Comparative Studies in Society and History 

About: Comparative Studies in Society and History is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Colonialism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0010-4175. Over the lifetime, 2139 publications have been published receiving 66151 citations. The journal is also known as: CSSH.

Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties

Abstract: Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft, and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program (Harris 1978). More recently, in a more sober tone, Eric Wolf suggested that the field of anthropology is coming apart. The sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) are increasingly pursuing their specialized interests, losing contact with each other and with the whole. There is no longer a shared discourse, a shared set of terms to which all practitioners address themselves, a shared language we all, however idiosyncratically, speak (Wolf 1980).

Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal

Abstract: L'A. etudie les effets de ce qu'il appelle le refus ethnographique concernant une serie d'etudes consacree a la resistance. Il montre que la plupart de ces etudes sont limitees par le manque de perspective ethnographique. Elles sont peu convaincantes en ce qui concerne la politique interne des groupes domines, la richesse culturelle de ces groupes et la subjectivite des acteurs engages

The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis

Abstract: The growth within the capitalist world-economy of the industrial sector of production, the so-called industrial revolution, was accompanied by a very strong current of thought which defined this change as both a process of organic development and of progress. There were those who considered these economic developments and the concomitant changes in social organization to be some penultimate stage of world development whose final working out was but a matter of time. These included such diverse thinkers as Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Weber, Durkheim. And then there were the critics, most notably Marx, who argued, if you will, that the nineteenth-century present was only an antepenultimate stage of development, that the capitalist world was to know a cataclysmic political revolution which would then lead in the fullness of time to a final societal form, in this case the classless society.

Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement

Abstract: This paper argues that the experiences of colonialism in Africa have led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West. Many of Africa's political problems are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics. I shall characterize these two publics and attempt to explain some of Africa's political features within the matrix of these publics. In order to give some empirical content to the distinction drawn here, I shall illustrate the issues raised with examples from Nigeria.

The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry

Abstract: Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore, Jr. have typically been concerned with understanding societal dynamics and epochal transformations of cultures and social structures. Attention to historical sequences is indispensable to such understanding. Obviously, though, not all investigations of social change use explicit juxtapositions of distinct histories. We may wonder, therefore: What motivates the use of comparisons as opposed to focussing on single historical trajectories? What purposes are pursued—and how—through the specific modalities of comparative history?