Abstract

BALBI, Fernando Alberto. Portrayers of butterflies: The subordination of comparison in today's Social and Cultural Anthropology. Rev. Mus. Antropol. [online]. 2015, vol.8, n.1, pp.171-186. ISSN 1852-060X.

In today's social and/or cultural anthropology, there is a trend to consider comparison as an auxiliary resource to ethnography whose usefulness is restricted to the detection and analysis of diversity. This paper argues that such situation has negative effects on the control of comparative procedures, on ethnography's productivity, on the ability of anthropologists to produce theoretical generalizations and, consequently, on the relevance of the discipline itself. It is suggested that, in order to recover anthropology's ability to formulate generalizations, comparison needs to be restored to its original condition of analytical resource in its own right and overcome the naturalization of its connection with diversity. The epistemological foundations of this enterprise are outlined in order to trace two possible ways to combine comparison and ethnography which would facilitate the simultaneous production of case analysis and theoretical-methodological resources.

Keywords : Social and/or Cultural Anthropology; Comparison; Ethnography Anthropological Theory; Epistemology.

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