Carmella C. Moore

Regions Based on Social Structure

Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history and the environment, embodied in the culture-area concept, as well as contemporary concerns with historical linkages of societies into world systems. We develop nine new regions based on social structural data and test them using data on 351 societies. We compare the new regions with Murdocks regional constructs and find that our regional classification is a strong improvement over Murdocks. In so doing we obtain evidence for the cross-cultural importance of gender and descent systems, for the importance of constraint relationships upon sociocultural systems, for the historical importance of two precapitalist world systems, and for strikingly different geographical alignments of cultural systems in the Old World and the Americas.

Cultural, Gender, and Individual Differences in Perceptual and Semantic Structures of Basic Colors in Chinese and English

In this paper we examine the judged similarity among the eight basic focal colors, and their names, among female and male Chinese (n = 68) and English (n = 52) speaking respondents. The major findings are: (1) all respondents share approximately sixty percent of their knowledge of the judged similarity structures of both semantic and perceptual tasks, (2) there are genuine individual differences among respondents that account for about fourteen percent of their knowledge on average, (3) there are small but statistically significant gender differences that come to about three percent on average, (4) there are small but statistically significant differences between Chinese and English respondents of about one-and-a-half percent, (5) there are differences in the semantic structure of the names of colors as compared to the judgments of the color samples that amounts to about five percent, and (6) there is about a three percent difference in the paired comparison task and the triads task. The results place strong constraints on theories relating to individual differences, linguistic relativity, and the relation of perceptual and semantic structures for colors.

Correspondence Analysis as a Multidimensional Scaling Technique for Nonfrequency Similarity Matrices

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an empirical investigation on the validity of two novel generalizations of the correspondence analysis (CA). The chapter explores the results from the empirical datasets for the appropriateness of using the CA as a general multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique for nonfrequency similarity data and to analyze stacked similarity matrices for obtaining a common spatial representation of many individual matrices, simultaneously. It is found that the CA applied to stacked similarity matrices provides virtually the same descriptive results as those obtained by a separate analysis of each case followed by the generalized Procrustes analysis. The chapter explores the representations of several individuals (or cases) in the same space for comparisons among individuals and subgroups of individuals. The chapter also illustrates the possible utility of the CA as a general MDS technique for the application to a variety of similarity data.

A Reanalysis of Murdock's Model for Social Structure, Based on Optimal Scaling

A REANALYSIS OF MURDOCK’S MODEL FOR SOCIAL STRUCTURE BASED ON OPTIMAL SCALING John W. M. Whiting, * M. L. Burton, A. K. C. C. Moore, and D. R. White** Romney, Murdock’s Social Structure (1949) is widely regarded as his most important work, the masterpiece exemplifying his approach to cross- cultural research. Often considered to be a modern classic-chosen by Barnes (1971), for example, as one of three important approaches to the study of kinship-Social Structure summarized much of what was known at the time about kinship, marriage, and community organization and added many new research findings. Murdock’s use of the cross-cultural method was a significant methodological advance, and his book contained a great deal of original theoretical thinking, based on an interdisciplinary approach that synthesized concepts from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Murdock’s book is organized in three parts-four chapters on family form, clan, and community; athree-chaptertreatment of kinship; and a final three chapters on sex and incest taboos. The center of the treatment of kinship, Chapter Seven, dDeterminants of Kinship Terminology,d is in many ways the book’s apex. There Murdock formulates and tests a large number of hypotheses about relationships between social structure and kinship terminology. Now, forty years later, it remains one of the very few examples in anthropology of formulating and testing a complex deductive system. Given the significance of this achievement, we are struck by the extent to which *John W. M. Whiting, Harvard University, Massachusetts. ‘*M. L. Burton, A. K. Department of Social Relations, Cambridge, Romney, C. C. Moore, and D. R. White, University of California, Irvine, California.

Systemic Culture Patterns as Basic Units of Cultural Transmission and Evolution

The authors suggest that with slight modifications, the concept of systemic culture pattern as originally defined by Kroeber provides one ideal basic unit of study for culture. Prototypic examples of systemic culture patterns include phonemic structure and kinship terminological structure, both of which are paradigms. The significant elements in each may be partitioned in terms of a limited number of universal features. Kroeber’s original list provided an important guide for kinship studies; Jakobson, Fant, and Halle provided such a universal list for phonemic studies. Some coherent substructures characterized by a subset of features may themselves be treated as basic units, such as vocalic or consonantal phonemes, or subunits of kinship terminology, such as sibling terminology. Paradigms may be mapped perfectly into Euclidean spatial models. Elements of cultural patterns with large or uncountable numbers of features may be mapped directly into Euclidean spatial models on the basis of judged similarity data.

An Optimal Scaling of Murdock's Theories of Illness Data—an Approach To the Problem of Interdependence

In Theories of Illness (1980) Murdock reported that theories of illness causation were not randomlydistributed with respect to world regions or language phyla. For example, witchcraft theories were prevalent among peoples of the Circum-Mediterranean and absent elsewhere. However, Murdock was unable to estimate the magnitude of either the regional or linguistic effect. In this paper Murdocks data are reanalyzed using the multivariate technique of optimal scaling, a method sensitive to interdependence among both cases and variables. The results of the optimal scaling are used to discuss the clustering of the theories of illness within world regions and language phyla.

Book Review: Statistics for the Social Sciences

Mark Sirkin’sStatistics for the Social Sciences , now in its second edition, has much to recommend it: clarity of writing, technical competence, interest ing examples, and, not unimportantly, Sirkin’s enthusiasm for the subject, which makes this introductory textbook come alive. Students using this book may actually learn to like statistics. Specifically written as an introduction to statistics for undergraduate students (and for those with high levels of “math anxiety”) by an experienced professor of political science, the book eases stu dents into the world of statistical analyses by emphasizing empirical data rather than probability theory and without being condescending by “dumbing down” the material. A student who completes a course using this book will come away with a firm foundation of statistical knowledge and the preparation necessary to continue on in statistics. The book is divided into fourteen chapters, which can be presented in order or changed around depending on the instructor’s needs. The first six chapters deal generally with descriptive statistics, whereas the remaining chapters deal with various topics in inferential statistics. Each chapter contains a list of key concepts at the beginning, and key concepts are further highlighted in boldface type throughout the text. When needed, mathematical formulas are summarized at the end of each chapter. There is a strong emphasis on the visual display of data, in both tables and graphs, which helps make the text itself quite readable. In addition, statistical applications are illustrated through the use of the computer programs, SAS and SPSS, either of which may be used in conjunction with the book. There is also an instructor’s man ual that accompanies the text (although it was not available to me for review). The introductory chapters of this volume are especially impressive. Chap ter 1 is titled “How We Reason.” It contains an important and elegant discus sion of the logic of science—including the notion of empirical versus norma tive knowledge, the meaning of “the scientific method,” the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, and the notions of hypothesis, causality, and association, among others—that emphasizes the unity of sci ence as well as the idea of science as a way of knowing. This is a topic that is all too often not clearly articulated, so this chapter is refreshing and could even stand alone as a brief introduction to the philosophy of science. Chapter 2