Hi all...saw the term 'comparative anthropology' somewhere...does anyone know anything about this?

Question

Hi all...saw the term 'comparative anthropology' somewhere...does anyone know anything about this?

Answer 1

Comparative anthropology is comparing one culture to another.  For example, you take a specific part of a culture, such as their kinship system, abstract it a bit from the reality and compare it to other abstract systems from other cultures.  In some cases you do this as an analogy to explain something in another culture (this happens a lot in archaeology), in others (when Comparative is capitalized) it is used to formulate general laws about culture.  The Big 'C' method is pretty out of favor in anthropology at the moment.