Conundrums of Comparison

Abstract

A bout five years ago I proposed to my friend Benjamin Elman, the Princeton intellectual historian of late-imperial China, that we consider organizing a comparative project on China and India. This was not my first foray into comparative studies; I had actually done an earlier project with Ben on the comparative intellectual history of the early-modern world and had thought comparatively about India and Rome in the Classical period for a book on Sanskrit cosmopolitanism published a decade ago. Why I persist in such enterprises when, as you’ll hear, comparison so befuddles me I can’t fully explain. But nowhere I amagain presenting ideas I amvery uncertain of, someof themcontainingwords I cannot evenpronounce. My befuddlement with comparison is primarily methodological and epistemological in nature. But I’m also befuddled by its stunted presence in our disciplinary discourses—the first of several conundrums I want to share here. This is palpably the case in comparative literature, which seems embarrassed and annoyed by the category baked into its academic identity. But theproblem isnotpeculiar to that field. Actually the disquiet with comparison seems to be ubiquitous—