In some countries, apples and oranges cannot be compared, in others apples and pears or – less fruity – grandmothers and machine guns.
A conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the uneasy question of comparison in the social sciences, which are “easily frightened by both accusations from within quantitative traditions that assert the inability of its methods to control variables precisely enough and a colonial past in which cultural comparisons had a dubious taint of racism”. See the CfP here.
Highly interesting, Karin,
thank you …
from uncle google I learnt that the Serbians explicitly (do not) compare
grandmothers and toads,
and the Romanians
grandmothers and the machine guns
In Polish, the expression: *What has (is) gingerbread to a windmill?* is common (whatever this means).
What is for Thai and the Laotian people (in)comparable?
Peter