Foreword / Thomas Gibson  vii

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction  1

Part I. The Fragment and the Whole

1. The Comparative Advantage of Anthropology  25

2. Market and Money: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory  48

Part II. Civilization and Comparison

3. Keeping the Muslims Out: Concepts of Civilization, Civility, and Civil Society in India, China, and Western Europe  61

4. The Afterlife of Images  80

Part III. Comparing Exclusion

5. Lost in the Mountains: Notes on Diversity in the Southeast Asian Mainland Massif  107

6. Who Cares? Care Arrangements and Sanitation for the Poor in India and Elsewhere  130

A Short Conclusion  147

Notes  155

Bibliography  171

Index  183

Thomas Gibson

"The Value of Comparison gives a rather unflinching critique of Western cultural assumptions while firmly seated in the very field it scrutinizes. . . . [Van der Veer] does not merely critique traditional methods and pathways of analysis used in sociological research, but offers concrete examples and discussions where a more nuanced and complex comparative method can be applied and produce better results." — Juli L. Gittinger, Reading Religion

"The Value of Comparison gives a rather unflinching critique of Western cultural assumptions while firmly seated in the very field it scrutinizes. . . . [Van der Veer] does not merely critique traditional methods and pathways of analysis used in sociological research, but offers concrete examples and discussions where a more nuanced and complex comparative method can be applied and produce better results." —Juli L. Gittinger, Reading Religion

"Passionately defending a critically informed anthropological method, Peter van der Veer takes on big names and massively funded projects in the social sciences—and he does not suffer fools gladly. He exposes the 'emperor's clothes,' critically revealing the persistence of unexamined Western cultural presuppositions while challenging the tendency toward generalization and cultural essentialism in the social sciences and the political uses of notions of civilization and civility to exclude unwanted others." — Kenneth Dean, coauthor of Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain

"Without question, The Value of Comparison will be a widely read book among those in search of a framework for more trenchantly confronting a world and a public discourse increasingly dominated by simplistic, positivistic, and poorly informed ideas about the nature of society. Peter van der Veer is especially effective in debunking the implicit binary assumption that treats an undifferentiated West as 'rational' and an equally undifferentiated 'Rest' as 'religious.' What van der Veer has to say is of paramount importance." — Michael Herzfeld, author of Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions

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