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Comparative work in anthropology sometimes appears to be as perilous as it is unfash ionable. That it is unfashionable is evident in the relative dearth of explicitly comparative studies published in anthropology over the past forty or so years. A few exceptions aside, the closest one usually comes is an edited volume in which each essay deals with a single society but an introductory essay by the editors hazards some broader comparative re marks. The reasons for such reticence seem clear: not only is it difficult for a single anthro pologist to acquire enough expertise in more than one society to make comparative remarks with any authority, it also goes against the grain of much contemporary anthropology to try to make data from diverse societies fit the analytic categories-any analytic categoriesupon which comparison might be based. This fear of reductionism, which defines the peril in comparative work, is well-founded: the disrepute into which so much earlier anthropology has fallen stems in large part from the brazenly reductive manner in which cross-cultural comparisons were made. Even comparativists as scrupulous and sophisticated as Boas and Levi-Strauss still seem to lose too much of what matters about the societies they study when they embark on comparisons of ritual, myth, or social organization. Since many contemporary anthropologists wish to grant the objects of their study the dignity of subjects, they are particularly careful to avoid fitting their data into preconceived molds. Of course, it is a truism that anthropology always presumes an implicit or explicit comparison with the society of the analyst, and that the de scription of "them" always consists in large part of a negative image of "us." Most anthro pologists try to overcome the distortion that that inevitable comparative perspective implies by building as thorough and complex an image of another society as possible. To do the opposite, to make comparison central to their endeavor, would appear to many to be quite retrograde. Yet there is a certain cost to avoiding the reductionist dangers of comparative work: it tends to make all the "not-us" peoples in the world begin to look alike. If, for example, the West is uniquely preoccupied with the status of the individual, then all societies that differ

Although older Burmese associate contemporary Burmese rap with an indigenous call‐and‐response genre, younger Burmese rap fans link it only to international models. The content of Burmese raps strikes an outsider as tame, but rap in Burma resembles foreign prototypes closely in its preoccupation with youthful masculine power. In Burma and elsewhere, rap's lyrical contents reflect a libertarian ideology in keeping with its emphasis on the autonomy of individuals and widespread anxieties of and about young males, in particular—this despite many commentators’ wish to see in rap an empowering political voice. [rap music, Burma, masculinity, globalization, resistance]

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