What do anthropologists do when they compare, what do people do when they compare? Professor Soumhya Venkatesan shows how comparison produces meaning, including fresh ways of understanding the world and

making particular projects worthwhile by way of contrast. Equally, she asks: when does comparison

stop being helpful? When might greater insights be gained by staying with things? She will think

through these questions ethnographically as well as synthetically, the latter mainly by focusing

on decolonisation and its aspirational reach.

Soumhya Venkatesan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She

is the author of Decolonizing Anthropology: An Introduction (2024, Polity). She has conducted ethnographic

fieldwork in South India among Muslim weavers and Hindu priests, and in England among

freedom-loving Brexiteers and pub philosophers.

Venkatesan's keynote lecture was recorded on June 16, 2025 in Helsinki at the conference organized by the Finnish Anthropological Society.