Professional Documents
Culture Documents
36i
362 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
per day, their temporal spacing, the degree of regularity or irregularity in
eating, etc.-and that physical anthropologists present the pertinent so-
matological information. Since the material had been gathered, it could be
assembled and the crucial correlations drawn. To have done so, however,
would have required several months of research, since the data had nowhere
been summarized and it would have been necessary to ransack an immense
amount of descriptive literature to assemble it. Understandably enough,
the physiologists were discouraged from undertaking this promising but
formidable task.
Other sciences have systems of abstracts, bibliographical aids, and quan-
tities of secondary collections, by means of which the researcher can quickly
track down the pertinent data and acquaint himself with previous research
on any subject. With a few notable exceptions,2 anthropology lacks such
aids. Its materials are widely scattered in descriptive reports, an immense
number of which must be scanned if adequate information is desired on any
particular topic. The factual data of sociology are in a similarly chaotic
condition. It became apparent, therefore, that if these sciences were to be
brought to bear effectively in the cooperative research program of the
Institute, a representative sample of the cultural materials on the various
societies of the world needed to be organized for ready accessibility on any
subject. The Cross-Cultural Survey was developed, in part to fill this need,
in part to facilitate a distinctive type of scientific research which will be
described below.
The first problem was to devise a standard system of classification for
the arrangement and use of the collected materials. After six months of
preliminary research, with the aid of helpful suggestions from about a
hundred anthropologists, sociologists, and other specialists, the author and
five collaborators published the Outline of Cultural Materials. Although
this manual has proved of some incidental utility in field research, it was in
no sense designed for such a purpose. It was written solely as a guide for
organizing and filing our abstracted cultural materials, and for facilitating
reference to the data already classified and filed.
Since the publication of the manual, in I938, the staff of the Cross-
Cultural Survey has been engaged in the actual assembling of materials.
To date, the descriptive data on nearly a hundred cultures have been ab-
stracted, classified, and filed. It is hoped ultimately to assemble andor-
ganize all the available cultural information on several hundred peoples,
2 Useful for special purposes are the massive collections of Frazer, Sumner and Keller,
Thurnwald, and Westermarck, such classic monographic studies as those of Hahn on domestic
animals, Nieboer on slavery, Schurtz on age groupings, and Steinmetz on punishment, and
such recent special treatises as that of Clements on theories of disease. These compilations,
however, do not lend themselves to the determination of "adhesions" in Tylor's sense, i.e.,
correlations within a culture indicative of functional relationships, and thus have but limited
use in the testing of scientific hypotheses.
THE CROSS-CULTURAL SURVEY 363