The Uses of Incommensurability in Anthropology

In common usage, the verb "to compare" has two distinct meanings: on the one hand, to liken, to describe as similar; on the other hand, to note similarities and differences. When speakers have the first meaning in mind, they can assert that because two phenomena are different, they "cannot be compared" (apples and oranges, as we say). Such usage shades into a related one that has explicit evaluative overtones: people say that two phenomena cannot be compared when they mean to rank one decisively above the other. (For example, "you can't compare [the quality of] major-league baseball to [that of] little-league baseball.") When people have the second meaning in mind, the question often becomes: given two similar phenomena, what significance should we attach to their differences? For anthropologists, this question (in the study of human culture, what difference does difference make?) has always been crucial. In this essay, I will explore what I consider to be the productive use not just of difference, but of incommensurable difference.

To study the relationship between similarity and difference entails consideration of the relationship between apparently discrete phenomena ("things") and the linguistic and cultural categories we use to group them. Do people group things together because they are similar, or do they conceive them to be similar because they group them together? (We can ask the same questions about differences.) More generally, the question "what is a thing?" has bedeviled modern anthropology and modern social sciences. In his seminal treatise on method, Émile Durkheim wrote, "the first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things." According to Durkheim, social facts should be considered as things since they are external to individual actors. But Durkheim also knew that social facts are not things since, unlike other natural phenomena (such as those of biology), they include, and are in part constituted by, what he famously called collective representations.¹ As we shall see, the comparative study of collective representations entails translation, which in turn raises the issue of incommensurability—the situation of phenomena that are, ostensibly, impossible to measure or compare in terms of the same metric.

Comparison in anthropology differs depending on which of two grand epistemological traditions, the positivist and the interpretive (corresponding to Durkheim's emphasis on social facts as things, and on collective representations, respectively), it engages.² In traditions we can loosely call positivist, it is thought possible to identify phenomena (from material items like tools to social institutions like "the family" to cultural assemblages like "ancestor worship") that exist in different cultural settings; in other words, classes of things that are in some important sense "the same" no matter the particularities of their historical and cultural context. Typically, in this tradition, analysis of similarity and difference leads to generalizations about causality linked, often, to ideas about human nature or about the nature of culture and society.

In traditions we can loosely call interpretive, objects of study are not considered to be given in advance; rather, they are thought to be constructed in semiotically mediated exchanges between "observer and observed," outsider and insider, anthropologist and "native." In this tradition, the anthropologist starts with concepts or models (like the family or ancestor worship) that orient research, but that cannot be assumed as apt analogues for realities that exist elsewhere. Anthropological research and writing leads to revised understandings of one's initial terms (and the familiar worlds to which they belong) as well as to an emergent understanding of other peoples' worlds. This kind of anthropology aims not for causal analysis, but for comparative reinterpretation of both insiders' and outsiders' cultural worlds.

Anthropologists on both sides of this epistemological divide agree that their discipline is inherently comparative; as Margaret Mead once wrote, "every single statement that an anthropologist makes is a comparative statement."³ Thus, anthropologists do not speak of "comparative anthropology" as a distinct field or subfield in the way scientists speak of comparative anatomy or humanists of comparative literature. Rather, anthropologists see their discipline as inherently comparative because its fundamental intellectual dilemma is the relationship between human diversity (understood in terms of historical, social...