By James D. Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger | The German gate of the fortress in the city of Landau, the hometown of one of the authors of this blog entry, shows the head of Louis XIV of France depicted as the sun with the Latin inscription “nec pluribus impar”.
By Hendrik Meyer-Ohle | When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s, majoring at a German University in Japanese Studies (contemporary Japanese society, politics and business) and business administration, there was broad consensus among scholars of Japanese Studies not to engage in explicit country comparisons
By Isaac Gagne | Comparisons are invidious. I encountered this statement early in my anthropological training when reading classic ethnographies that were written within the framework of evolutionary anthropology.
By Nora Kottmann | While studying political science at Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute, I was always told to refrain from making comparisons if and when I would become a researcher. Comparative research, it was said, is an extremely complex research methodology
By James D Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger | How and why do we compare in the social sciences and humanities? These are enduring questions. On 2nd and 3rd December 2019, a group of scholars affiliated with the Max Weber Research Group at the National University of Singapore and researchers from the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) met at the DIJ in Tokyo to compare notes on comparisons.
Barbara Geilhorn is a senior researcher at the Max Weber Foundation’s German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) Tokyo. Before joining the DIJ, Barbara was a JSPS postdoctoral researcher based at...