The Comparative Method and the History of the Modern Humanities
Devin Griffiths (University of Southern California)
The full version of this article is available in Polish in the printed version of Tekstualia and in the on-line subscription.
This article studies the modern development of the comparative method in the humanities and social sciences in Europe and the United States, and specifically addresses comparative subfields of philology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, history, and folklore studies. A juxtapositional study of these disciplinary histories demonstrates the historical relation between their methods and relation to other fields, e.g. comparative anatomy. It elucidates several recurrent features of the different applications of comparativism, particularly a consistent tension between genetic (or historical) versus functionalist (or contextual) explanations of common patterns, and suggests that comparatists would benefit from a closer scrutiny of both the history of the method and its development within other fi elds. Ultimately, the article aims to shed new light on the modern history of the humanities, their incomplete differentiation from social-scientific fields such sociology and political science, and the interdisciplinary exchanges that have often shaped entire fields of study
The sample of Polish version of this article is available here: https://tekstualia.pl/index.php?p=numery&s=porownanieimetoda&lang=pl
