More Comparison, Please!
September 24, 2025
[Editor’s note: This is the second of four posts on Aaron Mills’s article “First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality”, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 72, Issue 4, Winter 2024, Pages 892–932, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avae032]
Aaron Mill’s engaging and creative study leaves one hungry for more, and no doubt he will have more to give us. My queries about his article can probably all be answered by saying, “just wait for the next installment.” But hoping that interim reactions may be helpful, I’m glad for the chance to participate in this symposium, and to pose a few questions.
Some of questions in this blog on comparative law have to do with comparison. Professor Mills makes many observations about Anishinaabe society that make me wish for more comparative discussion. “[When] folks introduce themselves,” he writes, “[u]sually our kinship positions vis-à-vis parents and children come first.” The use of kinship terms as forms of address is a widespread in the globe, from East Asia, where it is common to address others as “eldest brother” and the like, to the Middle East, where fathers may be addressed as “abu.” The Anishinaabe practice may well have different social meanings from these practices elsewhere, and it may be lodged in a richer culture of kinship. But without a careful examination of the comparative evidence, it is difficult to know; and in any case in my experience comparative analysis is generally quite illuminating with regard to all the societies under consideration. I take it that Professor Mills sees his task differently—as one of “thick description’ in Clifford Geertz’ well-known formula. But to my mind, such thick description, at least when it gets too thick, is a bit at odds with the spirit, and the promise, of comparative law. The same question could be asked about Anishinaabe kinship terms—kinship terms being, of course, a long-standing focus of ethnographic research.
Other examples come to mind as well. The article quotes Nicolas Perrot to the effect that in seventeenth-century Anishinaabe marriage, “each man considers himself no longer a member of the village in which he was born.” Is this an example of matrilocality, or is it something else? One would rather like to know; and the risk of neglecting the comparative analysis is that one may fail even to notice that there is such a question to be posed. Or, to speak of a more uncomfortable example, Professor Mills writes that “my elders have taught me that before I harvest anything from the Earth, I should speak to it, express my need, ask permission, offer tobacco, and if I know it, sing the appropriate song.” Should we think of this as, to use a term in somewhat bad repute, animism? How should we understand these practices against the broader backdrop of sacrifice and relations to the holy elsewhere in the world? I, at least, find it difficult to feel entirely content with any approach at does not view the practices of a given society in the larger perspective that two and a half centuries of social science (and more, depending on how you count) has made possible. None of this is to say that Anishinaabe culture may not be wholly distinctive. It is only to say that without comparison we have no measure of distinctiveness. Nor would I by any means suggest that Professor Mills is ignorant of comparisons! He offers an intriguing counter to Marshall Sahlins in particular. Perhaps it is too much to ask of him, a scholar who has given us such a fascinating work of thick description, to dive deeper into comparative analysis. But I admit that the comparatist in me yearns for more.