Thick Comparison: Reviving the Ethnographic Aspiration

We have come a long way from Evans-Pritchard’s famous dictum that “there is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method - and that is impossible.” Yet a good 40 years later, qualitative social inquiry still has an uneasy relationship with comparison. This volume sets out “thick comparison” as a means to revive “comparing” as a productive process in ethnographic work: a process that helps to revitalise the articulation work inherent in analytical ethnographies; to vary observer perspectives and point towards “blind spots;” to name and create “new things” and modes of empirical work and to give way to intensified dialogues between data analysis and theorizing.

Contributors are Katrin Amelang, Stefan Beck, Kati Hannken-Illjes, Alexander Kozin, Henriette Langstrup, Jörg Niewöhner, Thomas Scheffer, Robert Schmidt, Estrid Sørensen, and Britt Ross Winthereik.