Sequential Comparisons and the Comparative Imagination
This chapter outlines three basic modes of comparison ethnographers wield: shadow comparisons to other cases that inform observations, internal comparisons among observations and other units of analysis within the case, and varieties of external comparison among different field sites. The authors then make two complementary arguments. First, the chapter widens ethnographers’ comparative imagination by arguing that ethnographers need to pay more careful attention to the interplay among different kinds of comparisons. And, second, the case is made that a preferred strategy for external comparison is sequential comparison, in which the ethnographer first abductively finds important puzzles in one field, and only then chooses a second field according to emerging theoretical themes.