Abstract
The Value of Comparison presents theoretically sumptuous fare, questioning and reframing oft-used notions of civilization, urbanization, and social cohesion/integration – notions uncritically applied to social problems, prospects, and paradoxes in non-Western societies. This book is a project to reinvigorate anthropology and historical sociology as well as preserve the usefulness and importance of rigorous qualitative methodology. The Value of Comparison questions modes of Western rationalization and universalization entrenched and enshrined within academic disciplines such as philosophy, economics, and sociology; Peter van der Veer does this by drawing from his expertise on issues of politics, religion, and economics in India, China, and other crucial geopolitical realms. He posits comparative methodology as a way to understand as well as raise vital questions about a rapidly changing world where so-called traditions and modernity coexist edgily, where borders are permeable and padlocked simultaneously, where global capitalism concurrently attempts to exploit and erase difference and democracies.
Van der Veer states: Comparison is, in my view, in the first place a question not of the right research design, the correct choice of cases to be compared (the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ to compare), although this is obviously important, but of an awareness of the conceptual difficulties in entering ‘other’ lifeworlds. That ‘otherness’ should not be exaggerated, since everyone is in some way interacting and communicating with everyone else. Moreover, anthropology is highly equipped to engage problems of translation and bridging different semantic universes. (p. 11)
The author dexterously handles semantics of fragment and wholeness, rationality and understandability, civil society and civility. He questions the anthropological logic of essentialization and holistic approaches, urging scholars and practitioners to ‘steer clear of a universalizing approach that first defines some kind of essence, like “ritual” or “prayer,” and then studies it comparatively across cultures’ (p. 26). He argues instead for a ‘fragmentary approach’ whereby one studies a specific fragment, a social event, a practice as significant but not essentially generalizable. One can move from a fragment to a larger insight by conceptual engagement and reflection, a move that he describes as ‘theory laden.’
Such a theory laden epistemic practice values critical ethnography over collecting survey data and prefers comparative cultural analysis/interpretation to coding. Van der Veer is critical of universal mathematical modeling and use of large data sets in economics and political science. He is not arguing against quantitative methods, but points out how they can arrive at simplistic universalization about people’s religious, political, and economic behaviors, and misinterpret and dehistoricize issues of social inequality and inclusion. He provides an example of weak causality established in the Pew Foundation’s recent report on immigration and religion that seems to conclude that Muslim immigrants are creating political/cultural tensions in the developed/secular regions they move and settle in. Such reports create discrete variables and categories, pay scant attention to sociohistorical backgrounds and political/economic origins of current processes and problems – and gloss over the difference between correlation and causation. Also, the notion of secularism is messy; much like the notion of religion/spirituality. For instance, the United States is understood as an exception to the rule of secularization because of the deeply religious nature of American society (which the current election season has shown to be politically significant, albeit often reduced to gesturing for popularity such as addressing the ‘war on Christmas’). There is a market for multiple faiths in the United States. Market theorists believe that Europe could be an exception to the secularization rule, too, because state religions create religious monopolies giving faith markets scant incentive to diversify and draw people. ‘One can learn from the debate between sociologists of religion that one should not strive for universal models but develop meaningful comparative analysis’ (p. 50).
Van der Veer’s scholarship on religious nationalism and networks bears testimony to the usefulness of this form of comparative analysis; his past work on Hindutva expertly traces the complex configurations of religious nationalism, symbolism, and political desires. He connects the riots at Ayodhya in 1992 to India’s histories of colonialism, iconoclasm, and stratification as well as sociocultural narratives of sacred and sacrilegious, purity and pollution, and shifting allegiances and allegories. It is a tale of reworked histories of conquest and contamination, sovereignty and ‘Hindu’ nation. His scholarship deftly captures the complexity of not just politics but of what he terms, ‘a syntagmatic chain of religious-secular-spiritual-magic . . . functioning as nodes within a shifting field of discourse and power’ (p. 81). In the process of arguing for a comparative methodology that unravels sociopolitical contradictions, van der Veer yet again explains the unifying myth of Hindu civilization used for political mobilization and ideological domination. A main aim is to keep the Muslims out, as foreigners and dangerous ‘others,’ even though state formation on what is now Indian territory was historically carried out by Muslim and other foreign invaders and outsiders including, of course, the British.
Likewise, Chinese state formation has followed an ideological logic of Confucianism as a political cosmology and civil religion. At present, communism has replaced Confucianism as the modern unifying ideology in China – where Muslims, a small minority, are also seen as a threat. Van der Veer compares the notion and recent histories of iconoclasm in China and India that cannot be captured by universal frameworks of religious and secular, sacred and profane, or modernity and tradition. We must understand processes of modernity as messy, dynamic, and deeply entrenched in volatile political economies and as consequences of short-term public memory and insistent statist propaganda.
The Chinese and Indian states cannot be compared on the basis of simplistic binaries such as democratic versus nondemocratic (e.g., Communist) or secular versus religious without considering specific forms of social stratifications and power arrangements, as well as trajectories of nationalisms and factionalisms. Comparison circumvents methodological nationalism and broad civilizational analysis. Communities blend into each other and borders are permeable and shifting while theories, frameworks, models, and categories strive to catch up. ‘Count, classify, culturalize and control are elements of the state’s ethnicity project, most pronounced in Communist China and Communist Vietnam and also present elsewhere’ (p. 120). This elsewhere is not just spatial but also temporal – reminding us of anthropology’s original imperial project of otherizing the primitive, the native, the tribal, and the savage. Van der Veer presents a clear critique of generalism, ethnocentrism, exoticism, and neoliberalism in the social sciences and varied evidentiary practices that study the ‘other.’ He upholds the intellectual potential of anthropological knowledge while shunning anthropologizing practices. Comparison often belongs to the latter tradition; however, that tradition employs empiricism in the service of the empire. The comparison that the author promotes and practices is ‘not a relatively simple juxtaposition and comparison of two or more different societies but a complex reflection on the network of concepts that underlie our study of society as well as the formation of those societies themselves. It is always a double act of reflection’ (p. 29).
The Value of Comparison is a methodological treatise that can be useful to sociologists, anthropologists, and indeed social scientists everywhere. In the process of demonstrating and operationalizing comparison, the in-depth, albeit brief, discussions on poverty, civility, and diversity in India, China, and the Southeast Asian Massif are interesting and important. Van der Veer does not merely expound on the value of comparison – he compares places, practices, and scholarship to illuminate societies as well as collective notions of civilization, belonging, and personhood. Many ideas in this book have parallels with postcolonial critique of Western hegemony and theories of hybridity, binary opposition, and subalternity. Van der Veer’s methodology is also reminiscent of feminist epistemology and feminist frameworks of situated knowledge and intersectionality – I wish such theoretical parallels could have been used, or at least cited in this work.
Claims such as ‘the anthropological lens enables a critique of universal modeling and is, as a consequence, outside the mainstream of the development of social sciences’ (p. 29), and ‘Anthropology’s staring point is to question the universality of what in modern society is taken to constitute the separate domains of the “economy,” of “politics,” of “law” and of “religion” ’ (p. 27), make one wonder about the checkered political history of anthropology. However, van der Veer’s project is not to tell the origin stories of anthropology, but look to the future where the comparative anthropological lens will focus on crucial sociocultural ‘fragments’ to dismantle the logic of Western modernity and rationality. This informative and theoretically sophisticated work will serve as an important reckoner to that end.