The Classification of Values: A Method and Illustration*

Abstract

ECENT intensification of behavioral science interest in the cultural facts R about values parallels a similar development in philosophy. Combination studies are appearing which bring together concepts and methods of contemporary philosophy and anthropological data (e.g., Macbeath 1952; Brandt 1954; Ladd in press), and this paper as well as the larger research of which it is a part belong in the same category. The ultimate objective of such inquiry is, hopefully, the clarification of both scientific and philosophical issues which involve knowledge of actual cultural value systems-the universality or uniqueness of various values, the relation between values and behaviors, the meaning or meaninglessness oi ethical terms, perhaps even the relation between duty and happiness (the "right" and the "good"). But the less abstract and general problems of adequate description of values continue to demand attention. The immediate objective of this effort is to outline and illustrate a descriptive-analytic method for classifying values as elements of a value system. The whole is regarded as an approximation and working hypothesis which may be useful, directly or suggestively, for the further study of values.The classificatory scheme to be presented was constructed to organize data relevant to the values of five cultures in the American Southwest (Navaho, Zuni, Spanish American, Texan and Mormon), collected over a five-year period by representatives of twelve special disciplines. Both philosophical and behavioral science sources were tapped for methods, concepts and terminology.' There follows a brief discussion of the theory and method of the classification; categories for describing a cultural value system; and, by way of illustrating a heretofore untested scheme, a description of the value system of the Ramah Na va h 0.

On Key Symbols1

“…IT IS by no means a novel idea that each culture has certain key elements which, in an ill-defined way, are crucial to its distinctive organization. Since the publication of Benedict's Patterns of Culture in 1934, the notion of such key elements has persisted in American anthropology under a variety of rubrics: "themes" (e.g., Opler 1945; Cohen 1948), "focal values" (Albert 1956), "dominant values" (DuBois 1955), "integrative concepts" (DuBois 1936), "dominant orientations" (F. Kluckhohn 1950)' and so forth. We can also find this idea sneaking namelessly into British social anthropological writing; the best example of this is Lienhardt's (1961) discussion of cattle in Dinka culture (and I say culture rather than society advisedly).…”

Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy

“…Different social actors produce and value a location (e.g., as a livelihood resource, a marketable asset, a production factor, a religious site, an aesthetic good) in terms of the "goods" and the "bads" that can accrue from its use in various ways. These conflicts strike the familiar chord of tensions between values and value, which anthropologists have long been addressing (Albert 1956;Munch 1970). In dealing with valuation in environmental conflicts, ecological economists reject the reductionism of commensurability, that is, the reduction of the valuable object to a single measure of value.…”

From cyberbullying to well‐being: A narrative‐based participatory approach to values‐oriented design for social media

“…In our second layer of analysis, we mapped the seven user‐generated design themes to Cheng and Fleishman's meta‐inventory of value‐oriented analytic frameworks, developed prior to the study. Attempts to catalog and classify human values, both individual and social, have a long history in anthropology, theology, and sociology research, with a particular concentration on the casting of values as explicit variables for analytical models in the latter half of the 20th century (Albert, ; Hutcheon, ; Spates, ). By bringing values (and as an adjacent field of study, ethics) into an ontologically analytical framework, some of the most important and deeply embedded motivators of human decision and interaction become more amenable to scientific inquiry.…”