In their talk Prof. Tom Boellstorff explores comparison’s potential for anthropological inquiry in climates of technological transformation, global warming, and authoritarianism. Such attention to emergence benefits from historical perspective. They thus begin with comparison as a diachronic versus synchronic project. How have time and space shaped meanings and practices of comparison? In a second line of analysis, they examine the productively troubled boundary between the comparative and the ethnographic. How does comparison both constitute and destabilize the “fieldsite,” and culture itself? They then turn to comparison as method versus analysis. How does comparison shape fieldwork, how is it employed to convey the results of research, and how do these inform each other? A key point to emerge from this discussion is that the grids of similitude and difference through which comparison takes place are not ontologically prior to comparison itself. They are constituted through comparison, which is thus both emic and relational. Prof. Boellstorff develops these analyses of comparison through two interlinked case studies: the metaverse and global warming. In so doing he will argue for the importance of comparison for theorizing the relationship between the online and offline, as well as formations of the real in the context of authoritarianism.
Tom Boellstorff is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and former Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, their research has focused on topics including climate change, digital culture, disability, game studies, globalization, language, nationalism, queer studies, and the history of technology.
Boellstorff's Edward Westermarck lecture was recorded on June 17, 2025 in Helsinki at the conference organized by the Finnish Anthropological Society.
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