Before The Abyss or Life Is Simple came to my attention, Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1 was a fixture on…
methodology
Texts, tales, transits: Archival method and the politics of listening
[Darryl] Li could not have set out a more difficult methodological task. To write an “ethnographic history from below–one that…
The view from Berlin: An interview with Hubert Knoblauch
Hubert Knoblauch is a professor of sociology at the Technical University of Berlin, where he specializes in general sociological theory,…
Critiquing reductionism
There are reductive categories . . . that have been and should be abandoned in scholarly discourse because the terms…
On reductionism
There’s something attractive about a neat typology, and also something we seem to loathe about the compartmentalization entailed. So what…
A note on secular comparison
In Comparing the incommensurate, Vincent Pecora builds on David Buckley’s recent inquiry about methods of comparison and the challenges that…
Comparing the incommensurate
David Buckley's recent post in Notes from the field raises a crucial methodological question. On what basis is comparative work…
Power spots
“Shoveling fog” is Courtney Bender’s acute phrase for the work of “studying spirituality,” an amorphous term that has suffered much…
When strong is weak
It is a testament to the power of the “strong program” image that most commentators on our working paper read…
After purification
Christian Moderns stands apart in at least two respects: in method and in conceptualization. Whereas earlier works on liberalism, modernism…