Reflections on Comparative Education: Telling Tales in Honor of Andreas Kazamias

Emphasizing the important role of “history” within comparative education is the classic way, much celebrated in the writings of Andreas Kazamias, to treat this theme. This article uses a different perspective. The argument is that “comparative education” and “history” use two words as professional identifiers of a way of thinking and working. Metaphorically, they are wizard words, magical claims that mark off different epistemic territories: “context” for comparative education and “archive” for the historian. The construction and—especially—the confusions, the contradictions, and the consequences within these codings of professional identity and the relationships of the two fields of study are the themes of this article about comparative education.