Benedict Anderson · Frameworks of Comparison · LRB 21 January 2016
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Benedict Anderson reflects on his intellectual formation
In my early days at Cornell, use of the concept of ‘comparison’ was still somewhat limited. I don’t mean that comparisons were never made: they were made all the time, both consciously and (more often) unconsciously, but invariably in a practical way and on a small scale. Even today, in the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences, only one department (Comparative Literature) uses the term in its title, and this department did not exist in the early 1960s when I left for Indonesia to undertake fieldwork. Historians, anthropologists, economists and sociologists rarely thought systematically about comparison. The Political Science department was a partial exception, since it had a subsection called Comparative Government, to which I belonged. But the comparisons my classmates and I studied were focused on Western Europe. This was understandable. European countries had for centuries interacted with one another, learned from one another and competed with each other. They also believed that they shared a common civilisation based on antiquity and different Christianities. Comparisons seemed both simple and relevant.