When a social anthropologist makes a comparative study, he has three levels of comparison. First, he compares a single society with other societies; second, he compares one or two institutions of a society with similar institutions of other societies; and third, he compares the institutions within a single society.
Ravindra K. Jain mentions that in India anthropological holism is combined with comparative perspective. He refers to the statement of Gopalasarana who advocates the analyzing of social and cultural aspects from a comparative perspective. He mentions two justifications for anthropology being called a comparative discipline:
One of the two justifications is the following: By convention and established tradition of doing fieldwork in a culture other than one’s own, the anthropologist uses a comparative framework in his study.
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In other words, there is much implicit comparison both in data gathering and data processing the second justification for anthropology being a comparative discipline is for work in the library rather than in the field.
From the days of unilinear evolution anthropologists have utilized the available ethnographic materials to serve many different ends. There are marked differences in the ways these ends have been attained.
The common feature of all these ventures is the fact that with very few exceptions they all involve inter-cultural or cross- cultural explicit comparison.
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Whatever Gopalasarana observes boils down to three things:
(1) Social anthropology accepts unquestionably comparison while generating data. This assumption relies entirely on comparison as the main purpose of fieldwork. He calls it implicit design of comparative process.
(2) In the analysis which is made on the desk and not in the field, comparison is very clearly or distinctly accepted as a mode of interpretation. This is obviously explicit comparison.
(3) In the method of comparison two things are done: within a society inter-cultural approach is taken and outside the society cross-cultural access is adopted.
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Thus, social anthropology in India generates and analyzes data implicitly, and finally, makes both intra-cultural and inter-cultural analyses.