FOCUSED ETHNOGRAPHIC BIBLIOGRAPHY: STANDARD CROSS-CULTURAL SAMPLE Douglas R. White* This bibliography consists, for each society in the Standard Sample, of (1) the sources cited by each of the major studies that contributed extensive sets of coded ethnographic variables; (2) any new sources that have been published or become available or known to the author since the original "pinpointing" sheets were prepared; and (3) citations to all of the above sources that are contained, as of 1988, in the Human Relations Area Files (1976, updated 1985, 1988). Publication of the bibliography of ethnographic sources for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock and White 1969) marks a new phase in the development of professional access to the cross- cultural data base. This phase builds on George Peter Murdock’s lifelong work of assessing the quality of ethnographic descriptions, coding the ethnographic variables for his extensive EthnographicAtlas (Murdock 1967), and classifying these societies in terms of cultural similarities. From 1967 to 1969, he and I assessed several thousand candidate societies, in order to pick the best-described societies in each of 186 world cultural provinces and to choose the earliest date of high-quality description for each, so as to construct a representative world sample of high-quality ethnographies for comparative analysis. Each society was pinpointed to a particular community or locale, in addition to a focal date, to which the description applied. In the Human Relations Area Files ( H RAF), the full text passages pertaining to a particular society may describe more than one locality and more than one focal date, which can allow the researcher to make intra- cultural and historical comparisons. In contrast, the codings for a *Douglas R. White is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, California. Downloaded from ccr.sagepub.com1 at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2015 2 particular society in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample all pertain to a particular space and time. Many reserchers have had access to either (a) the &dquo;pinpointing&dquo; sheets that we prepared for our 1969 article, which guided the coders for seven years of National Science Foundation funding of the Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Center (CCCCC) at the University of Pittsburgh, or (b) the shorter sample bibliographies that were published with each successive set of ethnographic codes (Murdock and White 1969, Murdock and Morrow 1970, Barry and Paxson 1971, Murdock and Wilson 1972, Tuden and Marshall 1972, Barry et al. 1976). Twenty years later, the successful fruits of this strategy are apparent. While this is not the place to review the extensive findings of cross- cultural research, over two-thirds of the hundreds of cross-cultural studies since 1969 (see Barry 1980 for a partial listing) have used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Scores of authors made contributions of anywhere from one to one hundred coded variables for this sample. The coded data from the bulk of these studies were assembled over the last decade by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, in a form suitable for electronic manipulation. In 1985, an electronic journal, World Cultures, was inaugurated as a means for disseminating cross-cultural coded data, bibliographies, codebooks, and related research materials (White 1985a). The current bibliography of ethnographic sources for the Standard Sample is now available in electronic form in the World Cultures journal, where it can be employed by researchers for a variety of purposes. Some of the new sources contained in this bibliography were located in 1979 by a bibliographer under the direction of Alice Schlegel. The remainder were found by the author. Table 1 contains a list of the 186 societies in the Standard Sample showing: (1) the SCCS number; (2) the societal name; (3) the pinpointed date; and (4) the pinpointed focus; as well as the Ethnographic Atlas, or EA (5) sequential number and (6) regional identity code; and the HRAF (7) file code (Murdock 1983, i.e., his Outline of World Cultures, or OWC); and (8) an indication of file quality (a=good, b=useful, and c=inadequate). The societies are listed by order of appearance in the Standard Sample. This list may be useful in organizing a coding project and in identifying sources in H RAF. The quality of H RAF sources for this sample, as of 1988, and using the standards of Murdock and White (1969: 28), are as follows: (a) Satisfactory (89), containing a good selection of the source materials, including all the major sources. (b) Useful (26), including the major sources but an incomplete selection of other important ones, and thus adjudged adequate for most cross- cultural research but requiring supplementary library research on particular topics. Downloaded from ccr.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2015 3 (c) Inadequate (21 ), lacking at least one of the major sources or several important ones, and thus to be used in cross-cultural research only with caution and preferably with supplementary library research. A comparison of the 1969 and 1988 H RAF quality codes indicates the extent to which the New Haven files have been upgraded: Use of the HRAF ethnographic archive with the Standard Cross- Cultural Sample is discussed in Ember and Ember (1988). The bibliography that follows is presented in the same order as that in which the societies are listed in Table 1. Each set of bibliographic entries for a society is headed by (1 ) SCCS#, the Standard Cross- Cultural Sample number (Murdock and White 1969); (2) HRAF#, the Human Relations Area Files (1976) number; (3) EA#, the sequential Ethnographic Atlas number and regional EA identity code (Murdock 1967); (4) the societal name; (5) the pinpointed focus; and, on the second line (6) G: the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the pinpointed group and (7) T: the pinpointed time. Groups of bibliographic entries are ordered under one of the six main numbered headings and two subheadings (1 a and 3a) that were part of the initial design of the bibliography for the sample (Murdock and White, 1968, 1969; White and Murdock 1988): 1. Principal Authority(ies) -pertaining to the pinpointed group and time. 1 a. Essential Secondary Sources-containing information or conclu- sions not easily obtained by a reading of the primary sources. 2. Other Dependable Primary Sources-pertaining to different dates and/or to adjacent groups representing the same ethnic and local cultures. 3. Auxiliary PrimarySources-pertaining to other similar groups of the same culture or to the general region to which the focal group belongs. 3a. Auxiliary Sources on the Larger Society-pertaining to essential sources on the relationship of local level groups such as the pinpointed focus to the larger society. 4. Useful Secondary Sources-summaries, reviews, or analyses of the culture in question, based on readings of the principal authorities and others. These are asterisked (*) when they are of similar utility for coding as the principal authorities. 5. Other Sources-regional histories, bibliographies, etc. 6. Sources to Be Avoided-pertaining to the general ethnic group in question, but containing known inaccuracies, marked differences from the focal group, etc. Downloaded from ccr.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2015 4 A string of seven numbers, dashes, zeros, or new source (&dquo; or blank) indicators appears to the left of each bibliographic item. The numbers indicate the rank order of use of the ethnographic sources, for a given society, for each of seven major sets of coded variables (see Appendix for references). These seven numbers thus indicate a rough ranking- not an absolute scale-of the quality of each source for each of seven topics: 1. Subsistence and Economics (Murdock and Morrow 1970) 2. Settlement Organization (Murdock and Wilson 1972) 3. Infancy and Child Training [0-4 years of age] (Barry and Paxson 1971 ) ’ 4. Childhood [4-12 years of age] (Barry et al 1976) 5. Political Organization (Tuden and Marshall 1972) 6. Division of Labor (Murdock and Provost 1973) 7. Illness Beliefs (Murdock, Wilson, and Frederick 1978) Each of these seven major studies reported its own evaluation of the usefulness of the sources for particular ethnographic topics. A principal authority, for example, may have a string of ones, twos, or threes, e.g., 1111111, 1122111, 3101122, indicating that it was often the first, second, or third most useful source in coding the respective topic listed above. Zeros indicate that a given source was available and consulted, but not used in the coding of the given topic A string of zeros (0000000) indicates that the reference was not used by CCCCC coders, but was used in some other coding of the society. A string of dashes (-------) indicates references that may be useful to other coding projects, although they were consulted and not used by CCCCC coders. A string of circumflexes (&dquo;&dquo;&dquo;&dquo;&dquo;’&dquo;) indicates sources located in Alice Schlegel’s 1979 bibliography project. A stringof blanks ( ) indicates sources found by the author. A string of alternating zeros and blanks (0 0 0 0) indicates sources that have not been checked as to focus, so that it is uncertain whether they should be included in the bibliography. For some entries, an additional symbol (+, &, or ~) is found in column eight at the end of the string of seven numbers. These symbols indicate additional sources cited in studies of three other topics: 8. + Sexual Attitudes and Practices (Broude and Greene 1976) [all 186 societies coded: additional sources for 13 societies plus 3 alternates are cited]. & Status of Women (Whyte 1979) [93 societies coded: additional sources are cited for 2 societies]. Downloaded from ccr.sagepub.com at MCMASTER UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2015 5 - Magico-Religious Practitioners (Winkelman and White 1986) [45 societies coded] Following this first row of numbers for each entry, and before the author’s name, a unique combination of numbers and letters is associated with each entry.