The Value of Comparison (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures) - Softcover

Van Der Veer, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822361582 ISBN 13: 9780822361589

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.

About this title

About the Author

Peter van der Veer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen, Germany and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. He is the author of several books, including The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India.

Review

"Passionately defending a critically informed anthropological method, Peter van der Veer takes on big names and massively funded projects in the social sciences—and he does not suffer fools gladly. He exposes the 'emperor's clothes,' critically revealing the persistence of unexamined Western cultural presuppositions while challenging the tendency toward generalization and cultural essentialism in the social sciences and the political uses of notions of civilization and civility to exclude unwanted others." (Kenneth Dean, coauthor of Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain)

"Without question, The Value of Comparison will be a widely read book among those in search of a framework for more trenchantly confronting a world and a public discourse increasingly dominated by simplistic, positivistic, and poorly informed ideas about the nature of society. Peter van der Veer is especially effective in debunking the implicit binary assumption that treats an undifferentiated West as 'rational' and an equally undifferentiated 'Rest' as 'religious.' What van der Veer has to say is of paramount importance." (Michael Herzfeld, author of Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0822361582
• ISBN 13: 9780822361589
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208