RETHINKING COMPARISON IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES: METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS AND CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES

Abstract

Comparison has shaped the academic study of religion since the field 
began, yet its status as a method remains disputed. Scholars often speak of a “comparative 
method,” but they usually mean a general approach rather than a defined procedure. 
This article reassesses the methodological foundations of comparative religion, 
drawing on classical debates and on recent scholarship, especially Oliver Freiberger’s 
claim that comparison is not an independent first-order method but a second-order 
operation organised by four parameters – goal, mode, scale, and scope – and by a 
sequence of steps: selection, description, juxtaposition, redescription, rectification, and 
theory formation. Reading the literature through a hermeneutic and historical-critical 
lens, the study examines four recurrent hazards – decontextualisation, essentialisation, 
oversimplification, and universalisation – and situates the emic–etic distinction within 
postcolonial and decolonial critiques, engaging Asad and Masuzawa in particular. The 
main result is a single framework that reconciles three competing labels – method, tool, 
and research design – as facets of one operation seen at different scales, and that treats 
an explicit tertium comparationis and careful contextualisation as the conditions of a 
valid comparison. The framework is illustrated through a short worked example, and 
the article recovers a premodern, non-European precedent for empathetic comparison 
in al-Bīrūnī.