Cross-Cultural Research

Optimal scaling techniques provide holocultural researchers with interesting ways to explore relationships in multivariate data. Carmella Moore's analysis of regional patterning in Murdock's theories of illness data was one of the first uses of these techniques with cross-cultural data. This article shows the flexibility of optimal scaling approaches to holocultural data. It also illustrates how different ways of conceptualizing and transforming data may affect the conclusions drawn from these techniques. The author uses dual scaling techniques to produce two alternatives to Moore's analysis. The first treats Murdock's codes as successive categories data and uses a clustering technique to search for regional groupings. The second identifies regional patterning with forced classification. Both techniques identify the Circum-Mediterranean region as possessing a unique configuration of illness theories and highlight a distinction between theories of witchcraft and sorcery.

The purpose of this article is to define a theoretical construct of social differentiation. Social differentiation is defined as the number of different structured roles in a relatively self-sufficient system of interdependent structured roles that, directly or indirectly, enable individuals in the system to meet their basic biological needs for food, shelter, clothing, safety, mobility, and so on. System is opera tionalized as an autonomous territorial political unit. A ratio measure isomorphic to this definition is constructed and may be applied uniformly to all societies ranging from the simplest to the most complex. A theoretical construct and measure of structural differentiation are also defined to measure how systems (autonomous political units) differ in the structure of their differentiation. Although much work remains to be done, this article is intended as one step in a direction that may illuminate an important subject matter.

A study of the 55 cultures in the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) 60-culture probability sample for which adequate data on burials exists confirms the archaeologists' notion that variation in expenditures on burials can act as a rough indication of status hierarchies. The degree of variability in cost required to infer hierarchy is, however, much greater than that assumed by some archaeologists. Minor to moderate variability in expenditures may be due to a wide variety of causes including the symbolization of small achieved differences in status, age, gender, cause of death, religious affiliation, and numerous idiosyncratic circumstances and personal and social identities. Further investigation shows, moreover, that social competition, rather than hierarchy, is the variable that is most directly being measured, and that burial treatment is only one of many choices for possible competitive display. Thus, societies with considerable differences in the cost of burial treatments always allow or encourage competition, whereas those lacking such variability in burial treatments may or may not.