In the nineteenth century the comparative method became the ruler of science. This method was also adopted by the cultural evolutionists. For decades it was assumed that the comparative method was abandoned when *evolutionism was attacked. In truth, not only (†unilinear) evolutionists, but *diffusionists, *functionalists, and *structuralists have all compared.
They, however, adopted different strategies for different purposes. †Kroeber stated the position correctly when he contended that the comparative method had never gone out of circulation in anthropology; it had only changed its tactic. Nevertheless, since the heyday of grand comparison in the 1940s and 1950s, †Evans-Pritchard’s (1963) scepticism about the possibility of anthropological comparison has become increasingly fashionable (cf. Holy 1987). In the 1980s and 1990s, few anglophone anthropologists were prepared to attempt comparisons above the level of *regional analysis and regional comparison, although more ambitious comparative projects (for example, in the analysis of *kinship structures) remained a feature of *French anthropology.
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