Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2019
Comparison has been at the heart of a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects in Europe and the United States, especially since the nineteenth century: anthropology, comparative anatomy, comparative linguistics, comparative literature, comparative politics, comparative religion, and so on Though comparative projects are not restricted to the West or to the modern period, they have functioned, there and elsewhere, in historically and culturally specific ways. In the nineteenth-century West, comparison was often at the heart of efforts to construct or to prop up hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class; to legitimate missionary outreach and colonial government; or to contain the diversity of human histories, cultures, technologies, and forms of knowledge in neat taxonomies and continuous linear narratives.In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, comparison has at times been made to do very different kinds of work: to destabilize hierarchies, to trouble familiar assumptions about identity and difference, to disrupt binary oppositions, or to establish critical distance.
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