as Postmodernists. After two decades of discomfort and malaise, of whispered and even shouted anger at POMOrhetoric, the defenses, the recanta tion—even incantations—are now finally committed to writing in the last three years. Norman Giradot provides a good summary of the feelings of many of the now older generation during two decades of sustained critique of comparison in the mode of postmodernism: