Comparative Essay practice questions.

An essay contains the sentence: 'This also happens elsewhere, as Scheper-Hughes found in Brazil.' A marker treats the sentence as weak evidence because it

• rests on fieldwork carried out in the 1980s, which a marker will treat as out of date
• brings in a second case, when a comparative answer should stay with the first one
• uses a study from an area of inquiry different from the one the essay is concerned with
• names an ethnographer without the fieldsite, the period or what she recorded

Answer: names an ethnographer without the fieldsite, the period or what she recorded

A named ethnographer is not yet evidence; the case begins to work only when the setting, the period and the relevant observation are given and tied to the claim. Age is not the problem, since a dated account is exactly what ethnography is.

A candidate wants to compare two ethnographies of market trading. The first is concerned with how prices are arrived at through bargaining, the second with how women traders finance one another through rotating credit. The most workable way to make these comparable is to

• compare them on a question both sets of material can answer, such as how trust between traders is established
• describe each study in turn at equal length and let the reader draw the comparison, which is the arrangement most candidates find easiest to write
• abandon one of the two, since studies with different subjects cannot be compared
• compare them on the number of months each researcher spent in the field

Answer: compare them on a question both sets of material can answer, such as how trust between traders is established

A comparison needs an axis that both cases speak to. Bargaining and rotating credit are different practices, but each bears on how traders come to rely on one another, and that question can be put to both bodies of material without distorting either.

An essay compares a monograph based on fieldwork in the 1930s with a study carried out in the 2010s, and concludes that the two societies differ in how kin obligations are enforced. Before accepting that conclusion, the candidate should consider that

• monographs written in the 1930s are not admissible as evidence in a comparative essay
• the difference may be one of period rather than of society, since eighty years separate the two accounts
• the earlier account is certain to be less accurate and should therefore carry less weight, since methods of recording have improved a great deal since the 1930s
• any two societies will differ in this respect, so the conclusion cannot be of interest

Answer: the difference may be one of period rather than of society, since eighty years separate the two accounts

Where the cases differ on more than one dimension at once, the comparison cannot say which produced the difference. The remedy is not to abandon the pairing but to name the confound: state that period and society vary together, and say what would separate them.

In a comparative essay one of the two ethnographies is described in far more detail than the other, because the candidate knows it far better. The best response to this imbalance is to

• expand the weaker case with plausible detail so that the two paragraphs are of similar length
• restrict the comparison to the points on which both accounts genuinely supply evidence
• present the better-known case first, so that the weaker one appears to follow from it
• state at the outset that one ethnography is more reliable than the other

Answer: restrict the comparison to the points on which both accounts genuinely supply evidence

A comparison is only as strong as its weaker leg. Narrowing the axis to what both accounts support produces a smaller but defensible argument, whereas inventing detail is fabrication and unequal treatment turns the second case into an illustration.

A candidate is deciding between organising a comparative essay case by case and organising it point by point. The consideration that should decide it is that

• the case-by-case arrangement is required whenever the two ethnographies come from different regions, and it is the arrangement that examiners are commonly said to prefer
• the point-by-point arrangement forces each paragraph to address both cases, so the comparison is made rather than implied
• the two arrangements are equivalent, since the same material appears in each
• the point-by-point arrangement should be avoided because it prevents either case being described

Answer: the point-by-point arrangement forces each paragraph to address both cases, so the comparison is made rather than implied

Case-by-case can work where each account needs to be set out before it can be used, but it defers the comparison to the final section and often loses it. The point-by-point arrangement makes the comparison in every paragraph, which is what the command term asks for.

A comparative essay concludes: 'Both societies value reciprocity.' A marker treats this as a weak conclusion principally because

• the claim is too general to distinguish these two cases from almost any others
• reciprocity is not a concept that may be used in a comparative essay
• conclusions should not state similarities, only differences between the cases
• the sentence is too short to be credited as a conclusion to an essay of this length

Answer: the claim is too general to distinguish these two cases from almost any others

A conclusion should be one the essay's own evidence produced. Something true of most documented societies could have been written without either case, whereas a statement of how reciprocity is organised differently in the two, and what accounts for the difference, could not.