The senses provide important everyday and symbolic media through which social order is routinely looked at. Throughout these multifold processes and in relation to exchange and imitation, we are able to discern a number of important issues that arise in the agenda to compose a sensory anthropology of Asia. First, senses serve as vehicles of knowledge across the whole array of everyday social domains in terms of how they organise human–nonhuman experience. Second, comparative approaches initiated herein are not only a response to either Western- or Asian-centric sensory analysis. They further advance the scope of sensory scholarship by prompting inter- and intra-cultural dialogue on the subject. Third, sensory transnationalism illustrates how sensory orders and practices work, and where established sensory norms are responded to by social actors adhering to different sensory scripts in cross-cultural exchanges. The broader intention is to spotlight how sensory cultures, sentient practices and encounters transpire as a way of comprehending Asia through sense perception as a newer perspective in social and cultural anthropology. In doing so, I inquire further both into the breadth and depth of how to articulate the social lives and textures of the senses toward crafting the future of sensory anthropology.

This chapter explains the nature of the social-scientific interpretation of biblical texts, tracing its recent development from the early 1970s and focusing on contributions that have come from sociology, anthropology, and social psychology.

Just as the world is imagined as consisting of nations and conceived of as an international assemblage in modernity, the modern world projects the Babelian vision of a single humanity fragmented into many individual languages. This vision of the international juxtaposition of languages cannot be apprehended unless the modern regime of translation is taken into account, according to which two languages are postulated as distinct and individuated unities. This chapter investigates how a new set of presumptions led to a particular representation of two distinct languages as individuated, countable, and comparable unities between which translation is to take place. The modern regime of translation represents the event of translation in terms of two separate figures or schemata, just like two distinct territories of state sovereignties in the international world as sanctioned by the system of international law (Jus Publicum Europaeum).

Quite a few elastic terms on the Chinese top-10 list are similar to their English counterparts or near-counterparts: keneng (可能) and may; chang (常)/tongchang (通常) and usually/often; hen (很) and very; geng (更) and more; duo (多)/xuduo (許多) and many/most. These cover epistemic, scalar and approximate stretchers. While the most frequently used general stretcher in Chinese is deng, the most commonly used general stretcher in English is things. In terms of how the four categories of EL are distributed, the Chinese and the English data exhibit two different patterns, i.e., SC-AQ-GE-EP and EP-AQ-SC-GE respectively. A series of comparisons of the most-used stretchers of each of the four categories in the Chinese and the English corpora yield some interesting findings. There is a clear preferred epistemic stretcher in online health information in Chinese and in English respectively, i.e. keneng (可能) and may.

This chapter identifies various similarities and differences between the Taiwanese and Australian data. An approximate correlation was found between the severity of a disease and the difficulty of understanding EL. The intensity of items of EL in the excerpt also affects the perception of difficulty with EL. The more different elastic expressions there are in the excerpt, the higher the rate of difficulty the excerpt is likely to have. Our interview data further explain what makes it hard to understand EL. Some of the interview responses in Chinese correspond to those in English. Nevertheless, a striking difference was also identified as one response in the Taiwanese interview data was more oriented towards a perspective that considers society as a collective group or community, a phenomenon not found in the Australian data. Culture may also play a role, but culture cannot be simplified and reduced to one determinant held accountable for any given cultural differences. We suggest three broad factors that affect discourse comprehension difficulty caused by EL/VL: the reader, the health topic and the text.

Medieval societies did not exclusively and inflexibly conceive kingship as the remit of a mature man, even if adult male rulers were more typical. This introduction shows the urgency and timeliness of looking beyond the ‘unspoken hegemony’ of adulthood to understand the intersections between childhood and kingship. Focusing first on the interconnectedness of representation and reality, the chapter highlights the necessity of uniting an emphasis on children’s lived experiences as political actors with an examination of cultural representations of ideas about childhood and rulership. The introduction then turns to consider three essential components which shape this study’s methodology: a comparative approach, a diachronic analysis and a holistic approach to the sources. This section argues for the importance of contextualising child kingship within a wider comparative framework which accounts for political, social, cultural and legal change. It also sketches the benefits of adopting a broad approach to the source material which incorporates chronicle, documentary, didactic, epistolary, legal and literary sources.

Chapter 1 is about the social and semiotic mediation of comparative grounds. In particular, the way people come to understand and alter the relative intensity of entities and events. Focusing on the multiple processes that mediate people’s understandings of landslides in a Mayan village in highland Guatemala, it shows the ways comparative grounds relate to communicative practices and social conventions. In addition, it highlights the political, economic, affective, and ecological stakes at work in such forms of mediation.

The concluding Chapter 7 answers the research questions and provides a comparative analysis of unfolding low-carbon transitions in the three focal systems. It also inductively draws conclusions about cross-cutting topics with salient differences and similarities between the three systems, including: the roles of incumbent firms, governance style and politics, users, wider publics and civil society organisations, and exogenous ‘landscape’ developments and shocks. Chapter 7 ends by discussing future low-carbon transitions, articulating policy recommendations, and offering suggestions for future research.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

In the past two decades comparative law scholars have rediscovered the importance of the debate on method. For a long time left in the background as a by-product of the old controversy on the epistemic status of the discipline, the ‘struggle for the methods’ has experienced a sudden revival. But does it really make sense to keep on engaging in a wearying confrontation among the various possible paradigms, once one recognizes that, as Patrick Glenn observed, ‘the history of comparative law is not one of adherence to a methodological norm but rather one of deviation and variety’? It makes sense, indeed, because ‘eclecticism’ as a theoretical perspective is itself the sign of the times and cannot strive for universal validity. Looking back at the history of comparative law, one is struck by the circumstance that throughout the formative era, the idea that obtained most credit in European intellectual circles was the opposite one, namely that ‘there is a comparative method’ (rectius: ‘Comparative Method’, as it was once written). This chapter is aimed at bringing back to light some distinctive traits of the original discourse on the ‘comparative method’ and highlighting the importance of the ‘scientific paradigm’ for the acceptance of comparative law as an autonomous subject of legal research.

Many of the historical and contemporary phenomena in which social scientists are interested are difficult to study using traditional methods of comparative analysis.  Since most cases are complex systems – marked by interdependence and operating at multiple levels of analysis at once – controlling comparisons to adjudicate causality is fraught with difficulty.  This chapter argues that scholars can use historical archival research to help disaggregate the temporal and spatial properties of the phenomena we hope to compare while also tracing connections among those disaggregated elements.  Specifically, practices associated with archival inquiry – classifying, contextualizing, layering, and linking – allow us to identify the boundaries around subsystems that can be treated as relatively independent while identifying the hierarchical connections tying those substemic activities together. The chapter concludes by showing how William Tuttle’s masterful history of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 provides a template for comparing complex cases.

Comparison is a key tool in the social sciences. Scholars make comparisons across time and place to better understand our social and political worlds. A central technique that scholars use is often called ‘controlled comparison.’ Controlled comparisons rely on scholars holding possible explanations for the outcome of interest (e.g., revolutions or political participation) constant across different cases. This approach has been central to some of the most influential works of social science. It has helped scholars explain everything from divergent development outcomes to difference in regime type. Yet controlled comparisons are not the only form of comparison that scholars utilize to answer important questions. There is little guidance, however, for how to design or execute these comparisons or why research that does not rely on controlled comparisons can offer important insights. The goal of this edited volume is to begin to develop some of these guidelines. To do so, this volume explores two of the most fundamental questions in the study of politics: (1) why do scholars compare what they compare and (2) how do the methodological assumptions scholars make about why and how they compare shape the knowledge they produce? By answering these questions, the volume creates new resources for future students and researchers to draw upon in their efforts to advance knowledge.