I gave a talk on comparative method, Buddhist studies, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim at the “Acts of Comparison” conference at Princeton last week. The talk was titled, “Comparison as Reconstitution: The Case of Buddhist Modernism,” and argued that we misunderstand both modernism and modern Buddhism if we do not grasp the ways in which they have mutually constituted each other. The conference was magisterially organized by three Princeton grad students: Cate Reilly, Jill Stockwell, and Javier Padilla. More info on the proceedings is available here: http://actsofcomparison.wordpress.com/