Week 9 Practical: Comparative analysis: convergence across cases

Pooling the regional and global surveys to ask what the cross-case convergence actually supports — and where the Comparative Literature Review, due this week, has to stop short of a verdict.

19 April 2027

Before the practical#

The Comparative Literature Review is due this week — bring it finished, not in progress.

In the practical#

Pooling weeks 7 and 8’s cases and asking, plainly: what do they converge on? This course’s classification categories recur across sources with no contact between them; certain triggers — thresholds, repeated counts, specific times — recur too, the same pattern week 3’s iron-and-salt line and spirit-wall placement were already trading on as folk practice, well before this practical had a name for it as convergence. What they do not converge on, at this point, is cause, and the practical spends as much time naming that gap honestly as it does on the convergence itself.

Afterwards#

The Comparative Literature Review is due this week. This week’s lecture takes the convergence question further: whether it points toward one cause, and why this course is not yet willing to say so.