INCORPORATING COMPARISON IN ONTOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS

This essay problematizes comparative analysis by collapsing the convention of assuming independence of units (eg, nation-states) compared. Since social units form relationally, the comparative method is more usefully employed to investigate their world-historical conditioning. Here, comparison is ‘incorporated’ in the very substance of inquiry into the mutual formation of such units. And, given cultural diversity and non-linear world-history, ‘incorporated comparative analysis’ can be deployed to examine historic cultural encounters, taking account of their distinctive ways of being in the world. This in turn challenges the Eurocentrism of conventional cross-national comparative epistemology. Accordingly, this method analyzes the historic interdependence of distinct ontologies: ‘economic’ and ‘ecological,’ representing the encounter between European and non-European cultures in the era of capitalist modernity. The argument is they are comparable precisely because their defining ontologies form relationally. It concludes that this allows insight into the tensions and possibilities of the current global conjuncture