SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

i6o
I Social Theory and Social Action
Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation I 161
totic options, each with serious implications for empirical work in the comparative
vein.
Despite the apparent newness of much comparative discourse, it would be
an error to assume that comparison itself has no historical lineage. In fact, some
form of comparative thinking can be located in almost any intellectual milieu,
especially if the assertion of noncomparability is taken as a negative modality of
comparison. Today, forms of comparison are typically distinguished by the absence
or presence of historical connectedness: similar phenomena that are remote
in space and time can be compared by a logic of analogy or parallelism, whereas
phenomena that are known to share a developmental source or to have been in
contextual interrelationship can be analyzed genealogically or historically (Marc
Bloch 1967:47; Gould 1989:213). This clear-cut distinction between analogy
and genealogy does not, however, fully characterize previous models of comparative
discourse.
It is easy to forget that for millennia the dominant mode of cross-cultural
understanding, whether dealing with religion or any other cultural phenomena,
was ethnocentrism, that is, the view that other societies can be placed on a continuum
of familiar to strange, calculating out from one's immediate neighbors to
the most remote peoples. Herodotus, commenting on the customs of Persia, notes
that ethnocentrism frequently correlates with an assumption of moral superiority:
Most of all they [Persians] hold in honor themselves, then those who dwell next
to themselves, and then those next to them, and so on, so that there is a progression
in honor in relation to the distance. They hold least in honor those
whose habitation is furthest from their own. This is because they think themselves
to be the best of mankind in everything and that others have a hold on
virtue in proportion to their nearness; those that live furthest away are the
most base. (Herodotus 1987:96)
Herodotus himself, on the other hand, was quick to locate the source of much
of Greek culture, especially its religion, in "barbarian" traditions of Persia and
Egypt, proposing thereby a model of borrowing and diffusion that angered Greek
chauvinists such as Plutarch, who complained, "not only is he [Herodotus] anxious
to establish an Egyptian and a Phoenician Herakles; he says that our own
Herakles was born after the other two, and he wants to remove him from Greece
and make a foreigner out of him" (Plutarch, De Herodoti Malignitate, quoted in
Bernai 1987:113).
In medieval Arabic culture strictly linear ethnocentrism was modified by a
systematic ecological determinism according to which societies were located in
zones starting just above the equator (Al-Azmeh 1992). Those peoples enjoying
the temporate climes of the middle zones (China, Arabia, India, etc.) are most
favored, while those existing at the southern and northern extremes are victims
of distemper—lethargy for black-skinned Africans and indolence for pale-
skinned Slavs. According to Al-Azmeh, the rigor of application of this deterministic
model of cross-cultural typology was itself conditioned by the Arab evaluation
of the societies to be understood:
It was a social judgement which ultimately determined the degree to which
credence would be given to geographical determinism, and this determinism
was applied mercilessly only in the construction of sheer barbarism, which was
not merely a distemper with varying degree of severity, but fully a disnature.
(Al-Azmeh 1992:8)
The inherent difficulties of comparative understanding were well articulated
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, despite Lévi-Strauss 's (1976:33) pronouncement
of his being the "founder of the science of man," warned that the period of European
exploration would not likely yield reliable knowledge of other cultures
because of the ethnocentric blinders of the observers:
I am persuaded that we have come to know no other men except Europeans;
moreover it appears from the ridiculous prejudices, which have not died out
even among men of letters, that every author produces under the pompous
name of the study of man nothing much more than a study of the men of his
own country. . . . One does not open a book of voyages without finding descriptions
of characters and customs, but one is altogether amazed to find that
these authors who describe so many things tell us only what all of them knew
already, and have only learned how to see at the other end of the world what
they would have been able to see without leaving their own street, and that the
real features which distinguish nations, and which strike eyes made to see
them, have almost always escaped their notice. (Rousseau 1984:159)
Rousseau did not, however, give up on comparison, for he thought that it would
be possible to replace the biased vision of these "sailors, merchants, soldiers, and
missionaries" (Rousseau 1984:159) with a true scientific study of other cultures
that would yield increased self-knowledge. His own reflections on the origins of
inequality, for instance, performed a shocking inversion of the more usual ethnocentrism
by arguing that the degree of human inequality radically increases with
civilization and that individuals eager for the institutional benefits of progress in
fact "all ran toward their chains believing that they were securing their liberty"
(Rousseau 1984:122; see J. E MacCannell 1981).
With the expansion of European colonialism and its supporting ideological
matrix of evolutionism in the nineteenth century, comparison of cultures frequently
involved the paradoxical principles of differential development and genetic
explanation. According to the first, societies pass through a sequence of
stages of evolutionary progress ("savagery," "barbarism," and "civilization," in
the terms of several key writers) culminating in the scientific rationalism of modern
European culture; according to the second, inexplicable phenomena later in
time are accounted for by uncovering their rational origins at an earlier point in