Guide to Comparative Anthropology

Begin with a single comparative spine and build outward. The most reliable entry point is Ember, Ember, and Peregrine, Anthropology, using the chapters on cross-cultural comparison, social organization, subsistence, kinship, and political systems as your baseline map of how cases are made commensurable. Read these chapters in order; they establish the categories through which comparison is possible without implying that those categories are universal truths.

Alongside this, work steadily through Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology, not for its historical detail but for how it shows comparison being used differently by different schools of thought. Read one Barnard chapter for every two or three Ember chapters. This keeps the act of comparison anchored in theory rather than drifting into informal analogy.

To see comparison in practice rather than abstraction, add a rotating sequence of ethnographies. Use Kottak, Mirror for Humanity as a curated source of short case studies and excerpts; after each major topic in Ember (for example, kinship or subsistence), read two or three contrasting cases from Kottak. The aim is to see how the same analytical category behaves across different societies.

As a digital backbone, use eHRAF World Cultures (available in many public and university libraries) as your comparative database. You will not read it continuously; you will consult it whenever you need to check how a particular institution or practice appears across many societies. This prevents your comparisons from being based only on a handful of familiar cases.

How to work with the material

You are not reading to absorb stories but to construct comparison tables in your own head and notes. For every major concept—marriage, subsistence, leadership, ritual—create a running document with three columns: the analytical category, how it appears in Case A, and how it appears in Case B or C. Use your textbook and ethnographic excerpts to fill these in. The purpose is not to decide which case is “typical” but to make variation visible within a shared frame.

When you encounter an ethnographic example, always ask two questions in writing: what is being treated as comparable here, and what is being ignored to make that comparison possible? This habit trains you to see comparison as a constructed analytical act, not as a natural one.

Every few weeks, write a short synthetic note of two or three pages in which you take one category—say, kinship or political authority—and compare at least three societies using your accumulated notes. Do not summarize each society separately; force yourself to organize the writing by analytical dimension. This is where comparative reasoning actually forms.

Managing difficulty

The hardest part of comparative anthropology is not the material but the abstraction. The learner must constantly move between concrete cases and general categories without letting either collapse into the other. When this becomes confusing, return to Ember for definitional clarity and to Barnard for theoretical context. If a category feels too vague, check how eHRAF codes it; if it feels too rigid, read another ethnographic case that stretches it.

Another common difficulty is false equivalence: noticing superficial similarity and treating it as deep sameness. The antidote is slow reading. When two practices look alike, trace their social context—who performs them, under what constraints, and with what consequences—before allowing yourself to compare them.

If a particular ethnography becomes dense, do not abandon it. Skim once for structure, then reread only the sections relevant to your current comparative theme. Comparative work does not require total mastery of every case, only disciplined extraction of analytically relevant features.

Supporting resources

Ember, Ember, and Peregrine, Anthropology serves as the main comparative framework. It provides standardized analytical categories that make cross-societal comparison possible without pretending they are natural kinds.

Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology anchors comparison in intellectual history, showing why different comparative logics exist and how they shape interpretation.

Kottak, Mirror for Humanity offers accessible, well-curated ethnographic examples that are explicitly chosen to illustrate variation across societies.

eHRAF World Cultures is the most systematic open-ended comparative database in anthropology, allowing you to move beyond textbook examples and test how widespread or rare a pattern actually is.