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SUMMARY:IAHR congress ||| Paper
DTSTART:20150824T070000Z
DTEND:20150824T090000Z
DTSTAMP:20260405T082433Z
UID:IAHRpaper2408_11-1572@ceres.rub.de
CATEGORIES:
DESCRIPTION:Exploring the Methodical in 'the Comparative Method'\nOliver F
 reiberger (KHK fellow)\nComparison\, in the narrower sense\, has been a co
 mmon and fundamental activity in the academic study of religion from the v
 ery beginning of the discipline. It has also been fundamentally criticized
  primarily for its potential to decontextualize and essentialize and for b
 eing used by scholars with theological\, phenomenological\, colonial\, or 
 other agendas. Yet comparative studies keep being produced—with varying 
 degrees of reflexivity about the comparative process. If comparison is a s
 ubject of reflection at all\, the discussed points are most often theoreti
 cal\, sometimes methodological\, but almost never methodical. Rarely have 
 scholars suggested concrete and applicable frameworks and techniques for c
 arrying out a comparative study. Summarizing a larger and more complex arg
 ument\, this paper outlines such a concrete procedure of comparing. After 
 briefly addressing various options for the research design (goals\, scopes
 \, scales\, and modes of comparison)\, it lays out a research process that
  expands a model suggested by Jonathan Z. Smith and includes six steps: se
 lection\, description\, comparison\, redescription\, rectification\, and t
 heory building. The paper briefly introduces each of these and discusses t
 he potential benefits of the method. Finally it argues that a developed co
 mparative method may once again become\, if understood as a second-order m
 ethod\, a distinctive disciplinary feature of the study of religion. Consi
 dering the discipline’s long experience with comparison—albeit often e
 mployed intuitively and also problematically—a comparative method that i
 s both based on critical reflexivity and practically applicable may even b
 e considered interesting by other disciplines\, and thus exportable.\nThis
  paper will be presented in panel The Work of Data: Methods in the Study o
 f Religions (24-105 | 132).
URL:https://ceres.rub.de/en/events/IAHRpaper2408_11/
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