In their talk Prof. Tom Boellstorff explores comparison’s potential for anthropological inquiry in climates of technological transformation, global warming, and authoritarianism. Such attention to emergence benefits from historical perspective. They thus begin with comparison as a diachronic versus synchronic project. How have time and space shaped meanings and practices of comparison? In a second line of analysis, they examine the productively troubled boundary between the comparative and the ethnographic. How does comparison both constitute and destabilize the “fieldsite,” and culture itself? They then turn to comparison as method versus analysis. How does comparison shape fieldwork, how is it employed to convey the results of research, and how do these inform each other? A key point to emerge from this discussion is that the grids of similitude a ...