Abstract
The practical and symbolic significance of the sun and the moon was coded for a world sample of societies. Methods included use of the eHRAF World Cultures (hereafter eHRAF) Word Search function and the coding of relevant eHRAF materials. The sun, objectively of greater importance than the moon for many aspects of human existence, was expected to be ethnographically more prominent than the moon, and this was found in 55 of 60 cases. There was also a strong tendency for ethnographic mentions of the moon to be made in connection with magico-religious ideas, whereas statements about the sun tended to be more equally divided between the magico-religious and techno-econo-environmental domains. In exploratory investigation, it was found that both sun and moon were frequently mentioned in the ethnographies of foraging societies, which in turn were found to be at the low end of a scale of cultural complexity. Discussion centered on interpretation of the findings and on suggestions for further research.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed . . .
In this study, we attempt to estimate the cultural significance of the sun and the moon for a world sample of societies. The sun, as the source of life on Earth, and the moon, as the nearest large, visible object in the sky, are obvious celestial features everywhere. Both seem likely to form a basis for close cultural attention, but there are differences in their empirical importance. The sun provides essential light and heat to human beings, and is decisively more central to human existence than is the moon, with its reflected, lesser light and an absence of life-sustaining warmth. Subsistence practices of almost all types depend on the sun, but fewer can be said to rely on the moon and its phases. The reliable cycle of daylight to sunset is also the usual basis for daily routines. To assess some of the import of these major differences, we have adopted a theoretical framework useful for inquiry into the cultural correlates and effects of material conditions. In the “Whiting Model” for psychocultural research, physical environments and maintenance systems (e.g., the economy) are considered to be primary factors and even “commonly occurring” first causes (J. W. M. Whiting, 1994, p. 89). The end-points, or effects, in the model are projective-expressive systems (e.g., magic, religion). 1 J. W. M. Whiting (1994) was careful to acknowledge that the assumptions in his model were oversimplified, but asserted that they “give rise to a readily testable set of hypotheses” (p. 89). Such hypotheses proceed from the underlying presumption that the fundamental elements of peoples’ lives—of their physical surrounds, daily sustenance, and related activities—help to account for their concerns about not only these matters but also for many of their values and belief systems. Taking into consideration the practical contributions of the sun, and working within the wide constraints of the model, we can propose a pair of hypotheses that appear plausible and easily testable.
The first hypothesis rests on the premise that ethnographic records will reflect the universally high level of importance of the sun, and the simple prediction can be made that in all cultures, more statements about the sun than the moon will be reported. Almost as a corollary, the prediction can also be made that for the sun, statements about the more practical spheres (techno-econo-environmental) and the supernatural spheres (magico-religious) will not appreciably differ in number, whereas for the moon, relatively more statements will be made about the magico-religious than the techno-economic domain. This second hypothesis is founded on the assumption that more reality-based statements will be made about the sun than the moon. Exceptions might be expected where the subsistence activities include high dependence on objective lunar effects, as for example among peoples with significant reliance on fishing and associated tidal changes.
Domains of culture besides the techno-economic and magico-religious spheres, for example, the social-structural system, were included in the data-gathering and coding processes as a means of seeking further regularities. In addition, the organizing and general coding of a body of ethnographic information on the sun and moon allowed investigation of other issues. Among such questions were whether solar/lunar emphases might be associated with particular subsistence patterns, 2 or with cultural complexity, as these phenomena were fundamental aspects of the maintenance-system “determinants” in the Whiting model (J. W. M. Whiting, 1994; B. B. Whiting & Whiting, 1975).
The data source for this investigation was the eHRAF World Cultures Word Search function that is part of Basic Search (http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/). For any culture included in the eHRAF database, the program can provide the ethnographic source and the number of all paragraphs that mention a given term. The first hypothesis regarding the prominence of the sun could be tested by making a count of the number of ethnographic paragraphs devoted respectively to the sun and the moon within each culture in a given sample of societies. The second hypothesis was testable with a coding system based on the ethnographic appearance of the terms sun and moon in paragraphs, and the specific contexts in which they were used. A code for subsistence patterns was available from eHRAF. 3
Method
Sample Societies
The sample comprised the 60 cases making up the HRAF Probability Sample Files (Naroll, 1967), now a subset of eHRAF World Cultures. All societies in the sample have been the subject of extensive ethnographic reporting, with a total of more than 1,000 pages of coverage in each instance. The cases were geographically stratified and chosen to represent the macrocultural areas of the world, with only one society included per culture area to minimize the possible effects of both diffusion and historical relatedness.
Number of Ethnographic Paragraphs With “Sun” or “Moon”
The eHRAF Word Search function was used to create the primary database for the study. Data to test the first hypothesis consisted of a count of the number of paragraphs in which the word sun (or moon) occurred within each sample society. The process was generated at the eHRAF site by typing a term of interest (here, sun or moon), and the program responded by tallying the number of paragraphs in which the term appeared across all eHRAF societies. In the current instance, when a specific sample society was selected from this listing, the total number of paragraphs that included the word sun (or the word moon) automatically appeared. In addition, and relevant to further inquiry, all such paragraphs could then be analyzed for any content of interest. A typical reference to the sun was found in the following excerpt from a paragraph on the Saami of Finland: “There are four hard elements: the day (sun), fire, water, and wind; they produce thunder” (Itkonen, 1948/1984, p. 700). An example for the moon from the Akan of Ghana: “That [name] for Monday is Awo; it is the day of the moon or the vesper which is ‘cool’; the day of peace” (Danquah, 1945, p. 17).
One issue specific to the present study was the widespread North American Plains Indian Sun Dance, which was practiced among three of the sample societies, the Blackfoot, Ojibwa, and Pawnee. The potential for overcounting mentions of the sun in relation to this ritual prompted a decision to include references to the Sun Dance for just one of these societies. On the basis of a random selection, the Ojibwa were chosen, and references to a Sun Dance ritual in only this society were included in the count.
For some of the analyses, it was necessary to control for differences in the volume of ethnographic reportage across societies. This was accomplished by counting, for each sample society, the number of paragraphs in which the word sun (or moon) appeared, then dividing that figure by the total number of ethnographic pages. The resulting quotients frequently made up very small proportions, on the order of 1% to 2% for both the sun and the moon in many societies. These figures shall be referred to as Sun-Quotients and Moon-Quotients, respectively. All such scores were unique when calculations were carried to several decimal places, but the overall distributions tended to dictate that nonparametric statistical tests should be applied when these scores were used.
Coding System for Ethnographic References to Sun and Moon
The authors developed the code by inspecting ethnographic reportage about the sun and moon for numerous nonsample societies. The sun and moon were considered independently but in relation to the same set of categories. On the basis of this preliminary work, we divided all references to the subjects of interest into three main categories and a residual one: the techno-econo-environmental, the magico-religious, the social-structural, and a category we labeled as miscellaneous. The following explication of these categories refers to coding for both the sun and moon.
Techno-econo-environmental items included references to practical uses, both food and nonfood (e.g., drying of clothing in the sun; fishing by the light of the moon), ethnometeorological knowledge (e.g., sundials; knowledge of lunar eclipses), and comments by either the sociocultural group or the ethnographer as to the sun’s or moon’s practical significance. 4 Magico-religious items included references to ritual, taboos, creation myths, and folklore accounts (folktales, folk beliefs). Social-structural items included named locations, named social units, and personal names. (For the last, transliterations such as the name Sun in Mandarin or Moon in Korean were excluded.) The residual category included physical representation of the sun or moon (e.g., replicas), naming the sun or moon in a lexicon, mentioning them in literature, or making general or rhetorical reference to them (such reference could be made either by the society’s members or by the investigator).
Each reference to the sun in a paragraph was assigned a 1-point score according to the category into which it was judged to fall. Although the great majority of such assignments were clear and unproblematic, occasional ethnographic passages combined techno-econo-environmental and magico-religious statements in approximately equal measure. An example would be where “exact” ethnometeorological knowledge (as understood in Western science at the time of the investigation) was mixed together with folk beliefs. In these cases, a half-point score was assigned both the former and the latter categories.
After the authors had come to general agreement as to the appropriate categories for numerous ethnographic paragraphs mentioning the sun, the second author proceeded to read and to categorize such items for each sample society. For 47 societies, the total number of paragraph-mentions of the sun was 200 or fewer, and all sun-related paragraphs were scored. In the remaining 13 societies, the total went above this number, sometimes reaching beyond 1,000. Given this limiting consideration, for each of these 13, a stratified sampling of 200 items was made, and the category Subtotals were extrapolated to correspond to the appropriate numbers as proportions of the grand total.
The first author then trained a research assistant to carry out coding for ethnographic references to the moon. After working with the first author on a randomly selected set of nonsample cases, the assistant then applied the above-described code to the 60 sample societies. As the maximum number of moon-related paragraphs in any society was 283, the decision was made to score all ethnographic paragraphs about the moon for every case in the sample.
During the coding process, neither the second author nor the research assistant was aware of the hypotheses.
Reliability
Applying the code, the first author read, categorized, and scored the ethnographic materials for the sun for 10 sample societies. Pearsonian correlations of the subcategory Totals yielded the following levels of agreement with the second author: For paragraph-mentions coded as within the techno-econo-environmental domain, r = .97, p < .001; for magico-religious mentions, r = .95, p < .001; for social-structural mentions, r = .10, ns; and for miscellaneous mentions, r = .82, p < .005. The lack of association between coders for the social-structural scores prompted a decision to exclude this subcategory from further analysis. For the other three subcategories, the scores of the more experienced coder, who had worked with data for the entire sample, were used.
Using the code, the first author also read, categorized, and scored the ethnographic materials for the moon for 10 sample societies. Pearsonian correlations of the subcategory Totals yielded the following levels of agreement with the research assistant, the main coder here: For paragraph-mentions coded as within the techno-econo-environmental domain, r = .97, p < .001; for magico-religious mentions, r = .98, p < .001; for social-structural mentions, r = .67, p < .05; for miscellaneous mentions, r = .96, p < .001. Given the previously mentioned lack of association for the social-structural scores with respect to the sun, the relatively weak relation for the moon scores prompted a decision to also exclude this subcategory from the data analysis. For the other three subcategories, the scores of the research assistant, who had worked with the entire sample, were used.
Exploratory Codes
Subsistence systems
A typology of major forms of subsistence patterns was available from eHRAF (now at http://ehrafworldcultures-legacy.its.yale.edu/). The coding included the 60 sample societies for this study. The eHRAF typology consisted of nine classes of major subsistence activities, which for analytical purposes we reduced to four: agriculture (horticulture or intensive agriculture), n = 31; pastoralism (pastoralism or pastoralism/agriculture), n = 7; foraging (foraging or foraging/food producing), n = 12; and other (varying combinations of agriculture, pastoralism, and foraging), n = 10. The distribution of these types, though skewed toward agricultural activity, was broad enough to allow useful statistical comparisons.
Cultural complexity
A measure of cultural complexity was adopted from Murdock and Provost’s (1973) scale incorporating and summing 10 subscales that involved the factors of writing, fixity of residence, agriculture, urbanization, technological specialization, degree of efficiency of land transport, money, population density, and degrees of political integration and social stratification. Murdock and Provost provided scores that covered 36 of our 60 cases. An additional six cases were added by consulting relevant information in Murdock’s (1967) “Ethnographic Atlas.” 5
Results
Hypothesis 1: Relative Ethnographic Prominence of the Sun and the Moon
The first hypothesis, that the sun would receive more emphasis than the moon, was testable by comparing the number of paragraph-mentions for each in the relevant ethnographic coverage. It would be consistent with the hypothesis if, within a society, subtracting the number of counts of the moon from the number for the sun resulted in a positive integer. There were 55 positive numbers and five negative numbers. (The five exceptional cases were the Central Thai, Ona, Sinhalese, Trobriands, and Yanoama.) On a binomial test, this difference was highly significant, z = 6.46, p < .0001.
This result strongly implied that the overall number of paragraph-mentions for the sun would be significantly higher than that for the moon. In a paired-sample test, the respective means were 150.2 for the sun and 60.02 for the moon, t(59) = 3.96, p < .0005. Significant differences held up across all three spheres—the techno-econo-environmental, the magico-religious, and the miscellaneous. Nevertheless, there was a strong relation between the total scores for each, higher scores for the sun being linked with higher scores for the moon, with r = .76, p < .0005, N = 60. This latter outcome was unpredicted.
Hypothesis 2: The Sun, the Moon, and Relative Techno-Econo-Environmental and Magico-Religious Emphases
The second hypothesis, also based on the fact that the contribution to life and sustenance is greater for the sun than for the moon, revolved around the expectation that peoples’ concerns with the sun would more often be reality based than would be their concerns with the moon. The simplest way to test the hypothesis was to compare, for sun and moon paragraph-mentions, the proportions of techno-econo-environmental versus magico-religious scores for the sun with the comparable proportions for the moon. According to theoretical expectations, subtracting the resulting score for the moon from that of the sun should have produced a positive number within each society. This was the case with 50 of 58 scores, z = 5.39, p < .0001. (The exceptional cases were the Blackfoot, Bororo, Hopi, Iroquois, Kapauku, Lau Fijians, Ona, and Tikopia.) In other words, for the sun the techno-econo-environmental sphere was proportionally more often mentioned than was the magico-religious domain, whereas for the moon the opposite was true. For the sun, the techno-econo-environmental score was greater than the magico-religious score in 59% of the cases, whereas for the moon, this was so in only 17% of sample societies.
As earlier mentioned, lunar references to the techno-econo-environmental sphere might be expected in those societies where fishing made a significant contribution to subsistence. But of the eight cases where the moon’s techno-econo-environmental score did exceed the score for magico-religious paragraph-mentions, in only four did fishing make more than an average contribution to subsistence (for the sample as a whole). (The ratings of Murdock, 1967, on categories of subsistence were used for this analysis.)
Exploratory Analyses
Subsistence systems
A completely unexpected regularity appeared when varying types of subsistence activities were analyzed with respect to the relative frequency of the sun and moon paragraphs (controlling for number of ethnographic pages for each sample society), here referred to as Sun-Quotients and Moon-Quotients, respectively. Foragers displayed significantly higher Sun-Quotients and Moon-Quotients when tested specifically against agriculturalists, pastoralists, and those practicing mixed (“other”) subsistence combinations. Of six tests, four showed Mann–Whitney U values significant beyond the .01 level, and two showed values significant beyond the .05 level (the latter two being the Sun-Quotient rankings for foragers vs. agriculturalists, and for foragers vs. those with mixed subsistence patterns). Given these outcomes, all sample societies’ scores were aggregated to achieve a general ranking (highest score assigned Rank 1). For the Sun-Quotients, the average rank of foragers was 17.00, and for all other subsistence types together, the average rank was 33.88, Mann–Whitney U value = 445.50, p < .005, N = 60. When the same was done for the Moon-Quotients, the average rank of foragers was 13.67 and that of all others was 34.71, Mann−Whitney U value = 483, p < .001, N = 60. To elaborate, the rankings of foragers for both the Sun-Quotients and Moon-Quotients were consistently high, in that 10 of these 12 societies scored above the median for both quotients, one was above-median for the Sun-Quotient only, and one for the Moon-Quotient only. (Sun-Quotient and Moon-Quotient scores and ranks for all sample societies can be found in the appendix.)
As reported above, for Hypothesis 2, we found that mentions of the moon more often concerned the magico-religious sphere than did mentions of the sun. This regularity did not distinguish between foragers and others, however. Foragers did not differ with respect to any other subsistence-pattern practitioners (agriculturalists, pastoralists, mixed pattern), nor did they differ when tested again all others in the aggregate, Mann–Whitney U value = 213, ns, N = 58.
The Sun-Quotient and Moon-Quotient scores were strongly related, with r = .72, p < .001, N = 60. 6 This is consistent with the earlier reported finding that the simple paragraph-mention totals for the sun and moon were highly related, with r = .76.
Although we made no predictions about subsistence patterns and either of the quotients, it had seemed that for agricultural societies, the sun’s importance for crop survival, growth, and yield could have made it a point of focus. But instead, those culture groups with the simplest of subsistence strategies were most concerned with the sun and, as well, with the moon. This raised the question of where foragers would be placed with regard to the matter of general cultural complexity.
Cultural complexity and the gods
The Murdock and Provost (1973) scale of cultural complexity, ranging theoretically and empirically from 0 to 40, was comprised of subscales covering traits that varied from population density to writing and record systems to social stratification and political integration. For some of the subscales, foraging peoples would fall low by definition—as, for example, on the presence of agriculture—and for others, foragers would seem intuitively to be low—as, for example, in degree of urbanization. The overall trend seemed obvious, and analysis showed that the foraging societies achieved a cultural-complexity mean of 7.88, and the nonforagers a mean of 20.59, t(40) = −3.67, p < .001, two-tailed. Even the single highest complexity score of 18 among the foraging societies did not match the nonforagers’ mean of almost 21.
It was clear that foraging as a means of subsistence almost predetermined its categorization as a feature of cultural noncomplexity. Extending this line of thought, we considered Swanson’s (1960) path-breaking work on traditional religions (see also Peregrine, 1996), which found that belief in a high god was associated with complex social organization. Murdock (1967), following Swanson, delineated four types of belief systems, two of which denoted the presence of a spiritual being who created all reality and was active in human affairs, and two of which denoted either complete absence of a high god or the existence of an otiose creator not concerned with human affairs. We discovered that all 12 of the foraging societies in our sample conformed to the latter two types: Nine were coded as “high god absent” and three coded as believing in an otiose high god. In contrast, all seven pastoral societies in the sample were coded as believing in an active high god, nine of 25 agricultural societies (36%) were so coded, and three of eight societies (38%) that followed “other” types of subsistence activities were so coded. (Six agricultural societies and two with a mixed strategy did not have scores on the Murdock, 1967, scale for high gods.) These results indicate that whereas foraging groups in no case believed in an active high god, in all other types of subsistence pursuits taken together, the general chances of such a belief system were about even (19 of 40 societies). The association was significant, χ2(1) = 7.05, p < .01, two-tailed.
Spirits and various deities were often said to be somewhere in the sky (celestial beings, sky gods, or spirits at an upper level), but the sun and moon were not assigned “high god” status in any of the sample societies. Among the Pawnee, who were primarily foragers, there were Sacred Beings, such as the sun, moon, and the Evening Star, yet none was itself a uniquely high god (Royce, 1990). For the agricultural Kogi, a mother-creator made the sun (Park, 1946). And among the pastoral Tarahumara, besides an overlay of Christianity, there was a father-sun and mother-moon concept that some informants confirmed and others denied (Bennett, 1935).
In this section, the following regularities have been found: Foragers display a high interest in, and attention to, the sun and the moon, their way of life appears to be at an opposite pole from those whose cultures are complex, and their religious systems—unlike those of many peoples in complex societies—do not include a belief in active high gods. These findings, taken together, suggest something approaching a syndrome. We take up a consideration of this set of results in the discussion below.
Discussion
Using the Whiting model as a basis for thinking about the sun and the moon and peoples’ conceptions thereof, we posited two primary hypotheses. The sun’s critically important contribution to life was taken as a starting point, an environmental “first-cause” element among J. W. M. Whiting’s (1994) maintenance-system determinants. As such, it was expected that ethnographic allusions to it would be more frequent than were mentions of the realistically less important moon. We hypothesized as well that for the sun, its significance would be reflected in relatively more ethnographic comments about technological, economic, and environmental matters, and that for the moon, its lesser real-world import would result in relatively more mentions concerning nonempirical, or magico-religious, foci. In a sense, such expectations may seem obvious, but cultural beliefs and practices about these celestial objects vary greatly, and there is no necessary connection between empirically meaningful entities and a people’s conception of them. As it turned out, however, both predictions were upheld, and strongly so. The sun was mentioned in more paragraphs than the moon in 55 of 60 societies, and techno-econo-environmental scores vis-à-vis magico-religious scores were more likely in ethnographic mentions of the sun than of the moon in 50 of 58 societies.
The comparative research of the Whitings pointed also to the subsistence economy and to cultural complexity as further maintenance-system factors that might prove important (J. W. M. Whiting, 1994; B. B. Whiting & Whiting, 1975). Here we did not have specific hypotheses but simply wanted to investigate possible associations between these elements and the degree to which the sun and the moon were culturally emphasized. As we learned, sample societies that relied on foraging as a subsistence strategy were consistently high in their mentions of both the sun and the moon. This cultural interest distinguished foragers from each of farmers, pastoralists, and those peoples practicing mixed economies. Moreover, when a standard operational definition of cultural complexity was adopted (Murdock & Provost, 1973), we found all 12 foraging cases in the sample defined as culturally simple, and in no case to believe in active high gods. The latter conception, or better the lack of it, might be seen as another aspect of cultural noncomplexity.
These distinctive characteristics of foragers seem coherent: simple subsistence strategies, overall cultural noncomplexity, and ontologies that may show, as much as anything else, an absence of political hierarchy (again as a part of cultural noncomplexity) which, if present, could have been reflected in the religious-belief system. To phrase the outcomes in terms of the Whiting model, the maintenance-system elements of simple subsistence type and overall cultural noncomplexity would fit a projective-system outcome that tended to exclude powerful supernatural beings who preside over, and are involved in, the social body. In Durkheimian terms, if the gods are the society, if religion is society divinized, then in simple systems there would be a lesser need for high gods.
If the foregoing interpretation is tentatively acceptable, the strong tendency for foragers to emphasize the sun and moon becomes understandable. These two bodies are large and highly visible and could well be a focus of cultural scrutiny—the sun not least for its certain light and life-giving warmth, and the moon for its mysterious cycle of waxing, waning, and sometime invisibility. Moreover, the small inventory of material culture among foragers would tend to render the sun and moon more salient parts of the environment. Of course other types of societies, both complex ones and those with subsistence strategies that differ from foraging, could find the sun and moon salient, and they do. There will be, almost inevitably, culture groups where the sun and/or moon are emphasized purely through human agency, namely, for internally generated reasons. But what we have found is that although nonforagers may or may not emphasize the sun and moon, the foragers in our sample always do so. The societal Sun-Quotients and Moon-Quotients, presented in the appendix along with their rankings, show this point clearly.
There is a further possibility as well. Among early civilizations, there were often important elements associated with the sun or the moon: structures (the Chinese Temple of the Sun), artifacts (the Near Eastern sun disk), ostensible astronomical laboratories (Stonehenge, Mesa Verde), or solar/lunar identification with mythological beings (the Hindu lunar deity) and personages (the Inka as the child of the sun). Perhaps “high cultures” like these were also focused on the sun and/or the moon, and if so, intensive interest in these astronomical features would then be apparent at both the lowest and highest levels of cultural complexity. Among the latter, some valid ethnometeorological conceptions probably held good, and that would generally differentiate them from most of the belief systems of the foragers in our sample. But this question cannot be answered with the current data set. Thus, even if we conclude, as we have done, that the sun and moon are culturally “more important” among foraging societies, the statement should be taken to mean that our argument is for what has been called, appropriately, “partial determinism” (Kaplan, 2012, p. 56).
The strong association between sun scores and moon scores, whether calculated for total paragraph-mentions or for the quotients, indicates that when the ethnographic data referred frequently to either of these celestial phenomena, they also emphasized the other one. Nevertheless, given that the overall scores for the sun strongly exceeded those of the moon (Hypothesis 1), we think it likely that attention to the sun has been generalized to a somewhat lesser, though corresponding, cultural emphasis on the moon. The possibility also exists that ethnographers were themselves influenced in their coverage in this way, such that cultural attention to the sun would lead them to ask about the moon. But this is speculative, and there is no way to assess directionality in a definite manner.
Future research might profitably look at the finer details of attention to the sun and moon. Further inquiry could determine whether the sun and moon were seen as mainly positive or negative forces, if there were esthetic judgments about them, if they were gendered, whether they were associated with romance (as in the Western tradition), if they affected humans and other natural phenomena or fully dwelt in a supernatural world, and the sociocultural conditions under which these factors occurred. Questions like these could be applied not only to a forager–nonforager dichotomy but also more generally to all societies in a comparative study.
Footnotes
Appendix
Subsistence Patterns and Sun- and Moon-Quotients and Ranks
| Society | Subsistence pattern a | Sun-quotient | Sun-quotient rank b | Moon-quotient | Moon-quotient rank b |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Akan | A | .010 | 53 | .004 | 52 |
| Amhara | A | .042 | 21 | .004 | 53 |
| Andamans | F | .055 | 15 | .040 | 9 |
| Aranda | F | .031 | 29 | .028 | 11 |
| Aymara | A | .058 | 12 | .012 | 36 |
| Azande | A | .023 | 37 | .019 | 22 |
| Bahia Brazilians | A | .008 | 56 | .002 | 57 |
| Bemba | A | .029 | 30 | .008 | 46 |
| Blackfoot | F | .182 | 2 | .045 | 5 |
| Bororo | F | .109 | 6 | .059 | 2 |
| Central Thai | A | .009 | 55 | .009 | 42 |
| Chukchee | P | .023 | 38 | .014 | 30 |
| Chuuk | O | .020 | 40 | .010 | 40 |
| Copper Inuit | F | .068 | 9 | .016 | 25 |
| Dogon | A | .061 | 10 | .015 | 29 |
| Eastern Toraja | A | .094 | 7 | .042 | 8 |
| Ganda | A | .012 | 51 | .011 | 37 |
| Garo | A | .046 | 19 | .021 | 18 |
| Guarani | O | .027 | 33 | .010 | 39 |
| Hausa | O | .006 | 58 | .003 | 55 |
| Highland Scots | O | .005 | 59 | .001 | 59 |
| Hopi | A | .122 | 5 | .021 | 17 |
| Iban | A | .017 | 45 | .008 | 44 |
| Ifugao | A | .140 | 3 | .083 | 1 |
| Iroquois | A | .038 | 23 | .021 | 16 |
| Kanuri | A | .011 | 52 | .004 | 51 |
| Kapauku | A | .019 | 41 | .017 | 24 |
| Khasi | O | .013 | 50 | .010 | 41 |
| Klamath | F | .040 | 22 | .019 | 21 |
| Kogi | A | .197 | 1 | .052 | 4 |
| Korea | A | .024 | 36 | .023 | 14 |
| Kuna | A | .032 | 27 | .011 | 38 |
| Kurds | P | .027 | 34 | .006 | 49 |
| Lau Fijians | O | .053 | 16 | .013 | 32 |
| Libya Bedouin | P | .009 | 54 | .002 | 58 |
| Lozi | O | .016 | 47 | .015 | 27 |
| Maasai | P | .018 | 42 | .012 | 35 |
| Mataco | F | .058 | 13 | .035 | 10 |
| Mbuti | F | .018 | 44 | .016 | 26 |
| Ojibwa | F | .032 | 26 | .013 | 34 |
| Ona | F | .055 | 14 | .059 | 3 |
| Pawnee | F | .138 | 4 | .044 | 6 |
| Saami | P | .028 | 32 | .009 | 43 |
| Santal | A | .051 | 17 | .008 | 45 |
| Saramaka | O | .037 | 24 | .013 | 33 |
| Serbs | A | .018 | 43 | .007 | 47 |
| Shluh | A | .007 | 57 | .001 | 60 |
| Sinhalese | A | .004 | 60 | .005 | 50 |
| Somali | P | .020 | 39 | .017 | 23 |
| Taiwan Hokkien | A | .015 | 49 | .003 | 54 |
| Tarahumara | P | .050 | 18 | .019 | 20 |
| Tikopia | A | .034 | 25 | .007 | 48 |
| Tiv | A | .029 | 31 | .015 | 28 |
| Tlingit | F | .045 | 20 | .027 | 12 |
| Trobriands | A | .015 | 48 | .020 | 19 |
| Tukano | O | .091 | 8 | .024 | 13 |
| Tzeltal | A | .024 | 35 | .013 | 31 |
| Wolof | A | .016 | 46 | .003 | 56 |
| Yakut | O | .060 | 11 | .022 | 15 |
| Yanoama | A | .031 | 28 | .043 | 7 |
A = agriculturalist; F = forager; O = other; P = pastoralist.
All ranks, despite numerous apparent ties in the quotients, are unique when the quotients are calculated to five places.
Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to Emily Chao, John Herzog, Susan Seymour, and Claudia Strauss for comments on the ideas expressed in this article. Four anonymous reviewers and editor Carol Ember also provided valuable suggestions. And we acknowledge, with gratitude, the coding skills of Suzette Soto.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Coding support was funded by a grant from Pitzer College to Robert L. Munroe.