SFB 1288:  Practices of comparisons: Ordering and changing the world

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities
• Term: since 2017
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317664947

University rankings, Nobel Prize awards, racist analogies—practices of comparing are omnipresent and play a crucial role in the past and the present. They shape the behaviour of a myriad of actors in business, culture, science, and politics. Consequently, the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1288 investigates the history of comparative practices from Antiquity to the present. The central object of our research envelope the social and cultural causes, the procedures, and the effects of comparing. The CRC established a new research agenda that transforms common thinking about identities and differences into a complex relational figure: when actors compare, they determine—based on an assumption of similarity—the difference and similarity of at least two objects of comparison (comparata) with respect to at least one third (tertium). Comparative practices are neither neutral, disinterested, nor timeless, but productive and performative: with the help of socially shared comparative practices, actors create the comparata and tertia that underlie these practices. We first developed conceptual typologies and identified vital features of Eurocentric comparative practices, making so-called Western modernity visible as the construction of an effective comparatum. We were then able to demonstrate—with the help of practical theoretical concepts—the dynamics of comparing: comparative practices do not just differ in their modes of execution, their addressed audience, and their media; they also change over time—depending on whether a prestructured world order was to be made visible by making comparisons or whether comparative practices were aimed at creating and establishing an order first. The second phase aims to explore the productive power of comparing and determine the relationship between change and stabilization on the intermediate level. The analysis of practice formations, communities of practice, and modes of comparison puts the mesolevel of comparative practices at the centre of the second phase. Before we turn to the macroprocesses of historical change in the third phase, we shall be examining how actors generate long-term knowledge, how they produce and shape their comparata and tertia, and how this consolidates or changes beyond concrete contexts. The next phase is organized into three project areas: (D) Generating and stabilizing knowledge, (E) Limits of comparing, and (F) Standardization and Globalization. The central questions are: How could comparative practices be established over a longer duration? How were they changed and stabilized? Which boundaries were drawn? But also: What standardizing and partly globalizing effects did they have? According to our thesis, it is possible with the help of the change in comparative practices, not only to examine global historical processes but also to re-establish periodizations. We are making a contribution to the long-term research goal of developing a contingency-sensitive theory of historical change

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

• D01 - Comparison in Ethnographic Thinking in Antiquity: The Roman Period up to the Late antiquity (1st–7th century AD) (Project Head Schulz, Raimund )
• D02 - Comparative Procedure: Case Law in Later Medieval England (Project Head Schwandt, Silke )
• D03 - The Compared Body: Order in Human Diversity (16th–19th Centuries) (Project Heads Brauner, Christina ;  Flüchter, Antje )
• D04 - World Comparison and World Knowledge: Ethnographic (Travel) Literature and Comparative Sciences (1850–1950) (Project Heads Erhart, Walter ;  Kramer, Kirsten )
• D05 - Comparative Reading: Stylistics as a Method of Literary Studies—Formation and Critique (Project Head Ronzheimer, Elisa )
• D06 - Comparison at the Interface of the Physical Sciences and the Life Sciences, 1960–2000 (Project Heads Carrier, Martin ;  Reinhardt, Carsten )
• E01 - Comparative Terms: Historical Semantics of Comparison (16th–21st Century) (Project Head Steinmetz, Willibald )
• E02 - Comparative Viewing of Pictures: Practices of Incomparability and the Theory of the Sublime (Project Heads Grave, Johannes ;  Hochkirchen, Britta )
• E03 - Beyond Racial Discrimination: ‘Backwardness’ and ‘Indigenous Peoples’ (Project Head Davy, Ulrike )
• E05 - Media Dispositives of Comparing: The Operational Image After Harun Farocki (Project Head Lutz, Helga )
• E06 - Comparative practices in the creation, perpetuation and transformation of "national literature". The Case of German-speaking Switzerland. (Project Head Herrmann, Berenike )
• F01 - (World) Orders and Societal Futures: Racist Practices of Comparing in the Caribbean 1791-1912 (Project Heads Epple, Angelika ;  Rohland, Eleonora )
• F02 - ‘Zero Meridian of Literature’? The Nobel Prize for Literature as a Global Benchmark (Project Heads Sneis, Jørgen ;  Spoerhase, Carlos )
• F03 - Practices of Comparing in Sellers’ Markets and in Target Marketing: The American and German Automobile Industries in the 20th Century (Project Heads Flüchter, Antje ;  Kramper, Peter ;  Welskopp, Thomas )
• F04 - Invest Globally, Compare Locally? Nationalization and Internationalization of Real Estate Valuation Standards Since the 1970s. (Project Head Kramper, Peter )
• F05 - Power Comparisons in Times of World Political Change, 1970–2020 (Project Heads Albert, Mathias ;  Müller, Thomas )
• F07 - Analogies between Comparisons as Mechanisms of “Departicularization”? On the Construction of Resonances between Colonial and Metropolitan Formations of Comparisons in National “Founding Debates” in the German Empire (1871-1918). (Project Heads Petzke, Martin ;  Rapior, Ralf )
• INF - Data Infrastructure and Digital Humanities: Digital Practices in the Humanities (Project Heads Schwandt, Silke ;  Vompras, Johanna )
• Z - Central Tasks of the Collaborative Research Centre (Project Heads Epple, Angelika ;  Flüchter, Antje )
• Ö - Making of: Communities of Practice: Humanities and Society in Relation (Project Heads Büschenfeld, Jürgen ;  Deile, Lars ;  Grave, Johannes ;  Hochkirchen, Britta )

Completed projects

• A04 - Cultural comparisons in German war propaganda in the years 1914-18 (Project Head Kauffmann, Kai )
• B02 - Modernity between ‘indigeneity’ and ‘blackness’: Inter-American practices of comparison in the fields of cultural production, social sciences, and politics (Project Heads Kaltmeier, Olaf ;  Raussert, Wilfried )
• B05 - Literary comparisons: Social dynamics and the eighteenth-century British novel (Project Heads Hartner, Marcus ;  Schneider, Ralf )
• C02 - Incommensurable? The comparative self in the premodern and modern eras (11th–19th century) (Project Heads Arlinghaus, Franz-Josef ;  Erhart, Walter )

• Applicant Institution: Universität Bielefeld
• Participating University: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
• Spokespersons: Professorin Dr. Angelika Epple, until 4/2021; Professorin Dr. Antje Flüchter, since 5/2021