Table Of ContentTHE VALUE
OF COMPARISON
THE LEWIS HENRY MORGAN LECTURES /
A SERIES EDITED BY ROBERT J. FOSTER AND DANIEL R. REICHMAN
PETER VAN DER
VEER / THE VALUE
OF COMPARISON
With a Foreword by Thomas Gibson
Duke University Press Durham and London 2016
© 2016 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Trade Gothic and Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Veer, Peter van der, [date] author. | Gibson, Thomas, [date] writer of
foreword.
Title: The value of comparison / Peter van der Veer; with a foreword by
Thomas Gibson.
Other titles: Lewis Henry Morgan lectures.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Series: The Lewis Henry
Morgan lectures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2015043613
isbn 9780822361398 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822361589 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822374220 (e- book)
Subjects: lcsh: Anthropology— China— Comparative method. | Ethnology—
China— Comparative method. | Sociology— China— Comparative method. |
Anthropology— India—C omparative method. | Ethnology— India— Comparative
method. | Sociology— India— Comparative method.
Classification: lcc gn34.3.c58 v447 2016 | ddc 305.80095
lc rec ord available at http:// lccn . loc . gov / 2015043613
cover art: Wang Jinsong, One Hundred Signs of Demolition, 1900–1999 (detail).
Photographs. Courtesy of the artist.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Thomas Gibson / vii
Acknowl edgments / xi Introduction / 1
PART I. THE FRAGMENT AND THE WHOLE
1. The Comparative Advantage of Anthropology / 25
2. Market and Money: A Critique of
Rational Choice Theory / 48
PART II. CIVILIZATION AND COMPARISON
3. Keeping the Muslims Out: Concepts of Civilization, Civility,
and Civil Society in India, China, and Western Eu rope / 61
4. The Afterlife of Images / 80
PART III. COMPARING EXCLUSION
5. Lost in the Mountains: Notes on
Diversity in the Southeast Asian Mainland Massif / 107
6. Who Cares? Care Arrangements and
Sanitation for the Poor in India and Elsewhere / 130
A Short Conclusion / 147 Notes / 155 Bibliography / 171 Index / 183
This page intentionally left blank
FOREWORD
A founder of modern cultural anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan was one
of the city of Rochester’s most famous intellectual figures. He was also a
patron of the University of Rochester and left a substantial bequest to the
University for the founding of a women’s college. The lectures named in his
honor have now been presented annually for over fifty years and constitute
the longest running such series in North Amer i ca. Each lecture is intended
to result in the publication of a monograph that embodies some aspect of the
current state of anthropological thought.
This book is based on the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture that Professor
Peter van der Veer delivered at the University of Rochester on November 13,
2013. The lecture was followed by a daylong workshop in which members of
the Department of Anthropology and a group of invited guests discussed
the entire manuscript. We had to cast our net particularly wide in this case
because of the ambitious nature of the topic, the value of anthropological
comparison, and the wide range of ethnographic examples that were dis-
cussed. The formal discussants included Joanne Waghorne and Bethany
Lacina on South Asia; Magnus Fiskesjö and Thomas Gibson on Southeast
Asia; and Gareth Fisher and John Osburg on East Asia.
In this book, Professor van der Veer argues that many recent attempts at
comparison in anthropology have been based on a misplaced quest for gen-
erality. This quest may be based on pan- human psychic universals, whether
those that, like rational action theory, privilege the Mind, or those that, like
cognitive science, privilege the brain; on the mathematical manipulation of
sets of “big data” that ignore the relevant conceptual schemes that governed
the activities that generated the data in the first place; or on the uncritical
extension of Western cultural categories, such as “religion,” to social and
historical contexts to which they either do not apply or in which they pos-
sess very dif er ent relationships to other institutions such as the state or the
economy.
But while rejecting generalizing forms of comparison, Professor van
der Veer insists first that “ there is no escape from comparison when we
deal with ‘other socie ties’ . . . since we are always already translating into
Western languages what we find elsewhere.” Second, when we do encoun-
ter concepts in other socie ties that are similar to Western concepts, this is
often because they w ere spread by Western imperialism. But even in this
case, the concepts have acquired new meanings as local actors have rein-
terpreted them u nder dif er ent conditions. It is therefore pointless to try to
craft universal definitions of concepts like religion and to assume that we
are dealing with the same kind of practice in dif er ent situations, even when
the practices have the same name. Such practices do not refer to universal
attributes of human beings but to historical proc esses of universalization
and particularization that are subject to a balance of forces on a world scale.
In place of the generalism that strives to make statements that are valid
for whole socie ties, nations, or even civilizations, van der Veer advocates
the intensive study of fragments of social life like caste, race, or gift exchange.
The meaning of these fragments are determined in each case by their rela-
tionship to other fragments of social life with which they are intertwined in
par tic u lar times and places. As this sort of inductive comparison proceeds,
it will inevitably lead us to rethink the meaning of the concepts with which
we started, and to ask new questions about the way they function in our own
society.
The central part of the book consists in a series of comparative analyses
of the dif er ent places occupied by social fragments such as money, markets,
Muslim minorities, iconoclastic movements, mountain tribes, and public
sanitation in dif er ent parts of Eu rope, India, Southeast Asia, and China.
Professor van der Veer does not approach t hese regions as coherent “civili-
zations” defined by simple, unchanging essences. Each region is composed
of complex sets of traditions that are engaged in endless internal debates
with one another and are endlessly borrowing and translating concepts and
practices from other regions around the world.
Given Professor van der Veer’s insistence on the need to stay focused on
par tic u lar ethnographic examples, the best way to characterize his argument
viii / Foreword
as a w hole is to provide a brief sketch of the topics he takes on. In chapter 2,
he shows that the cap i tal ist financial markets of New York and Hong Kong
are as subject to as much “hysteria, panic, and mystery” as the gambling dens
of Las Vegas and Macao. In chapter 3, he shows that the Muslim has come
to be regarded as the quin tes sen tial stranger in China, India, and Eu rope,
but in very dif er ent ways and for very dif er ent reasons. In chapter 4, he
shows that the rise of nationalism in Eu rope, India, and China targeted
certain material symbols of the religious past for iconoclastic destruction.
But as long as the religious communities that created t hese structures in the
first place persisted, these movements inevitably failed to achieve the aim
of purifying the nation. In chapter 5, he shows that all attempts by authors
such as Leach, Friedman, and Scott to explain life in the mountains separat-
ing India from China in terms of simple structural models fail because they
do not take account of the complex and fragmentary nature of the actual
history of this region. In chapter 6, he compares the way middle- class atti-
tudes toward the descendants of slaves in the United States and of peasants
in China shifted in such a way that the state came to take responsibility for
the public hygiene of all citizens. By contrast, the per sis tence of hierarchi-
cal attitudes toward the descendants of “untouchable” bonded laborers in
India has prevented the state from instituting efective public hygiene mea-
sures in the slums that surround middle- class housing.
Professor van der Veer makes a sustained argument for tempering the
thirst for generality with the rigorous analy sis of par tic u lar ethnographic
situations, and for using t hose analyses to critique our own traditions of
thought for the errors of ethnocentrism and essentialism. This book thus
constitutes a spirited defense of the continuing relevance of the comparative
proj ect of anthropology for both the humanistic and the quantitative social
sciences. It also serves as a reminder of the ethical responsibility of all t hose
who study the human condition to subject their own categories and prac-
tices to continuous critique.
—thomas gibson
Editor (2007–2013),
Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series
Foreword / ix
