First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book—the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe—focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features. In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework. The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.

In an era defined by daily polls, institutional rankings, and other forms of social quantification, it can be easy to forget that comparison has a long historical lineage. Presenting a range of multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume investigates the concepts and practices of comparison from the early modern period to the present. Each chapter demonstrates how comparison has helped to drive the seemingly irresistible dynamism of the modern world, exploring how comparatively minded assessors determine their units of analysis, the criteria they select or ignore, and just who it is that makes use of these comparisons—and to what ends.

An extended volume of New Literary History that considers the practice of comparison in literary studies and other disciplines within the humanities. Writing and teaching across cultures and disciplines makes the act of comparison inevitable. Comparative theory and methods of comparative literature and cultural anthropology have permeated the humanities as they engage more centrally with the cultural flows and circulation of past and present globalization. How do scholars make ethically and politically responsible comparisons without assuming that their own values and norms are the standard by which other cultures should be measured? Comparison expands upon a special issue of the journal New Literary History, which analyzed theories and methodologies of comparison. Six new essays from senior scholars of transnational and postcolonial studies complement the original ten pieces. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, R. Radhakrishnan, Bruce Robbins, Ania Loomba, Haun Saussy, Linda Gordon, Walter D. Mignolo, Shu-mei Shih, and Pheng Cheah are included with contributions by anthropologists Caroline B. Brettell and Richard Handler. Historical periods discussed range from the early modern to the contemporary and geographical regions that encompass the globe. Ultimately, Comparison argues for the importance of greater self-reflexivity about the politics and methods of comparison in teaching and in research.

The comparison of sound sequences (words, morphemes) constitutes the core of many techniques and methods in historical linguistics. With the help of these techniques, corresponding sounds can be determined, historically related words can be identified, and the history of languages can be uncovered. So far, the application of traditional techniques for sequence comparison is very tedious and time-consuming, since scholars have to apply them manually, without computational support. In this study, algorithms from bioinformatics are used to develop computational methods for sequence comparison in historical linguistics. The new methods automatize several steps of the traditional comparative method and can thus help to ease the painstaking work of language comparison. Dissertations in Language and Cognition This series explores issues of mental representation, lingustic structure and representation, and their interplay. The research presented in this series is grounded in the idea explored in the Collaborative Research Center 'The structure of representations in language, cognition and science' (SFB 991) that there is a universal format for the representation of linguistic and cognitive concepts.

Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to take things correspondingly as they are. Examining the practice of comparison across the study of history, language, religion, and culture, distinguished scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln argues in Apples and Oranges for a comparatism of a more modest sort. Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and what it can accomplish. He does this through studies of shamans, werewolves, human sacrifices, apocalyptic prophecies, sacred kings, and surveys of materials as diverse and wide-ranging as Beowulf, Herodotus’s account of the Scythians, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, Lincoln argues that concentrating one's focus on a relatively small number of items that the researcher can compare closely, offering equal attention to relations of similarity and difference, not only grants dignity to all parties considered, it yields more reliable and more interesting—if less grandiose—results. Giving equal attention to the social, historical, and political contexts and subtexts of religious and literary texts also allows scholars not just to assess their content, but also to understand the forces, problems, and circumstances that motivated and shaped them.

This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain ways. Comparing like this is an everyday practice. But in the social sciences, comparing often becomes more burdensome, more complex, and more questions are asked of it. How, then, do social scientists compare? What role do funders, their tools, and databases play in social scientific comparisons? Which sorts of objects do they choose to compare and how do they decide which comparisons are meaningful? Doing comparison in the social sciences, it emerges, is a practice weighed down by a history in which comparison was seen as problematic. As it plays out in the present, this history encounters a range of other agents also involved in doing comparison who may challenge the comparisons of social scientists themselves. This book introduces these questions through a varied range of reports, auto-ethnographies, and theoretical interventions that compare and analyse these different and often intersecting comparisons. Its goal is to begin a move away from the critique of comparison and towards a better comparative practice, guided not by abstract principles, but a deeper understanding of the challenges of practising comparison.