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23 1 From“CulturalTraits”to Global Processes MethodsforaCriticalComparativeEthnography In stark contrast to anthropology’s lone-wolf model of research and publication, we conducted the fieldwork for this project as a collaborative effort, sharing jointly developed research guides.1 We hoped that the comparative ethnographic research design would enable us (1) to distinguish between the features of each field site that had wider theoretical and public health significance and those that were particular to each setting, and (2) to theorize about how complex processes—social, economic, and discursive—operate across different social levels and in different cultural arenas. For example, as marriages around the world move toward a more companionate ideal and structure, and as urbanization and integration with national or global economies (e.g., through wage labor) increasingly characterize many settings in developing countries, much can be learned from comparing how these processes are unfolding across diverse cultural contexts. In particular, the multisited structure of the project has allowed us to generate understandings about companionate marriage, labor migration, men’s peer groups, and the social organization of infidelity that transcend the particularities of each case. At the same time, we had been trained to be wary—and even highly dubious— about the very possibility of carrying out comparative research. Whether our reservations had been informed by postmodernism’s influence on anthropology, by critiques of the culture concept, or by concerns about unwittingly falling into a neoevolutionary mode of thought in which each of “our” field sites would be mapped onto some teleological scheme, each of us entered the project with both enthusiasm at the prospect of becoming immersed in the others’ data and skepticism about whether what we were embarking on was even possible. Anthropologists who read this text may be familiar with some of the debates surrounding the project of comparison, but the notion that comparison either as a method or an intellectual goal is problematic may be surprising to readers from public health or other disciplinary backgrounds where comparative projects are the norm and even encouraged as a way of creating generalizable conclusions and theories. Thus, in this chapter, we review the intellectual history of anthropological comparison and locate our approach to comparative ethnography in relation to the discipline’s long conversation about the goals, methods, values, and flaws of comparative research. 24 The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV We then discuss the methods used to carry out what we have come to think of as “critical comparative ethnography.” In doing so, we demonstrate that comparative, team-based research can be particularly productive as a strategy for studying the intertwining of intimate subjectivity and global processes of inequality. Historicizing Comparison within Anthropology As students of sociocultural anthropology know, the discipline was founded with comparison as its raison d’être. Victor de Munck notes that for Sir Edward Tylor, one of social anthropology’s nineteenth-century forebears, “anthropology had two complementary missions: ethnography and ethnology” (de Munck 2000: 279; see also Holy 1987b)—that is, the systematic description of individual societies, paired with comparison of societies. It was ethnology that was seen as giving anthropology its wider significance; ethnography was not an end in itself but rather the means to generate the cross-cultural comparisons that would reveal the nature and evolution of human society. As Ladislav Holy says, the comparative method “was seen as the means of formulating and testing hypotheses or generalizations valid not only for one specific society or culture but cross-culturally. . . . [It] marked the distinction between anthropology as a generalizing science and ethnography as mere description of one particular society or culture” (1987b: 2). Comparison was envisioned as the method for a science of human society akin to the intellectual project of natural history, and was thus sociocultural anthropology’s “crucial justification” (Kuper 2002: 143). Much early anthropology therefore consisted of comparing societies according to particular “traits” such as type of marriage, level of technology, and political system, and categorizing them into “ethnologic stages” along a unilineal and progressive path toward greater complexity. J. D. Y. Peel describes the underlying logic: “The presents of backward societies were the equivalent of the pasts of advanced societies” (1987: 90). From the very outset, however, the project of comparison was considered problematic . For example, in response to Tylor’s presentation of results based on his (at that time) groundbreaking method of cross-cultural comparison, the statistician Francis Galton pointed out that seemingly distinct societies may have had a common origin and thus could be “duplicate copies of...

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