Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy

Abstract

This essay explores the role of cross-national and cross-cultural comparison within the race and multicultural debates as they play across various national and cultural zones—most notably U.S.-American, French, and Brazilian. Rather than "do" comparison, it analyzes the variegated modalities of comparison itself. The essay deploys a relational and transnational method that seeks, ultimately, to compare comparisons, eludicating the insights and blindspots of different comparative approaches and frameworks, as well as the limitations of comparison itself. The essay discusses the ways that asymmetries of power impact the discourse and rhetoric of comparison, making them reciprocal or unilateral, dialogic or monologic. The essay explores as well the ways nation-states define themselves with and against other nations in a diacritical process of identity formation, partially through a rhetoric of (sometimes invidious) comparison. Cross-cultural and transnational comparisons, the essay argues, serve myriad purposes. Negotiating constantly between the facile universalism, which denies difference ("we're all human beings!") and the bellicose stigmatization of difference (good versus evil; us-versus-them), comparison at its best can trigger a salutary deprovincialization and mutual illumination. A particularly invidious kind of comparison, however, takes the form of civilizational ranking. Nationalist and pan-ethnic exceptionalisms sometimes go hand in hand with an especially invidious form of comparison: ranking. In Hegel's The Philosophy of History, for example, every attribute of Hegel's personal and national identity becomes associated with supreme rank. The methodological problem with comparison is the reciprocal reification of differences and the erasure of commonalities. "Ideal type" generalities homogenize very complex and variegated national formations, while denying common features. In a bipolar method of comparison, all individuals line up in conformity with a set of a priori characteristics. Roberto DaMatta's comparisons of the United States and Brazil, for example, leave both Brazilians and inhabitants of the United States locked up in a prison of identity in which there is no room for contradictions and anomalies, resulting in the "ontologization" of cultural difference. The essay then explores the variations in comparative method in three French commentators on Brazil: Jean de Lery, Levi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide. It concludes with metaphors and proposals that bring us beyond comparison through metaphors that lead to Atlanticist and diasporic approaches that bypass the nation state as frame.

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