Comparing
ComparisonsJames D. Sidaway
Franz Waldenberger(Eds.)

Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien
Miscellanea 23

Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien

Jochi Kioizaka Bldg. 2F
7-1, Kioichi
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0094, Japan
Tel.: (03) 3222-5077
Fax: (03) 3222-5420
e-mail: dijtokyo@dijtokyo.org
homepage: http://www.dijtokyo.org
Direktor: Prof. Dr. Franz Waldenberger

Erscheinungsjahr: November 2021
Erscheinungsort: Tokyo
Herstellung: IUDICIUM Verlag GmbH, München
ISSN 0941-1321

Contents

CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Comparing Comparisons – Introduction and Overview
James D. SIDAWAY and Franz WALDENBERGER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Changing Meanings of Comparisons for Sociocultural
Anthropology
Isaac GAGNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Cross-Country Comparative Research and Quantitative Data
AnalysisMarkus HECKEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
A ‘Conversation’ on Comparisons between Japanese Studies, Contemporary History and Medieval Art History
Nora KOTTMANN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Comparative research in/of Southeast Asia
Shaun LIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
The Comparative Society
Felix MALLIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
From Implicit Towards Explicit Comparative Research
Hendrik MEYER-OHLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Studying Comparisons
Simon ROWEDDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Who compares? The commodification and decolonization of comparison
James D. SIDAWAY and Franz WALDENBERGER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

3

Preface

PREFACE“Semantic information, then, is a ‘distinction that makes a difference’.”
D. C. Dennett. From Bacteria to Bach and Back. The Evolution of Minds.
Random House, 2017, p. 116.

Comparisons form a core process in knowledge creation. We cannot notcompare, when reflecting about or studying what concerns or interests
us. Meaning derives from comparing.
The short essays collected in this volume reflect on aspects, methods,
benefits and possible pitfalls of comparisons in the social sciences andhumanities. They were originally published as blog entries on the open
edition platform Hypotheses between May 2020 and May 2021 (https://
trafo.hypotheses.org/category/comparing-comparisons). We decided to
re-publish them in the compact format of an e-book to make them moreeasily accessible as a set – and therefore more readily comparable. As
there is no inherent thematic sequence among the contributions except
for the introduction and conclusion, we sorted them alphabetically by author name.
Singapore and Tokyo, October 2021
James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger

5Comparing Comparisons – Introduction and Overview

COMPARING COMPARISONS –INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
By James D. SIDAWAY and Franz WALDENBERGER

How and why do we compare in the social sciences and humanities?
These are enduring questions. On 2nd and 3rd December 2019, a groupof scholars affiliated with the Max Weber Research Group at the National
University of Singapore and researchers from the German Institute forJapanese Studies (DIJ) met at the DIJ in Tokyo to compare notes on comparisons. Most of the 17 participants were at the postdoc stage of theiracademic career. They covered a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds(anthropology, economics, sociology, history, geography, psychology,
area studies and linguistics), although our title here is inspired by published reflections on comparative law (Chodosh, H. E. 1999, Comparing
Comparisons In Search of Methodology. Iowa Law Review, 84, 1025–1038) and
one of us had previously co-authored an article on comparative methods
at the interface of geography and area studies, the meeting was a conspicuously cross-disciplinary event. Each delegate presented their vantage
point on/experience of comparison, followed by discussion. Some disciplines, such as anthropology, are more explicit about the way that every
single case study contains comparisons, such as the way that the social
context of observers stands out and cultural translation is integral to research, analysis, and writing. And some themes, economic trajectories,
demography, or marriage patterns, for example, frequently become thebasis to stage comparisons. But what do these take for granted? What
drives them?
The presentations and discussions on these questions in Tokyo ranged
over three broad and intersecting themes.

THE ACHIEVEMENTS, LIMITS, AND SEDUCTIONS OF METHODOLOGICALNATIONALISM

Comparison is back in fashion. In some fields, urban studies for example,
it has spawned a vast literature and become the etiquette for discussionsof appropriate focus and methods. The advent of big data and AI debates
revolving around this have also rejuvenated comparative quantitative research. In other fields, however, such as economics, comparison peaked7

James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger

long ago. There is a complex and uneven historical variance across disciplines.
Of course, many studies, make little comparative aspiration, yet once
published, others may feed them into their own comparison. But even for
those with aspirations to do so, and there have been growing institutional
encouragement to compare, on the part of funding bodies for example,
we frequently struggle to escape national prefixes in research and criticalanalysis.
Yet, there is often potential for foregrounding other relevant scales andunits of analysis, in tandem with, or in lieu of the nation-state, which is sooften a taken for granted, default unit of analysis. This includes firms,
cities and regions and other analytical axes of divide, notably urban andrural. Or borderland, inter-state, and non-state areas, such as the debatesthat have been triggered by the idea that highland Asia (termed “Zomia”
by some) constituted a distinctive zone of life characterized by resistanceto sovereigns. Similarly, transnational, and regional networks and the interrelations of maritime spaces (under and beyond national jurisdiction)offer points of departure.
Yet national scales endure. They have deep roots in many disciplines. Indeed, they are foundational principles for some, such as
international relations and so deeply written into others, such as law
as to be hard to disentangle ourselves and our analyses from. The
influential work of the Dutch social psychologist Gerard Hendrik(Geert) Hofstede (2 October 1928–12 February 2020), based on datafrom IBM workplaces in the 1970s, is an example of theorization on
national (work) cultures that came to exercise enormous influence inbusiness schools. Similarly, the literature on “varieties of capitalism”
has become a conventional way – in some cases a method – to frame
understanding of business and finance in Germany and Japan vis-àvis other nation-states.
In the case of the now abundant literature on “varieties of capitalism”, the notion developed in a context of prior debates about nationalvariants of socialism, as Moscow’s hegemony over communist movements broke down from the mid-point of the twentieth century. Decades on, it is arguably more useful to focus on the intersections andhybridization of forms of capitalism than to keep searching for purenational prototypes.
Yet national comparison retains analytical utility and critical pedagogic
potential, in for example, the study of commemorative sites, monuments
and events, which are thereby denaturalized. Examples discussed in Tokyo included the 8th May, which is Victory in Europe Day in the UK andFrance and Liberation Day in Germany. We also compared how the8Comparing Comparisons – Introduction and Overview

course and memory of the Second World War is differently scripted
across Asia. Such examples yielded debate about seeking similarities ordifferences, likely vs unlikely or surprising comparisons and longitudinalcomparisons. The relative value of, to use the jargon of social science, diachronic vs synchronic comparison, looms large is some disciplines, suchas linguistics.
However, a more pragmatic approach to scales and comparison is often
merited, compounded by the fact that the way national figures are compiled varies. This relates to issues of translation and taken for granted
starting points, which often reflect western biases in the social sciences
and humanities. Such dilemmas are not easily resolved, notwithstanding
decades of critique of the consequences of essentializations, generalizations, orientalism (and its mirror, orientalism-in -reverse or occidentalism) and other exoticisms.
In more mundane ways, at the meeting in Tokyo, problems in comparing, for example, “organic” agricultural production between EU memberstates and Japan were an example of incommensurability, given varied
certification procedures and regulations. Likewise, per capita seafood
consumption cannot be reliably compared, given differences in how seafood is categorized. In the months after we met, the dreadful tally of Covid-19 has served as a salutatory reminder of the power – and the limits– of national comparison. It became clear that national systems of record
varied enormously, though the dreadful tabulations of national comparison, infections, mortality, recovery, became the domains of debate inmany places, though clearly the vectors of disease had no such respect fornational “containers”. The limits of methodological nationalism are,sometimes, a matter of life and death.

LOCATING COMPARISONS AND THEIR USES
Whereas some geographers, sociologists and anthropologists enact serial(or longitudinal) comparison, through returning to the same sites or objects of analysis over an extended period, serial comparison is also explicitin the discipline of history. Now and then. Then and there. Historians
must negotiate questions about intersecting durations and make decisions over which to work with. Historiographical categories, and periods
such as centuries and calendar systems and categories (post-war, postrevolution, post-socialism) are often taken for granted by other humansciences. Moreover, an historical era or moment cannot ever fully know
itself by its own consciousness – and so may be viewed very differently
in hindsight.
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James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger

Similarly, another way of approaching comparison would be looking at
the same object, but from different scholarly vantage points. This ofcourse is the promise of inter- and multi-disciplinary work. New domainsof comparison at the junctures of history, economics and sociology
emerged in the twentieth century, examples included Polanyi’s writing
and modernization theory, the latter bolstered by the violent mix of Cold
War, decolonization, and confrontation.
Equally, cultural differences loomed large in the discussions of manydelegates. Cultural background and differences in training profoundly
configure much research. And the vogue for comparison in some fields
yields an impulse to write comparatively, that is, sometimes, only incidentally comparative. In other words, personal connections and pragmatic considerations determine who, where and what is compared as muchas anything else. But then, post hoc justifications are imposed to claim
they are a useful or valid comparison. Comparison becomes a discursive
strategy, a rhetorical device. Such opportunistic and pragmatic underpinnings deserve to be more fully acknowledged. Moreover, much like historical categorizations are only cast in relief when we have stepped outside/beyond them, the idea that individual scholars will transparently
know themselves and fully understand the basis on which they decide
who/what/where and how to compare is naive.
In discussing alternatives, long established methods of abstraction, thatwere developed in dialectical analysis, including Marxism entered our
discussions. Such methods seek to understand the relational quality ofthings, to approach them as variously, moments, conjunctures, concrete,
abstractions and processes. Dialectics, it was argued by several delegates,
needs to be taught to fresh generations of graduate students. The question
can or should one compare is thereby replaced with questions about how
to compare. Our discussion also explored assertions that some things, inpart by virtue of their internal richness (this point has sometimes been
claimed by some traditional, canonical, scholarship of Islam) are only
comparable with themselves. However, counter-currents frequently
come from governments and funding agencies, who – on their own terms– will want us to justify research in terms of policy impacts, which areoften based on a thin notion of comparison. Politicians, civil servants –and social movements – will often use comparisons, or instrumentalize
comparative perspectives for their own purposes. Nation-state and policy
narratives, architects and political parties will invoke historical and geographical comparisons, new Roman empires and Caesarism, revived Silk
Roads (accompanying China’s Belt and Road Initiative), reanimated Caliphates or the Shah of Iran’s invocation of classical Persian empire or the
Khmer Rouge’s invocation of Angkor are all examples. These analogies
10Comparing Comparisons – Introduction and Overview

and claims are then folded into modernity – they are thoroughly modern.
Such process, and the wider invention of tradition invite the critical scrutiny of the political uses of comparison.

RELATIONALITIESA partial and, for several delegates, promising alterative to establishedforms of comparison is to explore relationalities. This refuses comparison
as a starting point and instead focuses on co-production of sites and phenomena. How does social life in city X, for example, rest on different
scales of connections that may envelop the globe? Arguably, such research is no less worldly than, for example, a multi-sited study, with globally comparative ambitions. As some delegates noted, the rise of transnational and global history has, to some extent rescaled or displaced earlier
comparative impulses in history. Transnational history often looks attransnational networks and discursive spaces, so different opinions orconnections within national spaces are in focus, rather than the idea ofcomparing such national spaces. An example is the interactive and connective discourse about “Asia” between and within Japan, Korea (where
Cold War further fractured the debate) and China – and the “overseas”
societies where ethnic Chinese (itself a relational category, whose meaning emerged in transnational context) are a majority.
Our closing discussions returned to some fundamental questions about
what is signified by triangulation and counts as valid findings or research
are invariably comparative issues, implicitly or explicitly. Nothing is beyond compare.

ABOUT THE AUTHORSJames D. Sidaway is Professor of Political Geography and convener of the
Max Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New
Infrastructures at the National University of Singapore. His most recent
book stages on comparisons of everyday lives of security in Cambodia,
Iraq and Mozambique: Paasche, T. F. and Sidaway, J. D. (2021) Transecting
Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq and Mozambique. Athens GA:
University of Georgia Press.
Franz Waldenberger has been Director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo since October 2014. He is on leave from Munich University where he holds a professorship for Japanese Economy.
11

James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger

He is editor in chief of the international peer reviewed journal Contemporary Japan. His recent publications include Governance, Risk and Financial
Impact of Mega Disasters. Lessons from Japan, Springer 2019 (co-edited with
A. Kamesaka) and The Future of Financial Systems in the Digital Age,
Springer 2022 (co-edited with M. Heckel).

Citation: James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger, “Comparing Comparisons– Introduction and Overview,” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research,
19.05.2020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/23834

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The Changing Meanings of Comparisons for Sociocultural Anthropology

THE CHANGING MEANINGS OF COMPARISONS FORSOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
By Isaac GAGNE“COMPARISONS ARE INVIDIOUS.”
I encountered this statement early in my anthropological training whenreading classic ethnographies that were written within the framework of
evolutionary anthropology. In anthropology’s infancy, comparisons wereas much about documenting human diversity as they were about validating European imperialism. By comparing the political, economic, religious, and social institutions of mostly agrarian or nomadic societies
against the “advanced” industrialized societies, Western-trained anthropologists developed distinctions between “modern” and “pre-modern”
societies which imposed a Eurocentric notion of how human societies“evolve” over time. The function of comparison within this evolutionary
framework of early anthropology was to place societies along a timelineof development from putatively “primitive” human aggregations to complex modern civilizations. Needless to say, this evolutionary framework
is no longer in vogue. However, the central place of identifying similarities and differences and constructing comparisons remains deeply rooted
in sociocultural anthropology, and likewise the danger of invidious comparisons.

COMPARISON AS METHODOLOGY
Fundamentally, anthropology is built on cross-cultural, comparative
study. Methodologically, anthropological study involves working at the
micro level but with an eye to the macro contexts, both geographicallyand theoretically. Conventional anthropological analysis usually proceeds from a single case study, which is “written up” as an ethnographic
monograph. As Reed & Alexander (2009 para. 40) note, “even single casestudies or ethnographies implicitly contain a comparison, at least to theinvestigator’s own meaningful social contexts, and this comparative consciousness forms an important basis for the development of theory andresearch.” In this sense, anthropological analysis is an implicitly comparative process rooted in what the researcher identifies as being distinctive
13

Isaac Gagne

about their research topic, which influences the kinds of questions they
ask and the kinds of findings that they identify as surprising or meaningful.
Multi-sited fieldwork and transnational fieldwork has also become acommon methodological feature of anthropological research. The internet has helped facilitate this, and with the global disruption caused by the
Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an even greater attention to how socalled digital anthropology and anthropological research from a distancecan be conducted (e. g., Blum 2020). The pandemic has also raised newinterest in the possibilities for collaborative, inter-disciplinary, and transnational comparative research, such as on different experiences of andresponses to the pandemic between Asian and Western nations, or among
urban and rural areas within the same country (e. g., Chaturvedi 2020; seealso the Pandemic Insights webpage of the American Anthropology Association).

INTERROGATING THEORIES AND CONCEPTS THROUGH COMPARATIVERESEARCH
Apart from methodological and conceptual comparisons, comparative
research in anthropology also includes theoretical approaches, such ascomparing configurations of local value systems among different communities within a single society, or between different societies, in order toreveal which taken-for-granted dimensions are actually dependent on
certain sociocultural configurations and why. I will illustrate these twocomparative approaches with two examples from my research. First, inthe case of an internal comparison within a society: when we comparesocial welfare configurations of rural and urban Japanese communities,
we see different attitudes towards responsibility towards neighbors, andby extension, differing notions of moral responsibilities for care within
the same society (Japan). These findings reveal the relationship between
urbanization and notions of community, and they also aid in constructing
locally relevant policies and practices (Gagne 2021). Second, from a crosscultural comparative perspective across different societies: in the case of
the influence of religions in society, comparing American and Japanesenotions of religious authority reveals how many values that are religiously influenced in the U. S., such as notions of charity, legal norms, sexuality,
and attitudes towards right and wrong, are not governed by or primarily
influenced by religious authority in Japan (Gagne 2017; 2013). Cross-cultural comparison thus provides a method of locating the socioculturally
constructed contours of value systems, institutions, and practices. This
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The Changing Meanings of Comparisons for Sociocultural Anthropology

enables us to identify areas of divergence that can destabilize hegemonic
concepts and lead to better analytical frameworks and additional topics
for future research.
Crucially, making cross-cultural comparisons intelligible involves theact of “cultural translation,” which is implicitly connected with structuresof power among researchers and subjects, professional knowledge, andlanguages of discourse. Thus, as Asad (1993) has cautioned, anthropologists must always be ready to critically interrogate their own position: totranslate their findings in ways that are also intelligible to the communities themselves and to be ready to open up their own languages of discourse to a comparative project of translating assumptions, norms, andconceptualizations. The comparative nature of cultural translation—of
describing or analyzing concepts and social practices from one sociocultural and linguistic context in a way that is intelligible to others—often
entails applying, or creating, meta-level concepts (such as “religion”) to
describe social practices or formations in a language familiar to the researcher and scholarly community; but this practice is always at risk ofcreating false equivalences through invidious theoretical or conceptual
comparisons. To give a specific example, this problem has bedeviled thestudy of religion in Japan (and elsewhere), where in the lives of many
individuals, certain public rituals, secular self-cultivation movements,
and private spiritual-cultivation practices overlap with and often transcend explicitly religious organizations and belief systems, blurring theboundaries between the religious and secular distinctions that are conventional analytical frames in religious studies. This has given rise to endless debates between scholars of religion about whether this or that organization or practice is really “religious,” or whether the category of religion itself is a Western concept with no straightforward equivalent in Japan (e. g., Larsson 2019). While this debate is far from settled, rather thandescribing and analyzing practices simply by forcing them into categories
that we are familiar with, from an anthropological perspective it may be
more productive to keep in mind Asad’s call for us to “test the toleranceof [our] own language for assuming unaccustomed forms” (Asad 1993:
190) in order to diversify and enrich our own repertoire of ethnographic
knowledge.
In sum, by moving between theoretical abstraction and criticalanalyses of local differences while guarding against invidious comparisons, anthropological comparisons—in their most powerful and meaningful forms—allow us to stretch, refine, nuance, and challenge theories, norms, and concepts through case studies. In turn, this yield pointsof comparison for other researchers as part of an ongoing scholarly
conversation.
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Isaac Gagne

REFERENCES
Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies of religion: Disciplines and reasons of power inChristianity and Islam. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Blum, S. D. (2020) Fieldwork from afar. Anthropology News website, September 10, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1483.
Chaturvedi, V. (ed.) (2020) The pandemic: Perspectives on Asia. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Gagne, I. (2021) Mapping the local economy of care: Social welfare andvolunteerism in local communities. In S. Ganseforth and H. Jentzsch(eds.), Rethinking locality in Japan. London: Routledge. pp. 102–116.
Gagne, I. (2017) Religious globalization and reflexive secularization in a
Japanese new religion. Japan Review, 30: 153–177.
Gagne, I. (2013) Private religion and public morality: Understanding cultural
secularism in late capitalist Japan. PhD dissertation, Yale University.
Larsson, E. (2019) Review of the category of religion in contemporary Japan: Shūkyō & temple Buddhism. Contemporary Japan, 31(2): 271–275.
Reed, I. and Alexander, J. (2009) Cultural sociology. The New Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. 10.1111/b.9781405169004.2009.00020.x

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isaac Gagne is a principal researcher at the German Institute for JapaneseStudies (DIJ) Tokyo. He is a cultural anthropologist with interests in issues of morality and ethics, religion and modernization, and the role oflocal community groups in the face of disaster and social crises.

Citation: Isaac Gagne, “The Changing Meanings of Comparisons for Sociocultural Anthropology” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 29.01.2021,
https://trafo.hypotheses.org/26432.

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Cross-Country Comparative Research and Quantitative Data Analysis

CROSS-COUNTRY COMPARATIVE RESEARCH AND
QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
By Markus HECKEL

In my field of research, which combines Economics and Japanese Studies(trained at the University of Bonn), it soon became clear that eventually I
would have to deal with cross-country comparisons. Even for quantitative analysis, which deals with statistical data, the challenges of crosscountry comparisons – not to mention the time intensity – should not be
underestimated. First, one needs “comparable” data. To assess whether
data sets are really comparable, one has to understand how the data werecollected. To interpret and explain differences in the data and in the statistical analysis, one has to control for differences in the respective national contexts. Here, difficult decisions have to be made as to what differences should be considered and how they should be operationalized andcontrolled for.
My most recent endeavour with cross-country comparisons was a journal article which I wrote together with Yuji Genda (University of Tokyo)
and Ryo Kambayashi (Hitotsubashi University) (Genda et al. 2019). For
this research, I visited the Institute for Economic Research (IER), Hitotsubashi University several times between 2015 and 2017. We were interested in what kind of employees did not know about their labour contracts, especially about the duration of their employment.
In Japan, employment contracts tend to be opaque. This contradicts
the national labour law, which provides employees with the right of alabour contract specifying among other things the length of employment. Genda (2016, 2018) had already found that 8 % of Japaneseemployees did not know their contract length. We termed this group of
employees DNK. We used the data set of the Employment Status
Survey (ESS), which provides basic data on Japanese employment
structure including the variable that interested us: the knowledge of
employees on their contract length.
Our assumption was that DNK is a Japan-specific problem. We wanted
to confirm this by comparing the situation in Japan with that in anotherOECD country. It proved extremely difficult to find a country with a comparable set of data, but in the end, we were successful. In Spain, the Economically Active Population Survey (EAPS) provides similar data. For
comparative reasons, it was also advantageous that both countries shared
17Markus Heckela similar labour market structure in terms of a high ratio of non-standard
employment.
At first glance, our assumption seemed correct. Spanish data suggested that only 2 % of the employees were DNK. However, after carefully
checking and controlling the data, it turned out that the comparable
figure was actually 11 % – a number even higher than for Japan. This
was a big surprise and meant that our assumption proved wrong. DNK
seemed not to be a Japan-specific problem, but to be of more general
relevance.
The next step was to analyse in more detail the economic and social
factors characterizing the DNK, possibly explaining why this grouptended to be ignorant about an important aspect of their employment
contract. To do so meant deciding what factors would be relevant, how
they could be operationalized, whether comparable data sets would beavailable and, if not, how to work around such incompatibilities. In theend, it turned out that DNK in both countries could be characterized by
the same socio-economic variables: Women, singles, and less-educatedworkers were in both countries more likely not to know their labour
contract duration. Different data sets revealed, that in both countries
this group tended to be dissatisfied with their current job, more likely
to search for other jobs and less likely to seek more work in theircurrent employment. It was striking how similar the results for bothcountries were despite their geographic distance and institutional andcultural differences. Regardless of the consistency of most of the results,
there were also non-negligible differences in some of the variables andresults. We constructed two additional data sets to combine the advantages of both data sets. We took an important lesson from the results
and concluded that despite the different institutional design of theirlabour markets, Japan and Spain shared similar structural problems.
Over time, the ratio of employees not knowing the length of theirlabour contract stayed the same or even slightly increased, which
underlines the severity of the issue.
Overall, we concluded that a better education – starting in school andcontinuing in the work place – possibly supported by work councils orunions – is necessary to raise awareness among workers about theirlegal rights as employees. So, although cross-country comparisons are
extremely challenging, the results can be highly rewarding. On a morebasic level, we also learned that one should never be content withattributing seemingly non-rational results to country-specific cultural
factors.

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Cross-Country Comparative Research and Quantitative Data Analysis

REFERENCES
Genda, Y. (2016) Shifting the employment debate: “Nonregular” focus
distracts and misleads. (22 March). https://www.nippon.com/en/column/g00348/
Genda, Y. (2018) Koyō wa keiyaku: funiki ni makenai hatarakikata (Employment is a contract: a working style that does not give in to atmosphere),Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo.
Genda, Y., Heckel, M., and Kambayashi, R. (2019) Employees who do notknow their labour contract term and the implications for working conditions: Evidence from Japanese and Spanish microdata. Japan and theWorld Economy, 49: 95–104.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Markus Heckel is a Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute forJapanese Studies (DIJ) Tokyo. His main research interests include macroeconomics, the political economy of central banks, the discourse of monetary policy and labour economics.

Citation: Markus Heckel, “Cross-Country Comparative Research and Quantitative Data Analysis” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 28.10.2020,
https://trafo.hypotheses.org/25275.

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A ‘Conversation’ on ComparisonsA ‘CONVERSATION’ ON COMPARISONS BETWEENJAPANESE STUDIES,CONTEMPORARY HISTORY AND MEDIEVAL ART
HISTORY
By Nora KOTTMANN

While studying political science at Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute, I was always told to refrain from making comparisons if and when
I would become a researcher. Comparative research, it was said, is an extremely complex research methodology, difficult to realize and terribly
time-consuming, expensive, and labor intensive. In Japanese Studies,comparisons are further complicated by language and cultural contexts.
Thus, I have never done any kind of a ‘classic’ comparison (and, indeed,
I also have warned my students of these difficulties and not to be tempted
to attempt comparative research). I have, however, come across comparative research in my field of interest – family sociology – that has mademe reconsider my reluctance to use comparative methods, notably a comparison of single women in Tokyo, Hongkong and Shanghai by anthropologist Lynne Nakano (Nakano 2016). Despite being convinced (and fascinated) by this comparison, I found the idea of doing comparisons stillrather intimidating – especially when considering my own abilities andresources. However, in the process of co-editing a handbook on methods
in social science research on Japan (Studying Japan. Handbook of Research
Designs, Fieldwork and Methods with Prof. Dr. Cornelia Reiher, Freie Universität Berlin, 2021) and reviewing the nearly seventy contributions, I
began to think about comparison(s) from a slightly different perspective.
The contributions clearly show that ‘Studying Japan’ itself is inherently
comparative (either implicitly or explicitly): in order to make our research
rigorous and relatable for researchers of other disciplines and to makeany broader arguments and contributions, we have to compare in thewidest sense of the term. Simultaneously, doing research on and teaching‘Japan’ can be “transformed into the incentive for critically apprehendinglarger ideological discourses”, as Ioannis Gaitanidis argues. He elaborates how ‘Japanese examples [can be] used […] to consider the contingency of frequently used, fundamental terms”, an approach he calls“Critical Japanese Studies” (based on Eva Illouz’ understanding of an‘impure’ critique) (2017: 4). Furthermore, with intensified focus on transnational entanglements and global flows of communications, commodi21

Nora Kottmannties, finance, people and pathogens, traditional national and disciplinary
boundaries are challenged (not only) in Japan-related research. This,
however, reinforces the need (and the opportunity) to contextualize andrethink ‘Japan’ in various realms – historic, geographical, and disciplinary – to put it in context and to ‘compare’.
For further elaborating on the topic of comparisons and for literally addressing the issue of ‘Comparing Comparisons’ I asked two friends andcolleagues about their perspective on and experiences with comparisons.1
Both work in completely different disciplines – Contemporary History
and Medieval Art History respectively – and focus on the European context. Dr. Agnes Laba (Contemporary History, Bergische Universität Wuppertal), whose current research project is based on a comparison of gender-specific everyday life practices under German occupation during theSecond World War in France and Poland states: ‘Nowadays, historicalcomparisons form an established part of the field of transnational history.’ Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Trinkert (Medieval Art History, University of Düsseldorf) takes a similar stance and argues that ‘comparisons are indispensable in the medieval art history of Europe.’ However, their understanding of what comparisons are, why and how to apply them (andwhat to actually compare) differs in an interesting way.
Agnes Laba elaborates on ‘historical comparisons [that] are usually understood as the systematic juxtaposition of two or more historical units inorder to explore similarities and differences.’ ‘Yet’, she argues,
historical comparisons aim at going beyond a mere description of the involved
entities. Instead, they aim at contributing to a deeper understanding of themand at developing typologies. In so doing, comparisons can offer new perspectives on a research field. One example is the analysis of gender-specific everyday life practices under German occupation during the Second World War indifferent countries; a topic that has long been researched from a mere national
perspective. The comparative analysis in the select countries shows that despite diverging [Nazi] occupation policies in both countries, the occupationalsituation had similar effects on the gender-specific male everyday practices
and male identities. Consequently, this comparison leads to a deeper understanding of the so-called ’crisis of masculinity’, which is often associated with
the Second World War but seldom analyzed in detail. (Email correspondence)

1

Inspired by Farrer, James / Liu-Farrer, Gracia (2021): ‘How to present findings:
Presenting and publishing’. In: Kottmann, Nora / Reiher, Cornelia (eds.): Studying
Japan. Handbook of Research Designs, Fieldwork and Methods. Nomos: Baden-Baden.

22

A ‘Conversation’ on Comparisons

Julia Trinkert, in contrast, focuses on ‘comparisons based on perception’.
She explains:
Since most art works from the medieval era are neither signed nor assignable
to a specific author through written sources, one can usually not speak of’artists’. In this context, stylistic comparisons between art works often serveas the basis for understanding their genesis. Yet, the method of style criticism,
which has a long tradition dating back to the 19th century, often leads to very
subjective and constantly criticized assessments. Therefore, when applying
this type of comparison based on perception, I argue that it is imperative tobear in mind the subsequent steps (1) connoisseurship and (2) interpretation,
which build upon each other. Far too often, artistic, technical and stylisticfeatures of individual objects are exaggerated to fit the artwork into a pleasing
interpretation scheme. To conclude: comparisons based on perception are agreat method of art history, but they have to be carried out in awareness of theshallows of the steps ’connoisseurship’ and ’interpretation’. (Email correspondence)
The above ‘conversation’ highlights three points. Firstly, it shows that‘Comparing Comparisons’ enhances our understanding of comparisonsand helps us to ‘study comparisons’: different perspectives on comparisons, divergent understandings of ‘comparing’ and a variety of dimensions along which to compare become apparent. Secondly, it highlights
the general relevance of ‘comparisons’ in such a wide understanding:
When done well and when choosing a suitable research design, comparing (whether implicitly or explicitly) can lead to new perspectives
and findings on an empirical, a methodological, a hermeneutic and/ora theoretical level. Finally, (and perhaps most importantly) comparing
can lead to and stimulate inter- and/or multidisciplinary discussions
and collaborations – both being key criteria for dynamic and relatable
research!

REFERENCES
Gaitanidis, I. (2017) Critique of/in Japanese Studies: An introduction to
the special issue. New Ideas in East Asian Studies (Special Edition), 1–7.
Kottmann, N. and Reiher, C. (eds.) (2021) Studying Japan. Handbook of research designs, fieldwork and methods. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Nakano, L. (2016) Single women and the transition to marriage in Hong
Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. Asian Journal of Social Science, 44: 363–390.
23

Nora Kottmann

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nora Kottmann is Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) Tokyo. Her research mainly focuses on issues related togender, intimacy, (im)mobility, (not)belonging and methods in Area
Studies.

Citation: Nora Kottmann, “A ‘Conversation’ on Comparisons Between JapaneseStudies, Contemporary History and Medieval Art History” in: TRAFO – Blog
for Transregional Research, 23.07.62020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/24501.

24

Comparative research in/of Southeast Asia

COMPARATIVE RESEARCH IN/OF SOUTHEAST ASIA
By Shaun LIN

As a geographer, comparative research is central to my training. In particular analyzing the similarities and differences in spatial transformations (both visible and structural) in two or more places. Spatial transformations influenced by the same factor(s) may result in highly diverse outcomes. Whilst similarities are easier to be identified and made sense of,uncovering the differences in various places are more challenging andrequire detailed locality studies. As such, Evans’ (2002: 161) argumentthat comparative research should be encouraged to chart “thematic issues, ‘deep analogies’, and contextual meanings” is helpful to understand
why and how such differences in spatial transformations, specifically interms of their different intensities and natures arise, change, or persist in
various places.
Comparative research is rewarding in Southeast Asia as a region
shaped geopolitically by colonial powers, the Cold War, and now to alarge extent, Chinese interests and responses to them, where it has resulted in intriguing patterns across the region as changes unfold in various
permutations and responses to these changes vary tremendously. I would
like to echo what van Schenedel (2002) pointed out in his call to “pay close
attention to the academic politics of scale that create and sustain areastudies” and place it in the context of comparative research. Elsewhere,
Sidaway (2013: 992) states that “it has been more common to compare andcontrast the geopolitics and development of East and Southeast Asiathan, for example, those of Zomia [a term used to refer to marginal highland areas in Asia] and the Indian Ocean”. Hence, the question of what tocompare exactly and why select or to some extent favour certain issues tocompare merits careful reflections.
I refer to one example in mainland Southeast Asia to (re)examine anissue that we could “favour” and “promote” for further comparison. In
recent years, the worsening environmental problems of the Mekong River
in mainland Southeast Asia, particularly its prolonged droughts and China limiting the water flow in the upper portions of the river have led tosome discussion in op-eds (for example, Kausikan, 2020) arguing that thisissue should be seen as significant as the regional issue of the South China
Sea between Southeast Asia and China. Whilst the South China Sea disputes draw in some of the maritime/island Southeast Asia states such as25

Shaun Lin

Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines (along with substantial
international maritime transport taking place in this body of maritime
space) to justify a supposedly “bigger” significance in terms of geography, it is argued that the Mekong issue is of a rapidly growing worry
implicating a water crisis that affects millions and should be viewed andregarded as an international concern (ibid). Comparing in this sense is
fruitful as changing circumstances on the ground should encourage us torelook at certain places and cast new lens on them as we re-evaluate thesituation. After all, the situation of the Mekong Southeast Asian riparianstates also relates to a common actor in China as seen in the South China
Sea, but it demands a more nuanced understanding of the regional andinternational politics surrounding it considering it is transboundary water management and water and food security and not sovereignty andfishing rights matters (South China Sea). As Sidaway (2013, 996) noted: “itis imperative, however, to supplement historic and history with geographic and geographical, signifying spatial comparison, perspective,
and position”. In this light, the Mekong River deserves more critical attention as its problems escalate spatially, including manners that the riverwas, for some years, considered for the wider Belt and Road Initiative andpart of the Lancang Mekong Cooperation plans of riverine transport aspirations at the expense of local environmental degradation (Lin andGrundy-Warr, 2020). On a wider perspective in area studies, one could
also alternatively view the historic and contemporary region names ofIndochina and mainland Southeast Asia more aptly as Mekong Southeast
Asia as the river winds through all five countries of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam (in running order).
Whilst I may think it impossible to achieve a unified or agreed approach to comparative research in geography, let alone the wider humanities and social sciences, it is crucial to sustain the aspiration for doingcomparative research.

REFERENCES
Evans, G. (2002) Between the global and the local there are regions, culture areas, and national states: A review article. Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies, 33(1): 147–162.
Kausikan, B. (2020) Why Asean should treat the Mekong like the South
China Sea. South China Morning Post (17 July). https://www.scmp.com/
week-asia/opinion/article/3093546/why-asean-should-treat-mekongsouth-china-sea (last accessed 19 September 2020)26

Comparative research in/of Southeast Asia

Lin, S. and Grundy-Warr, C. (2020) Navigating Sino-Thai ‘rocky’ bilateral
ties: The geopolitics of riverine trade in the Greater Mekong Subregion.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(5): 826–833.
Sidaway, J. D. (2013) Geography, globalization, and the problematic ofarea studies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(4):984–1002.
Van Schendel, W. (2002) Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: Jumping scale in Southeast Asia. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, 20(6): 647–668.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shaun Lin is a Max Weber-NUS Research Fellow at the Department ofGeography, National University of Singapore, and a member of the Max
Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures. His research interests include border studies, political geography, and environmental and resource politics.

Citation: Shaun Lin, Comparative research in/of Southeast Asia, in: TRAFO –Blog for Transregional Research, 28.09.2020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/24996.

27

The Comparative Society

THE COMPARATIVE SOCIETY
By Felix MALLIN

Comparison – or the mental faculty of distinction – is one of the mostfundamental ingredients of autonomous life. It aids us in the quotidian
tasks of decoding language, emotions, or smells, as well as in making
sense of the society and world around us. Similarly, for any form of social
scientific inquiry, comparison stands as an irreplaceable methodologicalprinciple. Indeed, to state the importance of comparison seems almost
trivial.
Yet not all comparison is necessarily meaningful. The value of comparison is determined by the logical framework and premises applied in thedevelopment of distinct categories. Where categories are weakly conceived, comparisons may generate little more than tautologies and truisms.
Even if they were carefully developed at some point and allowed for illuminating insights, the same categories may no longer be applicable in another time or a different space. To avoid such trappings, we need to ruthlessly and repeatedly critique the premises for each comparative scheme,
be they our abstractions of the nation-state, the global financial system or
local cultures of exchange. Beyond doubt, this process is time-consuming,
never follows a generalisable template, and sometimes requires a high degree of willingness to overthrow once dearly held assumptions.

COMPARISONS ARE MORE THAN ACADEMIC THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
In our personal lives, the effects of academic comparison are most felt
when they serve political decisions. Once translated from the realm ofideas into policy, legislation, and economic programmes, the political execution of ill-conceived comparative logics is bound to produce damaging implications for society. A case in point is the “quantitative revolution” that took hold of various social science disciplines in the 1960s andhas been reanimated in the advent of “big data”. The excessive focus on
quantifying all aspects of social life posited that one could make the human experience legible by comparing large aggregate datasets.
The outcome was an expansion of indicator-driven politics (i. e. evidence-based policymaking), where far-reaching political decisions began
to hinge on indices, some of the most well-known being the gross-domes29

Felix Mallin

tic product (GDP), human development index (HDI) and Gini coefficient.
Since their inception earlier in the twentieth century, countries and theircitizens have been placed on global scales of rich to poor, developed to
undeveloped, educated to uneducated, with little heed to other forms ofgeographical or cultural differentiation. Sweeping “development”
schemes were deployed on the basis of these indices and continue to doso up to the present day. Even societal well-being was henceforth presented to us as points or vectors on a graph.
Almost ironically, the impetus of quantitative comparison has made its
way back to regulate the professional freedom of academics, in large partcommanded by the competitive logics of our economic system. In a world
where metrics are constantly created and easily available, it is not uncommon to find intellectual pursuits increasingly governed by considerationsof citation metrics, successful funding rates, and university league tables.
The long trend of quantifying all facets of reality has not gone unchallenged. As a response to such abstractions of the qualities of time, space,and society to numbers, scepticism about quantitative predominancegrew in disciplines such as geography, in the form of a revival in humanist thought and qualitative reasoning. Many scholars began to reject
quantitative comparisons for the ways in which they overrode concrete
lived experience. Instead, they sought refuge in philosophies that placed
primary importance on individuals’ narratives. Some opined that the
only tool to understand reality (if there existed one) was to juxtapose themosaic of different perspectives against each other. Comparison, in theseviews, was essential because there is no universal, only relative or situated, truth. The corresponding rejection of universality meant that moral
principles could no longer be attributed to an inherent human nature.
This mode of social scientific inquiry was thus neatly bound to the premise that societal phenomena could only be explained by their specific parochial contexts, rather than a common human experience, such as the
expansion of the capitalist market economy or relations of class struggle.
Yet, one need only look at the simultaneous emergence of mass protests
and civil unrest in many parts of the world during the past two years to
be reminded that universal experiences may still hold some weight in academic postulations.

WE OUGHT NOT TO COMPARE FOR COMPARISON’S SAKE
In this entry, I have briefly reflected on two polar ends of comparative
thinking: one, comparison as the extreme quantification of lived reality;
and the other, comparison as mere juxtaposition. In the former, the objec30

The Comparative Society

tive appearance of computed quantitative models run the risk of overwriting social reality. In the latter, one could polemically argue that little
is left for us to meaningfully compare in a world where every narrative isonly relative to any other. The recent vogue for and wide proliferation ofcomparative research across the social sciences and humanities holds
promise in bridging these intellectual divides. Ultimately, however, ouremphasis should be on constantly questioning the actual rationale forcomparison, each with its unique set of premises, lest we risk comparing
for comparison’s sake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Felix Mallin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political
Science, University of Copenhagen, and a former member of the Max
Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobility and New Infrastructures at the National University of Singapore. His research interests
include critical political economy and ocean politics.

Citation: Felix Mallin, “The Comparative Society” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 17.12.2020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/26007.

31

From Implicit Towards Explicit Comparative Research

FROM IMPLICIT TOWARDS EXPLICIT COMPARATIVERESEARCH
By Hendrik MEYER-OHLE

When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s, majoring at a German
University in Japanese Studies (contemporary Japanese society, politics
and business) and business administration, there was broad consensus
among scholars of Japanese Studies not to engage in explicit country comparisons but instead to concentrate on analyzing Japan in its own institutional context and complexities. Depending on the research topic, this required knowledge of the relevant discipline and its methods combinedwith openness towards other disciplines. Additionally, good knowledgeof Japanese was expected, to be able to capture the empirics and to understand wider discourses among policy makers, in society, the media oramong Japanese academics. Achieving this level of understanding waschallenging. Detailed country studies were welcome given a perceived
need to learn more about Japan in the context of its increasing economic
importance. Research could therefore be straightforwardly justified byreference to the need to better understand Japan or the need to rectify
what had been wrongly assumed until then. Often, disciplinary treatments of Japan felt somewhat crude, especially in business studies where
Japan was openly welcomed as the grand other, fundamentally different
from the West and with these differences, in and outside of Japan, often
rather vaguely attributed to cultural than properly historically traceable
institutional contexts and developments.
I thus chose Japan’s retail sector as the topic of my doctoral thesis andexamined how a sector that had hitherto been perceived as backward,
merely a pool for unwanted labor or even an overprotected barrier to international trade, had in reality been a place for entrepreneurship, innovation and progress (Meyer-Ohle 2003). Of course, whilst seeking a morenuanced understanding of Japan, implicitly comparison was always present, asking how the situation in Japan fit with or differed from othercountries, whether Japan would develop in the same direction as elsewhere and how far theoretical frameworks developed elsewhere wererelevant to Japan. For my studies on Japanese retailing, this concernedmatters such as deregulation of planning regulations for the retail sector,
the changing influence of wholesalers and manufacturers on the retailsector and the prospects for foreign retailers. Yet, dealing with relatively
33Hendrik Meyer-Ohlelarge issues and seeking to explain the logic of the situation in Japan assuch, I did not see the need to set up a comprehensive comparative research framework and to conduct empirical research on the situation beyond Japan. Instead, I found it sufficient to implicitly frame my study anddiscuss my findings within patterns of development that previous research on the US and UK had identified, asking whether these patterns
had explanatory value for Japan, and if not, to come up with suggestions
for more suitable explanations.
As the international reputation of Japan as an economic success faded
somewhat after the 1990s research on Japan was less able to find receptive
audiences. At the same time, research on Japan generally moved towards
more detailed questions. In these contexts, I see the need and opportunities for more detailed explicit comparative research.
First, from an educational perspective, teaching in a Department of Japanese Studies in Singapore, yet still largely having to rely on texts that
more or less openly assume an underlying comparison between Japanand the West, I would welcome more comparative work across Japan andother Asian countries. Trying to learn about Japan, but as prerequisite
having to decipher the implied assumptions of authors about the situation in the US or other Western countries, is not only demanding for mySingapore-based students but also does not do proper justice to the rapid
economic development elsewhere in Asia; a comparison with these countries now possibly leading to more relevant frames of reference.
Second, research on business in Japan has advanced to increasingly
specific questions and also my own research has increasingly moved into
directions where it has become difficult to make clear assumptions about
the situation outside of Japan, this making it difficult to frame, evaluate
and communicate comparative findings. For example, I have found thatwhen compared to the development of retail formats such as department
stores and supermarkets the study of the development patterns of shopping malls is far less advanced. Yet, the shopping mall has become thedominating modern consumption format in many non-western countries
and here the existing predominant discourse that critically discusses
shopping malls as places of exclusion and control seems to be far lessrelevant (Salcedo 2003). Yet, at the time when I was interested in this topic, alternative points of reference were still missing and this resulted in
my only explicitly comparative study so far (Meyer-Ohle, 2008). Researchon human resource management has largely focused on clear differences
between Japan’s internal and Anglo-Saxon external labor markets, taking
the Anglo-Saxon system largely for granted and then asking for Japanquestions such as whether Japan’s employment system would converge
towards this model or continue to show distinct features. This framing
34

From Implicit Towards Explicit Comparative Research

has continuously proven itself robust enough to accommodate the discussion of new developments. For example, we have discussed the recent
tendency of Japanese companies to recruit graduates fresh out of universities outside of Japan into careers in corporate headquarters in Japan.
Applying the framework of internal vs. external labor markets allowed us
to focus empirical research solely on Japan, without having to resort tocomparative empirical research of recruitment practices outside of Japan(Conrad and Meyer-Ohle, 2019). Yet, while conducting this research, we
found that we lacked an understanding of the workings of the humanresource departments of Japanese companies and this led us to an explorative interview study on this topic. The results are challenging to interpret. For example, we found that there is intensive communication between HR managers of different and often competing companies in Japanin a situation where companies struggle to adjust their human resource
strategies. We think that this finding reflects the wider logic of Japan’sbusiness system. Nonetheless, it is difficult to judge the significance of thefindings without detailed information on the situation in other countries.
The concrete workings of HR departments and especially questions oforganizational learning in HR are an understudied field and the discussion on professionalism in HR management is generally confused by normative undertones. Thus, driving research towards more detailed questions leads to the need for more and “equal-level” comparisons. With thiscome questions about the scale and scope of comparison. Admittedly,
personally being deeply socialized and invested in area studies, comparison also comes with concerns with regards to establishing equivalence indata collection, understanding and analysis in terms of data availability
and linguistic abilities.

REFERENCES
Conrad, H. and Meyer-Ohle, H. (2019) Overcoming the ethnocentric
firm? – foreign fresh university graduate employment in Japan as a
new international human resource development method. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 30(17): 2525–2543.
Meyer-Ohle, H. (2003) Innovation and dynamics in Japanese retailing – Fromtechniques to formats to systems. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Meyer-Ohle, H. (2008) Two Asian malls: urban shopping centre development in Singapore and Japan. Asia Pacific Business Review, 15(1): 123–135.
Salcedo, R. (2003) When the global meets the local at the mall. American
Behavioral Scientist 46(8): 1084–1103.
35

Hendrik Meyer-Ohle

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hendrik Meyer-Ohle is an Associate Professor at the Department of Japanese Studies at NUS Singapore. His fields of research include Japanese
Political Economy, Marketing and Consumer Culture in Japan and theInternationalization of Human Resources in Japanese Companies.

Citation: Hendrik Meyer-Ohle, “From Implicit Towards Explicit Comparative
Research” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 08.04.2021, https://
trafo.hypotheses.org/27757.

36

Studying Comparisons

STUDYING COMPARISONS
By Simon ROWEDDER

If we remember that those we study are also studying us as well as themselves, and that they are all engaged in the human exercise of understanding
the play of cultural difference and similarity, we may be able to contribute to
making comparison the fruitful, congenial, and open-ended conversation thatthe discipline’s ethical as well as intellectual commitments demand.
(Herzfeld, 2001, pp. 272–273)

THE SCHOLARLY PRIVILEGE OF COMPARISON AND REPRESENTATION
Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld importantly foregrounds the role ofethnographic interlocutors in contributing to highly reflective comparative research. However, as it becomes apparent throughout his article, hiscall for a “reflexive comparativism” is largely confined to the scholar’s(i. e. mostly his) reflection on his own personal background and academic
trajectory. In the end, interlocutors are left with their passive role to merely react to theories prominently voiced by the respective scholar. Thus,
deploying “an unself-conscious standardization of vocabulary” (Anderson, 1998, p. 33), it is the scholars who are privileged to translate empiricalobservations into the self-referential language of their and their readers’epistemological familiarity.
In area studies, or in Southeast Asian Studies in which I have been institutionally trained and am currently conducting research and teaching, thestandardized vocabulary for possible comparison largely relies on spatialconstructs across local, national and regional scales within a certain area.
Scholarly spatial constructions are thus almost the only dimension along
which we compare and make sense of our research subjects. Academic—not necessarily the interlocutors’—understandings of space, area or region determine research questions and directions. The unquestioned areal
reliance is also visible in the current, seemingly innovative, push for interarea or comparative area studies. Attempts to transgress, or scale up, arbitrarily area or nation-state boundaries across China, South Asia and Southeast Asia through novel spatial imaginations such as “Zomia” (van Schendel, 2002) or the “Southeast Asian Massif” (Michaud, 2000) again arise fromdeep-rooted scholarly intuition of primarily spatial comparison. In turn,37

Simon Rowedderthese yield specific research directions and agendas which all powerfully
claim to explain or to make sense of living conditions and practices throughrespective external scalar and spatial interventions. It remains the privilegeof the scholar to re-invent and re-define areas and regions—to use a “newgrammar of representation” (Anderson, 1998, p. 34)—in order to draw, or
imagine, comparisons which are meaningful, at least to themselves. In thissense, comparative research impulses mainly result from, and respond to,scholarly representation, while running the risk of ignoring empirical variations and deviations.

TOWARDS AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMPARISON
Therefore, we should pay more serious attention to the voices of the people
we study. Instead of conveniently bringing their voices into dialogue
with—or, strictly speaking, attaching them to the monologue of—academic
comparative frameworks and representations, we should strive for an ethnography of comparison, crafted by our interlocutors in their own terms.
Before pondering on how to locate ethnographic observation within suitable and intuitive comparative coordinate systems, we should carefully observe how, and whether at all, the people themselves, who we claim to
study, are comparing. Taking vernacular discourses and practices of comparison seriously as an empirically central research object, and not merely
as necessary, and often institutionally demanded, methodology, mightyield “counter-intuitive” insights necessary for genuinely fresh ways of understanding, and eventually critically scrutinizing and theorizing, areal
constructs such as Southeast Asia “inside out”. As Benedict Anderson(2016, p. 126) argues, “the most instructive comparisons […] are those thatsurprise.” We should be open to these surprises, and embrace the fact thatthese do not necessarily result from our scholarly genius alone. While there
is certainly no methodological manual available, we can rely on openmindedness, cognitive and interpretive flexibility and creativity to conduct
meaningfully comparative ethnography. Being open enough to better integrate—and not subordinate—the comparative frames of our ethnographic
interlocutors, we might be indeed able to realize Herzfeld’s call to make“comparison the fruitful, congenial, and open-ended conversation.”
This heightened ethnographic sensitivity would force us to go beyond
treating our empirical cases merely as ornamentation of our well-established grand, “serialized” (cf. Anderson, 1998) narratives. Before we can“compare comparisons”, we need to “study comparisons” – not only
within scholarly spheres, but even more so in the “vernacular realm”
where ethnography ultimately takes place.
38

Studying Comparisons

REFERENCES
Anderson, B. (1998) The spectre of comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia,and the world. New York: Verso.
Anderson, B. (2016) A life beyond boundaries: A memoir. London: Verso.
Herzfeld, M. (2001) Performing comparisons: Ethnography, globetrotting, and the spaces of social knowledge. Journal of Anthropological Research, 57(3), 259–276.
Michaud, Jean (ed.) (2000) Turbulent times and enduring peoples: Mountainminorities in the South-East Asian massif. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon
Press.
Van Schendel, W. (2002) Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in Southeast Asia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20: 647–668.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simon Rowedder is a Research Fellow at the Department of Southeast
Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS) and a member ofthe Max Weber Foundation Research Group on Borders, Mobility and
New Infrastructures. His research interests include economic anthropology, development studies, ethnicity, and mobility in Sino-Southeast Asianborderlands, particularly focusing on Laos.

Citation: Simon Rowedder, “Studying Comparisons” in: TRAFO – Blog forTransregional Research, 30.06.62020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/24296

39

Who compares? The commodification and decolonization of comparison

WHO COMPARES? THE COMMODIFICATION AND
DECOLONIZATION OF COMPARISON

By James D. SIDAWAY and Franz WALDENBERGER

German gate – part of the former French fortress in the city of Landau, constructed between 1688 and 1691 under the guidance of
Vauban, military engineer of Louis XIV | Picture: F. Waldenberger.

KNOWING FROM COMPARINGThe German gate of the fortress in the city of Landau, the hometown of
one of the authors of this blog entry, shows the head of Louis XIV ofFrance depicted as the sun with the Latin inscription “nec pluribus impar”. The phrase is usually translated as “not unequal/inferior to many”.
School kids in Landau and visiting tourists were long told that this meant
there was nothing or nobody to compare the Sun King with. But there
seems to be no straightforward interpretation and some obviously frustrated scholars concluded that the words are perplexing or without clear
meaning. So, the three words seem to either negate the possibility of interpersonal comparison, or at the semantic level to not be comparable to any
meaningful statement. However, no matter what conclusion one prefers,
it can only be reached by trying to compare. The incomparable presupposes comparability. You cannot not compare.
The seven contributions to our blog offer variations of this theme as theauthors reflect on and draw examples from their respective areas of specialization – anthropology, ethnography, Japanese studies, political geog41

James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger

raphy, economics, cross-cultural studies, business and management research. They highlight some pitfalls of comparisons – choosing wrong
measures, imposing one-sided, culturally predefined concepts andframes and/or neglecting (local) contextual factors. But they also emphasize the invaluable benefits such as gaining insights via finding common
patterns or by being able to make sense of observed differences. One general conclusion from comparing the various scholarly accounts of comparative research would be: You can do it wrong or be seduced by too
easy comparisons, but you cannot easily do without some.
The general conclusion holds irrespective of what methods or methodologies are applied. We sometimes explicitly emphasize comparisons
when we conduct cross-cultural studies, comparative institutional analysis or comparative linguistics. But any kind of inquiry implies comparisons. It means comparing the newly discovered, observed, heard or readwith the already known. When the “new data” fit our existing knowledge, they are understood and recognized. If we need to adjust or revise
what we had known so far, we learn. If no integration is possible, we will
either continue our research hoping that at some stage we will understand or learn, or we decide to discard the new data as “irrelevant” orexceptional, as something we cannot and perhaps do not need to understand. In some sciences, it may be flagged as an exception, meriting further investigation or as an example of non-replication. There are growing
questions in social and physical sciences about why many studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce – and why these are more
often cited (Serra-Garcia and Gneezy, 2021).

THE INSEPARABILITY OF THE SUBJECT AND THE OBJECT OF COMPARISONS
Either way, in humanities and social sciences, comparisons enable us todiscern commonalities and differences, but they do not always instruct us
about what should be considered as common or different. This needs tobe decided, otherwise we will not know what to compare and how. It is
shaped by who we are, our training, our interests, our expectations andaims, our capabilities and the cultures of the institutions and fields wework in and how our work is appraised. These reflect wider structures.
Hence, when asking what is compared, questions of by and for whom
also loom large. The geographer David Harvey (1974, 23) once argued
that “The debate over relevance in geography was not really about relevance (whoever heard of irrelevant human activity?), but about whom
our research was relevant to [and its effects]”. In similar context, we needto ask who compares, what, how, where and with what effects?
42

Who compares? The commodification and decolonization of comparison

NEW TRENDS – RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIESCommodification: Whereas the seven contributions to the blog workthrough a range of disciplinary vantage points, we want to close withreflections on the social relations and history of comparison. In regardof the former, state agencies and scholars are often the focus of
discussions about who is assembling data, performing surveillance andcomparing who with what. But much comparison – and the data on
which it rests – are in corporate hands. The development of “big data”
and AI are multiplying this. The scale and commodification of comparisons and their uses – refracted back into public discourse throughsocial media and patterns of movement and consumption yields what
Shoshana Zuboff (2018) termed Surveillance Capitalism. It raises a
series of questions about what kind of comparisons are being made,who owns the data on which they are established and to what uses iscomparison being put?
Decolonialization: The rise of the West and the imperial cultures that
accompanied it tended to make the West the object against which the rest
were compared. This became entangled in discourses of “religion”, “civilization” and “race”, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is part of what Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (2018)
call the “the colonial matrix of power”. Critical work on orientalism andunder the banners of postcolonial and decolonial theory contains a
wealth of alternatives. They include what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000)
termed Provincializing Europe, so that narratives of the non-Western andthe precapitalist are no longer simply reduced to what Kevin B. Anderson(2016, vii) terms “a mere adjunct” to the theorization of Western capitalist
societies.
To decolonize comparison entails a series of struggles, possibilities andmoves. The first is to historicize comparison, excavating its genealogies.
When and how did categories, oppositions and hierarchies used to establish the basis for and then stage comparisons emerge? How do these relate to imperial power? Who benefits? This vital historicization is in tandem with a second step, asking what alternative traditions exist, who formulates them, where and why? In turn, what are the implications of starting with and elaborating alternatives? The question of why, what andhow to compare is thereby supplemented with ones asking on whoseterms is comparison made and with what consequences? Whilst there aremany pathways for such moves (see for example, Steinmetz, 2006 on Decolonizing German theory), writing, as the two of us are, between Singapore and Tokyo, we will close with a short quote that explores the path of
Asia as Method (Chen, 2010, 212):
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James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger

The potential of Asia as method is this: using the idea of Asia as an imaginaryanchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s point of reference…. On this basis the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives. This method of engagement, I believe, has the potential to advance a
different understanding of world history.

REFERENCES
Anderson, K. B. (2010) Marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity andnon-western societies. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ
Chen, K.-H. (2010) Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press: Durham NC.
Harvey, D. (1974) What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 63: 18–24
Mignolo, W. D. and Walsh, C. E. (2018) On decoloniality concepts, analytics,
praxis. Duke University Press, Durham NC
Serra-Garcia, M. and Gneezy, U. (2021) Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones. Science Advances. 7, eabd1705 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd1705
Steinmetz, G. (2006) Decolonizing German theory: an introduction. Postcolonial Studies, 9(1): 3–13.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human
Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.

Citation: James D. Sidaway, Franz Waldenberger, “Who compares? The commodification and decolonization of comparison” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 31.05.2021, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/28979

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