Situated Comparison: A Methodological Response to an Epistemological Dilemma

Ethnographic knowledge production exists in implicit tension with the tenets of a critical disciplinary politics normalized in the reflexive critiques of the late 20th century. Anthropologists have responded with numerous theoretical ‘turns,’ which in different ways attempt to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of critical attention to histories of power and inequality, with rich and nuanced accounts of cultural worlds and peoples’ agentive roles in them. This article proposes Situated Comparison as one possible methodological approach to this epistemological dilemma. We propose explicit attention to multiple local understandings of categorical social differentiation, which we compare on a plane of epistemic equality with academic theories of those same boundaries. Examples from two disparate fieldwork contexts—classed ideas of ethical sociality in the rural American South; and guanxi and social intimacy in Shanghai, China—demonstrate the potential of this methodology for reflexive engagement with ideas of personhood and self across lines of difference.