Cross-Cultural Research

Almost by definition, cultural anthropology iscross-cultural research. The search for an understanding of what culture is has meant undertaking research with an eye for comparing ethnographic data generated in different societies. Anthropological fieldwork has been driven as much by the desire to test a particular theory about culture as it has been about documenting another unknown group of people.

In current convention, however, cross-cultural research refers to a specific approach to cultural anthropology, namely, using data from multiple cultures to test hypotheses using statistical methods. This quantitative approach developed out of the culture and personality school of anthropology and grew through the work of George P. Murdock, who first organized the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), a database that today consists of nearly 400 different ethnographies of cultural groups, indexed by over 700 different topics.

The lasting value of the statistical cross-cultural comparison using HRAF has been that it has allowed cultural anthropologists to ask the “big” questions that other kinds of research are ill-equipped to handle: What are the causes of warfare? Why do states form? Why do states collapse? What are the causes of social inequality?

The very earliest anthropologists interested in cross-cultural comparative work were out of the evolutionary mold: E. B. Tylor, Herbert Spencer, and Lewis Henry Morgan. These late-18th-century anthropologists compared cultures and ordered them in an evolutionary sequence, calledunilineal evolution, based upon their presumed level of development. In analytical and methodological terms,Morgan was the most sophisticated. He conducted actual fieldwork (with Seneca Indians) and collected data from nearly 70 other American Indian tribes in the United States. Indeed, one of his main contributions to comparative cross-cultural research was the discovery of classificatory kinship systems. As might be expected, then, Morgan's evolutionary scheme was the most sophisticated, based upon a culture's technical capacity and material technology.

Nevertheless, the rejection of evolutionism and the kind of comparative work it engendered by Franz Boas and his students pushed cross-cultural comparative work into the background of cultural anthropology for nearly40 years. When comparative work reemerged in American anthropology, it was the intellectual descendants of Morgan and Tylor who were responsible for it.

Another source of the contemporary statistical model of cross-cultural comparison emerged out of the basic and modal personality school of anthropology. This brand of cultural anthropology included scholars such as Ralph Linton, Ruth Benedict,Edward Sapir, Cora Du Bois (all Boasians), and Abraham Kardiner (a psychoanalyst). This orientation toward culture and personality studies was essentially the application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of culture: Cultural anthropologists presented their fieldwork data, and Kardiner provided a profile of that particular culture.

[Page 614]The working assumption of the approach was that every society had a “basic personality,” a common denominator of personality types. There was a clear understanding that basic personality was formed based on the cultural institutions involved in child socialization. Cultural patterns, such as mythology, marriage patterns, and gender relations, were believed to be projections of basic personality.

The problems with the approach were that all of these “studies” were conducted after the fact, so there was no real testing of data. Cora Du Bois, however, conducted fieldwork with the Alorese during 1937 to 1938, collecting data specifically to test basic personality. Her work refined the understanding of culture-personality relationships. Unfortunately, the methodological improvements in her research design and execution were lost on most culture and personality anthropologists, who later became enamored of the national character studies.

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