What Have We Learned from Cross‐Cultural Surveys?¹

Color Term Salience

“…Durbin's word-length test of antiquity has not been tested except with these color terms. To the extent that Durbin's findings agree with Naroll's, they are evidence that word length grows shorter as time passes; archaeology provides the link between social complexity index and the time sequence (Naroll 1970(Naroll :1242 (3) Frequency of use arid salience: The more salient a focal color term, the more often it is used in a culture that possesses it. Berlin and Kay's definition of basic color term tends to assure salience and high frequency for every term, but should have no effect on the relative frequencies of the different focal color terms in any one language.…”

“…(1) Color uoca6ulary size and cultural comp1exit.v : Societies in whose languages Berlin and Kay found few focal color terms are usually simple societies, and those where they found more terms are usually complex (Naroll 1970(Naroll :1278. The measure of complexity is Marsh's societal complexity scale; its validity has been tested by Schaefer (1969).…”

The Rebirth of Kinship

“…For instance, whereas previous studies have associated postmarital residence with certain features of the socioecological environment (e.g., see Murdock and White 1969;Naroll 1970), evolutionary theory provides a rationale for such associations and updates outdated empirical associations. Several recent papers (e.g., Kramer and Greaves 2011;Marlowe 2004;Wood and Marlowe 2011) have questioned the association between foraging subsistence and unilocal postmarital residence, positing instead flexibility in residence in order to capitalize on help from kin.…”

“…Indeed, kinship may have been one of the first areas of anthropological study in which such techniques were elaborated (e.g., Tylor 1889), particularly within the context of cross-cultural analysis inspired by Tylor's work (Naroll 1970;e.g., Aberle 1961;Divale 1974;Driver and Schuessler 1967;Ember and Ember 1971;Murdock 1949Murdock , 1967Murdock and White 1969;Otterbein 1969;Otterbein and Otterbein 1965). Other scientific anthropologists have also relied on quantitative methods in studies of kinship behavior (e.g., Wolf and Huang 1980), and many contemporary anthropological studies of kinship use some form of quantitative methodology in their research, even if just to tabulate outcomes.…”

Changing Styles of Anthropological Work

“…Other groups are formed around the use of psychological instruments, a sophis ticated use of Human Relations Area Files (172,219,224,281), the Whitings' continued studies of judgments of selected anecdotes (156,304), use of question naires on mother-child behavior (5), Rorschachs, Raven Matrices, Mosaics, etc. Each user has to have at least a working knowledge of what is being done by others using the same instruments, and these uses are likely to cross every other subdivi sion, geographical or sUbdisciplinary.…”