Considering Comparison

Abstract

This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible theoretical approach and a methodological framework. Analyzing the ways in which comparison is used in the study of religion, the book identifies the primary goals of this method and argues that it is constitutive for religious studies as an academic discipline. Revisiting various critiques of comparison—decontextualization and essentialization charges, postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques, and the perspectives of recent naturalistic approaches—the book incorporates insights gained from such debates into an approach that is based upon thorough epistemological analysis of comparison and that takes the scholar’s situatedness and agency seriously. Few scholars have reflected deeply upon how comparison works in practice. The book argues, and tries to demonstrate, that such reflections are useful both for producing and for evaluating comparative studies. It proposes a methodological framework for the analysis of comparison that is meant to prove relevant both for theoretical reflections and for the pragmatics of comparative work. In addition, it suggests a comparative approach—discourse comparison—that helps to confront the omnipresent risks of decontextualization, essentialization, and universalization. Arguing that the comparative method is indispensable for a deeper analytical understanding of what we call religion, this book makes a case for comparison. It seeks to enrich the considerations of both aspiring and seasoned comparativists, stimulate much-needed further discussions about methodology, and encourage scholars to produce responsible comparative studies.

The ascetic twist

“…29 In general, historians have been reluctant, and rightly so, to compare things not standing in a direct historical relationship to each other. 30 And yet, those comparisons are unavoidable. An "unnatural" comparison, such as one between Maximus Confessor and Martin Luther, clearly displays that a comparison, in Jonathan Z. Smith's words, is "never dyadic, but always triadic", 31 The third part in a comparison is the scholar, "who makes their cohabitationtheir 'sameness' possible."…”