Is it still important to compare? This seems an obvious question to pose to ARC both in individual projects and relations across projects. If so, what to compare and how? If comparison used to be for the purpose of classifying general kinds, is that still the purpose?
For Radcliffe-Brown, and I’m thinking of his “A Natural Science of Society”, the aim of anthropology is classification contributing to generalized knowledge of kinds of (social) structure. Significance under this method is generated by relations between, what he terms, ‘mathematical’ properties of a class which is made up of the “actual interconnections of spatio-temporal elements” in social systems. The classic example is taking a set of actual kinship systems and then abstracting out such that one has a class of mathematical relation which distill the essence of kinship (I believe Josh has actually seen the equation whilst a student at Oxford).
Now, this impetus to compare as a device for getting at significance is still with us. In many of the dyads, triads and labs in the constellation of ARC, the use of charts as devices for seeing relations between things has been very useful. But is this really comparison? If the purpose behind the British social anthropological comparison of the 40s and 50s (and later I imagine) was to find regularity across diverse phenomena, these phenomena were fairly easy to isolate; nation, society, economy (whether global, or kula ring), tribe.
One lesson from making charts seems to be the obvious; today, people are putting in a lot of analytic labour in just figuring out what the object of inquiry is, in composing the object of inquiry. But then a question becomes; how to relate the object which was dependent on the act of object formation to something else. Is it necessary to do so in order to get at significance? Is this done through comparison? Or will significance be evident from the elements which were assembled?