Murdock-White Interdependence Alignment of Ethnographic Atlas Culture Clusters

Abstract

The Murdock-White sampling alignment, prepared for their Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, is the procedure of choice for solving Galton's problem, in place of any of Naroll's alignments. In order to use the Mur dock-White alignment for societies other than the 186 in their sample, it is necessary to take advantage of the Loftin-Hill concordance, which cov ers the 862 societies of the 1967 Ethnographic Atlas. However, Loftin and Hill's original concordance is ambiguous with respect to the placement of 32 societies, including such well-known ones as the Rwala, the Sanussi, the French, the Hupa, the Yurok, and the Karok. Loftin and Hill also did not classify the Tzeltal or any of the dozens of Overseas European soci eties. This paper claims to resolve these difficulties and thus to make the full 1967 Ethnographic Atlas list available for the Murdock-White align ment procedure. A revised concordance is presented as an appendix.

Galton's Problem and HRAFLIB

“…Thus almost any society in the Ethnographic Atlas can be inserted in its proper place in the MurdockWhite alignment. Loftin et al (1976) provide a more convenient revision of the original Loftin-Hill table. Where more than one society goes into a single Murdock-White area, I advise the user to align them by geographical propinquity among themselves and with neighboring areas.…”