The Limits of the Classical Comparative Method

This article reviews authors who are creating new ways to organize knowledge. This new organization makes the older methodology of compartmentalizing populations into separate species obsolete. The classical comparative method places a burden on research because it creates the image of neatly bounded discrete cultures with clearly defined traditions, and leaves us in a poor position to understand diversity and difference. The classical comparative approach separates cultures and civilizations when in fact modem world history has demonstrated their interconnections. We are beginning to see the emergence of an alternative approach. Diverse figures such as Edward Said and Immanuel Wallerstein, among many others, have demonstrated that what have been posited as separate units have in feet been closely interconnected historically by power relations. World-systems analysis, subaltern, and postcolonial theory, all share a fundamental break with the classical comparative method.